It’s a Threefold Disease

The holidays are here . . . and so is part one of our December check-ins.

We’re splitting December check-ins across two newsletters. Part one is directly below — right after this reminder!

Reminder! 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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Will I Always Feel Demons Breathing Down My Neck?

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

I know we say, “It’s a threefold disease, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s,” and I absolutely needed the caution, care, and guard rails of extra meetings during the season when I was younger in recovery. I’m coming up on 36 years in February, now, though (assuming I stay close to the rooms, which I plan to), and honestly I’m able to sort of weather the storm of it all a lot more serenely than back in the day. I’m sharing this so folks can hear that it absolutely gets easier, gets better. It doesn’t scare me anymore the way it used to.

Yesterday I went to pick up my turkey breast and drumstick from a poultry farm in the middle of the suburbs. The week of Thanksgiving the local police have to come out and direct traffic because people come there from miles around NJ to pick up their birds. The folks who work there are kind, and everybody who’s there to pick up food is courteous . . . or maybe it’s just that these days I try hard to be kind and courteous, and amazingly that’s the response that I receive! Back when I was drinking, this is a week where I would have been such an asshole. God forbid I had to drive through the area, I would have railed against “all these fuckers making it hard for us locals” and I would have had choice words and hand signals for other drivers. That’s even if I’d been driving! The only reason I even live in this lovely burg is because I’m able to stay sober a day at a time and I met a lovely man and married him and I don’t trot out my disease to display every day. I’m so grateful not to be that gal who got sober all those years ago. Without a doubt, sobriety has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

*****

In the competition of worst years of my life, the past year has definitely come close to first. I don’t think I am addicted to any substance exactly, more so to my own self destruction. Like all addictions, the relationship is an ambivalent one. Having been on the verge of (somewhat) sorting myself out, I recently lost a close friendship overnight, or at least lost the closeness of it, in what seems to be both my own fault and a complete shock to me, as the issue in question was not communicated to me for over a year. We both cried a lot; I apologised, I asked her to work out what’s best for her, whether it involves me or not, and let me know. I expected this to trigger a doom spiral but what it has in fact triggered is a deep, extreme fatigue, as if someone has anaesthetised me, interspersed with intermittent random crying. Still, I think this could be progress: something unquestionably and unexpectedly bad has happened in an already miserable life, and, finger on the big red chaos button, I have paused. Are we really doing this? Again? I have run out of energy to make things worse for myself than they already are. I am finally tired of my own bullshit, and I have a feeling this is crucial.

*****

I am sitting in the warmth of low winter sunshine. I have coffee and fresh sourdough with butter. The only sounds are the ticking clock and passing suburban traffic.

I moved out of my family home into an apartment, alone, two months ago. I have been on the sobriety/recovery/relapse rollercoaster for many years. The Serenity Prayer asks us to change the things we can, and accept those we can’t. Examining my reasons for drinking, I found it was when I was feeling lonely, or angry/resentful. I felt lonely in my family. I resented my family and myself. Separating is allowing myself time and space to put my recovery first. It may be selfish, but spending a lifetime as a martyr hasn’t worked out so well for me. I am optimistic for the first time in years. I have a couple of seasonal get-togethers to navigate, so will up my frequency of meetings to avoid slipping yet again. I am really enjoying my own physical and mental space.

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We’re not having turkey this year. The decision was made easily but now I am feeling amiss. The traditional meal so full of promise and history is being tossed to the side for a new menu. How this makes me think of my recovery and the years and years I felt the need and want to continue to blanket my senses with the comfortable and often delicious bounty of excess!! Until . . . the alcohol gradually stopped working, the anticipation became a chain that tethered me to a smaller and less and less flavorful world. The pain, fear, and work required to change that menu has led to my freedom — not always comfortable but sustainable. And the smorgasbord of choices, oh my!!

*****

I have good advice from my own experience for people who will be with a crowd this time of year. (With 5 children, their spouses, a sister in law or three, and our 8 grandchildren, we will be 21.) Go with the flow. Don’t try to orchestrate or manage. As a far younger guy, I watched my poor, drunken mother try to “make things right.” Mind you, we are blessed that there is no tension among members of our throng, so I speak from a position of privilege. But I find it does wonders to sit back and affirm the joyful chaos. Sure: make plans, but if they are changed by circumstance — yeah, go with the flow.

*****

I have 33+ years sober and I participated in a psilocybin mushroom ceremony about a month ago. My sponsor and I have been talking for months about the intentional, therapeutic and ceremonial use of psychedelics and their implication for 12 step recovery. He and I both share a curiosity about it. We agreed that intention and context are key. If I eat mushrooms at a Phish concert to have a good time with my drunken friends, that’s a slip. But if I convene in a room with experienced guides, describe in detail what I want to explore, uncover, let go of, and then commit to a collective process of integration afterwards, that is not a slip.

Which is what I did. The last time I had eaten mushrooms was with my sponsor (we are co-sponsors for each other) when we were both in our addictions, about 35 - 40 years ago. After drinking some beer and whiskey, we ate the shrooms, and then stumbled around the streets of Philadelphia cackling like madmen on frigid February day. No intention. No consciousness. Just debauchery.

Last month I stayed in one place in a room full of similarly intentional people. There were no substances other than the mushrooms. At the beginning of my journey I immediately encountered in the room the two things I wanted to explore: my co-dependent tendency with women, and the feeling of being excluded from a group. From then on it was just playful. The deeper meaning was found not in the room that night but in days afterwards. I was asked in class to give a piece of advice to a younger version of myself. I said very calmly, “I would tell him he does not have a family of origin and the sooner he accepts that the happier he will be.” The words surprised me — I had never said anything like that before, and certainly not in front of a group of people. I was finally naming something I had known to be true for some time. It felt like a slow-motion epiphany.

Did I say that because of the ceremony? Who knows. All I know is that a) it unlocked a transformational acceptance for me and b) I still have 33+ years of sobriety. Because I say so.

*****

I got four months on 11/22. I’m feeling good about the holidays. My little brother is sober too, my family knows, and I have a strong support group in AA. I’ll keep going to meetings, praying, and taking it one day at a time. My only defense is against the first drink. As long as I don’t have one (which I don’t want anyway), I will be fine.

*****

I am staggered to be looking at the approach of my first sober Christmas. The stage is set again with all the main characters and familiar choruses that have concreted, year after year, the foundations of this illness (as I am learning it to be). As mum/priest/wife/provider/hostess/magic creator, I do not know how I will keep going. The spiritual side of the season helps at a deep level — the light in the darkness; the baby born in chaos; the scandal of it all. That fits. But the jingle bells, the once-a-year parties with people who haven’t bothered to care all year, the endless hosting and tidying and cleaning. Booze at every turn. Someone was telling me the other day how excited they were to find a whisky advent calendar. And I smiled while I got sad inside again and shame rose somewhere behind my eyes. The flare of craving has morphed now into an old ghost that regains control or reduces shame by counting calories instead of units of alcohol. Boozy Christmas cakes have lost their appeal for two reasons now. Joy shrinks with my waistline now. At least I’ll look hot this year.

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I’ve spent most of the year allowing myself to drink alcohol one month off, one month on. I’m not drinking in November, and am allowed to drink in December. Thankfully, I want to hide away in my house/bed or a cabin somewhere in the countryside far from others. Ideally with a promise to keep drinks away from me.

Not drinking for one month at a time, has given my heart the time to become tender. Tender for nourishing an expanding love with myself. I’ve bloomed some this last year. But the tenderness also lets in the toxic, swirling energy that parts of the world seem to be spinning around in. It’s distracting me from loving my family. I can’t muster anything that takes energy, or if I do, I won’t have much left for other things. I’ve used it all up panicking about job security, learning a new, complex job, and I am mourning the dismantling in public health and community health, the fields in which I work. I feel removed from the holidays this year. But I also want to lean in, slow down and let go of the past year joyfully.

The feels have also resulted in me consuming cannabis more, masturbating as an act of distraction, or staying awake late to spite myself. I’ve come to recognize these behaviors as substitutes for alcohol. As the year comes to an end, I wonder, will I always feel demons breathing down my neck? And I’m proud that I have learned to recognize how demon breath feels like, in those moments when I allowed myself to stay present and tender all these times.

*****

This year, I’ll be spending the holidays with my family. It’s my seventh sober Christmas, and all I can say is, wow, my life is so different from what it used to be, especially regarding my family. I grew up in a codependent, alcoholic, and dysfunctional household — an emotionally unavailable dad and an emotionally volatile mother don’t provide much stability at home. My parents were wildly codependent, even though my dad was an unrelenting womanizer. He eventually left our family to live with his mistress. Would you believe that today she is his wife, and we all get along?

There was a time when our lives were pure chaos due to my parents’ dysfunction and my burgeoning alcoholism and addiction to chaos as a mildly functioning teenager. I ended up going to a Seven Sisters school and graduated in four years; I still don’t know how I managed it. After college, things really hit the fan. At 23, I attended my first AA meeting (in the psych ward, casually). That was nearly nine years ago. My mom got sober, and my dad found Buddhism. My mom and I began the long journey of the 12 Steps. Slowly but surely, our lives started to change.

It was a painful process; we faced our share of troubled relationships in sobriety and had a lot of resentment and grief to work through. But with solid sponsorship, meetings, faith, and a lot of therapy, our family has recovered something I don’t think we ever had collectively: sanity. We had to descend to the depths of hell together to realize we needed to save ourselves individually so that we, as a unit, could survive.

This Christmas feels different. I’m not sure what’s changed, but I know I’ve changed. I’m grateful that, one day at a time, we’ve chosen to heal our family’s wounds so that we can focus on what truly matters: loving ourselves, each other, and God.

Off we goddam go.

*****

November 26, 2025. It was 14,965 days ago tonight that I remember thinking, If I bend my knees a bit and move down the water will stop hitting me in the head. As the whisky and hash induced fog cleared a bit more, I saw that I was fully clothed, sleeping in some unknown woman’s bathtub, with her faucet dripping on my face. Ah, the amazing transformational power of water. The next day, Thanksgiving Day, was the start of what would turn into 14,965 days of sobriety. Unfortunately, I am not very optimistic about making it another 14,965 days as that would make me 129 years old. But, hey, one day at a time, right?

*****

fin

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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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