I’m grateful for waking up an hour too early. I’m grateful for a quiet dark morning and for the patches of light blue sky showing through. I’m grateful for empty parks. I’m grateful for used books. I’m grateful to be sober today.
In case you didn’t know it, today is Halloween. This is significant for me, because it comes right before All Saints Day and, in the Lutheran Church, that is connected to “Reformation Sunday,” wherein, we Lutherans celebrate our “victory” over the papal forces of the 16th Century and sing hymns like “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” and “Onward Christian Soldiers.”1
No, be serious. It’s because there were a few too many completely crazy Halloweens there. There was the college caveman episode, where my friend Glenn and I wore homemade “caveman outfits,” constructed from So-Fro Fabrics finest cheetah-print.2 Authentic experiences were how we rolled, so we committed to speak only in an improvisational cave-language that we were inventing in real-time.3 Disturbingly, I felt like we began to actually communicate in this language sometime around 3am. For sure, we had thought our jaunty cave outfits would draw a lot of the right kind of attention. This was a mistaken assumption, the misunderestimation of the fabric meant that our outfits were a bit “skimpy.”4 The spears we had fashioned from sticks and aluminum foil had a decidedly 6th Grade look to them. Also, the cave-language thing came across as very strange to everyone, since we didn’t break character, ever. We kept it going for at least the better part of November 1st.
I miss that.
I prattle on about the joy of sobriety and that’s 110% true, but it’s fun to remember some of those crazy escapades. I’m sympathetic to the drunk-a-logues that get spun out sometimes at meetings. Let’s face it, a reason people drink is because it’s fun. There really is such a thing as a “golden hour,” where research shows that people who are drinking together smile more at each other.5 The problem someone like me faces is that my brain got hardwired to squeezing out every possible drop of whatever the magical part of alcohol is to the alcoholic, using that to keep the self-ish ship of state running, and then realizing that we were actually going to need more, a lot more. After ten years of running through every possible variation on sobriety treatments, I finally realized this simple fact:
I couldn’t control my drinking.
You see, the filter I applied to all of my treatment efforts was actually to find a way to continue to drink. The magical thinking part of my brain (which occupies a substantial portion of the overall capacity) was great at spinning out this plan: We’d stop drinking for a while, work really hard on the treatment stuff, be really earnest about it, really earnest. This would then reveal the new me, personality issues sorted, relationships mended. People would finally understand me, things would turn rosy again, there be no need for any of the fussing or fighting. And, against this backdrop of the new, improved me, no one would notice if I drank a little bit every now and again. I’d be so sober, and was working so hard at it, who could get upset if I rewarded myself a bit now and then?
That literally was my plan for sobriety. I don’t think I articulated it that plainly to myself until pretty recently. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why nothing worked for like, an entire decade, and then did. People who loved me, maybe still do, people who are definitely on my 8th Step list, they’d like to know, too. That’s a big part of this little endeavor—and I very, very much appreciate having all of you along.
But seriously, my old plan for “sobriety” always included drinking.
I just thought I could fix all of the other stuff and then the drinking wouldn’t really be a problem. Here’s the buzzsaw that approach to recovery ran into:
I can’t control my drinking.
Dudley Do-Right, and his sometimes squeeze (?) Nell, faced the buzzsaw a number of times, but always managed to avert disaster.
Do you know how many times I went through the buzzsaw? Maybe it will be different if I take Baclofen this time? Ummmm, no. I got the same result because I hadn’t really integrated the idea that any plan that included controlled drinking was just not going to work to get me sober. All that earnest work? It was actually going to create a sober facade that maybe did or didn’t represent the real me, who really knew? I went to meetings and talked a lot about the challenges of sobriety, how hard I worked and how earnest my efforts were. I look back and realize I was building my cover story, not my sobriety.
Here’s the problem with that approach. Aside from it not ever working, it fails to produce an integrated version of myself. You see, there is still the nugget of belief in there that real fun requires drinking, that without that you’re listening to the K-Tel version of “Brandy,” not the real Looking Glass version.6
And that finally brings us to the point of today’s excursion: The importance of being silly. Look, I get that this is all really hard stuff, and when you look at the numbers, so few of us recover, it’s really, really sad. But the importance of play in human lives is pretty fundamental. The great book, “Designing Your Life,” suggests that “Play,” is one of the essential components of a happy, sustainable, well-designed life. I think that’s right. I think one of the things that makes early sobriety, sometimes all of sobriety so hard, is that most of our preconceived notions about what’s fun, well, they weren’t really sustainable, were they?
