I’m grateful for lovely surprises. I’m grateful for connections that somehow don’t end. I’m grateful for seeing a whole new way. I’m grateful for what is and what I have a chance to be. I’m grateful for what brought me here. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I realized late yesterday that I used the word “remarkable” three times in one paragraph when I was writing about Marty Mann. I guess the feelings are there on the sleeves sometimes, and in my case, usually mustard, too. 1 Thank you, as I like to say, I’m here all week. Except tomorrow, when
takes the stage and lets you read her diary. 2I think I used the word “remarkable,” that many times yesterday morning because I think there was a sense of “remarkability” all around me. I didn’t begin the day on great footing, there’s a lot of doubt and uncertainty in my life right now, a fair amount of old fashioned fear. I don’t enjoy it, especially when the alcoholic hamsters get out of their quasi-retirement hamster-loungers and take an arthritic spin on the wheel. For sure, the wheel doesn’t turn as easily as it used to, it’s not getting lubricated according to the old maintenance standards. Also, the hamsters have a noticeably-diminished amount of vim and vinegar. Or vigor, whatever is supposed to go there.
The old me had one move in that situation—while the fear and anger and whatever else was swirling around—I needed to get the required dosage of alcohol in there as soon as possible. That would help me stop hearing the wheel. And, if I threw a few more drinks down there for good measure, maybe the hamsters might think it’s raining and quit. Was it a good plan? No. Was it avoidant behavior? Yes. But it was more than avoidant behavior, it actually reflected a series of carefully constructed lies that I had packaged together and had been repeating to myself in the background for years:
Drinking would help this situation
Drinking alone can solve this problem
Because of my unique circumstances, I need to drink more than most people
It’s perfectly acceptable and logical to deal with my emotions this way
There will be no significant consequences from this
Everyone does this in some form or another
I’ll do better next time.
I’ll stop tomorrow
These are just some of the lies that undergirded my drinking and they just repeated quietly in the background, I wasn’t even aware I was telling myself these things, convincing myself of these things. They just seemed true. They were all lies.
Marty Mann, in her remarkable book, “Marty Mann’s New Primer on Alcoholism: How People Drink, How to Recognize Alcoholics and What to Do About Them,” both classifies alcoholics and then lists out their common symptoms, helpfully dividing them into “Early,” “Middle,” and “Late” stages. Here was her description of the methodology:
The effort here is to give enough information to be used constructively as an aid to identification of incipient alcoholism. They have been gathered largely from the recollections of recovered alcoholics, many of whom, on looking back with perspective and honesty, have stated over and over again that they now realized they had never been “normal” drinkers; that the signs had been there from the very first drinking…
Marty Mann’s Primer, p. 19
Symptoms One and Two are “Behavior” and “Lying.” She identifies that early alcoholics have already begun building the “alibi structure” that will permit them to “believe [their] little lies…to cover their growing difference from other drinkers.” But here’s the point:
What most people fail to understand is that his need is to conceal this difference from himself, far more than from other people, for it makes him very uneasy. It is bewildering and a little frightening.
Id. at p. 21.
That was exactly it for this alcoholic. There were a carefully crafted package of lies and I managed to convince myself of their truth and validity, to my very core. Those lies didn’t magically reveal themselves, or stop driving lots of misinformed, very destructive behavior when I stopped drinking. Instead, they went into overdrive—”what the f are you doing?” “Do you see what you’re doing?” “We can’t possibly survive this way.” What stripped those frantic lies of their power and legitimacy was working the Steps and studying the Big Book.
None of this came in the form of bolts of lighting or burning shrubbery, it came as I re-framed my life with spiritual meaning and purpose at the core and love and understanding and patience as the most visited links on the homepage. I saw how my lies drove me far away from myself and from everyone else. I saw how those lies created an equation where fear and shame and isolation always generated exactly the same answer. The same wrong answer.
The tricky thing about self-lying is what to do with the perpetrator? How do you bring him to justice?
Of course, you don’t. Hopefully that’s not what you think AA or the Steps are about—imposing the cosmic sentence of a perpetual “90 in 90” on the most wayward of alcoholics. You recognize that was a pretty scary, big, f***ing bear back there that you thought was chasing you. Maybe the years of running inadvertently made the bear even scarier. I mean, if you’re running that hard, it must be a pretty big, f***ing scary thing chasing you? The Steps somehow reframed and recalibrated my life, exposed those fear-based lies and showed me how the machinery, gummed up with fear and other icky stuff, was mistakenly generating them. Then I realized there wasn’t actually a bear chasing me.
If you’re lucky enough to have been to rehab a couple of times, like me, you have probably been part of one of those sessions where you are invited to think about the consequences of your addiction, or some other equally grave topics, set to music. Just as “Stairway to Heaven” was a necessary part of every Junior High Dance, so, too is “Desperado,” the default and necessary music for this endeavor.3 I mean, it is kind of applicable:
“Your prison is walking through this world all alone.”
I built that prison, not intentionally. Those lies I began constructing to explain my early reliance on alcohol in the 1970’s just grew and grew and grew. We know where those lies took me. Going alcohol-free wasn’t the antidote and didn’t knock any walls down. It was seeing my mistakes, replacing my faulty perspectives, understanding the purpose of my self-deceit and finally seeing that things could be different that produced change. When I finally saw I could just be me.
Marty Mann found freedom and liberation every time she announced she was an alcoholic. That’s because she identified that word with the solution, not the problem. She saw that solution unlocked the cell door. It worked for me, too
Seriously, mustard accounts for about 70% of the stains on my clothes. I like mustard but it doesn’t account for 70% of my diet. I’ve considered buying my clothes “pre-stained” to ease the later frustration.
That’s not exactly the premise of “The Diary of a Sober Girl,” and I’m sorry if this has rankled Jane. She’s already a little peeved because I’ve developed this habit of addressing her as “Jane of AA,” actually, I like to say it this way: [phone rings] “Well, hello, Jane of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Like “Anne of Green Gables.” It’s a good thing. Also, we can’t all like our nicknames.
I didn’t link to it for a reason.
😑