Getting to Just Unhappy

July check-ins are here.

It’s July. How have the first six months of the year been? The first six months? Of this year? The one we’re in? Currently? Well actually [sound of a train horn]. Hm, that’s odd. Let’s try again. So the thing is [gets yanked off stage by one of those old-timey hooks]. Okay that’s weird. One more time. I’ve been thinking that [turns into a glitter bomb and explodes].

Dang I guess I’m going to need to spend the rest of my life cleaning glitter off everything I’ve ever owned or will own. The rest of you get to read our July check-ins, which are below. —TSB Editor

If you are unfamiliar with our Check-In format:

All the Anonymous writers below are credited collectively as “The Small Bow Family Orchestra.”

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

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Better to Feel All of It Than None of It

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

I got a job, y’all.

It’d been nearly nine months to the day since getting laid off in pretty brutal fashion. About five months since my family had zero income and started paying for our own healthcare. I’ll speak for myself when I say when two “accomplished” parents can’t find work, our young kids are blissfully unaware, and our emergency savings completely disappear — and the future I’d envisioned starts to feel viscerally at risk — I started engaging in some pretty goddamn alcoholic and addict behavior.

Not actually drinking or using. But that obsessive, compulsive, repulsive, pessimistic, fearful, antagonistic side of me was often on full display.

When I first came around the rooms and toyed with the idea of sobriety eight years ago, I had this notion that getting clean would fix all my problems. It didn’t. But life got better. And, hesitant as I am to admit it, I became slightly less of an asshole. A more honest and grateful asshole.

Reading about other folks at TSB going through similar things became one of my anchors. Hearing about it in meetings. It all felt so familiar to those early days in the rooms — hearing my own story, which felt tragically, uniquely mine, told back to me by complete strangers. What a gift.

I don’t think this job is going to solve all my problems. It won’t. But I now have the experience of getting and staying clean — and still having problems — as a way to weigh my expectations against reality.

*****

I got a new sponsor. I didn’t want to. I’d had my previous sponsor for 12 years and I liked her a lot — I still like her a lot. I didn’t call her though. And I didn’t really work steps with her, and she didn’t really push me to. Which was all great with me. But through a series of “God shots” it became clear I could probably get more out of my recovery if I put more into my recovery.

I’ve gotten pretty good at “good enough.” And while that approach helps combat perfectionism, it can also be limiting. What if I could feel better than “good enough”? My new sponsor is making it clear that I can. She has more expectations of me but she’s also more available and effusive. I’m grateful I’m willing to do something different.

*****

Seven years ago, I was walking the beach, trying to pull my shattered self together before meeting my husband and friends at the sunset bar. Our fifteen-year-old daughter’s wilderness school counselors had insisted we follow through on this Costa Rican vacation without her. “You can’t give her the power to stop your lives.” (They’re twenty-somethings, childless, I griped inwardly. What do they know?)

Before my daughter left, I’d stopped drinking, all the better to be on call 24-7 in case she snuck out the window again; was again brought home by police. My grim sobriety, meant to save her, if anything inspired her to drink more, do more drugs. Now, gutted, no model for anyone, I was ready to drink again. Why not?

Approaching the bar, I passed some young people, drinking, smoking, glowing under the palm trees. What if she has to quit substances forever? I worried suddenly for my girl. Cold-sweating. How will she make it through college, worklife, marriage, motherhood? She had overdosed twice already. To say my thoughts were twisted is to understate my thinking problem.

All that vacation, I prayed that if I had nothing better to offer my child, God would grant me a swift-acting terminal disease. I tried to drink socially but my raised glass no longer lifted me, rather alcohol kept me awake, prolonging my suffering. I quit “for life,” assuming this wouldn’t be long.

Today I’m on a low-key summer vacation with loved ones — healthy; seven years sober; five in recovery from codependency. My daughter entered active recovery three years ago. Neither of us chose addiction or recovery to hurt or help the other; nevertheless, we’ve asked each other how to make amends for the past.

