I’m grateful for a gorgeous sunrise. I’m grateful to be home. I’m grateful for my own coffee. I’m grateful for the life I’ve built. I’m grateful for what I’ve learned. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I’m coming back from one of my favorite events, that is the South by Southwest festival (SXSW for people in the know) in Austin. While it began as a music and film festival, it has morphed into a sprawling week-long celebration of culture, technology, sports, entertainment and, well, lots of other stuff. Even though there is a plethora of panels and stuff connected to what I do for a living, one of the things I love is the chance to go listen to panels and speeches and presentations on things way outside my professional interests.
It’s an eclectic mix of people and topics set in one of the more eclectic and interesting cities (Austin, TX) with an amazingly interesting and eclectic set of attendees. I love attending this, I love all of the new ideas and novel ways of looking at the world. Also, the food is very, very excellent. Some of the finest fried chicken that I’ve yet encountered and, of course, lots and lots of very high-quality BBQ.
Why the extended travelogue? Because as much as I liked, even loved attending this conference, it didn’t stop me from spending the biggest chunk of it drinking, back in the olden days. I haven’t been to SXSW since before the pandemic, which meant I hadn’t been to SXSW since I got sober. I used to attend with a whole team of people and there was always a busy slate of meetings and panels and coffees and dinners—it was exhausting. When you add in the secret drinking, well, no wonder I’d leave after three or four days and be absolutely drained.
As I’ve mentioned, a lot of my decade of trying to get sober was marked by my lying about already being sober. That’s why I can’t really get behind the whole,”fake it until you make it” thing—I literally tried that for ten years and had very, very limited success—and hurt a lot of people in the process. My version was tell people that I was sober and hope that I figured out a way to get sober before they found out I wasn’t.
There’s more than a little magical thinking involved in not recovering. I had this magical belief that even though I had a difficult time staying sober from day-to-day, that there would be a day in the not-so-distant future where I would suddenly “become sober,” or being sober would cease to matter to the rest of the world, or something like that and I would be freed of having to pursue some of the more extreme (I thought) ways of getting sober, like stopping drinking and working the Steps. I usually had these thoughts while occupying one of my favorite barstools.
Drinking was my magic bullet and I wasn’t going to give it up for anything except another magic bullet. Which meant I wasn’t going to get sober anytime soon. Which I didn’t
When I used to go SXSW, I’d find a variety of places to secretly drink, but the huge crowds and the literal size of the conference meant I had to do a fair amount of recon to find a place that would allow me to drink with a relatively low risk of being observed. For whatever reason, I fixed on the PF Changs in downtown Austin. It had the right combination of good bar food, a variety of Sauvignon Blancs to choose from (my patron saintesses, Kim Crawford and Elizabeth Spencer), and no one I knew seemed likely to randomly pop-in at the PF Changs.
I’d drink so much of the conference away, pulling myself away to go to a panel or speech every so often so that I’d have something to talk about at dinner and to resist interrogations about my daily activities and whereabouts. I’d sit at the PF Chang’s drinking and watching the TV behind the bar and wondering why I bothered to come to things like this, when all I did was hide-out and drink.
Come to think of it, you could ask that question about just about any activity or aspect of my life back then, why did I bother, when all of it was mostly a cover for drinking? And despite knowing how badly I needed to stop (the fact that I couldn’t stop, even when doing things I liked and enjoyed should have been more alarming), I clung to the belief that I would be miraculously bailed-out one day, that there would be a cure for alcoholism or a new drug or a new therapeutic regime would suddenly reach me. You get the idea: Just as I thought my drinking was caused by other people and situations and places, I thought my stopping drinking would similarly be a third-party led project (rescue expedition?). I was wrong about this.
The calvary does not ride out very often for the recalcitrant, relapsing alcoholic.
People just decide they’ve had enough, that the situation is unfixable, the alcoholic appears to be unfixable, all of it true and all certainly capable of providing the undergirding for the decision to leave or break-up, or “detach with love.” Ultimately, we alcoholics get what we work so hard for: The chance to be alone with our addiction.
I remember one fateful ides of March, the end to a relationship came pretty suddenly, though not really unexpectedly. An hour later, I was on a favorite barstool, freed of the obligation to try and stay sober to keep someone who loved me from leaving. Now that the leaving was accomplished, well, look at what’s waiting for me. And just in time for March Madness. It’s weird to think back and re-experience the feelings of freedom and happiness that originally washed over me—because I could drink freely again.
