I’m grateful for the way things start. I’m grateful for the way things change. I’m grateful for the dark fog this morning. I’m grateful knowing that things are moving and not being afraid. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
This one kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, not actually “nowhere,” everything, everyone comes from somewhere. I mean I didn’t expect this. As we stumble somewhat awkwardly into the backstory, I was doing a little playlist archaeology and began playing from one cleverly entitled, “May 19.” This was my clever way of denoting that this playlist was started in May of 2019. That was an interesting time in my life.
I was sober-ish. Things had gotten very dark for me in 2018, I don’t really remember very many details about that time in my life, because there was so little there. My life ran with an alcoholic metronome keeping beats, and an alarm that we needed another infusion soon, or the withdrawal symptoms would start to kick in. I was going to AA meetings, but found them pretty hopeless affairs, no matter what I heard or read, I went home with the same thoughts running around my head.
I had a sponsor during this period of time, but our conversations were mostly limited to try to quell the growing panic in me that my life was no longer liveable. I think, in my own way, I had reached the famous “Jumping-Off Place,” where the misery created by the alcohol is pitilessly no longer quelled by the alcohol. Where drinking doesn’t work anymore.
In the midst of this torpor, an opportunity presented itself and suddenly I had a whole new challenge in front of me, something exciting and meaningful, and a chance to take a big cut at the plate. I was energized, happy, super busy and sober-ish. I wasn’t going to meetings, I wasn’t doing “the work,” I was journaling every day, I was exercising like a fiend and working really hard. I was happy. IN particular, the journaling made me very happy. I traveled a ton during that time and can remember the happy feelings when I woke up and realized it was time to write in my journal. Funny how that works.
Anyway, I wasn’t drinking. I was seeing a therapist and she would nod her head nervously as I would describe my new found “sobriety.” Maybe I’ve just been pressing too hard…Writing that makes me think of a friend who went out and is gone. He actually called me to tell me about his decision, he said, “life can be easy or it can be hard,” and he began to detail his new life-strategy of keeping things at the beer and wine level. That’s not how it turned out.
I would get the eyes-wide response when I’d suggest that my struggles getting sober were because I was trying too hard. I really thought that for a while. I was spending a lot of time in Philadelphia, an in particular the train station. I’d listen to this playlist, and this song, and it was hard to not start imagining the glory that awaited me. The subtle refrain of the song, “don’t worry, I’ve got this.”
At some point that Spring, I started drinking again. It was a really gorgeous day, I’d been apartment hunting in the morning and just had found a place I really liked, it was in a neighborhood with lots of trendy restaurants and cobblestone streets and art galleries. I stopped in at one of the local restaurants to enjoy the local fare, and when they asked if I’d like something to drink, well, I didn’t hesitate to say yes, especially since they had asked so nicely.
I just had that one glass that day, but the next day, having proved that I could drink just one, I didn’t feel the need to repeat the exercise. Pretty soon, my evenings were being spent in a way that felt very familiar, sit at the bar of a nice restaurant, back to being the urbane alcoholic. Pretty soon, the urbane alcoholic had found another place that started serving even earlier in the day, and before you can say “jack’s your uncle,” I was back in the pancakes and sauvignon blanc groove. It’s actually not groovy.
Since I had no program, I had no friction to slow my descent, tumble is more the right word. The illusion that I could get myself sober was a casualty of this relapse. To my mind, I had pretty much exhausted the options, even the vaunted, life can be easy approach had failed. The same question that chilled me in 1980 was being re-asked,
“how does this ever end?”
My sobriety date is October 22nd of that year. But the road between this playlist, this song, and my sobriety is a bit arduous and involves trying to dodge some pretty horrible wrecks. We’re not here to talk about how exactly I did get sober,
We’re here to talk about what’s different. It turns out, when I first started to listen to this song, things were far from under control, “don’t worry, I’ve got it” was more than a white lie. I listened to this song the other night coming home from the office, it was on the late side and I was looking through the old playlist to figure out what to listen to, saw this song, and there were the old dreams of grandeur, success fame, the siren calls for alcoholics.
But it’s different this time. I know exactly how I got here and what it took. It took a few years of meetings and introspection and hard work and study and letting my heart break a couple of times—mostly over things that should have broken it a long time ago. I read the Big Book and realized it was about me. As I worked my way through inventories and confessions and essays, I saw that I had been simultaneously fighting and hiding from myself.
I do a fair amount of corporate strategery during the day, one important part of setting strategic objectives is that things turn out better if those things are possible to achieve. Fighting a doomed war is never good strategy. I gave up.
But before you think “giving up” means sitting on the couch wishing Maury Povich was still doing those DNA-reveals, you can ride along with me one day. For whatever reason, the Universe deigned to give their aging veteran not just another long-odds at-bat, but the chance to build something. When I describe the gig, people widen their eyes, “how did that happen?” The real answer is very unsatisfying, I showed up, worked hard, was myself and let things happen after that. Things are groovy, things are great, things are under control, just not mine.
Happy Friday.