“Call me regularly,” I tell her. “Live your best life. Tell me about it,” she advises. When she calls this afternoon I’ll tell her today has been rainy with one submission rejection, three accepting conversations, multiple decent cups of coffee. Like my everyday spent sober, good as it gets.

*****

Old guy here. One month shy of four years sober. Not what I expected. I expected sober would have “legs,” that is this super grand personal achievement (yeah sure) would spread throughout the rest of my life. Sobriety would lead to smoothing out rough edges with the humans I routinely encounter. It would lead to rational, even smart decisions about finances, dental care, cooking, auto maintenance, and all myriad challenges I have been failing at. In a completely unsurprising way, none of those expectations have currently been met. I may have to re-examine those expectations? “No magic” is the mantra. There’s pain, along with ongoing problems (some of which have gotten worse). Whine whine, but no wine. So there’s that, but less whining is a swell idea. And that is the main finding of this experiment: sober is big and way better than not sober, but what were we thinking? Thinking about the whole big array of things that humans grapple with. Well, think again. There is work to do, and if lucky it will be done slightly better than half-assed. That would be progress. The reward for progress? One might feel a bit better, maybe get to just unhappy. Another reward? Maybe some people will be helped if I do a bit of service. Make a small difference. The goal that underpins any other efforts or outcomes? Given my age, to end this experiment sober. Right now the radio is blaring Beethoven. That was a fave decades ago when staggering drunk. Now? Bach or blues might be a better fit to my upcoming anniversary.

*****

I hit three years on July 7. Everything about my life is so much better — I’m not dead, for one — but this past year has been rough. Prolonged unemployment, plenty of financial insecurity, reams of rejection, heartbreak (the kind of pure shattering pain I hadn’t felt in over a decade or more). None of it made me want to drink, though, which is the only thing that’s felt good on some days. I’ve doubled down on self-care — going to the gym, long meditation sessions, lots of meetings, plenty of service work, more writing just for me. And next week when (if 🤞 🙏) I get my chip, I’ll do so with a new (part-time) job, a tiny bit of money in the bank, and having been on a handful of recent dates with someone who communicates what he’s feeling, unlike the person who broke my heart. It’s all temporary, and it might all end soon, and even end badly. But it really does get better in sobriety, even when it gets worse for a while. Even when nothing in your life looks anything like you thought it would at this age, at three years sober.

*****

Last week, I finally found steady work after a year of post-layoff struggling. It’s a contract gig and only a month long (with the tenuous possibility of “extending it longer”), but they pay me decently, and the people are nice. My partner is a small business owner who, coincidentally, saw a lot of success after my layoff, so he’s covered most of our living expenses. I’m so thankful for that . . . but I’m also very grateful to be contributing again.

Of course, as soon as I started the job, I immediately threw myself into it at the expense of everything else in my life. I showed up late to therapy, blanked on doing stepwork with my sponsor, and my meeting frequency dropped down to once a week. (I wound up doing stepwork with her on a different day, and I’m trying to find meetings near the office.)

We also finally started looking into fertility treatments. I didn’t get sober until I was 32, and up to that point, I thought motherhood wasn’t in the cards for me, for my own sake and everyone else’s. I’m 35 now and scared it’s too late. No, I’m scared of everything related to this topic: having another miscarriage, finding out my egg reserve is low, the cost of IVF, the IVF treatments not working, getting denied on adoption applications (we’re both sober and stable now, but we’ve each struggled with substance abuse, and I’ve been hospitalized and my partner’s been arrested). Still, I finally made an appointment with a fertility doctor for late July. I’m hoping for the best, but even if I get bad news, I am not going to drink, I am not going to drink, I am not going to drink . . .

