I’m grateful for the storm I heard all last night. I’m grateful for spots of blue sky this morning. I’m grateful to know there’s always something underneath. I’m grateful for only spilling one cup of coffee. I’m grateful to be sober today.
As you may know, we conduct the Anyone Anywhere AA meeting every Tuesday night. We’re a small but hardy group, always happy to have more along for the ride. We read the Big Book and we’re thirsty for more, so we started taking turns picking stories from the back of the book and reading them together—I think it’s really fabulous and the short story format is really great. It’s almost like having the legends of AA as the speakers at meetings.1 I think it’s actually a fun, fresh approach to an AA meeting, and I feel like we’re all staying sober, so it’s a good thing. Are you invited? Yes, you are. And, since it’s an “Open” meeting, we’re waiving the usual membership standards.
I watch way too many YouTube videos, especially on kind of random, pseudo-scientific ones. Based on my viewing patterns, YouTube thought I needed to see this the other day:
When I sent it to my daughter, her very fair question, “aren’t you concerned about how you got there?” Yes, I should be. But call it the “pursuit of knowledge,” and let’s move on. So, I was pursuing knowledge and I watched this really crazy video about redundancy in computing systems on spacecraft. So, in space, without the benefit of our atmosphere, etc, these crazy particles, like super-charged photons come crashing through everything, including the computers. When these particles hit the computers just right, they are capable of “flipping bits,” meaning, in the binary world of computers, a “1” becomes a “0” or vice versa. This is a very bad thing and it will result in a computer producing an incorrect calculation—this is very bad news if you’re trying to rendezvous with the main capsule orbiting the moon at about 30,000 mph.
That got me thinking, using my well-worn alcoholic brain and I realized that my brain has exactly that problem—it is subject to bit-flipping. Meaning, for whatever reason, my alcoholic brain just produces very wrong answers sometimes. Interestingly, when I listen to other alcoholics share their stories, I start to see that they might have had some bit-flipping going on, too.
There are things I still get weepy about in sobriety. I was qualifying at a meeting last week and just telling a part of my story, when I was trying so hard to get sober in Washington, D.C., and going to meetings at the DuPont Circle Club all the time. I rarely had more than a day or two of sobriety, but I went and was on time, because I wanted to hear this:
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.
Big Book, p. 58
Just thinking about sitting in that room overlooking Connecticut Avenue on those old chairs and listening to that gives me chills and tightens my stomach. I sat there and listened to that over and over and over and wished it could be me. I wondered, why couldn’t I get it, why was I stuck in this long, horrific, inexorable swan dive?
I didn’t understand the part about self-honesty.
Frankly, the notion of self-dishonesty made no sense to me. I mean, I knew when I was lying to other people. I told them I was at work, or whatever, when I was sitting on a barstool somewhere. But I knew that was a lie. I thought I knew the difference and it turns out I didn’t.
Marty Mann, Bill W’s female protege, wrote a fabulous book in 1950 called, “Marty Mann’s New Primer on Alcoholism.” I’ve written about it before and think it is just chock full of really good, practical advice about addiction, recovery and sobriety. Anyway, one of the fascinating things she points out is that self-dishonesty is actually one of the early onset symptoms of alcoholism. The young alcoholic usually knows they drink differently than their friends right from the start. The young alcoholic immediately knows how powerful a tool or weapon this is. The young alcoholic knows that the beverage also has the seeds of destruction at the bottom, like the worm in the tequila bottle.
The young alcoholic knows all of those terrible and frightening things, and that’s when the self-dishonesty comes in. It’s meant to soothe and protect and calm, I think, it’s not malicious. It’s lies like this, “I’ll do better next time,” “I won’t get out of hand tonight,” “My friends are way worse,” or whatever. The point of these lies is to avoid the all-over realization that one lacks power over alcohol. The realization I had that night in the black naugahyde booth at Magoo’s in 1981,
I couldn’t control my drinking. I was powerless over alcohol.
Those aren’t the words that went through my head, but that was the gist of the icy feeling that gripped me that night. Then I told myself that we’d figure it out, shrugged my shoulders and ordered another drink. I continued to excuse, minimize and eventually just flat-out deny my drinking, but the conclusion that was presented to me that night, gripped me for almost the next 40 years.
I think “the bottom” is the wrong term to use, I’m not sure what a better word would be yet, but what I think happens at “the bottom,” is more about losing the capacity to continue to lie to oneself. At “the bottom,” it’s impossible to ignore the truth that has been standing right there all along.
Sobriety has mostly been an exercise in telling myself the truth. An important part of that truth has very little to do with drinking. It has to do with recognizing that I have a brain that just produces wrong results around the topics of drinking and other people. None of it is intentional, none of it is mean-spirited. My brain, left to it’s own devises, spins out these crazy, fantastical stories about people and why they’re doing what they’re doing and how it’s all directed at me and will ultimately result in my ruination. That creates the desire to drink, and then the really alcoholic part of my brain re-assures all of us that this was a “one-time thing,” or really just couldn’t be helped. People, after all.
That was my very defective and very alcoholic worldview.
What replaced it was curiosity, patience, listening and waiting. If I do the next right thing, the next right thing will probably happen. I’ll do that today and then I’ll probably do it again tomorrow. Beyond that, we’ll see. My brain is good at lots of other things, it’s just that there’s a bigger, more reliable, less prone to catastrophic bit-flipping, system to do the big thinking.
All I have to do is listen.
You can expect to be hearing more about the “Legends of AA,” I like the ring of that quite a bit.