When Am I Most Myself?

...my drinking filled in the distance between the life I was leading and me.

I’m grateful for giving things a chance. I’m grateful for not deciding what things are. I’m grateful I’m grateful for people who see a lot. I’m grateful for how the same view looks different every day. I’m grateful for running jokes. I’m grateful to be sober today.

As I start working on new projects, as there are more demands on my time, I can see how quickly, how easily, I can get lost in the crush. I can see how time that used to get spent more reflectively, more openly, gets replaced by having other people’s narratives poking in here and there. For me, it’s a bit of struggle to stay on the right side of the “this is what I’m actually responsible for” line. It’s very easy to gravitate towards outcome attachment. I know very little Buddhist philosophy, but the idea that attachment to things, to outcomes, to results, often ends up driving despair resonates with this alcoholic.

Of course, there are responsibilities and in the real world things have to happen, deadlines have to get met and work has to get done. Not all of it is pleasant, which I like to remind people, is why you get paid for work. For me, I entered a series of demanding work environments, places where a lot was expected, I went to work, hit it pretty hard and very promptly lost myself. Drinking ensued. Again, the drinking was not caused by the job, it was simply a consequence of really faulty life-design (not intentional at that point).

I couldn’t live the life I was leading without drinking.

I’ve said stuff like that a million times.¹ I say it over and over again, not because I’m trying to drive a recovery-coated nail into your brain, I’m trying to understand it myself and you, for perhaps your own reasons, have decided to ride along for this (or parts thereof—all good). ²

I’m discovering more of a creative side in later life than I maybe thought I had. I realize I sometimes I have to reduce things to something visual to really understand it, or in math terms. I think my drinking filled in the distance between the life I was leading and me. The greater that distance, the more I needed to drink. And then comes the day when the drinking no longer produces the desired effect, and you are left with a monstrosity of a life that doesn’t match what you really feel inside. There is no lonelier place to be. Bill W called that, “the jumping-off place.” That’s a pretty desolate few words.

I realize that if I don’t want that distance to begin to yaw open, I need to figure out a game plan. Here’s what I’m figuring out, the key objective is not getting praise in the workplace, making bank, bro’, or anything else like that. The prime objective is to walk through life and hang on to myself.

My very first 30-Day Chip

I was going through old photos and I think, based on the dates and such, this is my very first 30-day chip. One of the things that’s frustrating is how they kind of hide the ball on you in AA. They never really get to the point. It would be so helpful if they gave something to newcomers that kind of encapsulated maybe one of the critical elements, and if it was something you could carry in your pocket… You know where I’m going. How did it take me a decade to not think about the words on that chip:

To thine own self be true.

If I lose me, the rift opens and, let’s just say, it starts to feel like hurricane season. The key objective is staying with myself, which sounds annoyingly self-helpy and very obvious and cheesy and dumb. But, it’s true. So, part of my task is figuring who is me and when am I mostly that guy. There are things I do and have been doing for years and years and those things all feel like very genuine expressions of myself. Those things seem to touch and reflect aspects of myself, they seem to generate energy, rather than deplete it, and they all contain a Internal Judgment Free Zone of Silence.³ They are things like walking, listening to music, being in libraries, playing basketball, hiking and fishing, going to the farmers market, haunting used record and book stores.⁴

Everyone has their own list of things, and maybe it goes by the name “self-care,” these days, I think it’s more about self-identification. That’s the trick, finding when I’m most myself. That’s the signal frequency I need to determine, because that’s what will let me navigate back when the jostle and bump of life intrudes. The key skill in surviving an avalanche is figuring out which way is up, the signal frequency broadcast by the real me is that homing beacon.

So, last night, I went downtown and went to one of those events sponsored by The Moth, where people show up and tell stories. Last fall, I did something similar and read “Equine Therapy,” to very modest, “oh, and he’s an alcoholic, bless his heart” applause.

Breakfast with an Alcoholic: Episode 12

So, last night there was a theme, all of the stories were supposed to be about envy. I thought, I have the perfect story:

My Funny Rehab Valentine

I was excited, then practicalities intruded. First, there was a pretty strict 5-minute rule. I was told by my computer that an average person would take 30 minutes to read “My Funny Rehab Valentine” aloud. I did the math, this meant cutting about 5 out of every 6 words. Ok—I did a line edit and realized the problem is that it was never going to get done. It’s even better, trust me, but when? Anyway, I took more of a slash and burn approach yesterday afternoon and came up with a version that I thought I could dash off in 5 minutes. It was reflected in pages of manuscript with notes of a variety of different colors and chicken-scrawling all over it. If I had hired a drunk Dr. Frankenstein to do the edit, it couldn’t have looked more insanely-composed.

Ok, cool. I’m going with it. Then they announced the part where you weren’t allowed to take notes up on stage. Gulp. Lots of time now trying to memorize chunks of manuscript and the weird, Frankenstein-scrawled transitions. Then they called my name. I told the story, I didn’t do a great job of time management and kind of botched the finish, but none of that was really the point. The point was I had something about myself, in this case, a story, that I wanted to share. I went up there and shared it in front of a bunch of people. I wasn’t particularly nervous. I realize before you can engage in self-expression, you have to find your self.

They actually had judges in the audience and my scores were not great. Again not the point. I do think announcing myself as an alcoholic takes a bit of the air out of the room, but don’t hate the player, hate the game. Whatever. The other thing I realized is kind of weird and I’ve been trying to figure out how to say it:

I’m more myself reading what I’ve written than talking out loud

When I’m talking out loud, I’m looking for a reaction from the people around me. That’s how non-insane people approach communication. But that’s the paradigm, when I’m talking out loud, what I say is shaped by what I think those people want to hear. I only know myself, and that people-pleasing (maybe people-manipulating is more accurate) has a pretty strong gravitational force.

Telling the story of Red and Sally in rehab was very different, and frankly less compelling, than reading and writing it. When I write, I express things differently than when I speak. I’ve done a lot of public speaking in my life and have often had the experience of almost watching myself as I argued something in court or gave a speech. It was sometimes like watching someone else give a performance and I would even wonder where the unrehearsed words came from. I don’t have that experience when I write. I mean, stuff comes bubbling up that I didn’t expect or understand all of the time, but when I’m writing, I have confidence, these days it’s me.

Finding me, and locking onto that frequency, has helped guide my recovery. Also, it has led me to discover and begin to assemble a pretty groovy life. There are lots of challenges, but they don’t seem as threatening or instill despair, as long as I stay focused on keeping that signal strong.

1. Given the volume…

2. Thank you so much, by the way. It means so much to me that people actually read and subscribe to this.

3. This is a “Get Smart,” reference. We have not yet begun to plumb those depths.

4. I know, all very solitary. That’s another problem to address.