*****

It’s Sunday afternoon as I write this and I’ve been holding back tears most of the day. I want something and I don’t know what it is. As a food addict, I am finding more and more that I can’t pinpoint what it is that my body is desperately desiring. I scour the food apps and nothing speaks to me. Yet, the inner infant wails with hunger. It’s hard to explain without it sounding completely crazy. I have always been a food addict, I’ve learned, thinking back over my personal eating history, this isn’t new. But I was talked into bariatric surgery two years back, and since then, I crave with a different level of fire and self-hatred. I used to have too much of what I wanted, all the time. But now, I don’t know what I want. And I want it more than ever before.

*****

I’ve been sober for 694 days. This isn’t the first time I’ve been sober, but it’s the first time I’ve been sober and not miserable about it.

Last week I had my dog euthanized. We were together for over 10 years. Grief is a lot, but I'm grateful to be feeling it instead of drowning it in whiskey like I did when my sister and grandfathers died.

My world has gotten bigger since I've gotten sober, so I have others I can talk with about what I’m going through: 12-Step fellowship friends, sponsor, family, therapist, a power greater than myself. And I’ve been talking about it. I’ve also been buying a lot of shit I don’t need, eating a bunch of junk, and sleeping too much. The thing that’s amazing to me is that I haven’t had an urge to drink. “. . . the problem has been removed.”

Now I get to wake up every day and face all these other problems that make up a life, like learning to live with loss. I used to get so irritated by Big Book quotes and recovery slogans. “Progress not perfection.” “One day at a time.” But lately it feels like they’re a blanket and a compass, keeping me safe and showing me the way.

*****

After seven plus years in recovery, I am in relapse. I don’t want to talk about it.

But I want relief.

The things that used to hurt, the ones that drove me to my addiction, still hurt. They hurt like they did in the beginning.

I don’t know how I got here.

I am not supposed to figure that out, just surrender to what’s true, and take it one day at a time.

I can recover that way. I’ve done it before. I know I can’t do it alone, but I still want to. I want to fix everything alone. That’s part of the problem.

I am disappointed in my life. I am ashamed of how I live — that I’m not more successful, that I don’t have more friends, that I get so uncomfortable so quickly that I struggle to maintain relationships.

I need help. I went to a meeting today.

*****

My birthday is in a few days. Despite being a repentant people pleaser with low self-esteem, I am one of those folks who like to make a big deal about it. It’s the one day a year the judge living in my head (mostly) takes the day off and I feel (somewhat) guiltless about friends and family giving me attention (there’s probably a lesson here, I just haven’t learned it). That is supposed to hold me over for the next 364 days.

Celebrating this year was always going to be tough: We just relocated a few hundred miles from home for my wife’s new job, we don’t know many people here, and a myriad of problems associated with our relocation (including the imminent demise of my job) have limited our options. I’m already trying to get my head into a place of gratitude and calm, but I know that longing pull for something bigger, stronger, or different will be there, lurking. Maybe my judge’s idle hands will help me out. He owes me one.

*****

I’ve been doing great all year: a wide variety of therapies, healthy hobbies, spending time with friends. And then in June some things happened and I made some choices that felt like a real step backward. Or maybe sideways. Either way, derailing. I mostly feel confusion and shame now. I deal with process addictions like codependency and a craving for love and affection, which feel squishy to be “sober” from and I’m not sure how I feel about calling it all a relapse. I realized my illusions of stability and healing are precarious and dependent on me having a vice-grip clamp-down on all my desires, which doesn't feel healthy either. So I’m wondering if I’ll ever get it right.

*****

In January I hit the 3 year sobriety mark. Frankly, I thought things would be easier by now. I mean, I’m doing okay but I’m still fighting urges which is incredibly annoying. Two years ago at this time I was fighting breast cancer so I suppose trying to get my mind off of crisp white wine on a spring day is better but c’mon, does this end? When I think hard about it I don’t really want to drink but I do miss the rituals around it, the bonding (which I understand is fake on some level but it felt like bonding in the moment), the way time slowed and the clock didn't matter, the bodily relaxation. I don’t miss many other things: the hangover, the bone-deep fatigue, the emotional wreck I became, the sense that I was physically harming myself, the mental tricks and games I played, etc. The back and forth between the desire and the reminders of why I quit are exhausting. In reality, I want to time travel and never take that first sip of the stuff. Since that’s not possible, I’ll plug along fighting urges, talking to people, writing about it, and maybe? maybe? someday a beautiful sunny day won’t send me down the desire-to-drink spiral.

