Liner Notes for Episode 16
Breakfast with Jamee Sailor Rowe
I hope you enjoyed my breakfast with Jamee Sailor Rowe as much as I did.
If you recall, Jamee is the author of the very excellent Substack newsletter Macrodosing:
Jamee made so many good points and said so many interesting things, it’s kind of hard to know where exactly to start. I loved a moment early on when she said that she was a “radical stay-at-home mom” living a very traditional life and being the happiest she’s ever been. I feel like three years of sobriety could also be a big part of that equation.
I think another point that Jamee made during breakfast and in her writing, is how we ignore or downplay the negative consequences of drinking.1 This is not limited to alcoholics—most civilian drinkers can come up with some pretty solid consequences from even casual drinking. But what’s important is how we all just assume that’s part of the deal; Go out, get drunk, and yeah, some pretty unfortunate stuff is probably going to happen, but hey, that’s part of the fun! As Jamee was thinking about those negative consequences she started wondering if maybe alcohol wasn’t adding too much to the equation after all.
Jamee had a hard time stopping because she just couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol. I completely get that. For all of those years I shuttled between barstools and AA meetings, the fundamental problem was that I just didn’t believe there was a better life out there for me sober. In a way, my inability to stop drinking may have been more a failure of imagination than anything else. I could not, in my wildest dreams, conjure up a life worth living that didn’t involve drinking. Pause on that for a second, because it is a completely insane thought. I could not even imagine how my life could be better if I was sober.2
I’m not a doctor, but I think a lot about the nature of this disease and how perplexing it is. For a long time, we looked at former NFL players and how some of them ended up in terrible situations when playing careers ended: addicted, homeless, violent and suicidal. I think a lot of us assumed those were just unrestrained character defects at work, until we discovered they were actually symptoms. All of those terrible behaviors and all of that chaos turned out to be the hallmark symptoms of CTE.3 My guess is that one day we’ll learn that all of our outrageous addict and alcoholic behaviors, the ones that are so perplexing and so injurious to others, are symptoms of our disease.4
Bill W. outlined the disease of alcoholism in Chapter Two of the Big Book; “There is a Solution,” and describes the alcoholic we all knew and maybe were:
Here is the fellow who has been puzzling you, especially in his lack of control. He does absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking. He is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is seldom mildly intoxicated. He is always more or less insanely drunk. His disposition while drinking resembles his normal nature but little. He may be one of the finest fellows in the world. Yet let him drink for a day, and he frequently becomes disgustingly, and even dangerously anti-social.
Big Book, p. 21
Of course, the question we all want to know the answer to is this:
Why does he behave like this? If hundreds of experiences have shown him that one drink means another debacle with all its attendant suffering and humiliation, why is it he takes that one drink?
Big Book, p. 22
In the last eighty years, medical science hasn’t been able to come up with a better answer than the one Bill W. was able to muster in 1939:
The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically non-existent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink
Big Book, p. 24
The best treatment that Bill W. and his colleagues could devise, and that actually seemed to work, is the one laid out in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and it requires a spiritual awakening.5 You can decide for yourself if this awakening requires being knocked off a donkey by a bolt of thunder, but the first three steps of this Program do require a fairly significant restructuring of the relationship with and connection to a Higher Power.
I was raised a Lutheran and definitely believe in God, but if you were to ask me what God is, that I’m less sure about. I think there is a force in the Universe that brings order and light and I know that when I’m connected to it, the things that are supposed to happen, tend to happen.6 Sometimes, I think it works a little like this:
Well, maybe not exactly like that.
For me, when I’m connected, I feel almost inexorably pulled to the right place. That’s the feeling of synchronicity, of coincidence, those little jolts of electricity as I move (or am sometimes pulled) into alignment. Jamee described it more eloquently and saw it as “a force that connects us all and that one day we will understand.” Admitting that spiritual force, whatever it is, into your life is what ultimately helps make the change in us and, in a lot of ways, we kind of have to believe that spiritual force into being, it is our faith in it that makes it real and gives it the power to transform.
In the Gratitude list today7, I included a poem about origami cranes I saw on the subway yesterday8 and it had this line:
My daughter makes and makes them, having heard the old story: What we create may save us
I think that pretty much hits the old nail on the head. There will be a new episode of Breakfast with an Alcoholic this weekend and until then,
Thanks for Letting Me Share
I can’t footnote pictures but just wanted to mention that there is no real reason for me scattering the pictures of my beloved dogs in here other than that I wanted to.
Trust me, I had plenty of people telling me.
I don’t mean to suggest that this would, in any way, let any of us off the hook for the consequences of our conduct. But would’t it be nice to have a better understanding of why we do such terrible shit?
Unfortunately, this is not limited to things that I want to happen. We’ll discuss Acceptance and page 417 one day soon.
Here’s the link to the entire poem: Cranes in August
Really pondering my “inability to learn from my actions while drinking” after reading this. I think that’s the biggest thing that helped me identify as an alcoholic, because I knew I wasn’t stupid…I could learn plenty of complex things in school, etc. but I absolutely could NOT apply critical thinking to my drinking behavior. It’s like it was a nebulous blob outside of my brain that was exempt from useful analysis.