Everything Is Normal and Fine

Ladies and gentlemen boys and girls ... healing time's here. The internet's bravest readers write in about the current state of their recovery.

Good morning, just like last month, comments will not be paywalled on this post.

If you read something here that makes you feel Not Very Alone, would love to hear from you—that’s an excellent and useful comment to make. If you’d like to Check-In from the comments section, you will also get a free month of the Sunday newsletter. Clear eyes, full hearts…

Now as for the Check-Ins, the usual formatting rules apply: All the writers shall and will remain Anonymous but are credited collectively as "The Small Bow Family Orchestra."

The ***** separates individual entries, as do pull quotes.

And, of course, TSB looks incredible because Edith Zimmerman drew everything. 

Thanks for your continued support of The Small Bow. If you love what we do and believe that we have provided some value to you or people you love, please try out a paid subscription and get access to our complete archive and the Sunday newsletter. — AJD

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This Show Won’t Last Very Long

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

Even with the insane amount of grief I am feeling, I have no urge to drink.

My husband abruptly left me two months ago. We had been together for almost a decade, and known each other since college (met in the year 2000). We have a 5-yr-old daughter. Literally the night before he left me, I fell asleep in his arms and he told me he loved me. For the first three years of our relationship, we were drinking buddies, then I got sober (will hit seven years in September) and he did not. Even with the insane amount of grief I am feeling (I walk around sobbing openly in the streets; it is mortifying), I have no urge to drink. Instead, I have joined a running group and I take a lot of bubble baths. I call my close friends and weep. I'm writing. I will not let this destroy me and I will live one day at a time, just like the early days of sobriety.

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For several years, porn hasn't been a part of any attempt at solving fear and boredom, but I'm still addicted to my phon

Last month, I marked 7 years without putting alcohol or drugs in my body. I haven't exactly been a model AA the past six months, nor a model husband or father, but I am well, especially as compared to 7 years ago. I wish I were hitting more meetings, but I have two that I love and get to most weeks, though I should share more (taking baby steps to overcome my long-standing social anxiety). Though we stayed in touch, my sponsor moved away, and I haven't made anyone local official. I can say, though, that my ongoing search and yearning for exstasis is healthier now. The 10th and 11th steps and therapy help keep me on the beam, regularly taking inventory and making sure I enter the realm of the spirit daily (ahem, maybe not daily), even if the latter is simply getting lost in the reverie of mono no aware (thank you TSB for introducing me to that) if I haven't managed to meditate that morning. I can't say that all the promises have been realized. I still struggle with fear and boredom. For several years, porn hasn't been a part of any attempt at solving the latter, but I'm still addicted to my phone. And I still too often don't speak from a place of love to my wife or don't often enough demonstrate my love for my grown daughters (just like my father, the emotionally inscrutable one), but I'm more aware of it when I don't. Speaking of awareness, I recently realized that I now don't have as strong an urge to get up from the dinner table right away after eating when the family is still gathered talking, an urge that comes from an old habit of sneaking off to take a couple of shots in secret to help overcome what I told myself was boredom but now realize is more a fear of intimacy. Perhaps a new freedom, after all. Progress not perfection for sure.

With gratitude for The Small Bow Family Orchestra.

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Checking in from Brazil, after I somehow conned my job to send me here for a month and pay for the whole thing — another one of God's funny little gifts that I didn't deserve. The Promises might be real for everyone else, but for me it must be the result of more trickery and deception. I wonder how long I have to be sober before I start trusting myself. Recently I've been "exploring my sexuality" (gross) and trying to live as though my desires are not inherently wrong or bad, but that's hard to do when wanting things too much is how I ended up here in the first place. I'll be six years sober at the end of July if the caipirinhas don't get me first (which they won't).

*****

I realised that I will never be the person I was when I was using, and I mourn certain parts of that life. Even in knowing the happiness and content I feel with sobriety, I wonder who I truly am now. I am learning to sit in the discomfort of my feelings instead of turning to my phone, TV, reading and any other distraction to numb them. It has been powerful to truly understand that knowing myself in sobriety will be a lifelong process, instead of one that just magically happens three years in. .

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What is becoming increasingly clear to me is that my eating disorder is an addiction. What has not become clear is how to get out of it. It's worse than ever, after more than a decade of struggle, despite numerous rounds of many levels and types of treatment — I recently found out researchers are now labeling what I have as SE-AN, severe and enduring anorexia, and that people are advocating to let us access MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) because we are more likely to die of it than recover, and starvation is such a miserable way to go. Of course, part of me wants to sink into this desperate mentality. Part of me wants to die. But, as frightened as the concept makes me, I still have a fierce longing for recovery. I am so hungry and so tired of living like this. When will it be rock bottom enough to motivate me to put down my drug of choice and just let myself eat?

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I joined the Lamotrigine club recently because I’m now in the “treatment-resident depression and anxiety” club. The brain fog is very, very real. I can’t remember conversations from 30 seconds ago and am feeling embarrassed that I am losing my train of thought multiple times in a conversation. Yet, it is working. Two types of therapy (trauma-informed talk therapy and EMDR) plus my meds (and sometimes weed) are helping but the work…the work is so hard. Progress, not perfection but as a people-pleasing conflict-avoidant sad person it’s so hard. I’m doing it though, and so are us all. We’re doing our best and that’s good enough. 

*****

If I don’t drink I’ll have 32 years continuous sobriety of July 13. The last twelve months have been some of the hardest yet, with two moves, a breakup/reunion/breakup, depression nose-dive, collapse of a nonprofit I founded, and many months on unemployment. More than all of that though, has been the anguish of watching my first-born son getting the shit kicked out of him by alcoholism. I’ve lost count of the relapses and rehabs. I have planned his memorial in my mind several times. 

