I’m grateful for a quiet morning. I’m grateful for the coffee and everything else in front of me. I’m grateful to see when everyone’s off that it’s actually me. I’m grateful for the way things happen. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Yesterday was Monday. I spent a lot of the weekend working and Monday, well, let’s just say that it felt very much like another hill to climb. I was sending and receiving emails and doing Zoom calls and everyone just seemed on edge, kind of aggressive, things just felt very weird, very off. I finally squeezed out enough time in the afternoon to manage a quick walk and a coffee and a chance to ruminate on the days events so far.
I didn’t like the way everyone else was behaving.
As a kid, we briefly lived in Gainesville, FL and something that made a big impression on me were the “Alligator Wrestling” shows. For real, some guy, often a member of the Seminole Tribe, would demonstrate the technique for wrestling a pretty good-sized, pretty fearsome alligator and then putting him to sleep! Maybe there was less actual danger than this 8 year old imagined, but I thought that was pretty bad-ass.
The putting the gator to sleep part involved holding the jaws shut (this takes advantage of a discrepancy in the power of the jaw-opening vs. jaw-chomping down muscles) and then rubbing this one spot on their abdomen and they kind of go unconscious or something.
That’s also kind of a long explanation for how I think walking works on my alcoholic brain. It clamps my jaw closed and turns off the hamster wheel. It takes my finger off the transmit button and turns me into a listener. What am I listening to? Not sure. It’s a mix of weird ‘70s tinged music and my innermost thoughts and feelings, probably. Oh, and that could be when some of those potentially unlistened-to messages from the Big Guy finally get heard.
I left the coffee shop, cortado in hand and began replaying the events and conversations of the morning. It all seemed unpleasant, but I kept getting this stray thought poking through intermittently—it was some nonsense about acceptance and such on page 417 of the Big Book.
When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.
Big Book, p. 417
This is a very famous passage, and even though it is not part of the “Original 164,” one of the most quoted passages in the Big Book. Also, one of the most confounding and infuriating. For me, there was something incredibly excruciating about having another alcoholic, in response to my explanations for my drinking, remind me about the duty of acceptance. Sometimes people suggested that one should be doing this with a smile.1
Here’s my view: I don’t like everything that happens in the world around me. There are a very few things that I can change, the rest not so much. Historically, this has been a source of great frustration for me, because I very much wanted to change things that I couldn’t, or, more importantly, shouldn’t. Alcohol gave me the endurance for the repeated, daily head-pounding and then let me forget another day of head-pounding with Law & Order playing in the background.
There was no great realization yesterday during the coffee walk. No pithy nuggets summing up the glorious experience of sobriety showed up in the pan. I just exhaled, took a really delicious sip of coffee and thought:
“Ok, it’s me.”
There was nothing seriously wrong with me, nothing that needed to be fixed. I just had to realize that the particular stew of feelings and thoughts brewing around that morning had produced just a cranky, negative, the world-could-be-ending outlook. One of the things I’ve come to see is critically connected to sobriety is the ability to alter my own narrative. My own feelings and insecurities often provided the missing links between people’s ambiguous conduct and their obviously hostile and malign intentions. I realize now, alcoholic me made that last part up, the part where I divined other people’s intentions and figured out they were out to destroy me. At that point, alcoholic me would knowingly clink a glass to the proposition I had just falsely established.
That very faulty narrative is one of the things that was and is at the core of my feelings for myself, and, of course, my drinking.The dis-establishment of the alcoholic narratives in my life is what the Steps so brilliantly address and accomplish. The typical alcoholic narrative of resentment, under-appreciation and unfulfilled egoism turns nearly every interaction into a reason drink, or at least more evidence about how it was never going to be possible to stop drinking.
It was impossible for me to stop drinking until I destroyed that narrative. My alcoholic brain loves that narrative, it feels like home when I start thinking that way sometimes, it’s so familiar, the neural pathways are so well-worn and marked. But it’s a path to dislocation and isolation, it’s a path to an arms-length relationship with the entire world. I couldn’t have more of a relationship with the world around me until I accepted it, as is. That included me. The hardest nugget for this alcoholic to swallow:
That what I could do is enough.
My own particular flavor of alcoholism was driven by the fantasy that I could control the world around me, as opposed to just live in the world around me. I could never do enough to control that world, the fact that it kept doing these stupid things meant I just needed to redouble my efforts—that was the thing that tightened the spiral down, the sense deep down that it was my own failures and shortcomings that were actually at the bottom of the world’s dysfunctions. That I was responsible for all of the outcomes for all of the people around me.
The principal lessons of my sobriety have been:
I am not in control of the world around me. What I do is enough.
That’s it. A lot of my alcoholism was driven by fear and shame, the secret knowledge that I was not enough. Acceptance doesn’t really require me to smile at all of the nonsense in the world, or at people who aren’t honest or do hurtful things, with that knowing, sober, better-than-thou grin. No, the main thing I need to accept is me and that who I am and what I do is enough. Fortunately, there’s a catchy prayer that sums up the necessary attitude adjustments:
Higher Power,
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
That might be a little much.
I hate that sometimes it's me, but yeah, sometimes it's me 😑 (Maybe even *often,* UGH).
Thank god for that catchy little prayer.
It was definitely me today...probably would’ve of done me some good if I had read this earlier