As I resurrect more and more of the life I used to lead, I’m really struck by how much I lost. How many people, how many opportunities. I think of all the sadness, desperation and heartbreak, all of the lies and fear and inexplicable behavior, and wonder how that person and I could spring from the same place. One of things I’m actually trying to accomplish with the writing and what-not, is to arrive at an understanding of what happened and why.
Maybe my approach is not right for everyone, maybe I should just let go and move on, focus on all of the love and beauty that inhabits my life these days. But that feels like closing the closet door on a real mess and I have a feeling that there could be a day when I open that closet door with a certain frame of mind and wonder what would happen if we took some of those prized beliefs and behaviors out to play for just a little bit. Until I understand the nonsense in the closet, it has some power over me, it’s the addict part of me that will always be there, waiting for just the right time and place to reactivate that old network of dopamine dam-busters—just for a little bit and just to see what will happen.
How did I get sober? Here’s my current understanding:
1. I got to a bad-enough spot in life where I was no longer able to lie to myself about where I was or how I got there. I was unable to continue the lies about how everything was fine, or would be, with just a little time.
2. I was pretty much alone; most of my bridges were either burning or pretty charred already. I lacked the energy, stamina, desire and ability to start over again. There was no more moving on and trying again.
3. I had lost my way. I’d spent my entire adult life pursuing a fairly narrow set of goals and had managed that pretty successfully. Now, I wasn’t working, I didn’t know what I was going to do or how it would come to pass. I lacked confidence that I’d ever be able to accomplish what I had in the past. I didn’t know how I was going to support myself for the rest of my life.
I was working on Number 4, but realized it was hardly necessary. I think the bleakness of the setting has been pretty well-established. I was pretty miserable and did not see a path for my life to improve materially. I spent most of my days fighting the nausea that comes from realizing you’ve squandered a rich, beautiful life. That it’s your fault that you are where you are. That it’s your fault that you’re irretrievably alone.
I mean, it is. Who else’s fault could it be? That’s the shame of addiction. I think we addicts associate shame and drinking/using very early—sometimes right at the start. Seeing how much power it has, or potentially could have, over my life somehow induced shame in me. I was so weak. Who but a degenerate could get so much pleasure out of drinking and being drunk? Who but a degenerate would build their entire world around drinking? Who but a degenerate/weakling could be powerless to stop the activity that was laying waste to their life.
That is the the thing I felt I had to hide, right from the beginning: How important drinking was to me; How desperate I was for the escape it promised; What I was willing to do to maintain my relationship with it. The more shame I felt, the more I drank and the more shame I felt. So, I drank some more, to try and stay ahead of the shame.
The zillions of relapses did not help matters. As you might expect, drinking on the day one is released from rehab, for example, generates a fair amount of self-punishing thoughts. I could start to see the familiar lie that kept popping up with every new one-day chip I collected, “We’ll get this tomorrow.” I knew this was a lie, I knew that nothing was going to actually be different tomorrow, except for maybe where I was going to drink.
So then, how did I get sober?
As part of my strategic withdrawal to New York, in the midst of the pandemic, I decided to try living in a sober house for a bit. When I moved in, I had nearly a year of sobriety, but hadn’t been going to meetings or really doing anything recovery-related, except I was taking Antabuse. A drug that has been proven safe and used extensively for more than fifty years in this country. A drug that definitely will stop the drinking, it won’t get you sober, but it will definitely stop the drinking. Trust me, I did my own one-man sting operation. Antabuse works.
I wasn’t happy. I felt pretty miserable, as a matter of fact. I was lonely, afraid, isolated, and didn’t know how any of those things would ever change.
How did I get sober?
Well, I got a sponsor who insisted on doing the work. He forced me to start writing essays and answering questions and I suddenly began to see things that I had somehow missed all of those years. I kept thinking, as my sponsor told me of his troubles, how he had nearly ruined his life, that maybe this Program actually worked?
I guess in the hubris and arrogance that accompany drinking, and particularly relapsing, I never really believed that AA worked. I just thought meetings were what you did in sobriety to pass the time, since all of the pleasant, worthwhile activities were no longer available to the alcoholic.
This same sponsor “suggested” that I start writing a daily gratitude list. I did and pretty soon, I was sending it to about 20 friends every day and had lots of gratitude list exchanges going. I got the idea in February 2021 to begin putting them online (on Twitter to be exact).1
This is not a set-up for a gratitude list encomium; I’ve written about the radical consequences that can attend constructing a practice of daily gratitude:
I was starting to see, just like the Big Book said, just like Bill himself said, that my drinking wasn’t about the evil power of alcohol or other people or events or circumstances. The problem was how I saw, approached and interacted with the world at-large. I thought I played a far more central role in other people’s lives than I did. I thought that I played less of a role in other people’s lives than I did. I thought that I never really got what I deserved, but also, that I always got everything I deserved. If you see a set of no-win scenarios lurking in those parodoxical ways of thinking, then you are correct. They say that true open-mindedness is evidenced by holding two competing thoughts at the same time; this is also how alcoholism works.
What changed those beliefs? Working the steps and discovering who I really was, what I really thought and felt, how I lived, how I wanted to live and why. Coming to those understandings wasn’t important because it would facilitate blaming the correct persons for my alcoholism. It was important so that I could see why I had that big hole and what made me think that alcohol worked to fill it. The “why” is critical; if alcohol and alcoholism are tools for managing the world in a very dysfunctional way, it’s still important to understand what the construction project is; why are we getting out our alcoholic tool chest?
Because until this alcoholic knew the “why,” I couldn’t take the steps I needed to address the hole and fill it with “Sackrete” or something that had a better chance of not ruining my entire life.
How did I get sober?
By replacing the belief that drinking made me feel better, that it helped me manage life, that it made up for the isolation and loneliness. What did I replace it with? Nothing too complicated: self-love. As I have mentioned, my Higher Power/God/The Big Guy has addressed me directly only a couple of times.
One of those times, while in the Equinox locker room, I was instructed to “Do the thing you don’t know how to do.” The more I meditate on that semi-mysterious missive, I see new facets or angles to it. Implicit in the command “do what you don’t know how to do,” is the prospect of failure. I think that direction was intended to force me to try things where success might not seem so likely. I think it was a very sneaky, crafty even, way to get me to widen and deepen my spiritual life.
How?
Because if the Big Guy says I should do the thing I don’t know how to do, he’s probably also considered the prospect of unfavorable outcomes and is okay with the numbers. Meaning, that as long as I’m trying my hardest to do what seems like the next right thing, it’s going to be okay, even if it turns out to tbe he next wrong thing.
One of the things that drove my drinking was the fear of failure. The Big Guy’s approach to sobriety and recovery seems to include a healthy dollop of potential failure(s). The thing that I got most wrong in my pre-sobriety days was the idea that things were irreconcilably f****ed up. If things were as bad as they could be, why not have a drink or seven?
I saw that my place in the world wasn’t defined by what I achieved, but by what I believed. There is no single right-answer here; there is no single, silver-bullet-ish, sobriety-producing belief, other than believing that my place in the universe is set by grace, directed towards finding ways to help others, and bounded by love.
I walked past the PF Changs a bunch of times over the last few days. I do love the Kung Pro chicken, but I didn’t poke my head in. I’m not worried about being magically drawn in by the scent of the forbidden nectar. I’m not worried about losing control or convincing myself that one or two certainly couldn’t hurt. All of the work, all of the realizations and self-questioning have helped me understand myself and a little bit about my place in the Universe. I’m happy, life seems kind of wondrous and magical, even when I’m doing the mundane stuff. There is purpose and love and light in my life, every single day.
I didn’t set foot inside the PF Changs this time—not because I feared what would happen if I did. It’s just a little too sad to set foot in the places where I thought letting this wondrous (I know that’s twice) life pass by, while I guzzled white wine, was my life’s purpose, the best that I could do. That all seems so silly and misguided, but that’s how I thought and why the Steps are critical in changing the nature of my thoughts, and ultimately, in changing me. That’s how I got sober.
I don’t think I’ve missed a day over there since February of 2021—I think that adds up to a fair number of gratitude lists.
Always powerful. Always inspiring. Thank you 🙏
You are so kind! And speaking of inspiring…