Hanging On By Letting Go
I’m grateful for a night listening to rain falling. I’m grateful for a fire and coffee. I’m grateful for whatever comes next. I’m grateful for moments of faith and grace. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Each week I gush about how much I like this week’s song selection, which, at some level, seems both pointless and obvious, since I’m pretty much the lone decider on this issue. I guess it will be time to send for help when I start posting songs I don’t like as the song of the week. That would be like a little like asking my friends if they would like to date an ex. Wait, did things just come full circle?
I love this song. More importantly, I love this album. I have been fruitlessly searching for this album in the bins of New York’s finest record stores for yea these many years (also “London Calling”). I don’t want one of the newly issued, over-engineered pieces of whatever to add to my collection of “vinyl.” They’re called “records,” or “albums,” and I want one that was produced around 1978.
I’ve listened to this whole album a lot, and if you were trying to explain why an album can be greater than the sum of its songs, then I’m going to nominate The Cars eponymous first album.1 “My Best Friend’s Girlfriend,” is maybe my most favorite song of all time. Again, not because I identify with the subject matter, it’s just pretty much impossible to listen to this song (at an appropriate volume) and not find some part of you moving along to the music. Go ahead and try it.
I wrote the other day about the great story, “Because I’m an Alcoholic,” found in the back of the Big Book.
One of the other things that struck me about that story was the alcoholic’s description of herself and her relationship to other people and how alcohol was the tool that bridged those things:
I see that alcohol helped me construct an image of myself as a sophisticated metropolitan woman…
Big Book, p. 328
Remember this?
The Primary Addict, from his first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to [her] environment.
Alcoholism, Its Scope, Cause and Treatment, Dr. Ruth Fox (1955)
I saw myself in this passage on the next page:
I would look at my friends—delightful, interesting, good people—and try to define myself through them. If they saw something in me that made them want to be with me, then I must have something to offer. But their love for me wasn’t a substitute for loving myself; it didn’t fill the emptiness.
Big Book, p. 329
No, filling that emptiness, that’s where the drinking came in. The drinking helped maintain that facade, and because drinking always produced the opposite of courage in me, it also reinforced the need for further drinking. Yes, the idea of drinking just to quell the effects of drinking does seem a bit of an odd approach.
Reading a story like that shows me that alcoholism has some pretty common currents, no matter whose boat is involved. It was alcohol that helped me construct that facade for people to admire; it was alcohol that helped persuade me that I didn’t really drink differently than anyone else; it was alcohol that helped me tamp down the rage and disappointment that went with the feelings of not really being seen. Not even by myself.
Or, most importantly, not even by myself. That’s why I think that recovery ultimately becomes an exercise in recovering, or maybe even discovering, oneself.
When I see other people struggling, the knuckles maybe getting a little white from the death grip on sobriety, I think maybe they’re hanging on to the wrong thing. I think there is a progression of beliefs in recovery. I began by believing that sobriety could help me recover myself, but that if I didn’t stay sober, I’d lose myself again. That is a very true statement, but it is also a belief system that puts a lot of pressure on the alcoholic; it can turn every day into a life or death struggle. Which it is, but look, it’s already raining a shit-ton every single day, is that “lose it, lose myself” fear really the thing to hang on to?
I came to see it wasn’t. It took time and faith and a burgeoning belief in the power of the universe to finally see that the important message was actually the converse of “lose it, lose myself.” The real message was “Hang on to myself and I’ll stay sober.” If you really believe in a higher power, you are sneakily forced to acknowledge your own value to said universe and I think that’s one of the ways the Steps work.
One of the common threads of alcoholic thinking is “I’m valueless as is.” We say this in different ways, or just act it out sometimes, but it’s a belief that is at the core of addiction. It stands to reason that amending that belief might be an important part of recovery. I don’t see this as a chest-thumping, ego thing where I proclaim my value to all within earshot. It’s the quiet moments, when I’m alone and fearful, that’s when the new way of thinking about things kicks in. Because even in those moments, my higher power/the universe will affirm my value, if I let that happen.
The “I’m valueless” strain of thinking also feeds the common alcoholic lie, “what I do doesn’t really hurt people,” because deep down the belief is “I don’t really matter to people.” This self-lie can excuse a lot of bad stuff and it feeds directly from the “I’m valueless” trough.
My brief interchange with the Big Guy, a few weeks ago on 86th Street, makes more sense now. I wasn’t exactly home-free like I thought that day, but the words that got stuck in my head that day, the words I try to live by today,
You Hung on to You.
You can’t love thy neighbor as thyself until you love thyself. In the early days, my recovery was a hard, frustrating, lonely endeavor. Hanging on to my sobriety was essential to hanging on to me. How did I make that transition? There is a moment in every action movie where someone is hanging on the ledge of a building and has to let go of that ledge and take the risk of grasping that offered hand to be pulled to safety.
That’s what finally happened. I let go of my own precarious, white-knuckled hold on things and I grasped that much stronger hand. Like the Second Step says, that hand was strong enough to pull me to safety. My Higher Power has me here for a reason and that requires me to believe in that, too. That is me hanging on to me and in that world there just isn’t a reason to drink anymore. Me believing in a higher power, me hanging on to me per that higher power’s request, that’s what produces sobriety for this alcoholic on a daily basis.
Apparently, even on the dark dismal ones.
Seriously, the way that the songs move together, like the way “All Mixed Up” starts, or “Moving in Stereo.” Just wow.