I’m grateful for brisk walks on chilly days. I’m grateful for particularly good coffee. I’m grateful for persistence. I’m grateful for letting waves pass over. I’m grateful to be sober today.
It’s been go-go-go here for a while now and there are a fair number of miles on this airframe and not all of them terribly “easy” miles. I’m not sure whether this is a feature of recovery or advancing age, but I just get really worn out. I don’t think about drinking, I just feel a very vague sense of unease, that vague feeling that I’ve forgotten something, am missing something.
I remember way back in the olden days, I was in the midst of one of my IOP stints.1 One of my fellows, a lovely middle-aged woman who was trying to stay sober while waiting to find out if she was going back to prison for a parole violation, made us all candles. She painted a different affirmation or slogan or comment on the side of each one, and they were all different. I think there were 12 or so people in our group—so it was a fair amount of effort.
I don’t know if she had particular candles for particular people, but the one she handed me had something about “the nature of my dis-ease.” I’d heard people refer to that before, but seeing it spelled out made more of an impression. That is, I think, one of the hallmarks of the disease of addiction/alcoholism; that feeling of dis-ease, is what defines our disease.2
It’s the feeling that things are off, slightly off-kilter, that something bad is about to happen, that something bad has happened and we just haven’t gotten the news yet. It was the sense I always had that celebrating things going right was what happened right before things went really wrong. Why did I, do I, think that? Is there some specific situation that generated that feeling, that belief?
The answer is no, not that I’m aware of. That’s the thing I’ve realized that has helped me tremendously. There are times when my thoughts and feelings simply have no basis, no objective reality. I believe in premonitions and energetic connections with people that exist and don’t exist at the same time, but I don’t believe that I possess some kind of long-range radar that correctly identifies what will happen in the future. I’m fairly certain I don’t know the future, at any level.
So then, why these “feelings” about things I think I know about the future? In my case, a good number of those feelings are probably expressions of fear, maybe even unconscious fears that don’t have a big enough cross-section to be detected on their own, but that quietly aggregate until they can’t be ignored and suddenly, like a gust of wind, there is a cold shot of fear. Maybe I’m crossing York Avenue, cheerfully on the way to the secret coffee shop that is definitely not “on the way” to the subway, and there is that stab of fear. My mind races to explain the horrible feeling, the sensation of foreboding. Could it be this? Or this? Ohhhhh, it’s probably this…..
Except it’s none of those things. Those are just explanations that my alcoholically-inclined brain tends to throw out. The problem is, those “explanations,” those thinking patterns are what helped generate my need to drink and what justified my drinking (to me) over those many decades. The perniciousness of those beliefs (and they are beliefs, not facts) is what made it so hard for me to recover, to get and stay sober.
My own recovery has been driven by the earth-shattering realization that things will probably be okay. Another realization, driven by the Third Step, was that I was not the center of the Universe, capable of controlling people and events just enough to get what I deserved. The frustration generated by my coyote-like inability to “get what I deserved,” was nearly-perfectly salved by drinking.3 I say “nearly-perfectly,” because that approach to resentment at my lack of control laid waste to a significant portion of my life.
I’m a big believer in the power of routines as well. My routines, which in the early mornings revolve around coffee, aimless thinking, writing and listening to music, have evolved over decades. I did these same things when I was much younger, and even at times when I was drinking. I’ve also come to understand, via recovery, that my brain has a pretty mechanical bent to it, and that those activities tend to help keep the machine working right.
Somewhere along the way, I came to understand that my brain, and the thoughts and feelings it helps generate, was not the Oracle at Delphi, or even run by the Wizard of Oz—it’s a machine and it functions in very mechanical ways at times. Getting hungry or tired can cause the brain-machine to spit out crazy thoughts about the end-times being upon us, and then a few Reeses Miniature Peanut Butter Cups are consumed, and suddenly those horrible earth-ending beasts are unicorns dancing in the air again.4
For whatever reason, my brain spits out more of these slightly-off thoughts than does the brain of the average bear.5 For additional whatever reasons, my ability to deal rationally with those thoughts is not really great either. I get things wrong a lot, the signal gets garbled, I’m left wondering what to do, how other people cope with these situations, and the stress of all of that uncertainty, well, the boat definitely rocks less with Captain Kim Crawford at the helm.
I think the “work” of the Steps is identifying and changing those thinking patterns—-the ways of approaching and analyzing life that produced misery and unhappiness and replacing them with a way of living that produces serenity, calm, even peace. That equation is different for every single person—how could it be otherwise?
You might not feel the way I do when I look out my window and see the island that might be named for me, through the growing leaves of the plant a sponsee left me to tend, with my beloved coffee near the keyboard, music playing.6 That’s a soft reset for this weary brain-machine, and just that little conglomeration of things is often enough to shut down the applications that aren’t responding anymore, that aren’t working correctly.
Getting comfortable with my dis-ease might have been the message on my IOP candle. I don’t remember exactly what it said, but that has been part of the recovery process, getting used to the fact that I’ve got a brain that tends to manufacture dis-ease. Learning that the stray, very wrong thoughts and ideas are not lightning bolts of truth.
They pass in just about 12 seconds, about as long as it takes me to cross York Ave and realize that the stab of fear and regret was not caused by some horrific calamity or calamity-to-be, I just forgot to drop-off my dry cleaning.
Again.
IOP stands for “Intensive Outpatient Program.” These are very valuable alternatives to sleep-away rehab—they usually offer daytime or evening sessions, meaning you lessen the disruption to one’s life and still pursue recovery. If you were to ask me, an IOP coupled with a stay in a Sober House could be a very effective alternative.
That’s definitely a sorry/not sorry type of situation.
Also, at some level, didn’t the coyote always get what he deserved?
I don’t actually think exactly that way. I’m exaggerating for effect.
One of the few impressions that I can do is of Yogi Bear. This is unfortunate because no one really knows who Yogi Bear is anymore. No, he wasn’t a baseball player, he was a bear.
This morning, it’s Saint Saens piano trios.