It Was as Bad as I Thought
Say goodbye to Daylight Savings and hello to . . . November check-ins
The sun is setting before 5PM and the winter darkness . . . it beckons. But don’t worry about us. We’re embracing monotony. We’re avoiding the metaphorical hurricane. We’re grieving, but we’re not self-destructing. We’re like the fox. We have real insider status. The worst has happened, or it will. And still, here we are, breathing deeply, surviving.
Not ever unrelated: 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:
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The ***** separates individual entries, as do pull quotes.
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It Was as Bad as I Thought, but It’s Over
by The Small Bow Family Orchestra
It’s the thrill of the purchase, the high of the hunt for something fun, cool, new that will allow me to ignore what’s going on.
The truth is that I’m not drinking, I’m not using food, but I’m also not ‘sober’ sober.
I’m still searching for things to help me cope with my anger/fear/ resentments/boredom/etc. so I’ve been buying. Packages have been coming fast and furious — to my house, to my office, to other people. See? I don’t even need the stuff for me, I’m buying things for other people. It’s the thrill of the purchase, the high of the hunt for something fun, cool, new that will allow me to ignore what’s going on.
I am a work-in-progress in learning to sit in my discomfort, and even my comfort can sometimes freak me out, w/o needing a distraction. I am working towards accepting life on life’s terms, as the saying goes. Recognizing and appreciating the blessings, which can easily get lost in the busyness, recognizing and dealing with the disappointments, which I often try to muscle past instead of acknowledging and allowing myself to feel my sadness.
I want to live without needing the ‘shiny shiny’ of any addiction
*****
I am trying to separate my distress over how I found out and not being there from my relationship with him and it is still an absolute nightmare.
My dad died this week. I had not seen him in three years because I don’t get along with his second wife, so I did not get to say goodbye and I had not known he was in the hospital for three weeks so there was no heads up. My family sent me a link to the church youtube page to watch the funeral (I live abroad) and told me he was gone in a way that I would not have time to travel there. I am trying to separate my distress over how I found out and not being there from my relationship with him and it is still an absolute nightmare. I would like to remember him, the person who is no longer here. All I can think about is myself and what this is doing to me. At the same time, a few people have been incredibly kind, like taping his funeral so I can watch it when I am ready (not live) and staying on the phone with me for hours. My dad was 84 with dementia and I had feared for years that I would find out he was gone in a terrible way and now that my worst fear is actually here I feel free from having to dread it anymore. It was as bad as I thought but it is over.
*****
I drank for another eight years and that night became a drop in the bucket of how bad things can go.
When I was 21, my roommates and I threw a Halloween party. There was a band in the basement, hardly any space to move. Endless booze and bags. A guy slipped down the rail-less stairs and cut his head open. He was ok but the fire department came. I remember combing through the house, assembling my roommates, picking googly eyes off their flushed, jaw-clenched faces. Telling everyone (myself included) to be cool. None of us understood the severity of that moment, how badly things could have gone. I drank for another eight years and that night became a drop in the bucket of how bad things can go. I spent this Halloween like most other days this fall — up early, 3rd step prayer, meditated, ran, worked, checked in with recovery and non-program friends, tried to make a meeting. I walked to the late-night market to buy Skittles and salad greens, passed people in costumes smoking cigarettes outside dive bars, and felt ok to be headed home. I’ll take monotony over putting someone’s life at risk.
*****
I’ve realized that I have to do things different, even from that almost-year I had clocked under the idea that I had this thing figured out.
After almost a year of sobriety following 28 days at a rehab, I had a rapid and acute relapse a month ago. When I realized that I could not pull out I headed to the ER and got a 3-day detox, for which I am grateful. Having endured and been increasingly frightened by these repeated episodes, my wife this time was close to moving out or insisting I do. She was not really glad when I came home. I’ve realized that I have to do things different, even from that almost-year I had clocked under the idea that I had this thing figured out. I’ve enrolled in an IOP, and my sponsor and I are kind of starting over. I realize I have to go deeper into gratitude and actively concentrate on pushing away my selfish reflexes.
*****
The real currency now is discovering something new about myself through step work and sharing it in a meeting where it helps someone else.
I’m heading into my anniversary month and — if things don’t go sideways — I’ll celebrate 15 years on the 14th. The more distance I get from that last glass of rosé, the clearer it becomes how lost I was in drinking, even though I dressed it up as sophistication.
Last night, my wife and I sat at the chef’s counter of a new restaurant for a multi-course tasting menu. The food was extraordinary, but what struck me as even more out of the ordinary, was how little everyone drank. I counted, of course. Almost no one went past a cocktail and a glass of wine after six or seven courses.
Back in the day, just sitting at the chef’s counter was reason enough to drink. I’d hide behind the “art” of a pregame cocktail, bond with the bartender over craft mixology, chat with the sommelier about wine pairings, and try to score a free drink from the manager as proof of my insider status.
Today, I find connection and meaning in the rooms of recovery. The real currency now is discovering something new about myself through step work and sharing it in a meeting where it helps someone else. Fifteen years of sobriety has given me access to truths I never knew existed. I’m learning, shedding what no longer serves me, and becoming something new.
Now that’s real insider status.
*****
And that family I would return to again and again? Things have devolved to the point where no one is really speaking to me anymore.
At one of my meetings early on, I heard an old-timer share “Buckle up folks! It’s hurricane season!” After the meeting I asked him what that meant. “You know, the three hurricanes: Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.”
A hallmark of my active alcoholism was returning “home” for any one of the hurricanes, and performing as Big Brother Ben for my half siblings, step-mom, and Dad — who desperately wanted to cling to the fiction of “big happy family.” Then at night, after cranking up my alcohol intake throughout the evening (I was generally a jolly drunk), going to the guest room (that’s a hint about the big happy family fiction) with a bottle of wine stolen from . . . wherever the wine was kept. I was already drunk but masking it well, so the bottle was the kick in the head I needed to descend into full-on solo improv, drinking out of the bottle like a wino, leaning out the window smoking cigarettes, venting my despair and rage by talking to myself like a madman before collapsing onto the bed.
This year, the hurricanes are just as triggering but for a different reason. I have moved across the country to enroll in graduate school for clinical counseling. This is a late-career transition born in part from my need to find something to do to support myself as I age (I’m 63.) I love the program I’m in and I’m convinced this was the right choice. But my kids are far away: one sober living on the Cape, and the other in Berlin. And that family I would return to again and again? Things have devolved to the point where no one is really speaking to me anymore.
We are asked in the 12 steps to make a searching and fearless moral inventory, and also to make a list of those we have harmed. I know I bear some of the blame for the way things are now with them, for actions taken and things said while in recovery. For years I have asked if there was any way for all of us to meet in some group therapy situation — even if it’s a one-off — just to clear the air and say what we need to say. Most often the response I got was “never going to happen.” And then there’s this: The man at the center of all this isn’t me, it’s my dad. And he is slowly descending into dementia.
As part of my education now I am steeped in mindfulness training. I am meditating more than I ever have. My wish for all of us is that we may find compassion for ourselves just as we are, that we may lose the judgment of ourselves and others, and that we may find a calm place to sit amid the roaring wind and rain.
*****
The deeper I sank, the more I blamed the blameless people who love me, the more I guaranteed I would lose everything important to me, everything I gave up the privilege to share in.
The most dangerous lies I ever told myself were that I’m terminally unique and I’m not really an addict. They meant only I could solve my problems, that every time I acted against my values I just needed a clever trick to “fix” it or a better lie to undo the last one. The deeper I sank, the more I blamed the blameless people who love me, the more I guaranteed I would lose everything important to me, everything I gave up the privilege to share in. I’m fifteen years without a drink, but walked away from recovery years ago because I had found happiness and love and didn’t think I needed it anymore. When hard things happened I had no defense against myself, reverting to ego and fear, denying the rot spreading throughout my soul — a worsening cycle I woke up every day desperate to break free from but powerless to change. It all came due and I’m exposed and raw, without the secrets I clung to but realize now will kill me. I know that in spite of what I want, I cannot force the future, so I write unsent letters, confronting myself and the past honestly, having conversations I can’t have in person. I grieve, deeply, but I don’t self-destruct and I pray for acceptance. I don’t want to run anymore. I’m active in the program again, reworking the steps, and finally understand why the old timers keep coming back. I sit quietly, learn to love myself as I am, and try to be there for me. I yearn to give instead of take. These consequences were never my intention, but I made them my reality and I deserve better for myself and the people I love. One day at a time, I try.
Neither my mom nor my siblings has said a single word about this since. “Your great-grandmother was kind of a victim of sex trafficking” doesn’t have a nice ring to it, I suppose. One day at a time.
*****
Fell asleep drunk on the sofa while housesitting and made my partner close everything up, and I think (and hope and wish and pray) that I’m done.
Almost a year ago I sent in my first check-in. Yesterday I went to my first AA meeting. I can’t fit one into my schedule tonight, but I’m hoping and wishing and praying that something has clicked now. Fell asleep drunk on the sofa while housesitting and made my partner close everything up, and I think (and hope and wish and pray) that I’m done. Going out tonight and having a club soda with bitters. I’m just so tired of living like this and waiting for the urge to just stop. Wrote in my journal the other day that I need to start making the life I want instead of waiting for it to appear, fully-formed and glittering, in front of me. Deep breaths. Courage to accept the things I cannot change. Be like the fox, who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
*****
fin
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OTHER RECENT CHECK-INS:
Does It Get Better?
It’s go-time here in Los Angeles. The days are darker and spookier, and on some mornings, there is actual frost accumulating on lawns and leaves, adding to a feeling of remarkable change surrounding us all. Change is a good thing, correct?
Doing Our Level Best to Stay Level
Beginnings are hard, aren’t they? Though that’s also the trick of them. Making the decision looks so tough in the moment just before that you forget that’s often the easiest part.
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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The format of the monthly check ins is so powerful. I come back to these little 250 word essay-ettes to read where everyone is at. The brevity of the check ins really pack a cathartic punch.