I’m grateful for being where I am. I’m grateful for expanded coffee production. I’m grateful for mornings on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful for meetings and other alcoholics. I’m grateful to be sober today.
New York has been gray now for about two weeks—at least that’s how it seems to me. With the exception of the other day when that big huge rainbow either began or ended in Queens. Would you like to see the other side of the rainbow?1
That looks like a pretty direct hit on the 91st Street Sanitation Facility. I heard someone describe the injury to QB Aaron Rodgers as the most New York Jets thing that could ever happen. I’m a lifelong Packers fan and after enduring the Brett Farve nonsense (really, you had to be a Minnesota Viking?), I’m pretty much at the et tu Aaron stage. But a rainbow that stretches across the East River between a sanitation facility and Queens seems like the most New York rainbow that could ever be.
Will I actually be cheesy enough to start talking about the “other side of the rainbow?” That would require supplementation by cheese whiz, and while I love that particular cheese-related product, there isn’t quite enough of it and it’s never really been a breakfast thing with me.2 But what happens on the other side of sobriety is pretty interesting.
I spent about ten years in “early sobriety,” and one of the things that kept me relapsing was a failure of imagination. I could not imagine a happy, adjusted, non-chaotic life, that I wanted to live, that didn’t involve alcohol. Even as someone who fervently believes addiction is a real disease, and says things like “it’s a diagnosis, not an insult,” still wavers on the “did I really have to do that?” To digress, this is one of the fundamental things that is really hard for civilians to grasp about addiction and alcoholism:
“Did you really have to do that?”
I mean, getting my breakfast of pancakes and sauvingnon blanc, took a fair amount of doing—getting dressed, kind of combing my hair, kind of brushing my teeth, putting on shoes, opening the door, locking it behind me, walking the 10 or 12 minutes to the bar, stopping at stoplights, avoiding other pedestrians, knowing which door to open, knowing what time it was, pulling the door open, not turning around when I got inside and saw the bar to my right, empty and inviting, walking over to the bar, pulling a stool out, sitting on it, taking out my phone, catching the bartender’s eye, nodding yes to the offer of wine, a little morning banter when the wine arrives, taking care to order a short stack, not a full stack, waiting until bartender moves to the end of the bar before trying to lift the glass to my lips to hide the shaking, not stopping after the first mouthful, waiting impatiently for the “click,” craving the very short-lived, but very warm, oblivion-type feeling that was about to arrive, ordering another…
I wasn’t a zombie. I wasn’t in a daze or an alcoholic stupor, I remember the details. I even knew what I was losing and what I stood to lose. I was capable of very rational, sometimes even intelligent, decision-making in other aspects of my life. But this eluded me. Completely and totally. It’s because I believed that alcohol was necessary, vital even. I really did, I simply could not imagine a life that didn’t have alcohol flowing freely through it. I say that a lot, and ascribe drunken me to a failure of imagination, but it was also a reflection of who was in charge of the universe. Because when the guy who runs the universe is telling you that it’s probably a good idea for you to keep drinking, well, I’m not going to argue with that guy.
We read another really great story from the back of the Book last night at the Anyone Anywhere meeting.
We read “Late Start,” about a woman who became an alcoholic in her sixties and got sober in her seventies. These are all such great stories, and full of lots of fascinating turns and revelations. One thing that is unavoidable: The thinking patterns of addicts and alcoholics are so similar. I read these stories, and listen to other alcoholics at meetings tell their stories, and I’m struck over and over by the fact that the way we all think is so similar. I think that’s one of the ways you know it’s a real disease:
When the same thing makes lots of different people do the same things.
Hopefully, you’re here more for the banter and nonsense than the scientific method, but I think there’s truth in that. That’s why AA meetings and working with other alcoholics can be so powerful, they instill a sense that we’re not the only ones who think and acted this way. An old-timer once confided to me that one of the secret underpinnings of AA was the “Two-Zebra Principle.” The gist of the “Two-Zebra Principle” is this:
Downtrodden alcoholic has done another terrible thing, he had an inappropriate relationship with a zebra. He trudges to an AA meeting to confess this latest, terribly heinous act,3and tearfully does so. A few shares later, an old-timer raises his hand, ignores the conventions about “cross-talk,” and tells the story of the time he had a Zebra threesome. The Two-Zebra Principle, simply put:
If you think it’s bad that you f***** a zebra, there’ s someone in AA who has f***** two.