*****

I spent last Wednesday in the Emergency Room for what I told my family and friends was a bad stomach flu. I won’t show them the discharge paperwork, that I was diagnosed with what is called CHS or “Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome.” The doctor told me it’s not incredibly common, but it becomes much more likely in people who abuse cannabis. It’s right there on the paper: “Cannabis Hyperemesis concurrent with and due to prolonged cannabis abuse.”

When the nurse came over to review the paperwork, I stopped her politely and said, “Yeah. I get it. I smoked too much weed and now I’m done.” So much for “green” sobriety.

She smiled and shrugged. “You’d probably be fine as long as you moderate your intake.” I nodded and thanked her and collected my things. Moderation. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

I’d be lying if I said the effects weren’t immediate. I’m irritable and have trouble sleeping, and for some reason I haven’t been able to get the Wordle in three straight days. But I’ve been reading, listening to music, watching movies and taking quiet walks. There’s a pall over all of it, though. A regret that this newfound clarity is really just a desperate making up for lost time. That the booze and the weed and the numbness have closed doors and windows to art, experience and relationships that I won't ever get back. That these twee little moments of clarity and quiet comfort are just a distraction from the fact that I threw away my 20s and 30s, and the aspirations that came along with them.

I am not sure how long it will take to forgive myself for that, and I truthfully don’t even know if I should. But I’ll try.

*****

With every escalating crisis out in the world, it gets harder to trust my gut on the way I’m interacting with people. Or rather, the way I’m thinking about interacting with people I’ve had ruptures with. It goes like this: Brain receives bad news, fixates on the idea that we’re headed for imminent catastrophe, and then goes to what seems like a solid idea — that the way we get through this all is through connection. And of course that’s true, but it becomes a really good and compelling excuse to impulsively write to the person who cut contact nine months ago, or to turn up the simmer on my fury about a friend who avoided sorting out our issues despite a lot of lofty talk from them about the virtues of working through conflicts. I want to shake perspective into them, but I guess I also want to shake perspective into me. Other friends will tell me I’ve really done my absolute best this time, that I don’t need to learn any hard lessons from these ruptures or change the way I’m going about the world — trying gently to pull me back from my obsessive over-thinking — but I can’t bring myself to believe them. Someone’s fucked things up here, and I need to pinpoint who and why and what to change. (It’s me right? It must be me? Somehow?) Or I need everyone to stop disappearing all the time. We don’t have time for that. I guess what I’ve lost is patience, or the trust that things will work out in time. The runway is disappearing rapidly beneath the wheels, and I don’t want to reach the end of it knowing there was something else we could have done.

*****

Anger is a cruel addiction in and of itself. It is an invasive plant species that grows and twists itself around emotions and the body. Like the comic book villain Poison Ivy, there’s often a cause — parents, trauma, or something deep inside. Thorny vines emerge from triggers or for no reason at all, wrapping around innocent others. But there’s no Batman to save you from the wrath of someone’s anger. There’s no superhero to cut you loose at the last minute. No one in a cape to whisk you away into the sky from the anger. There’s no Avengers team swooping in to grab you from Thanos’s rage. And that’s what makes being on the receiving end of anger so hard. No one will save you but yourself.

