I’m grateful to be up early on a really dark, quiet morning. I’m grateful for what I had to learn. I’m grateful for what’s before me and grateful for seeing where I was. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I’m not sure why I’m drawn to dark, gloomy places. Not like caves or creepy places or haunted houses. But I definitely prefer the low-light setting most of the time. This is not the prevailing design norm at law firms, I’m discovering. I’m doing my best to fight the good fight with the robot sensor that controls the overhead light in my office; like HAL, he stubbornly refuses disconnection. I’m sorry, I just find that I’m more focused and more comfortable without the glare and buzz of overhead lights. ugh.
I’m going to let you in on a secret: I actually love getting up early. Really early. I’ll make the usual moans about not sleeping and being awake since 4:30 or whatever, but on the rare days when I sleep until 7:20 (gasp!), I genuinely feel like I’ve missed something.
I was a terrible sleeper as a kid, I really struggled with insomnia and the worst part of that is the fear and dread at the prospect of having to spend another night trying to fall asleep. I knew I should sleep, that if I didn’t I would definitely underperform the next day at 5th Grade, I would be so tired, and it would all be my fault. So why don’t you sleep? That’s the actual thinking pattern, I can remember that exact chain of thinking spinning in my head as I was trying to count sheep or relax my body part-by-part, or whatever active-thinking potential remedy was being suggested as I lay in my twin bed and listened to my brother snore.
What I note is the sense of self-imposed shame, I was scolding an insomniac eleven year-old on the importance of sleeping. For me, it was that self-built engine of shame that propelled my drinking. It certainly played a role in generating a need, a thirst that was perfectly quenched by everclear and kool-aid. I, perhaps, have spent too much time gazing fondly inwards, but I really see, pretty starkly, how significant self-produced shame was in my own cycle of addiction and addictive thinking.
I’m not a doctor, but I think people get really hung up on the whole, “if it’s a disease, why doesn’t it act like other diseases?” “Why can’t you treat it?” Which is fair, but misses the point. I think addiction is very much a disease, but a disease that is difficult to understand because it infects thoughts, not cells. It would be very much easier if you could draw a bit of blood, or pee in a cup, as many of us are accustomed, and say, “ah yes, you’re quite the alcoholic!”1 The beauty of this is that you would also eventually be able to declare the patient to be cured.
The thing that strikes me over and over, really every time I go to a meeting or talk to another alcoholic, is how similar our thinking patterns are. We can be different ages, genders, ethnicities, political viewpoints, body-types, astrological signs, or whatever, but we have this way of thinking that is amazingly similar. I have no idea why this is, I’m guessing it’s just a path that some brains can take during development if certain combinations of things happen or don’t happen.2
The thinking patterns that drove my drinking, even as an adult, first manifested when I was in elementary school. Those thinking patterns had nothing to do with exposure to any substance, they were generated organically. There’s a saying, “alcohol works for alcoholics,” and it’s completely true. Those troubling thinking patterns that I began spinning out in the Fifth Grade had a remedy; I discovered that in the Tenth Grade. Once I discovered that it worked, I had a multi-year backlog of troubling thoughts that needed to be swept away.
Before you know it, there’s that version of me, with a very thin, proto-moustache, sitting in the black vinyl-clad booth at Magoo’s realizing that drinking was both the answer and the curse. I think this is what people don’t always get about AA, it’s really not about stopping drinking. It’s recognizing that alcohol or whatever substance we came up with as the answer, just wasn’t. The problem, the real question, is much deeper and it has to with my view of myself—which is why it is so supremely difficult to face.
I also got a paper route in the 5th Grade, and now there was an excellent reason to be up and at ‘em before the sun came up. Actually, there were 34 reasons spread along Koser Avenue and Highland Drive—I believe I made about 60 cents per customer of pure profit every month. Here’s the thing, I was still awake when everyone else was asleep—but now I had a really good reason. Looking back, I recognize that as a form of re-framing an issue. It took accepting outside employment to accomplish that reframing, if I could have simply accepted myself, my insomnia and over-anxiousness at night, I could have gotten to the same spot.3
I still don’t sleep much or in regular patterns. The fact that I consume half my bodyweight in coffee every day could play a role, as does the perpetual motion hamster wheel in my head. Acceptance is padding around the apartment in the middle of the night, aware that a lot of the world is resting for tomorrow, but quite happy to be brushing up on another way the world might end or the finer points of Hittite history.
In early sobriety, being told to read the acceptance passage on page 417 is the equivalent of hearing the words “bad dog,” and seeing a newspaper being waved around. That’s not it. It’s actually the key to freedom. You know that whole bondage of self thing? It turns out we had the key to the prison we walked around in our whole lives.4 Seriously, it is acceptance that is the key in ending the obsession, the compulsion, the addiction. Accepting myself was the hardest thing to do in recovery; it is a relatively involved process, having at least twelve steps and requiring a fair amount of dedication and introspection. The pay-off: When I’m awake in the middle of the night these days, all I can think is that I’m lucky to be here, with me.
You know what had a surprising game-showy feel to it: The random drug testing selections at the IOP. Was tonight my night to get randomly tested? Would I get away with having had some drinks two days ago?
All of a sudden, this sounds strangely like my theory about songs playing in the right order on the radio…
But without the cash, so I’m still going to pick the newspaper route, even if it’s no longer strictly necessary from the self-improvement angle.
With apologies to the Eagles and potentially foreshadowing the sotw.
If you get a chance look up Dr. Naomi Fisher- she is doing great work on how schools are failing kids- my heart immediately went out to that 5th grader... no amount of SEL is going to prevent some of these kids from becoming alcoholics