In the last twelve months I have been to more recovery meetings than any time in my sobriety except for maybe my first 90 days. I added Al-Anon to my AA and the combo has been life-changing. I thought I was going to Al-Anon because of my son. I was, but now I know I’m also there for myself and all the many fucked up relationships in my life. Sometimes I get impatient with all the navel-gazing in Al-Anon. I don’t want to hear about your qualifier, dammit! But there’s no denying the gentle power of that program is transforming me. 

I’m writing this in the apartment I moved into last month, on the outskirts of Philly, next to our beautiful park system, with indoor and outdoor pools (I’m a swimmer). It’s the first apartment I’ve lived in that has been simply and solely mine since I first began getting sober, back in the early 90s. No kids’ rooms. No love partner. Just me and my co-dependent, 17-year-old cat Lucy Blue. My consulting business is picking up, and for the first time in a while I’m feeling guardedly optimistic about my prospects. 

I feel disoriented, here on the cusp of my final third: 60 – 90. I’m aware that — just as I was 30 years ago — I am on the threshold of a New Era, and holy shit I am feeling the feelings. The past twelve months have been an ongoing Step Three challenge. Maybe this is what it feels like to finally, finally turn it over to my higher power? 

*****

In the morning before my journal, before meditation, I read the papers and do the puzzles. Then sometimes if I’m feeling that I haven’t wasted enough time I will stretch things out to my Apple News feed. I clicked on an article about a watch Yoko Ono had given John Lennon shortly before he was killed that had been stolen and now up for auction for $42 million. I clicked because of the mystery and the $42 million, but what I got was this: the portrait of Lennon in the last years of his life, watching soap operas and listening to Muzak because any other music would make him want to fix it if it were bad and mad at himself for not writing it if it were good. Also, not making music of his own. Generally I stay away from celebrity profiles for just this reason: I might get a window into their life that makes me grapple with my own. If John Lennon could ride a narcissistic rollercoaster by listening to music then why not me? But also — if John Lennon didn’t have the internal structure to feel steady whether the music was bad or good, what hope is there?

Anyway, it was Saturday morning and my husband was around, so I thought I’d tell him about this. He is a concrete guy, my husband, and when I can find ways to share my inner world, I try to do it. So I told him about it and he said, “Why didn’t he just listen to classical music?”

To live with and love a person who entirely misses the point of personal pain is a blessing. I am almost never responsible for his feelings. He takes me as I am. So, after my initial feelings of “Wow, he just will never get it I need to run and search for something to soothe me,” I had another thought: This is just who he is.

There are other good things about him. Just because he has a small emotional range does not make him unlovable. Plus, I know that people at The Small Bow will get the John Lennon story so I have other outlets. It sucks that it always seems like a struggle to love. 

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I’m about to go on a wonderful trip with an old friend, I should be excited but instead I’m worried about how I will function as an entertaining travel companion

Recently I’ve felt as if everything is pointing to some weird generalized entropy. It’s personal, general, political, climatic. I feel as if my life is shrinking and desiccating. I found myself looking through a series of Facebook photos and it served to reinforce the feeling that my life is basically over. As if it’s too late for everything, as if the next crisis is lurking just around the bend. But because I’m not drinking, I’m also able to see that this might all be related to my mood disorder, the thing that I thought my boyfriend had so acutely, and he does, but guess what, so do I. I’m about to go on a wonderful trip with an old friend, I should be excited and grateful, but instead I’m just worried about how I will function as a cheerful and entertaining travel companion. Normally these trips would be an opportunity to drink a lot, but I’m aware that the greatest thing in my life right now is the not-drinking, it’s the thing that doesn’t fit into the dark lens of everything sliding into oblivion. It allows me to see that this too shall pass, this summer gloom, that it’s temporary, like everything. 

*****

fin

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OTHER RECENT CHECK-INS:

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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.

You can also get a Sunday issue for $8 a month or $60 per year. The Sunday issue is a recovery bonanza full of gratitude lists, a study guide to my daily recovery routines, a poem I like, the TSB Spotify playlist, and more exclusive essays.

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Here’s the latest one with Megan Koester.

And, hey—if you think someone else will dig The Small Bow, you can give them a subscription.

Thanks for keeping us alive.

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ZOOM MEETING SCHEDULE

Monday: 5:30 p.m. PT/ 8:30 p.m ET

Wednesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Thursday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET (Women and non-binary meeting.)

Friday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Saturday: Mental Health Focus (Peer support for bipolar/anxiety/depression.) 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET

Sunday: (Mental Health and Sobriety Support Group.) 1:00 p.m PT/4 p.m. ET

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If you don't feel comfortable calling yourself an "alcoholic," that's fine. If you have issues with sex, food, drugs, DEBT, codependency, love, loneliness, depression, come on in. Newcomers are especially welcome.

FORMAT: CROSSTALK, TOPIC MEETING

We're there for an hour, sometimes more. We'd love to have you.

Meeting ID: 874 2568 6609

PASSWORD TO ZOOM: nickfoles

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editors@thesmallbow.com SUBJECT: RECOVERY OPTIONS

More info here:

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Aquarium

by Kim Addonizio

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The fish are drifting calmly in their tank

between the green reeds, lit by a white glow

that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank

glass that holds them in displays their slow

progress from end to end, familiar rocks

set into the gravel, murmuring rows

of filters, a universe the flying fox

and glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose

pleocostemus all take for granted. Yet

the platys, gold and red, persist in leaping

occasionally, as if they can't quite let

alone a possibility—of wings,

maybe, once they reach the air? They die

on the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise.

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN