I think of myself as someone with a high pain tolerance. It’s what I rely on as a runner: I’m not especially athletic, I just have the capacity to — I can choose to — endure discomfort. But there’s choosing pain because you think you deserve it, gritting your teeth through it (often what I’m doing!) and then there’s learning from the pain that inevitably comes to you as part of the experience of being alive. This month, our TSB community is learning from pain. Let’s listen. —TSB Editor

A Room Full of People in Pain Just Trying to Feel Better

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

My recovery is going alright. I sat in a meeting yesterday. It was small, half the chairs arranged in a circle on one side of the room. I heard things I needed to hear and probably wouldn’t have gotten to without it. When I shared, the words poured out in one steady stream. At the end, I repeated a sobriety catchphrase, “connection really is the antidote to addiction,” and I meant it. Meetings help. Picking up the phone helps. Listening to someone else helps. A few hours later, I had a miscommunication with a friend. One of those interactions where words are blunt and before they come out, some long-buried fear rises in my chest. I hung up the phone and let myself move through the feelings. I listened to music, didn’t push down the tears when they clouded my eyes, and handwrote all the overwhelming tangents my brain went down. I’m looking at my phone’s lock screen right now, it’s Rilke’s The Man Watching translated by Robert Bly. A couple lines stick out to me — “a storm is coming, and I hear the far-off fields say things I can’t bear without a friend.” I think I’ll go to another meeting today. 

It’s been a little over a year since my best friend from college died after relapsing. I realized that I needed some help when I was driving my son to school and I started bawling because the Grateful Dead song that we used to put on the stereo when we’d smoke weed at the end of the night came on the radio. I started attending Al-Anon and Nar-Anon meetings. It’s a beautiful experience to be in a room full of people in pain who are just trying to feel better. 

I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember so the higher power piece has always been difficult for me. My wife suggested that maybe the song on the radio was my friend’s way of telling me that he’s ok. I’m not sure if that's true, but it is a comforting thought. Now when the universe puts a reminder of some long-forgotten memory in front of me, I smile and think of him.  

In May, I went to our 25th reunion. My anxiety was really ramped up going into it. I was terrified that being back there might stir up the grief that’s been on a low boil under the surface all year, just waiting to jump out at any moment. I slept terribly for weeks leading up to it. But it was actually great and my fears were far far worse than reality. Not that everything is perfect now, but I feel better since then.

I’m still just six months back into my new sobriety. So I don’t even know if I’m the best one to evaluate my check ins but that’s probably me just being alcoholic about the whole thing which is a large part of how I got here in the first place. My problem is, I’m feeling like a huge complainer and lacking gratitude because the truth is I’m alive and sober when I should be first and foremost dead (fact) and IF alive not sober (fact). It’s just that even in doing the work inside the program and myself I’m overrun with depression. My mental health issues make it nearly impossible to feel any type of gratitude for my sobriety, and the exhaustion that comes with living this way makes it hard to want to go forward. When I hear others expressing happiness for their sobriety I mainly associate out instead of in, and nearly every day is still filled with vast amounts of pain. I’m doing everything I know to do for both my mental health and my sobriety and this is the place I am. I know enough to know then all I can do is accept where I’m at. And, that’s the hardest thing in the world for me to do right now. I hope it gets easier. I hope this helps anyone else perhaps feeling this way. If you’re out there know you’re certainly not alone and that I for one understand you. 

It’s been 6 years since my ex and I split. I’m happy that marriage is over. It was broken from the start (thanks, alcoholism and codependence!). But his birthday is on July 5th so I find myself thinking about him, reminiscing on our broken relationship, and feeling angry about two decades of pretending we were great.

The truth is, we were basically roommates with benefits who got sober together. Being on a sobriety journey together made it easier. My identity in recovery was enmeshed with his. We looked like the example of a strong, sober straight couple. But what others saw on the outside didn’t match what was actually happening at home. He and I talked a good game, but we lacked a deep connection. 

When he made the decision that he had enough and left, I was able to start telling the truth about who I am. Turns out I’m more queer than straight, and maybe that has something to do with why we never could make things work.

If I were to set aside everything I think I know about July and allow myself to have a different experience, maybe I could start by celebrating my freedom. If I were to celebrate being free of the bondage of self and free from broken systems of oppression, maybe then I could start to feel true freedom from my old life and step into this new, beautiful, rainbow colored life I have today. 

Because the truth is, I’ve never been happier.

I finished the annual trip home at the end of June and now I have two months, two months of beach time on Cape Cod. But do I wish I was still back in Minnesota? Where I lived for 60 years of my life? Where my son and his family still live? Where I visited the cemetery of my mother, sister and brother? With my father buried not too much farther away? Minnesota is beautiful in the summer but I’ve always been a water baby and despite Minnesota and their 10,000 lakes the ocean surrounding Cape Cod is “the beach” for me. The waves and the salt air have become my favorite, and so I sit with the dissonance of loyalty, of family, and the hedonism of one of our country’s top vacation spots! Off for a swim, do I choose the Bayside where it’s warmer or the ocean side where the powerful waves toss and tumble me around? I love them both and am so grateful for two more months.

