Liner Notes for Episode 21
Welcome to the Liner Notes for Episode 21 of Breakfast with an Alcoholic!
First of all, you have presumably had the opportunity to listen to Episode 21 before today.1 If you haven’t, this isn’t a time for judgment or casting glances askance or anything. It’s just time for this:
Avid listeners of the podcast are no doubt familiar with the part of every Alcoholic Lightning Round where I ask:
One day, someone will make the movie, Breakfast with an Alcoholic. Who should play you in this movie?
I bring this up, because I think one of the important moments in the movie happened last week.2 That’s when Jane hosted her first episode of Breakfast with an Alcoholic. Jane and her friend J had a supervised breakfast at Gracie Mews Diner and I thought it was great. First of all, the two of them are pretty funny together, but there is more than a little sobriety in all of that banter. That’s what I thought was really great—-if you saw Jane and J in a diner chatting pretty intensely, your first guess would not be that they were talking about sobriety and spirituality and finding ways to listen for God in their lives.
I’ve known the topic of these Liner Notes since I listened to J tell the story of how she started on heroin.3 The succinct version: J had a friend who was addicted to heroin and J wanted to help this friend. J thought the first step was to find a way to really empathize with the friend, and, with the kind of reasoning that is only accessible to active alcoholics and addicts, came up with this great idea:
I’ll start taking heroin so that I really understand it and what my friend is really going through.
You can guess how that worked out. And that is exactly the point: What we do when we are drinking or using or whatever is just completely f****** incomprehensible. I don’t know about you, but I did some pretty “absurd, incredible, tragic things” when I was drinking. It was incomprehensible to people on the outside because they saw me making decisions in other aspects of my life that weren’t all f****** up. They astutely wondered how could I keep making the same mistakes, doing the same thing, over and over and over. We all have heard the phrase about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result as being the definition of insanity—and that’s exactly right. I was insane. “Insane” being an aggressive way of saying that I was ill. But I was actually ill, sick, I had and have a disease.
The disease I have is still pretty mysterious, and, interestingly, one of the few that is largely treated by telling people to read a book written in the 1930’s.Whatever my disease is, when I drank, things changed pretty dramatically and in a way that was entirely distinct from the way most everyone else experiences alcohol. I don’t offer that as an excuse for anything, but I think the idea that all of this is volitional, just a product of bad character or a lack of self-control is an idea that keeps a lot of people drinking and using. An idea that ultimately kills addicts and alcoholics.
Coming back to J and her nascent heroin addiction, we all know that idea was insane! When she told that story at the diner I snorted out loud.4 Literally, it was the one and only time in my life the whole “laughing with you” thing was true. Who but an addict or an alcoholic could come up with that plan? Except that every alcoholic and addict is intimately familiar with exactly that absurd, incomprehensible, inescapable, unavoidable logic. The most compelling, obviously bad ideas, ever. Well, maybe not the worst idea5:
Bill W. was entirely familiar with this phenomenon:
Our behavior is as absurd and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink as that of an individual with a passion, say for jay-walking. He gets a thrill out of skipping in front of fast-moving vehicles. He enjoys himself for a few years in spite of friendly warnings…
Big Book, p. 37
Our friend6 suffers a series of increasingly severe and traumatic injuries as a consequence of his unusual attachment to jay-walking. Eventually, he loses everything, his wife divorces him and he suffers a devastating injury (why does it have to be with a firetruck, though?).
You may think our illustration is too ridiculous. But is it? We, who have been through the wringer, have to admit if we substituted alcoholism for jay-walking the illustration would fit us exactly. However, intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane. It’s strong language—but isn’t it true?
Big Book, p. 38
Like I said, I was insane. I don’t know exactly how it started or when it ended7 or precisely how it was triggered. I know that when I drank, inevitably things became chaotic and lots of people got hurt. While we wait for medical science to figure out the details, I kind of agree with Bill: When alcohol is involved, I am strangely insane. The word “strangely” is an important modifier—because in all the annals of insanity, our sub-species of crazy is still considered a pretty strange affliction, still pretty much terra incognita.
The even weirder part is the remedy:
But the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge. This is a point we wish to emphasize and re-emphasize to smash home upon our alcoholic readers as it has been revealed to us out of bitter experience.
Big Book, p. 39
The remedy for this disease involves uprooting a lot of your old beliefs about yourself, your place in the Universe, your relationships and it’s kind of a big job, but it is not accomplished simply by stopping drinking. It is accomplished by opening the door to a spiritual transformation. But more about that next time! As I now say to my Sponsees, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t drink for at least 24 hours after reading this, because otherwise it looks kind of bad for me.8 See you tomorrow!9
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Knowing me and my promotional bent, you’ve had many, many “opportunities,” to be attracted to this content, since, of course, we’re supposed to operate on the principle of attraction, rather than promotion, but that is another topic for another day.
I know this movie is not yet made and very hypothetical. I also know of a young 8th grader who had a dream of being a game show host and that seemed outlandish at the time, too. And now…….Oh, did I say too much? Remember the thing thing about God answering prayers in unanticipated ways?
So why wasn’t this written much sooner?
If you ever need to know if I find something genuinely funny…
Is it going to change things if I tell you that I’m wearing a “Prestige Worldwide” t-shirt while I’m writing this? Because then maybe I won’t.
Has no one else recognized the obvious nickname possibilities.
If it ended. Fair. But who’s reading the footnote?
Of course, my Sponsor, oh right, we have to call him “Your Sponsor” now, “Your Sponsor” would never speak that way to a Sponsee.
See what I’m doing here?