The Zebra thing is a metaphor, but you get the point. So, we’re reading “Late Start” from the Big Book and what is striking me is the same story as mine: Someone intelligent and aware and completely unable to stop drinking. One of the realizations that precedes sobriety is recognizing that a lot more than just the drinking needs to change. This person goes to meetings dutifully, but nothing really changes and the feelings that drove the drinking are tamped down by willpower and, to be honest, by the forces of shame and regret. The fear of failing at not drinking. The fear of having to restart the day count and acknowledge failure publicly again.
The problem with fear and incipient shame as motivators is that they lead down exactly the same trail and go off exactly the same cliff every single time.
What changed things in “Late Start?” A sponsor and working the Steps. You don’t learn the trombone by sitting at band concerts. Actually, the better analogy is Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts.4 You go to Pack and Troop and Den meetings, and do all of that nonsense, but if you want those cool Wolf and Bear badges and a shirtful of arrowheads, you have to get busy, son. You have to actually get things done. In Boy Scouts, going to meetings didn’t get you the Wilderness Survival merit badge, that took learning how to do the rock climbing thing, building lean-tos and baking potatoes in mud.
The point being, it may be that we aspire to progress rather than perfection, but progress requires hard work and effort. There is a certain osmosis to being around people in recovery, but you have to do your own Fourth Step. I mean, you have do all of them, but it is that work, asking those questions of one’s self that represents progress. In the story we read last night, you can see the light go on when you read these words:
I found direction to my own special Higher Power. On that spiritual foundation I began to build a new life.
Big Book, p. 540
And what exactly does that new life consist of?
I am free to laugh all of my laughter, free to trust and to be trusted, free to both give and receive help, I am free from shame and regret, free to learn and grow and work.
Big Book, p. 543
The part that caught me up short was “free from shame and regret.” It wasn’t “much less'“ shame and regret, or that shame and regret were “materially reduced.” No, it was “free from shame and regret.” To be honest, I still struggle with shame and regret, so a life “free” of that sounds pretty enticing. The existence of that struggle is what tells me that I still have work to do and it gives me some pretty good clues about where to find this particular under-the-saddle burr.
On those old terrible mornings, as I trudged over for my alcoholic breakfast, I knew exactly what I was doing and why. I lived a life ruled by shame and regret and the only thing that made that disappear for a bit, that helped me see that it was really the fault of other people, was that gold-glinting glass of wine. That was as close as I got to the proverbial pot o’ gold.
What was on the other side of that rainbow on Monday? I don’t know, and haven’t seen any reports on Citizen, but I know what’s been on the other side of sobriety for me, a life that is not ruled by shame and regret. This became possible when I recognized that I was not the ruler of the universe, that I did not need to be in the absolute center of the universe for my life to have meaning.
One of the ancillary benefits of recognizing the existence of a higher power is that it can’t help but infuse one’s life with value. If there is a Higher Power calling the shots, and I’m still around, then I must be doing something that Higher Power values. That’s how shame and regret end, not with tearful confessions and reduced lives, but with adopting a purpose and seeing the meaning that flows through real connections to the world around us.
That rainbow can make a even trash sorting facility seem kind of magical. I think that’s how recovery and sobriety work as well; living life under that rainbow replaces shame and regret and fear with hope and faith and confidence that simply doing the next right thing is all that is necessary.
It’s gray and rainy again here in New York, but I know exactly where that rainbow still is.
Isn’t that the title of a book about something traumatic?
Cheese whiz on a cheeseburger? Yes! I miss the old Post Pub very much. Cheese whiz on a cheesesteak? Yes! I miss Abner’s very much.
Well, it was a relationship, so “so series” of acts, but still it was just the one zebra.
It’s not that I think they are superior to Girl Scouts or Brownies, it’s just that I wasn’t ever one of those and didn’t have a sister.