This month is mercifully easier than the last in my personal world, and I haven’t thought about pulling over for a shot and a beer on my drive home in weeks, a great relief after the most tempting and difficult month of my recovery in several years. But the mirror of addiction holds itself up every time I have to interface with my dad. In the last few years he's gotten much sneakier about drinking — you don’t ever see him in the act, just smell it on him once he's a few in. I wonder how my mom, someone who deeply hates alcohol and has confronted him about it before, is feeling. And I watch him slide into the aggressive, conspiratorial mindset of Joe Rogan and RFK Jr., spitting furiously about how medicine is bad, taking expensive and unending supplements while actively poisoning himself several times a week. It is a mess I will someday have to help clean up, and I have to figure out now what that looks like so I can stay sober and weather that storm when it finally rolls in. 

Within the last six months, our most reliable old car was lost to a rear-end collision (not my fault, thankfully), another is in the shop with major, expensive, repairs that might have been avoided, and a third is about to shit the bed, in spite of pouring money into them to try to keep them going. 

The water heater is mysteriously, randomly, tripping its breaker, and there is heat and a metallic smell randomly coming from the hvac return. Repair people have not been particularly helpful.

On a rainy May afternoon, the CDS pointed me to a sopping wet, terrified, kitten, in a gutter. I fostered him for a month, and we grew quite attached to each other. Yesterday he was adopted from the county shelter, which is excellent news, of course. But it’s wrecking me that I know nothing about his new people, or if they’ll love him as he deserves when he shreds their furniture, they have a kid, or have to move.

I’m still unemployed, still terrified to go back because of many unpleasant (me) reasons, and still depending on my family. Money is running out, and patience, I imagine, though they remain kind about it. And though we all are better understanding how I got here, glued to the threshold of life by fear and shame, something has to give. 

Instead of drinking myself into oblivion every day, years ago I found a way to manage it and limit myself to three beers in the evening. However, it occurred to me recently that I’m actually just poisoning my mind and body slowly, twirling in clumsy circles and teasing the drain, while other drunks run full-throttle toward their gifts of desperation and grace. Not that either is good, or like it’s a competition. I’ll just never get there at this rate.

The heatwave in Europe collided with a particular and well-established tangle of family stress in the last couple of weeks, which pretty much always lights the fuse of my attachment stuff, and I found my brain systems catapulted back in time while the rest of my body was mostly just lying on my couch trying to stay cool. For a couple of days I thought I’d escaped it this time round: but no. It’s just a slightly longer fuse. It’s weird things like feeling compelled to rewatch series from 20 years ago, dig up old songs, all of these little things that blur the lines between then and now. Even my dreams seem to be in on it, pulling long-ago longings from the depths. I fixate and fantasise, and meanwhile all the old habits kick into gear. I stop eating enough, I isolate, I start feeling like I’m disappearing. I guess — I know — I’m better at recognising what’s happening and changing little things here and there, but I’m not sure how much that helps. It’s heartbreaking because I know my brain was once trying to build me something safe and beautiful and diverting, but it’s more like a janky carnival ride. I can pull the sheets off a couple of ghosts, but I can’t yet make the haunted train stop, or let me off. 

My sleep has been crap for almost 2 months now, pretty consistently getting “rest” between 5am - 10am. I’ve been “grateful” that I don’t have a relationship, important day job, or expectations so that I can let myself do whatever the soft animal of my body wants. I only recently realized I’ve been in the midst of a depressive episode and have pulled myself out of a brutal 10 day cycle. I can’t believe how easy it is for depression to tank everything. I am grateful that I heard my therapist say that sleep deprivation is used for torture; I somehow got my shit together enough to make an appointment with my psychiatrist tomorrow. I haven’t needed a sleep medication in about 3 years now, it’s ok that it’s time again. 

Well, here we are. This month will be both one year since I last got high and one year since my ex and I spoke. One year since I finished blowing up my entire life, of launching shrapnel into innocent people who didn’t deserve it. There’s a symmetry in the alignment of those dates. It means I’ll never forget why I have to do the things I do now. In many ways, I don’t recognize myself or my life anymore. I look in the mirror and see a man who tries to take care of himself, who shows up for his ailing father, who has done a fucking lot of work to find himself again and build a life he’s proud of. Most days, anyway. I’m not striving for perfection, but just to do a little better than I did yesterday. More often than not I’m able to do that and feel a warm mix of peace and contentment, even when it’s hard. And yet, a year out, I still think about her every day and I see the memory of her everywhere. The grief is duller now than it was early on, and I’ve accepted that it will fade on its timeline, not mine. I’ll always love her, but loving her doesn’t mean I get to control any of it, and that’s ok. I want her to be happy more than I need to be in her life. I haven’t forgiven myself yet, but I don’t hate myself anymore, and that feels like a good start. I am so grateful for my recovery today, in a way I never was when I was sober earlier in my life. I’m grateful for so many things, and as long as I remember that, I’ll be ok. Without gratitude, without acceptance, and without my recovery, I have nothing, and I can’t go back to that place.

fin

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN