Keep Telling Me How Good I Am

June Check-Ins, Part Two

As promised, the second half of our June Check-Ins. Lets get to them. —TSB Editor

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

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I’d Rather Be Present Than Numb

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

According to my big book app I am 102 days sober. My sobriety date is February 15, 2025. The event that prompted another bout of sobriety was an engagement party for my dear LPN schoolmate. I was too excited to celebrate. It gets dangerous. Nonetheless I had more stress to endure a month later due to my child going through a third cardiac surgery. Now that we have gotten through the whole 47 days in the hospital, I’m impressed I can do that sober. I was never an everyday drinker, but when I do decide to drink, I put it away. It’s always a gamble if I have a good experience or not. It also makes me sad that I could have such profound happenings in my life and I could still think to myself, “A drink would be nice right now.” I have gone to AA meetings and I enjoy them. I love listening to the raw stories about the experiences with this highly socially accepted activity. One time I even cried at an AA meeting. I was literally crying in front of people about the fact that it’s unfair that at my age I can't drink. I’m 36 now. All of this is to say that I don’t feel too terrible about not drinking. I was sober back in 2020 for three years. Staying sober for the remainder of my life sounds INSANE but for now I’m good. I don’t NEED it or anything. I’d rather be present than numb.

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When I got married, my boozing simmered down for a spell. But I was a grad student laboring to finish his dissertation, and I discovered that after a day of scribbling, a pint of gin was just the trick.

That February my dad, 56, had dropped dead. The sweetest man I’ve known, his one flaw was enabling my alcoholic mother. She, on my arrival home for the funeral, stationed a bottle of bourbon, “the world’s greatest tranquilizer,” next to my bed. I finished it within hours. I had a handy excuse.

I’ve been sober a long time but on a certain day in late winter I wake up in inscrutable despair. Decades back, I realized my subconscious was remembering Dad’s death. I rued the fact that I hadn’t adequately expressed my love for him. He was my bulwark against my mother’s excesses, and at his death, a kind of agonizing loneliness overtook me. It annually returns, though it’s of shorter and shorter duration.

I meant to emulate Dad’s character when I became a father, but in my two older children’s early years it was my mother’s I showed, thanks to booze. That’s my own sad fatherhood tale. On that February day, I can physically feel as I did when Dad died, and I’m reminded of how unlike him I was as a young father. God and 12 Steps have provided me an escape from chaotic addiction, and perhaps their greatest gift is the closeness I now feel to our five children and eight grandchildren. (In the case of the older ones, it took a while to re-establish.) On a sorrowful anniversary, I’m especially reminded of my own early fatherhood — and of how easily I’d lose those family bonds with the first drink.

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Remember when everyone wanted to be a June bride? Well, the retro fondness is a bit outside my age but it still bled over into the general pursuit of the Mrs. that was part of my early 20s/30s. I haven’t seen a single bride this year and I live somewhere there are often outdoor photo shoots and suchlike where you might see those clouds of veil, dresses and stuffed together suited folks hopefully smiling, kissing and generally feeling joyful.

Married twice, neither worked out and after the collapse of the last, I decided to also quit alcohol while I was giving up on things. I am four years into my sobriety. It brought me clarity and a sense of peace with my alone-ness.

I do though have a lover (autocorrect made that liver!) and their birthday is in June. They have a partner. There have been many conversations about this and what happens next. Sobriety has not brought me into a moral high ground, it seems. Still, it’s possibly one of the best relationships I’ve ever had. Maybe because of being sober? Maybe because of my experiences. I am more present, happier, sexier and confident. Maybe this June I’ll find a happy couple standing together in a picturesque garden and figure out whether I want a more permanent state of relationship being, or not?

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I’ve had this recurring nightmare where I accidentally take a sip of a friend’s drink, invalidating my sobriety. A year sober at a party and I absentmindedly grab my partner’s whiskey, spitting it out awkwardly. “I was afraid this would happen” I say, and laugh.

I don’t have the nightmare anymore.

*****

June 2025 marks six years of continuous sobriety from alcohol and six months sobriety from cannabis for me. It feels like I’m finally settling into my soberness. I can contemplate the idea of going out to dinner with friends who still drink without panicking (though I’ve yet to do this).

I can now thankfully enjoy a yummy tasting NA beer because there are so many decent choices available. When I first quit this was not the case. I’m still not a big fan of most NA spirits and will probably not try NA wine, at least not red as that was my drink of choice.

I feel proud of myself for making this life enriching choice though I’m still working through regret of not quitting sooner. Most everyone close to me still drinks though none of them seem to overdo it like I often did. I’ve come to accept my path. I like not being hungover. I like not guessing what happened the night before. I like that my kids can count on me to be sober and present. I like that I live pretty much guilt free these days. It is 100% worth it. Highly recommend sobriety to anyone considering it. Cheers to me for six-years booze free and high hopes for many, many more.

*****

My father fell and went into a coma on Christmas Eve. We drove from NY to Chicago on Christmas Day and sat with him until he decided he’d had enough and let go on December 29th. A lot of executor business came next which kept my mind off my father and focused on making sure my siblings got everything that they deserved. I have a big family and they were curiously absent during this time. After I had plowed through the estate and settled most everything my oldest brother called to tell me he had been diagnosed with throat cancer right after my father’s funeral in early January and that is why he wasn’t available. This is the brother whose drinking led me to Al Anon. I went to Al-Anon for a few years until I had that lightbulb moment where I realized he didn’t have a problem with his drinking, I had a problem with his drinking. I was able to accept that I was holding myself back from being in relation to him because I “disapproved” and was “uncomfortable.” Once I accepted who he was and that it wasn’t my business we worked together seamlessly on both my parents’ declines and deaths.

Another brother whose drinking also was a reason for Al-Anon was absent during this time because his wife had a series of strokes and is now bedridden with little chance of recovery. His drinking was easier to tolerate since he was a kind drunk and not an obnoxious bully which is what my older brother was like when he drank.

There was so much tragedy so close I didn’t process anything. I just came back from the memorial service for my father and with people not drinking some deep conversations took place. A very different dynamic and one that has me feeling unmoored. I got what I wanted, a relationship not distorted by alcohol, but they had to suffer so much for that to happen. We are all in the process of grieving our parents, accepting our own mortality now and forgiving our past selves. It’s brutal but I hope we can continue to be present in each other’s lives and that the shame that comes from the reckoning won’t keep us apart.

*****

Yesterday, I was talking with my best friend and talking about how I am actually doing, now that I am four and a half months into my journey towards “being a healthy person” [ie: get sober, etc]. As I was talking, she cut me off to tell me how immensely proud of me she is, and said “This has to be so hard because you can’t post on instagram and tell all of your friends and find strength in their support.” She also told me she was proud of me, and I immediately deflected and evaded.

Everything she said was true, but all I could hear was my sponsor saying, “You’re not a martyr for getting sober" and, “You are not doing this for other people to tell you that you’ve done a good thing.” And while he’s right, all I can hear is, “What you’re doing is just getting back to the baseline of human existence, no one should be proud of you for just learning how to be normal.” Which isn’t what he is saying, but is what I heard even when my friend said, “I am proud of you and it makes my day everyday to see you happier.”

While I don’t necessarily want things to get easier, I do want to be able to feel proud of myself, because I haven’t drank, and I haven’t smoked, and I haven’t parked on the train tracks. And I want to be able to hear someone say they’re proud of me, and see what they see rather than just feel selfish for wanting them to keep telling me how good I am.

*****

Tuesday, June 2nd will mark one year of sobriety. And I admit, I thought there would be some cosmic inner shift that would accompany this milestone . . .

For me, deciding to forego substances was not nearly as difficult as attending to all of the shit beneath my using. I’ve heard folks use the whack-a-mole metaphor about what starts to surface in sobriety, and while I do my best to take things as they come, I’ll be damned if I don’t find myself getting smacked upside the head multiple times a week, if not daily. Even now. Especially now.

My therapist says my capacity to be with myself is “increasing,” as she pointed out I previously used drugs and alcohol to alleviate the crippling inner turmoil brought on by rumination and pervasive self-doubt. And I want DESPERATELY to believe that. To believe I can be with myself . . . without abandoning myself. Which, if we are being honest, I got REALLY good at. Self-abandonment felt more readily accessible than any measure of self-love. Safer, even.

And the rumination and self-doubt? They greet me just the same, though I would like to think I am holding them differently now.

*****

I turn 59 this week. Barring a surprise diagnosis or death by falling space junk, I’m likely stepping into the fourth quarter. That I’m squinting through smudged reading glasses as I write this feels both symbolic and slightly pathetic.

I want to point out to you that — in sports — the fourth quarter is when you get to switch sides and see things from a fresh, new perspective. It sounds wise but doesn’t hold up under inspection. I will let it go. I will, however, clean my readers.

I was at an AA meeting yesterday and had one of those awareness moments: I’m in a room full of alcoholics. I tried to imagine them in states of drunk degradation but could not. I don’t have that color to paint with. But what I could feel was the quiet, restorative power of shared vulnerability. That’s the stuff, right there — I want to root myself in it and stay.

I am considering using my 60^th year to transform myself into the hyper-chiseled, grey-bearded elderbro who haunts my algorithm.

*****

I spent a few hours yesterday at the Gopher State Roundup. Surrounding myself with the kind of alcoholics who go to AA conventions is a sure way to make me feel like I don’t belong. I call myself an alcoholic when I’m in AA meetings, though I feel like that’s a bit of a stretch when I look around the convention floor and see the kind of people who I imagine are real alcoholics. Being surrounded by thousands of people who feel different from me — all making small talk — is exactly the kind of situation where I most need a drink to participate. I went to the Roundup because I told my sponsor I would go. It’s good to get out of my comfort zone, I tell myself. I heard someone say once that they caught the disease of alcoholism by going to AA meetings. That resonates. I don’t think I need to be in AA to control my drinking — I controlled it for years and years on my own. If the goal was not drinking, I’d be fine. I’d also be pissed off all the time and irritated at the tiniest infractions. And I have a tendency to starve myself when I don’t have alcohol to help me manage my emotions. So, the Roundup was a good reminder of how much work I have yet to do, even when I feel like I have things under control. As different as I am from a lot of the people I encountered there, I also relate to them in some fundamental way.

*****

fin

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OTHER RECENT CHECK-INS:

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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.

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Summer Silence

by E. E. Cummings

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Eruptive lightnings flutter to and fro
Above the heights of immemorial hills;
Thirst-stricken air, dumb-throated, in its woe
Limply down-sagging, its limp body spills
Upon the earth. A panting silence fills
The empty vault of Night with shimmering bars
Of sullen silver, where the lake distils
Its misered bounty.—Hark! No whisper mars
The utter silence of the untranslated stars.

—Via Poets.org

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