Today is the second half of our September Check-Ins. Before we get into it, here is my annual pitch about Recovery Month.

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September was the start of Recovery Month. This is the tenth September I am a recovering person, and not once has someone in my 12-step orbit acknowledged it. Based on a brief look over SAMHSA’s website, purple and white might be the official color scheme of Recovery Month, but purple is also the color chosen to raise awareness for (inhale) animal abuse, Alzheimer's disease, domestic violence, epilepsy, lupus, sarcoidosis, Crohn’s disease, and pancreatic cancer. And September is a crowded awareness month, too, as Recovery Month has to make room for Sickle cell disease, ovarian cancer, arthritis, children’s eye health and safety, cholesterol education, and, like, five or six other maladies that have September as their month to raise awareness. Not to mention it’s Breakfast Awareness Month, Sewing Month, Chicken Month, Rice Month, and Baby Safety Month.

Plus, football season starts soon.

I’ll tell you straight up, it’s tough for me to be earnest about something like Recovery Month, but I’m gonna give it a whirl. Because I believe it’s meant to celebrate aliveness. Recovery is not only a willingness for some of us to stay above the dirt, but a genuine commitment to be a better version of a human while we’re here. I didn’t know what better was, let alone how to be it. Luckily I’ve met many other people – in rooms and in Zooms – who’ve helped pull up my rope. Those who understand the complexities of addiction, depression, weirdo-ness, hollowness, otherness, can attest to the emotional overhaul that’s needed to move one inch closer to better. I won’t call it miraculous but it’s a huge, huge win. So celebrate.

The list of ways to die from This Disease – which I was reluctant to call it that for most of my life, but I think it’s important to do so now – are innumerable: Heart explosions, liver rot, misadventure (as the Brits call it), hypoxeia, drunk driving, falling off a deck, jumping off a bridge, all sorts of cancers and cavernous sadness. Death is defied, until it’s not – and it’s on the loose out there right now.

So my one request for everyone reading this newsletter today is just to connect with the living and remember the recovering. Say thank you and I love you and I’m so glad you’re still here. Some days that’s all it takes.

Now let’s get to the Check-Ins. —AJD

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

The recipe says: mix the lemon zest with the chopped Italian parsley and set it aside. Roast the cherry tomatoes in the oven with olive oil and thyme. Sauté the garlic and onions. So I do. Cooking, unlike the rest of my life, feels controlled and predictable. I love me a cause and effect. I can vibe with a set of instructions.

Two days ago, on my birthday, my twenty-five-year-old son got released from a 72-hour psychiatric hold. He was placed on the hold when I told a healthcare worker some of the things he’d been saying lately about hurting himself. My kid was scaring the hell out of me and I didn’t know what else to do.

My son has suffered years of chronic pain. He says wanting to die, in his case, is entirely rational and not due to a mental illness. He asks me if I think suicide is immoral.

I have one answer if we’re talking about you, I say, and another if we’re talking about other people. Have you told your therapist all this stuff? He says he has.

Right now he’s lying in the dark because of the tinnitus and the headaches. All I can do is make him dinner. I’m reciting the Serenity prayer in my head and trying to think about how to practice “detachment” and “boundaries” while I slice garlic and onions paper thin and rinse a couple of cans of cannellini beans.

Eight years in, I thought I was pretty good at Al Anon. It turns out having a suicidal kid really feeds your recovery through a meat grinder. Next person to tell me my son’s got his own higher power gets spit in the eye. Or maybe it’s the higher power itself I want to start a brawl with. Do your fucking job, I think. Do it MY way.

I ladle the stew into two bowls, sprinkle the parsley and lemon zest and flakey salt on top, drizzle it with olive oil. It looks delicious. It smells even better. There is so very little I can do, but I can do this. I go upstairs and knock on my son’s bedroom door.

September 1st will mark 9 months sober for the first time since I was a teen. I still don't know what I am doing. I feel like a beginner but isn't that the point? To begin, to do. I am worthy of beginning something new. 

My father was the drinker, but he drank at the bar. Rarely did we experience the drunk, who wasn’t such a bad guy; instead, we got the tyranny of the crabby, angry, anxious, depressed, hungover man. When he was home, we walked on eggshells. I hated him and later I hated my mother for enabling him. I spent my childhood dissociating: I don’t remember much but as I type, I feel every nerve in my body firing.

There were signs in college — the hysterical message I left on Garrett’s answering machine — but it wasn’t until I graduated and moved from restaurant to office work that I noticed there was something “wrong with me”; how I related to people. I didn’t need to act out or shut down, but I didn’t know safety and how to navigate interpersonal relationships. Eventually, almost thirty years ago, I found Al-Anon and the source of my insanity. It saved me, to a point. I am a professional and have reached a functional level of emotional maturity; that’s not to say I don’t ever act out or shut down, though less hysterically. The thing is, now that I am again in a serious romantic relationship, I am seeing how I can dissociate. This manifests as hyper-vigilance, scanning for threats and danger. This is no way to live.

Eight years ago, I realized the full cost of my upbringing, what it robbed me of. I have found safety in friendships, but romantic relationships can still trip me up. My work is to stay present and connected to myself and my partner and to lean into safety.

