I’m grateful for a quiet morning on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful to be where I’m supposed to be. I’m grateful for the clouds and everything else drifting by. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
This is a really weird and powerful song for me. When I listen to this song, it’s indelibly connected to the memory of being in rehab and walking up the big fucking hill to the Sodexho cafeteria three times or so a day. That was yet another September for me. I checked into sleepaway rehab for the first time on Labor Day weekend in 2016 and this was in heavy rotation right away.1 I’d trudge up that hill, feeling completely lost, shell-shocked at where I was, wondering how I was possibly going to manage life without the tool I’d relied on for my entire life. And who were all of these insane alcoholics and addicts? Am I really this bad?
For some reason, rehab felt like I was fighting some kind of war, and I guess I was, fighting myself definitely counts. It’s also the definition of a zero sum game. Anyway, this song struck the right line between pathos and defiance for me:
I walk along the city streets, so dark with rage and fear, and, I wish that I could be that bird, and fly away from here, I wish I had the wings to fly away from here
I don’t know where I would have gone, had I been granted the gift of flight in that moment. I wasn’t far from Reading, PA, so not sure flying would have have solved much:
my my, I feel so low, my my, oh, where do I go?, my my, oh, what do I know? my my, We reap what we sow
That summed up the current situation pretty aptly. It very pithily posed the questions that kept me from sleeping most nights (even with a helpful prescription of trazodone). The reason this was a go-to song, the one I listened to when everything felt like I was slogging through an endless field of shit,2 was because these lines always followed those lines and never, ever failed to hit me. They struck me as the most appropriate prayer I heard during my time there:3
I’m just a troubled soul, who's weighted to the ground, give me the strength to carry on ‘til I can lay my burden down, give me the strength to lay this burden down, give me the strength to lay it down
While I listened to those words over and over, and came to believe they summarized my current mission, I didn’t really know how that was going to happen. I didn’t really know how to approach the seemingly contradictory command to gin up the strength to surrender one’s burden. TBG (“The Big Guy”) knows he is dealing with someone who requires a bit of unsubtlety in the messaging, meaning sometimes things have to be put in flashing lights in front of me. And they had been.
That burden language was what kept hitting me. I kept thinking this was a building muscle mass kind of thing, that enough time soaking up the lessons in rehab would enable me to confront the world and my tormentors, but now, thanks to the new tools I was learning, I would be so strong I wouldn’t need alcohol to vanquish mine enemies.
I was a model citizen in rehab, popular, funny, lots of trenchant comments to throw off in our group therapy sessions.
My friend, Rob, the Tire King of Buffalo, called me the “Mayor of Shaky-Town.”
I was so sober, they let me out of rehab a day early, so I could drive home on a beautiful Fall Saturday morning. I drank three glasses of horrid Pinot Grigio at a really soulless Chili’s on I-83, about 50 minutes later.4
I went back to rehab just in time for Valentine’s Day and listened to this song even more. If that was possible. That was a really dark time. The first time I was in rehab, there was the prospect I could return to the life I had once inhabited. I’d make my grand re-entrance, grudges and justifiable anger would vanish when people saw how much enlightenment was beaming out of me. The second time in rehab was different, like the other song said,
“For some reason I can’t explain, I know St. Peter won’t call my name.”
There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which requires rigorous honest.
Big Book, p. 58
I think the mistake I made was not knowing exactly what this “burden” was that I was trying so hard to lay down. I thought it was drinking. I thought it was the set of grandiose feelings, the sense of entitlement, that enabled me to think it was ok to drink all day, even though no one else did. That it was ok to lie to people all the time, even though other people didn’t. I thought the exercise was to eliminate that horrible demon, keep the beastly Mr. Hyde in a box. Then contritely live my life making up for the misdeeds and going to AA meetings to talk about how terrible I was and how meekly I live now.
Of course, I didn’t stay sober. If shame is one of the things that was at the bottom of the bottle of Kim Crawford’s best, then the problem with this approach is obvious: It produces more shame. In this alcoholic’s experience, even small amounts of shame metastasize very rapidly and can undo all of the positive learning imparted. That approach inevitably took me back to:
I’m just a bad person who likes to drink.
The burden I needed to lay down was the life I made up. The burden, the thing that kept me weighted to the ground was the character, the persona, I invented to win friends and influence people. The version of me that was simply a version of me, not the real thing. That version of me, and the life that person was leading, well, it required alcohol for locomotion and cohesion.5
Fortunately, there was this other catchy quote about “burden” dancing around my head. If I was running for President and someone asked me if I had a favorite bible verse, I have an answer. My birthday is November 28 and even as a kid, it hit me that this, from Chapter 11, verse 28, of the Book of Matthew, might be meant for me:
Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest, Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Hopefully, you caught the trick, too. I’m not building muscles to better be able to shoulder my own ridiculous, self-constructed burden. I probably can’t even manage to get that thing into an overhead compartment.6 My burden was self-defined, but paradoxically, it was not the burden meant for me.
Sobriety has been about finding the burden that is easy, the yoke that is light. When I truly feel connected to my Higher Power, when I truly feel that I’m trying to find a way to make every day a day of service to whatever it is that I’m serving, no matter how hard that it is, it still feels lighter than what I had. It feels manageable. Not great all the time. But almost always manageable.
I’ve thought, off and on, that “Little Bird,” could be a pretty perfect soundtrack for rebuilding a sober life, a really great recovery anthem. It’s not just the defiant, “I’m going to go and kick some sober ass” feelings it can inspire. It’s the acknowledgement that there is a tremendous amount of strength and courage required in letting go of the life I meticulously built.
There are many times when that process feels like the end. It turns out the process is very trying, produces lots of fear and a genuine sense of really not knowing what’s around the corner. I feel uncertainty and fear with nearly every step and the super weird thing, as I move through these days:
I’ve got a feeling I might have been blessed, So, I’ve just got to put these wings to test
Alert readers may notice a pattern.
I’m sorry, the hill to the cafeteria felt that way. No offense to the folks who worked there.
No disrespect intended to the Serenity Prayer.
The ROI on that four weeks: Less than hour of sobriety.
These are things not typically associated with significant levels of alcohol consumption. This could be why alcoholic lives tend to be unmanageable and unsustainable.
Please don’t do that on planes around me.