I’m grateful for quiet mornings. I’m grateful for the chair at the end of the Pirate Balcony. I’m grateful for seeing where I am. I’m grateful for coffee and sponsees. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Song of the Week
I’m sorry things got late this morning.1 I had a chance to see just how dependent I actually am on the whole Internets thing. The answer: A lot. Waking up to no internet means no music (well, thank goodness for albums, but that is a bit of a chore to manage), no news on the television (kind of a news junkie, too), no YouTube to browse for the song of the week, no YouTube to watch crazy videos about how the Universe will end or competitive walking from Japan.
It leaves just me and my thoughts.
This, historically, has been a place I have worked very hard to avoid. Even as a kid, situations of enforced solitude provoked fear and eventually near-panic. I was fine if I was moving or listening to music or watching something or whatever—but this idea of “sitting with my feelings,” felt not just unpleasant, but tremendously frightening and dangerous.
For me, work was also a way I distracted myself. Volunteering to help on a preliminary injunction motion over the weekend was usually enough to prevent the dreaded quiet, introspective time
This fear, the fear of being alone, let’s call it, was a driving force in my life. It led me to a lot of places I didn’t want to go, places I shouldn’t have been. But they all seemed far preferable to the dreaded, “being alone with my thoughts.”
I’m not quite sure what exactly I was afraid of. I mean, we all spend plenty of time alone or alone-ish during the day, and it often does not lead to crippling rumination—but the idea of coming home to an empty house, no one there, no one coming home later, provoked a very deep set of fears. But still, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what I was afraid of.
Was it the fear that I would always be alone? Maybe. At the bottom, for this alcoholic, I think it was the fear of having such strong, negative feelings and not being able to make them stop or control them. From the time I was a kid, I had a difficult time controlling thoughts—I had lots of negative thoughts racing around my young head, and pretty fast. It wasn’t terribly pleasant.
I think that fear of being alone turned into a kind of background noise—a fear that was always present at some level. I have learned that carrying fears around is exhausting business. There are times when we all have to carry some fear around with us; As I learn to let some of the fears go, I can see the burden they imposed. I can feel their weight.
I made a lot of terrible decisions trying to run from those fears. The pervasiveness of fear contributed to the intensity of my drinking. The need for the hamster wheel to stop or slow or just quiet down a bit was so keen, it was very important to always try to keep the glass at least half-full. Not a metaphor, an actual drinking strategy for a desperate alcoholic, worried about running out, losing the trusty sidekick who kept the scary thoughts at bay.
There was a period of time, when I was still in DC and still drinking, where my life was simply an intolerable expression of that fear. I’d wake up at 3:30am, the starts of withdrawal symptoms already noticeable. A racing mind from the first open-eye starting gun. I’ve never really been a consistent smoker—mostly at rehab and such, but that was one of the few weapons in my self-avoiding arsenal in those days.
Rather than lay in bed and risk becoming aware of the monstrous thoughts already getting churned out by those relentless and heartless hamsters, I jumped up, pulled on clothes and headed to the 7-11 on Rhode Island Ave. I’d walk through the crowd of homeless, K2-smoking guys at the corner, hoping to catch people with change walking out, and go buy a pack of cigarettes.
I’d crank up the music and walk around my Logan Circle neighborhood, mostly avoiding myself, until it was closer to the time for some coffee and then a triumphant return to my morning throne at The Commissary. The Commissary didn’t really have good food and the service at the bar was often a bit hit or miss. Note: When striving to keeping the glass half-full, service matters. The charm of the Commissary, to this alcoholic, was that it opened and served alcohol unreservedly from 8am on—even on weekday mornings.
What changed? One of the functions of the “bottom” is that you realize how far away you are from the life you thought you were meant to lead, the person you thought you were. Coming face to the face with the person who is—who had become what he was because of the persistent belief in some very virulent self-lies—rather than who I wanted to be, was a very jarring experience.
It’s those kind of realizations that drove my early recovery and still deepen my sobriety. It was not just finally acknowledging who I really was, but then having to spend a ton of time with the guy. This is where the Pandemic kicked in—I had moved to NY where I didn’t know many people, I was living alone in a new apartment, and had the enhanced solitude and isolation afforded by the Pandemic. Back in the days when we wore masks to walk the two blocks to the dry cleaners.
Well, to be honest, that was a really difficult, hard, frightening time. I wasn’t really working, I wasn’t really doing much of anything.
I ran out of places to run.
I watched episodes of The Office pretty obsessively at night. I went to zoom meetings a lot, I read the Big Book with my sponsor, I was part of a Big Book Study Group and I started writing my gratitude lists. Those days, particularly those early mornings, seem so bleak in retrospect. It felt like the sun never got much above the horizon most of the time.
Those days turned into months, pretty soon I had two years of sobriety. I had started to see things the way I needed to, the way they were. I did two more Big Book Study Groups and started working with Sponsees. I’m not sure I even noticed the fear of being alone ebbing away, until one day when I was anticipating a day of solitude like it was a mouth-watering meal. It was a Friday night and it just struck me: I was looking forward to being by myself.
I wasn’t by myself because I had done something wrong, or because I had screwed things up, or because I didn’t deserve better. I was by myself because I wanted to and it made me happy.
You can think of alcoholism or addiction as a kind of civil war; a fight between internal factions for control of the narrative. A battle where I am guaranteed to lose, no matter how successful I am (because I’m fighting myself). In my case, the civil war didn’t end with a laying down of arms at a courthouse in Spotsylvania County. I just realized one day that it was gone.
What was gone?
The fear of being by myself; the fear I had carried around for almost my entire life.
How did it leave?
I imagine it happened the way the coffee grounds come out of the French Press in a clump when I empty it, the stream of running water slowly but lethally undermining the ground coffee structure, until suddenly, the whole thing collapses and is gone down the drain in the very next moment.
That moment was not signified by any white lights, not even a quiet “aha.” I just felt the onset of peace; the sense that things were okay and would be okay. The sudden sense that a crazy number of things had conspired together to bring me to this exact moment.
All I had to do was live it.
I’m wired for fear, I can concoct some pretty insane but plausible scenarios pretty quickly. Roughly none of them ever turn out the way that I imagine. I’m learning that my fears are often semi-irrational vestiges of the bad old days. Not that I disrespect them, I simply let them pass.
Now that the weather is nice, my mornings often begin in my little chair at the end of what I call the “Pirate Balcony.” From there, I can survey my little empire: Down York Avenue to the FDR and the sanitation facility and over the bay to the island that might be named for me, Queens across the tidal estuary known as the East River. It’s often the best part of my day, the time when I can get a sense for where things actually are, how I actually feel and how much I have to be grateful for. Why is the best time of the day?
It’s the time when I’m most myself. The greatest gift of sobriety is recovering the person I was meant to be and getting to spend time with him. This is his POV:
Happy Friday.
The song of the week? I really don’t have a good explanation and sometimes things like that just happen. It does capture the vibe of that era….Just saying.