SUNDAY GRATITUDE EXTRAVAGANZA: THE NOVEMBER REVOLUTION
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I’m grateful for a quiet Sunday morning. I’m grateful for what looks like a beautiful day. I’m grateful for the chance to do things differently. I’m grateful for apples and apple crumble. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Happy Sunday, this is the SUNDAY GRATITUDE EXTRAVAGANZA. That is probably a sentence that sounds better than it reads, but you get the idea. Somehow, it has become November with me barely noticing. This is a big month, it includes Thanksgiving and me turning 60 again.1 November, in the annals of AA history, is also important, as it marks the last month of Bill W’s drinking career. While Bill W’s sobriety date is December 11, the revolution began in the tumultuous events of November.
I’ve written about these events before, I think the history is fascinating and makes Bill W’s sobriety even more approachable and meaningful:
A few weeks ago, we covered the First Step (like always, maybe too much), here’s a collection of essays on that topic, for your convenience and perusal:
From here, the next stop is Step Two. From my personal vantage point, most of the First Step had been stipulated to, early in my drinking career. I didn’t labor under the illusion that my drinking was costless or could eventually be controlled, I just thought I could keep evading the consequences and that one day I’d be miraculously delivered from demi-sobriety2 by some new treatment or pill or something that would change all of the world around me, including the way I felt about myself. This miracle treatment would make drinking just a cute accessory for me, like it can be for civilians. Given my drinking proclivities, this was very, very magical thinking.
I have often ascribed my difficulty getting sober to a lack of imagination, and certainly faith. I simply could not imagine, and certainly could not believe in, a way of life that didn’t include drinking, but still included happiness. To be honest, the fear way ran deeper than just “I won’t be happy.” I didn’t think I could manage my life without drinking. In fact, I believed pretty strongly I couldn’t.
That’s why reason and logic and “consequences” sessions aren’t enough to produce sustained sobriety; because they don’t stand up to the alcoholic’s very entrenched belief that alcohol is what makes life “work.” The misconception is that we cling to drinking because we like it, because we prefer drinking and the mayhem over the opportunity to change.
We keep drinking because we don’t think we have a choice.
Like I said, I was pretty aware that my life was a shambles and that it was going to hit a really unpleasant wall at some point. I just didn’t think that what I saw going on at AA meetings was really that much better. I really think sobriety starts with this Step:
Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
It’s possible that I put the rabbit in the hat, here.3 For me, it becomes blindingly obvious that the solution to my faith and imagination problem, the thing that kept me drinking, was imagining a faith that I could believe in. That sounds like a rhetorical trick—but it is actually the philosophy that underlies the Twelve-Step approach to sobriety.
Sobriety amounts to a change in ideology.
There is a great book, “The Ministry of the Future,” written by well known sci-fi writer, Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s a pretty real-sounding story about a decades-long struggle for human survival against climate change, set in the not-so-distant future. He paraphrases some other folks with his definition of “ideology:”
Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.
Meaning, we stitch together the events in our lives and attempt to extract common threads, elements and meaning. We construct a story, a narrative, that explains these disparate events and attempts to predict the ones that are coming in the future. When I was drinking, there was definitely a narrative constantly unspooling in my head that not only justified drinking, it enthroned drinking as a necessary component. Alcohol was defined as part of that “life,” according to that “ideology.”
But here’s the problem with that approach: It’s made up. The problem is not that it is “made up,” that's how our brains process events and emotions and random hormones and brain chemicals. We all make up stories. The problem for us alcoholics is that the story we’ve been living is, well, not to be too judg-y:
But it’s just really wrong.
Fortunately, we all know how easy it is to convince people they are wrong about things and should just see things differently. To be honest, that’s not too far from most of the standard month-long addiction treatment regimens, and it’s why it’s so hard to hang on to that sobriety, because the story hasn’t changed yet.
I think the Twelve Steps don’t end drinking, they change ideology. The Second Step is the beginning of that process. The First Step is simply the alcoholic-targeted universal predicate to change: Things are f****ed up and could be better. The Second Step is much more eventful and much more frightening, because it implicitly requires the abandonment of the old way of thinking, the old ideology.
The first thing that has to change is our belief that we actually “know” what’s going on, that we can control events around us. That we can and should decide for ourselves and others what those events should be. Part of climbing to safety is letting go of the thing you know can’t last:
Don’t actually do that, you’ll get sober, but you’ll also die. But that’s the metaphor for the change in ideology that needs to happen in sobriety. It’s acknowledging that the old narrative was false, that it was based on some fundamentally incorrect ways of looking at the world. Most importantly, it’s a narrative that doesn’t produce happiness. Or sobriety.
Here’s the funny thing and the grain of hope. We alcoholics and addicts are capable of believing some real nonsense—especially when we’re telling it to ourselves. I think the Steps capture this proclivity, re-orient it and put it to good use. I was capable of believing that there wasn’t a life worth living without drinking, that I was personally not able to lead a life that didn’t involve drinking. I worked the Steps and used that alcoholic faith-muscle to start believing things that were more true, that more accurately expressed and explained the world around, that actually made me happy, that helped me stay sober. This was not the consequence of simply letting non-drinking time accumulate; this required a change in my entire belief system, a fundamental change in my ideology.
Maybe, you’re shaking your head, this all sounds like more metaphysical nonsense, navel-gazing nonsense, the ravings of crazy alcoholics. Except that it worked for me. I had four years of sobriety last month—significant for someone who couldn’t manage four months for more than a decade. The Steps start a revolution and, like all revolutions, there is a change in ideology required.
As the saying goes, “if you want what I have,” well, I know where you can get it.
I scoured the Internets for songs about November, the pickings are slim. I’m sorry in advance:
I’m sorry, November just isn’t that dramatic, is it a good month for weddings?.
I think this accurately sums things up, from a festivities point of view.
Other than “Five Fat Turkeys,” the song that most gets Thanksgiving “right.”
The TFLMS Pyramid of Support
Perhaps you enjoy reading what we write or the podcast or whatever, and maybe you were even thinking, “Gee, I wonder if there is something I could do to help. The good news is that there is. Like the famed game show of legend, “The $20,000 Dollar Pyramid,” there is something similar at work here. If you really like us and read us every day, maybe it would be cool to upgrade your subscription, or you can get your friends to pay, or you can just share what share with you. It’s all cool and it’s all very much appreciated, and without further ado:
It’s the TFLMS Pyramid of Support:
For us, reading and writing have been a big part of recovery and sobriety. We thought we’d start sharing some of our favorite books on the topic of recovery, addiction and general happiness and telling you how they helped us! If you have ideas, thoughts, comments, suggestions or if there are some books that you’d like to chat about, well, we’d love to do that with you. 4
Now, here’s something new. You may have heard me mention something about writing your story in the style of Bill W’s: and this is where we are going to do it. If you want to write your story and share it, I’ll be happy to put it here for other folks to read. If you’d like to record yourself reading your own story (I highly, highly recommend this), I’ll put it here, too:
The “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous
It’s the “Anyone Anywhere” meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, this Tuesday evening at 7pm. We’re ready to go and hope you can join us this Tuesday! It’s 1/2 AA Meeting, 1/2 Alcoholic Book Club and 1/2 something else we haven’t figured out yet. We’ve been reading the “Stories from the Back of the Book,” and they are all so great. It’s a fun way to learn more about the Big Book and reading these stories out loud is a little like listening to the legends of AA share.
Hope you can join us!
From the TFLMS Archives:
I’m completely ok with this and here’s my reasoning. I’m not big on the odd-numbered years, in the same way that the elevator in my building “omits” floor 13, I moved to 60 on my 59th birthday. Having voluntarily entered the 60’s voluntarily and early, I feel like staying 60 is not a big ask. Also, is 60 vs. 61 really a material fact?
I think I’m inventing this term, it refers to a circumstance where one is “trying” to stay sober and comes to believe that this is best accomplished by occasional, secret drinking. If no one knows you’re drinking, are you really an alcoholic?
That’s a law school phrase.
Seriously, write a book review (or we might expand into movies!) and we’ll probably put it up.