It Felt Nice Talking With Someone New Who I Haven't Hurt Yet

Part two of our December check-ins.

Hello again, friends. Time for part two of our December check-ins.

For anyone out there who might maybe kind sorta definitely need one, we have a meeting today at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. More info, including a full schedule, here.

Onto the check-ins. —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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I Am There for Myself

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

I’ve been sober for a while now (13 years Sept. 11) and am deeply grateful. My family relationships have finally come full circle this past year and even my narcissist Mom and I have reached an unbelievable level of mutual respect and understanding. Right after I got out of my own damn way.

Me, my Mom and my grown girls had a fantastic, meaningful Thanksgiving with all my aunts, uncles, cousins and kids, 22 (!) humans in all. Pre-sobriety I’d have been high the whole time or not invited. Even in early sobriety I’d have been a wreck or bowed out of the whole ordeal.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m still chock full of character defects and despite my chronological time sober, they keep getting harder to let go of.

My relationship with my long time live-in boyfriend, also in recovery, is circling the drain. We grew apart. I realized I’d made myself and my needs smaller and smaller because they weren’t being met. Of the multitude of pills I’ve swallowed, this one is the toughest. I truly believed (and told everyone) I was happy and fulfilled, but the level of denial I’m still capable of is what truly floors me. My therapist says this is a normal way of coping with the cognitive dissonance of unmet needs.

We spent Thanksgiving apart, with our respective families. I’m just too chickenshit to declare it’s over during the holidays. Now the dishonesty involved in constantly putting on a mask is weighing on me. As is the guilt of hurting another person.

I have to be the one to say the words, to end it. I resent that part, too. He seems okay with the tiny shell of a woman I willingly whittled myself into to fit with his inability to show affection. Years ago I stopped asking for more attention or complaining that he was never home. I told myself I was practicing tolerance, compromise and acceptance. But those are just convenient words to disguise my fear of being alone and not loved. It’s been lonely for a long time, really.

So that’s where I’m at. Not really holiday related but perhaps holiday adjacent.

Thanks for providing a space for me and others to speak honestly.

*****

Thanksgiving 2025 was held in pieces. The extended family has splintered into partisan, political enclaves. A divide that once belonged to the older generation now infects the younger cousins — twenty-somethings who’ve turned Instagram into a trench war of sanctimony and schadenfreude. The assassination of Charlie Kirk gave them fresh ammunition. Things were said. Threads were deleted. Alliances calcified.

My mother, eighty-five and slipping into softness around the edges, pleads for unity. Or, failing that, civility. “Can we please just pretend to get along? I don’t know how many Thanksgivings I have left.” She then calls me and asks if my family’s still doing the vegetarian thing and does she really have to make stuffing without sausage again.

The part of me that wants to don a cape and dive headlong into the fray still flickers — self-importance masquerading as moral clarity. I imagine myself delivering the perfect monologue, changing hearts, silencing uncles, saving the republic.

Yet, I do nothing. Sobriety has taught me this: I can simply nod. I can observe. My mouth does not have to be making sound. I am not a vital ingredient.

But does the ordinary version of me have any value at all?

*****

According to my app, I am 439 days sober as of writing. Sober from booze, weed, and porn after all three habits and the secrets & lies I needed to maintain them as a father and husband nearly unravelled my entire life. The life I always wanted but just could not be grateful or present for.

The first weeks were incredibly difficult as I had to rewire my brain and body and make the early efforts at re-establishing trust and love with my wife. Meds, therapy, couples therapy, leaving social media, books, the 12-Steps and fellowship of AA, and the Small Bow have all helped.

The obsession is gone, but I’m still here and thus too are the elements that lead me to self destruction. The selfishness and self-centeredness are proving particularly difficult defects to let go of. I am also prone to people-pleasing and when that combines with the selfishness, I start lying and keeping secrets to try and keep everyone happy (ok mostly me!) but it just ruins everything. Recently I became too friendly with a co-worker even though I never wanted it to become anything approaching real. It just felt nice talking with someone new who I haven’t hurt yet. Tried to downplay the whole thing and all it did was blow it up into a bigger mess than it ever was, but what did I think would happen? All this while over a year sober. Progress not perfection I guess, and progress is rarely linear, but man this most recent thing was so stupidly avoidable. I’ve got work to do but it’s still better than it was.

*****

What a ride, the last seven years of sobriety. I missed the annual settler colonialist holiday this year, made my own simple meal, and had my first shot at cooking a turkey. It went much better than expected (I was informed my turkey was much better than my mom’s this year). An hour in the oven and it was done, delicious after a spatchcock.

My cooking skills and prowess have only grown in sobriety and I’m grateful for the meals I make for myself nowadays. It’s a love I can show for my Type 1 diabetic, neurodivergent self: the presence of cooking in the kitchen and the zen of doing dishes.

In a time where I’m at political loggerheads with my elder family support system, these moments spent in the safety of my own existence are invaluable. Even when I feel lonely and desire the comfort and embrace of another, I am there for myself. I keep digging and healing, and life without alcohol keeps going as I keep an eye on my thoughts and feelings rising and falling away.

I get to know myself just a bit better each day as I move forward with my first college class in 20 years, showing As for each assignment, still feeling like a complete dolt.

Life as a whole is complex and complicated but if I can keep to my part and my people, I know I’ll be okay. I have so much love from so many folks, even from my old drinking self’s past. I am so fortunate to get to live the life I do. And when tall buildings appear enticing and gun barrels look tasty, there’s the marijuana to remind me that life continues, even if the feelings overwhelm. Thank you all for your continued existence.

*****

Every meeting I hear a variation of this statement: “I am grateful to wake up alive today.” It is so foreign to me, even after years of AA. I’ve tried gratitude journaling and while it sometimes helps, I have never felt grateful to wake up alive each morning. I don’t NOT want to be alive yet that feeling of peace, appreciation to my HP, and love is not there. I am envious of gratitude (insert my therapist saying “that your depression talking”). I want that gratitude. Where is it inside of me?

*****

I’ve been keeping a running list on my Notes app for the last two months — every time I start arguing with someone in my head or get caught in a loop of thought, usually anger, I type out the thought that’s spinning around my head. I let it exist in all its pettiness, its small-heartedness, its heartbroken wailing feebleness. I write the date and the time and then just go for it — sometimes it’s just the word “fuck” in various caps and conjugations, sometimes it’s “I want to SCREAM” repeated over and over. Sometimes I write things out in very clear-headed detail, the thing I am feeling, the memory it’s attached to, my feeling about my feeling. So far it’s worked like magic: as soon as I put it down, just a couple of sentences — the longest one is about 150 words — the thought stops blaring in my head and I stop screaming at spectres and the loop closes.

There are thirty-two entries since the start of October, and when people ask me how I am lately I say “Good.” as a full sentence and I mean it and it’s true. If I sit here and think about that list, and what I would feel if someone found it and broadcast it to the whole world, I think: I’d probably be upset with that person, but I think I’d also expect people generally to understand why I’ve been feeling that way — I certainly can. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so generous with myself like that before. I definitely didn’t expect that if I took these awful, poisonous thoughts and put them outside my head that I’d be able to bear their continued existence.

*****

Check in from the daughter, wife and Mom of addicts. Overjoyed that my needle-using son has turned his life around and is repairing his relationship with his only sibling who has an incurable cancer but is doing well. My drunk mother and her violent drunk third husband made a shit show of my childhood Xmas so I determined my adult holidays would be great. Alas, I’ve now spent 15 years of Xmases waiting for the police to tell me they found his body or to be told that her MRI looks bad. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop — sorry Ram Das. And our anniversary, December 23rd, was ruined when my husband pretended to go shopping but spent the day calling his mistress 6 times; years of damaging acts for which he’s never made amends because he’s been white knuckling sobriety for three decades thus we ignore it but I mourn it. I will cook and clean and bake and be very grateful for my kids who are, against all odds, still alive.

*****

I’ve spent my entire time in sobriety trying to blame my family for the way I am. My parents never got divorced. My older sister and I have never lost touch. To this day, money has never been an issue. And yet here I am. A drunk and an addict. Everyone else has their screwed up childhoods. I’ve got nothing but a family who will drop whatever they’re doing to help me out if I call. It feels overbearing. It feels like a burden.

My dad died 13 years ago, so it’s just me and my mom and my sister now. They still push all of the wrong buttons. All of the partners and the kids that we’ve added can’t provide enough of a buffer to keep me safe from their clinging. They just want to spend time with me but for some reason, that feels like torture.

The constant planning and rearranging and overcomplicating. All to get everything just right. All to make sure that everyone gets exactly what they want. It comes from a good place, but it does bad things to my constitution. As I type this I realize I sound like a spoiled first grader complaining that the toy truck he just unwrapped isn’t the right color.

It ends with an inevitable explosion, a temper tantrum fueled by guilt, that stuns the room into an awkward silence. Then I hate myself. Then it’s time to send late night texts with half apologies. I’m already sweating.

*****

Recently, at the last minute, an incredible opportunity fell out from under me in a way that was completely out of my control. I was crushed. I truly believe the experience I had been promised would have helped me quit drinking. I’m still sad over it. And I’m still on the other side of sobriety, wondering how to reach it or to want it badly enough.

Also, this week, I broke up with my (well-meaning) therapist — a legit decision that still sucks.

Because I don’t expect to find a skilled, affordable replacement, this means I’m now in DIY therapy mode. I know this is not ideal. However, I have found some good sources online for learning practical, healthy skills and tools that I’d always hoped to learn from the pros. I’m trying to figure out a structure for practicing those lessons daily while also juggling the overwhelm and crushing weight of doing this on my own.

It’s kind of ridiculous. But I’m cracking on anyway because the alternative is a return to misery and I’m desperate to find a path away from that. There is also a sense of urgency, because while those supporting me are kind enough, they are not the emotionally sophisticated type and don’t do much in the way of endeavoring to understand. Their patience and support — for which I have been incredibly grateful and which I may or may not deserve — may not last much longer, which is fair.

So, it was serendipitous that you wrote about selfishness vs self-seeking. Ironically, that was a question I asked in my last therapy session (though differently) that went unacknowledged. Perhaps she mistook it for out-loud rhetorical wondering?

My goal is to be a decent human, in all the ways that applies, as it has always been and will always be. But, so badly, I also want the luxury of transforming the wasteland into a hearth.

*****

fin

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