*****

I’ve had a tough month, nothing crazy, but my fiancée and her teenage son moved here to live with me and my kids and work continues to take up what feels like all my time. I’ve been struggling with work for about a year now. I’m just stressed and feeling behind all the time even though I work too much as it is. I’m always worrying things are on the precipice of collapsing at work even though they never are but that’s just how my mind operates. The hell of it is when I feel like work is going bad it makes me feel like life is also going bad and makes life feel impossible. I was able to go back to therapy the other day though and get started on new anxiety meds after being off them for the last 8 months or so.

Bad thing was that the new meds seemed to make me feel worse this week as I was starting them and between that and work stress I almost lost my mind. I was ready to just quit work without a backup job or put in for some leave because I felt like the work was going to fall apart and my life was going to end. I thought about drinking to help with the anxiety but one thing I feel quite sure of at this point after 18 months sober is that it will make the anxiety worse in the end. Thankfully I was able to take a couple days off work at the end of the week and get some rest and am feeling better going into this week. I hope everyone else can turn the corner if you are having a hard time. Solidarity to everyone that’s struggling out there in the world.

*****

July is the month that my daughter was born and the month she died. One month holds her whole lifetime. And so as my daily calendar gets flipped closer and closer to this sacred time of year, a heaviness settles in. She would be turning four, she should be turning four. The first anniversary I was still drinking and boy did I drink that month. The second I was pregnant with my second, and the third I was pregnant again (surprise!) with my third. This fourth year I am sober. Going into this month is the first time since getting sober that I’m acutely aware that I could drink if I wanted to, since I’m not actively pregnant. Your child dying is I think top of the list for reasons to get absolutely wasted. But if I drink to block out the pain, then I’m blocking out the love too. It’s better to feel all of it than none of it. I got sober to be a better mom. She’s the one who gave me that title. Happy Birthday my darling girl.

*****

I have two kinds of breast cancer, which sucks, but honestly isn’t the end of the world since what I have is very treatable and we caught it early, so I will live. Nothing is permanent, right? I am really, really good at telling myself that when things are good, and I’m trying to remind myself of that now that things are shit.

The mastectomy is looming, as in less than 48 hours away. Maybe it hasn’t hit me yet, or maybe I’m coping. No clue. What I am not handling well at all is the laundry list of drugs I need to take. Breasts aren’t considered limbs, so the goddamn insurance company has ruled that getting my left one chopped off is not worthy of an overnight stay at Cedars. I am coming home within a couple hours of the surgery and once the pain block wears off, my docs want me on oxy for the first three days post-op. Their thinking is that if I don’t manage the pain, then I will end up in the ER and that will expose me to all sorts of creepy crawlies that will lead to infection.

Prescription drugs are the one thing I’ve managed to avoid. (Aside from that 18th birthday eons ago when I took some little mint pills I bought off a rich kid in a “Die Yuppie Scum” t-shirt at a Social Distortion concert and spent the night rolling over pink cotton candy clouds, waking the next morning in some total stranger’s backyard.) Pills scare me more than cancer.

“You aren’t going to get addicted with three days of use,” my doctor insisted. “I promise.”

Yeah, but my family tree is riddled with people who probably thought that way. My son, my goddamn mother, half my dead uncles, that auntie no one is sure is still alive, easily half a dozen far-flung cousins — all of them at some point “needed” their medicine. So far, only my baby boy has succeeded in any sense at fighting it off. (And I am grateful everyday for that.)

Again, I am beyond fortunate. My husband gets it and gets me and has promised — promised! — that he will be vigilant for me. So wish me luck that this too isn’t permanent.

*****

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.

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ZOOM MEETING SCHEDULE

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

Tuesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 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

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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

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Serenade

by Djuna Barnes

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Three paces down the shore, low sounds the lute,
The better that my longing you may know;
I’m not asking you to come,
But—can’t you go?

Three words, “I love you,” and the whole is said—
The greatness of it throbs from sun to sun;
I’m not asking you to walk,
But—can’t you run?

Three paces in the moonlight’s glow I stand,
And here within the twilight beats my heart.
I’m not asking you to finish,
But—to start.

—Via Poets.org

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