I’m grateful to spend time with my Mom and Dad. I’m grateful for a really lovely daughter (and a pretty nice son-in-law). I’m grateful for understanding, empathy and kindness. I’m grateful for incremental improvement. I’m grateful for bright mornings. I’m grateful to be sober today.
When I sit down on Tuesday mornings to get this out, it always feels like it’s been a long time since the last time, which is a complete misperception owing to the fact that it was only Friday and also, the intervening Saturday Gratitude Round-Up and Sunday Gratitude Extravaganza. Incrementalism can be a good or a bad thing, the Big Book certainly endorses gradual, incremental change (“progress not perfection”), however, incremental change can also be dangerous.1
The thing about incremental change is how startling it can be. Addiction works that way, the steady, relentless progression of small steps takes you a long way before you have a chance to look back and see how far away you are. My writing and my sobriety are also both products of incremental change. I started writing these longer essays last July—all of a sudden it felt like there was something I wanted to write about and I did. I look up and realize that since then I’ve written more than 100k words2—-and when I’m away from this for more than two or three days, I’m really eager to get back at it.
Getting sober has had similar aspects to it. I remember I’d been living in New York for about eight or nine months. It was a Friday evening and I’d had a busy week. My plan was to hit the 6:15 meeting at the 79th Street Workshop, order food from there and try to time my eventual arrival home with the delivery from my favorite Chinese restaurant. I pulled off my coat, sat heavily in the aluminum folding chair, exhaled even more heavily and just felt a moment of sagging, easy, happy calm. I think I may have even had my eyes closed. Then I snort-laughed, out loud (other people always hear), and for no apparent reason, but I was laughing because I had just had this realization:
You crafty motherf***ers. How did you trick me into doing this? And I actually like it?
As I have said many, many times, I was AA-skeptical for many, many years of my drinking career. In honesty, I just didn’t see how it could possibly work. I’d been drinking for many decades and was pursuing the finest treatments money could buy—this AA nonsense was, well, nonsense. Until that slowly began to change for me. Bill W. may have had a white-light moment in rehab, I just had a series of realizations, growing and compounding realizations, that things were changing. I couldn’t tell you exactly how, but I could feel it.
Quick side note: That’s actually what I think I’m doing here. It took me a long, long time to get sober with a lot of failure along the road; lots and lots of misery-sparing exits that I sped past. I’d kind of like to know why, that’s part of it. But also, how did it happen? How did my attitudes and worldview and everything begin to shift? I think if I could have read something explaining how this actually worked to produce change, maybe it wouldn’t have been quite so hard and painful to let that change start happening.
That Friday night, in that church basement, I felt at ease, at peace, at home. I was chagrined at having been tricked, but mostly in the good way. Sobriety has been that way for me. It has not been a yellow-brick road with the Lucky Charms leprechaun riding shotgun and scenic pull-offs to view the wild unicorns.3 It's been a series of moments where I see how far away I was and now feel how close I am. In the morning, not being crushed by the weight of the struggle as soon as my eyes open, feels pretty miraculous. Just the ease and calm and peace feels like plenty.
There’s the neuroscience of habits and the neuroplasticity of the brain at work here, too. Part of this is realizing that your brain is actually damaged, altered by the drinking and using—that’s why this is considered a disease. When they do scans of alcoholic brains, they can see structural differences, we’ve known about this for a zillion years, it was called “wet brain,” not so flatteringly. That’s why the change doesn’t really start until you can stop using or drinking for a bit. We all know that’s not a matter of simply flipping a hidden switch, otherwise we would have…
That’s the mysterious part: How finally recognizing the true nature of the situation, re-ordering priorities and outlook accordingly, coming to terms with my own flaws and mistakes, trying to fix what I can fix, somehow produces sobriety and relieves the obsession that had plagued me for so long?
Near as I can figure, that came from simply realizing that my my life would be better served connecting to the world around me, rather than trying to direct the world around me.
I think Bill Wilson took an amalgam of his own crazy, alcoholic thinking and some other crazy alcoholic thinking being done by folks in the Oxford Group and such, maybe some things that came through the Ouija Board, put it all together, called them the 12 Steps and somehow began changing lives immediately. Notably, starting with his own. Bill W., potentially suffering from detox-induced hallucinations, had a vision of being on a windswept mountain surrounded by clear white light. From there, he made his way.
I had a moment of peace falling asleep one night in the Sober House. After all of the chaos and pain, a simple moment of “things will be okay,” as I drifted off. Another moment at 6:00am the next morning, smoking a cigarette by myself on the back deck, “things will be okay.” Every step I took, as I worked things out in my head on the streets of New York, began producing downstream moments of peace and calm. Things will be okay. Every Step I worked, every Big Book-fueled, Sponsor-taught realization, generated a few more moments of “things will be okay.” Going to meetings, listening to other alcoholics, working with other alcoholics, all produced more and more “things will be okay.”
I get that “Things will be okay,” may not be the flashiest slogan. Marching behind that flag in the parade may not be terribly stirring, but those moments are the seeds of things like hope and faith and love for us addicts and alcoholics, and for the people who love us. They are often quiet, humble moments; moments when we are alone and suddenly realize we are no longer terrified at that prospect. That we no longer have to drink our way around that.
Finally realizing that “things will be okay,” may feel like finding a hidden gem, a diamond in the rough. For sure, it is a tremendous relief and a tremendously easier way to live. As it turns out, getting sober wasn’t about a sudden discovery or finding diamonds or rubies for me. It was about those pennies I kept finding in the streets, the ones that kept trying to tell me “things will be okay.” Things just quieted down enough that I could finally listen and let them.
Ask Lobsters about this.
What do with all of that: A different issue.
Actually, if I was choosing a cereal-based companion, it would have to be Cap’n Crunch.
Lovely. Pennies,yes. Things will be okay. Thank you.