My current schedule is identical to the way it was when my alcoholism was its most dire. A full-time job and a handful of part-time gigs cobbled together, occupying most of my free time. After working a catering gig and watching my coworkers do shots of tequila and discuss their going out plans, I felt this little tickle, but it wasn’t really to drink, it was to go out and find someone to make out with. Earlier in the week I played a show at a smoky bar and had a crush on everyone and didn’t do anything about it. Lately I’ve been missing that side of reckless behavior more than the substance abuse side. The cheap thrill of intimacy with a stranger or taking a flirt too far with an acquaintance, the game of charming someone into thinking that I’m worth a few minutes or hours of their time. I didn’t go out, of course. I ate catering leftovers standing up at the counter with a Heineken 0.0. and went to bed at 9:30 p.m. since I had to work at 7 the next morning. Maybe it’s because this time is a mirror to an earlier time of active addiction that it feels tempting. Maybe I’m finally accepting that my brain is wired for vices and that’s not something I can change. So instead I’ll laugh off my desire for meaningless flings and focus on staying healthy. 

I’ve been sober for 10.5 years. I was at a spa of all places, ordered a lavender lemonade, took a big double sip because I was hot and the drink was icy cold. As it went down, I tasted something familiar but so foreign. FUCKING VODKA. Panic set in. Told the server he gave me the wrong drink and he said he just “assumed” I wanted the cocktail. WTF. Commence water chugging, bread eating, get this shit out of my system. Then I sat by the pool for two hours, trying to figure out if I felt any different. Thoughts continued ALL DAY. It absolutely sucked. I wasn’t drunk. But I felt like a fucking loser. Old me would’ve taken that one sip as permission to drink the day/night/week away. New me put an immediate stop to those thoughts, didn’t become a victim of some server’s fuck up, spiraled a bit, then moved on. My guard is definitely back up though. I know this could be a slippery slope, but I know I have the tools to protect myself. 

August and September are always about too many feelings, not enough coping strategies. Or should I say, not enough good coping strategies. I’m losing my shit a little. A few weeks ago, a driver smashed into my dad’s car (and several other folks’ cars) in the middle of the night; on the one hand, thank God no people were injured, but also, wow, that 2am phone call revealed how ill-equipped I am for the emotional, logistical, fiscal, and administrative burdens of almost all emergencies. I’ll keep showing up, but good grief. 

AA is killing me.

I started the program in earnest about 2.5 years into my sobriety and am a third of the way into the 90 in 90. I’m going to 8 meetings a week, plus stepwork with my sponsor, on top of the life I’ve been rebuilding while white knuckling. I am maintaining my shiny career; hobbies; a not-small number of close friendships; and a committed romantic relationship. I’m an extroverted, bipolar, only child so I thrive in busy-ness. But, historically, when I’ve gotten myself into too much, I resort to benders to get some space that I won’t grant myself naturally.

It feels ridiculous that AA is driving me to want to drink, but it’s my second biggest unpaid time and emotional expenditure and because I’m tapped in time and emotional reserves, I’ve come closer to relapsing within the program than before I started it. I’m pushing through because one of my character defects is that I am bad at follow-through. Much like my sobriety as a whole, I have gotten better at following through on my own. I cancel less plans and send birthday presents on time. But AA is so much to juggle, especially when you’re new and your “willingness” is tested repeatedly by the bids for connection to the program. The rub is I feel like the program is breaking my existing connections to the strong pillars of my sobriety and rationally something has to give. I’m just terrified of what that something is.

100 Days not drinking since the beginning of the year. 

On track to drink less days than having a drink. 

Progress.

Do I need to drink? No.

Will I ever not drink? Hard to say. 

I acknowledge stumbling across The Small Bow has had an impact.

Thanks.

I’m coming up on my first full year of sobriety. Alcohol is no longer my problem... mostly. I’m dealing with a dead bedroom. My partner doesn’t engage in any intimate activity. The reasons are some combination of medical stuff, their trauma history, and my alcoholism. Trying to figure out who and what to blame for my frustration is impossible. 

I know my feelings are my responsibility, but damn, this is difficult to let go of. I’m trying to accept the things I can’t change. Is this something I can change? I don’t know. 

I do know last night I was crying in the living room after everyone went to bed. I was mourning what feels like the loss of my marriage. That was the first time in a long while that I’ve seriously considered a drink.

I’m sitting in bed moping because I’m not going out tonight. I picked up the kids from camp, prepared and served dinner, cleaned the kitchen, got the kids completely bathed and ready for bed, and there is nothing left to do but relax and hang out with my husband. But my reptile self is throwing a massive tantrum, clawing and kicking and screaming that I need to go out to a bar where my friend is playing a gig so that I can be a “good friend.” Because he asked me with puppy dog eyes to go and said it would be “so supportive” if I did. And whenever I go he invites me to sing with him and it’s so incredibly fun and validating. The problem is hard for me to name, because it isn’t alcoholism or sex/love addiction exactly or simply an urge to escape from my domestic life, it’s more like a blend of all those tendencies. Maybe I should just call it “being selfish”? The number of times a week that I am going out to do music stuff with this guy and his crew is starting to add up, to the point where my husband is rightfully feeling like I’m gaslighting him and is resenting the extra childcare hours he has put in this week. I spent all of yesterday afternoon at the park in the sun jamming while he was incapacitated with a migraine and the kids watched TV. It’s like . . . whatever I’m up to is plausibly deniable but only just barely. And now it’s as if tonight I think I deserve a medal for staying in and taking care of my family. 

fin

NEW PODCAST EPISODE: YOUR CHILDREN ARE NOT YOU: BECOMING A PARENT WITH AN ADDICTIVE PAST w/ ERIN KHAR

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN