I’m grateful there are still mornings left on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful for the soft breeze and quiet sunrise. I’m grateful for all of the pennies I’ve found. I’m grateful to be sober today.
If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast, well, I guess you must be awaiting an invitation—you may consider this to be that invitation. Soon, there will be another episode to listen to and then you’ll keep wondering why you didn’t find the time to listen to Sean and Episode 31. I’m just trying to spare you a little regret down the line.
I’ve mentioned the role that sober living played in my recovery. It’s where the seeds of my sobriety really and finally took root. During the ten years I spent trying to get sober, a number of people suggested it as an option for me and I always resisted it. Why? Because it was likely to work.
The excuses I made at the time were all nonsensical, because they were served up in defense of something that just was defensible anymore. Part of my attitude was motivated by pride, for sure. I wasn’t going to go live in a group home for alcoholics. I still clung to the view that my drinking was different, that my thinking patterns were different, that I was capable of controlling my drinking in a way that all of the other unfortunates occupying those folding chairs simply couldn’t pull off.
As people like to ask, “How did that work out for you?”
When I moved to New York in 2020, I didn’t really have much of a plan. It being in the middle of the pandemic definitely complicated things and I wasn’t sure about where I was going to live. I knew that moving to NY and living in a short term rental or hotel was going to be a grim, isolating affair and I knew in my heart that I was pretty certain to drink eventually in that environment. Improbably, I got connected to someone who, lo and behold, owned a sober house on the Upper East Side of New York.
I’ve written about my triumphal arrival in New York on that fateful Labor Day weekend before—some would describe my arrival as “Madisonian.” Oscar more than James.
To be honest, my arrival at the sober house more closely resembled Felix’s arrival at Oscar’s apartment, personalty and chattels under arm.
I spent that first weekend settling in, exploring my new neighborhood in the 80’s near 1st Avenue. I discovered Agata & Valentina on 79th Street—kitty-corner from St. Monica’s church and the 79th Street Workshop. This was critical and became my source for coffee beans (I pretty reliably drink only the Vienna roast from there). I travel with a French Press. Before you laugh, you haven’t heard the story about how I had to spend a week in pandemic isolation in a converted motel in the California desert before I could enter the touch-up rehab that preceded the move to NY. I’m going to use words like harrowing, apocalyptic, dsytopian, devastating isolating and profoundly dispiriting. In fact, I’ve never written about that week and have not been able to read the journal entries I made that week. Literally, the thing that saved me? The fact that I had my French Press along. Another time.
I spent a fair amount of time sitting on the back deck of the sober house, trading stories with the mostly younger guys who were my housemates and smoking. I’ve alluded to the fact that I’m a rehab smoker before, whether smoking in recovery settings is necessary, a different issue. I do think it’s interesting that I can stop and start smoking without too much difficulty. Anyway, I spent a lot of time on that deck, looking into the backyard, smoking Marlboro Lights and wondering how the f*** I got here. And, where the f*** was I going to go?
I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression for most of my life, and the crazy, antic, hamster-wheeling that went on in my head was a big reason I drank. I really felt like it slowed things down to the point where they could make a bit of sense. Those spinning thoughts were something I’d never been able to control, I always needed a distraction and then an escape. Alcohol was a very reliable accomplice in this effort.
I was meditating a lot in those early days. Laying in bed at night or when I first woke up (earlier than anyone else in the house), I’d focus on my breathing, trying to number breaths and simply observing the worrying thoughts that were zipping around my head, like tracers in a war zone. There were tons of catastrophic, how-did-we-end-up-here thought. Lots of recriminations and lots of anger. Lots of anger.
The advice I’d been getting about just observing thoughts and the meditation were definitely helping me gain a little bit of separation or distance from those previously drink-inducing thoughts. That’s when I started to see those thoughts were f***ed-up transmissions from my brain, not me. I started to see how thoroughly I had misinformed myself about drinking, my place in relation to others, my place in relation to the universe.
I was attending a lot of Zoom AA Meetings—there is a tremendous amount of sobriety here in New York—and I started hearing things that made sense. I had already met someone who would become my sponsor and was already working on my First Step again. I was also exploring my new city, and falling in love with the idea of living here in New York. I remember sitting in Tompkins Square park on a beautiful October day (like today) and writing a First Step essay about what I believed. Even though I was coming up on the first anniversary of my last drink,
Now it felt like I was getting sober.
I did a lot of walking, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading and a lot of writing. On nice days, I’d go to Bryant Park and write in the afternoons under those beautiful trees. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to do. But I felt peace and calm improbably creeping into my life. I wasn’t noticing the crazy intrusive thinking so much, I wasn’t hit that often by the icy feeling in my stomach the hard realizations typically produced. I started sleeping a little better at night.
One night, probably right around this time of year, I was laying awake in bed. It was around 10pm, I’d taken my meds, secured a handful of cookies from the kitchenette on the second floor and gotten into bed. My windows were open and I could hear the thrum of traffic on 1st Avenue. I thought about where I was. A group home for alcoholics. I thought about who I was? A 57 year old alcoholic with a very uncertain future. I thought about where I had been. Much nicer and fancier places, let’s just say that. I thought about who had been in my life and how I’d managed to drive them all away. These were the thoughts that spun out of my alcoholic brain on a regular basis. Usually, they usually ignited the anxious thinking/catastrophe prediction rocket and there was only one antidote for all of that.
That night, I thought all those thoughts. And then the next breath came and went. And another. Those thinking patterns could usually be counted on to start the lawnmower engine of shame and regret. That night, no matter how hard I pulled the rope, the engine just produced a “click.”
Those few moments of peace and calm made a very big impression on me. I couldn’t quite understand what had happened and why my heartrate was still under 60. One of the things I realized was that my thoughts, the electrical/chemical output of my silly alcoholic brain, did not define the Universe. I realized I was not responsible nor capable of keeping the world spinning. And that was okay. I literally realized I had no power, that the alcoholic emperor wore no clothes, that my brain wasn’t God.
That sounds kind of obvious and dumb. But it was that realization that began the process of setting me free. Laying in bed that night in the sober house, there were at least 99 real problems out there that would need to be dealt with eventually. But as I was quietly dozing off, I knew the reign of those terrible thoughts and thinking patterns was coming to an end. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I was discovering a force that brought peace and calm to me, like a soft breeze on a hot day, when I let it. And that was the key, I had to let it happen.
There’s no single recipe for producing the peace I felt that night, I’m not sure I could reproduce that feeling even if there was. It was the beginning of a revolution, an overthrow of the misguided tyrant who had ruled for too long. I know exactly what started that revolution: Willingness.
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
Big Book, p. 12
It’s hard to believe it’s been three years since that night. Three years of discovery, of happiness, some heartbreak, some grief, some joy—lots of peace and just general grooviness. I’ve been re-united with someone I thought I’d lost for good. And that entire miracle gets summed up pretty nicely when I raise my hand and say, “Yes, on the 22nd of October, I’ll have four years of sobriety.”