Of course, there’s a grimness to early sobriety as one has to recalculate all of the old formulas for the new, no-drinking world. This is why I really don’t like the “trudging” language in the Big Book. I may be a 60 year old recovering alcoholic, but I still like to have fun. And you know what? Like roughly the rest of the world, I’d very much like to find a way to disappear, be silly, not be so rigidly tied to myself, just for a little bit. Of course, these were the same impulses that got tied to my drinking, so that all of those different avenues led to the exact same Cul de’ Sac de Sauvingnon Blanc.
One of the most difficult challenges of sobriety, I think, has been cultivating that sense of fun and excitement. It’s easy to look at that sobriety date as a before and after marker, and this side, the sober side, is all about being earnest, working hard, maintaining that routine, working a program. I definitely have more of a grasshopper personality, but I think all work and no play makes TBD…
Am I stuck in a perpetual state of longing for a person I can never be again?
No. One of the gifts of sobriety is personal insight and I finally saw that most of my life was constructed in an inauthentic way, and that what I considered fun, well, it wasn’t what the song called “fun, natural fun.” Meaning the things I thought were fun, weren’t really that fun for the real me. This goes back to the point I like to make about the importance of imagination in sobriety, it’s equally important to imagine the fun side of a sober life.
One of the things the Big Book is pretty adamant about is that recovered alcoholics don’t have to go around wearing sackcloth and ashes, we are not required to mutter and spit when passing establishments that serve liquor. It basically comes out and encourages us to live without fear that outside forces (people, places and things) will make us drink. They were never responsible for my drinking in the first place. I was.
That’s the point. When I hold I onto myself, when I’m honest and transparent with myself about what I want and need and what I can reasonably expect, well, drinking just doesn’t seem that interesting. Sure, it’s Halloween and everyone will be out looking to have fun, crowded into bars. I remember all of that. I remember that delicious feeling the first drink or so brought on, all of the possibilities, all of the potential excitement and fun. The thing is:
Things almost never turned out that way.
Where I went off-track was confusing a very temporary reprieve from life on life’s terms with a long-term life plan. The harder thing is to recognize what really gives me joy, what really generates excitement, what really leaves me feeling happy, what do I look forward to? It has to be more than another day of sobriety. It means being honest with myself and true to myself and then having the imagination and the daring to go and do that.
My view, as long as I hang on to my self, the true, authentic, sober version, there aren’t that many limitations on what I can do. But what I have to do is to find a way to incorporate the fun, the escape, the excitement into my life, or I really will be “trudging,” and when I’m trudging I tend to notice the bright, shiny things I see in the distance. All that glitters isn’t gold; it’s usually a mirage that lacks substance or real-ness.
When I’m playing basketball, or browsing used bookstores or getting kind of lost in a neighborhood I’m exploring or just doing my insane, bad music fueled, Ricky Bobby-style walk through Central Park, I feel those same tinges of excitement and possibility that used to attend the start of the drinking festivities. But now, they’re real and sustainable and they don’t do injury to myself or others.
It takes real courage to find fun, silliness and excitement in sobriety; it requires a level of personal honesty and intimacy that us alcoholics and addicts find difficult. Try doing karaoke sober. I have and more than once. Having fun is a critical part of living life on life’s terms—it will be fun seeing everyone in costumes packed into those bars—I’m actually on my way to much better party, the kind that never really stops.
Happy Halloween
The “Luther” thing obviously runs pretty deep in the Lutheran Church, extending even to the name of the youth organization; of course, it was the “Luther League.” Guess who was the president?
I’m going to tell you, despite taking home economics in high school, estimating fabric needs was not a skill either of us had acquired. This was significant because it gets cold at night in Wisconsin.
People didn’t use phrases like “in real time” back then, because there was no other kind of time.
This is apparently the point of Halloween now.
Things change in these studies when you get towards that magical third drink.
It’s a huge difference, FYI.
One of the greatest gifts I’ve received in sobriety is the ability to be alone without being lonely.