Heroes Often Fail
I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for a day with my son. I’m grateful for seeing what love and patience do. I’m grateful for a cloudy morning and focus. I’m grateful for what I have and what’s in front of me. I’m grateful for opportunities. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
or
In a startling break from tradition, there are two songs of the week. Well, actually, two versions of the same song—and these are about as different as two songs can be, even though it’s the same song. Of course, this was originally a big hit for Gordon Lightfoot. I like that version, too, but it’s very Canadian. I say that without offense to any Canadians. In my line of work, there are many, many Canadians and we get along famously, owing, in part, to my love of Canadian bacon and my knowledge of “Timbits.”1
Anyway, here are two versions of a pretty sad song, done very differently but they get you to the same point in the middle:
Heroes often fail.
When I was doing my first stint in sleep-away rehab, I listened to this song a lot. Even though there was a decent sized campus, we weren’t really encouraged to take long meandering walks, which are a pretty essential part of my emotional maintenance and regulation. Anyway, I had this route that took me up the big hill to the cafeteria, then along the row of dormitories and office buildings and then past the huge auditorium where we received lectures about the many benefits of sobriety.
I didn’t find too many of the lectures to be that helpful, they often devolved into horrifying but memorable anecdotes, like the “architect” who woke up in a haze and thought he was outside peeing on the neighbor’s bushes, but was actually peeing on the Christmas tree in front of his family. My issue was that people spent most of their time telling tantalizing stories like this, but then saying something like, “but then I got sober and everything changed. Thanks very much.”
See, this is the part I wanted to hear. I already had the catalogue of bad stories, a pretty sizeable list of people I hurt or let down, so didn’t really need more of that. I needed to hear the how part of the equation. And telling me that going to meetings is the “how” part didn’t strike a receptive chord. I wanted to know the details of how it works.
I was thus naturally drawn to the part of the Big Book called “How it Works.” I was living in DC for much of the time I was trying to get sober and used to attend meetings at the Dupont Circle Club pretty regularly. A lot of meetings began with a reading of the first few pages of “How it Works,” and I would volunteer to read every time I got the chance. I was often attending these meetings with the foreknowledge that I would be drinking after the meeting. Note: “After the meeting,” could start as early as half-time. I wasn’t trying to impress anybody, I think I was trying to convince myself.
Maybe I saw that passage as an incantation that if prayed enough might actually activate the “solution.” It didn’t work that way. I can still get emotional if I read that passage out loud, so many memories and feelings are attached to the words for me. For a long time, I fixated on the first part, about people being unable to grasp the principles of honesty and humility and being among the class for whom the Program might not work. I believed that to be me.
This was a convenient narrative for me. If I simply accepted the fact that I was constitutionally incapable of living a sober life, well, it took away a lot of those feelings of guilt and shame as I sat at the bar relapsing. We gave it a pretty good ride, man. Yes, another would be great. Same glass is fine.
Aside from reciting the Steps, which are literally a step-by-step guide to building a sober life, the first few pages of “How it Works” give clues about what this is really all about. Sobriety turns out to be like a quest and this quest involves being things like “fearless,” and it requires abandoning old ideas (“the result was nil until we let go absolutely”), it requires the commitment to a journey of indeterminate distance (“willing to go too any lengths”) and it requires facing a cunning and baffling foe of enormous power.
One of the lectures in rehab that made a lot of sense to me was comparing sobriety and recovery to the journey of mythical heroes. Maybe this just appealed to my dramatic side, instead of the semi-tragic doomed alcoholic, I could be the hero on a mythical quest.
If only they allowed swords in rehab.
The newly-introduced narrative for the hero’s quest mapped to sobriety pretty neatly. There had to be a crisis, a looming battle that finally had to be fought, or a long quest to obtain the thing that was necessary to save all of us. The journey was not going to be easy, it required that the hero leave behind what they have built and strike out into the unknown. The hero faces many, many challenges, including office holiday parties and fights to the death with gigantic trolls.The hero acquires some friends and allies along the way. Perhaps a talking donkey, even.
The hero and entourage (sponsor and sober community) face the daunting challenges together. In the movies, the death star explodes, or the South African criminal shouting “diplomatic immunity” gets shot by a righteous cop, Butch and Sundance successfully leap off the cliff, the ring is finally destroyed. In real life, well, heroes often fail.
I have a lot of one-day chips in my collection and they come nowhere close to approximating the number of relapses. There was nothing heroic about any of those relapses. Maybe one of my favorite hero movies is Rocky. Who isn’t stirred by the scene of Rocky raw-egg slurping, doing one-handed push-ups, pummeling sides of beef and running through the Italian Market in Philly, with the cry of “Yo, Rocky,” ringing in his ears? Spoiler alert: Rocky took a tremendous beating and lost that fight.
Well, I mean the movie ends with the Ring Announcer proclaiming Apollo Creed as the heavyweight champion of the world while Adrian and Rocky exchange sweet I love you’s.2 I know that’s supposed to be a happy ending, but he did lose the fight.
heroes often fail.
If that is so, why are they heroes at all? Shouldn’t our heroes be winners? I think the real hero metaphor is this, and maybe it’s darker and has longer odds attached. None of us chose to be an alcoholic or an addict. All of us have faced moments where we were finally forced to choose a different path and, to varying degrees of success, we did. I think the heroism comes in accepting the journey, especially when there is not a guarantee of success. Especially when there is a significant chance of failure.
Fear is at the bottom of so much in my life, and despite all of the work I’ve done, I know I have so much more to do. Fear still runs very deep and strong in me and produces lots of difficult emotions and feelings and impulses. I know that dealing with those fears, taking the dark, scary parts out and seeing them for what they are, is going to be an ongoing process. Accepting that as a process, an ongoing quest is not always easy or pleasant, but that is at the core of the journey. Accepting that changing one’s life involves a lot of effort, frustration, loneliness, fear, anger, uncertainty and failures.
The journey is heroic, not because of the prospect of ultimate success, or the grandiose nature of the achievement, but because the hero has finally seen what is necessary, what must be attempted and has set out to do it. The goal is not accumulating the longest list of days of no drinking, the goal is to reclaim a potentially mythical, long-lost treasure. We must leave what we have become accustomed to and strike out in search of something we may not find. It’s the commitment to that goal that is heroic, the willingness to face fears with abandon, to stand at the turning point, asking for help and then taking the first step, and then the one after that.
That’s all heroes actually do. Commit to the journey, put one foot in front of the other, wait for the next right thing and accept whatever comes next.
Happy Friday.
Is there supposed to be a hyphen in there?
Best ending movie scene other than Casablanca? Lost in Translation.