March arrived, thank God. I can tell that everyone is restless and ready to get to whatever comes next. We have a shit-ton of check-ins this month so we’re gonna split it up into two batches. First one drops today.

Thank you all for your contributions and your willingness to tear your guts out for us. You are the best. — AJD

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra

I hit thirteen years clean and sober on the 11th of this month — though it turns out I’ve been carrying a thirteen‑year coin since last year. At some point I miscounted and gave myself an extra year. When I went through my old coins, I realized it was year nine I’d skipped, which lines up with when my daughter was born.

So I’m re‑doing year nine now, and I’m genuinely fine with that. This past year has been full of shedding and re‑starting in a lot of areas.

February was rough, as it usually is for me. That pattern goes all the way back to my senior year of high school. When I first got sober in 2013, my home group talked about how meetings always fill up at the end of February and early March. It’s like the opposite of the January gym rush — people hold it together through the holidays and then hit a wall in the dead of winter.

That’s when it becomes a battle of willpower. The drunk trying to bend the universe to his will. And the answer is always the same: you can’t. I should know that from all the Februarys I barely remember.

This February was a mess. I was sick most of the month. My doctor gave me antibiotics for a sinus infection, and I took them even though we both knew they weren’t the right call. That led to pink eye, and by mid‑afternoon every day I could barely see.

My gums flared up again too — no surprise, since they haven’t really improved since my dentist told me twelve years ago that I needed gum surgery.

And then there was the doomscrolling. Sick, half‑blind, anxious, and reading every worst‑case scenario the internet could offer. No wonder my blood pressure and heart rate were through the roof. One Saturday night I genuinely thought I was having a heart attack because of some post about aliens coming to destroy everything. Meanwhile, my family remembers that night as a perfect, peaceful evening together. They had no idea what was happening in my head.

I leaned straight into the February spiral even though I know how it hits me. I doubled down on meetings and talking and asking for help, but I still felt unsober in my thinking.

At one point I accidentally sent A.J. a quote from the newsletter. In my head, that was me signaling I was spiraling and needed to do something.

So I ran. Literally. I focused on work, on being steady for other people, and on running as many 5Ks and 10Ks as I could. Things started to level out.

Then last Thursday, while rinsing my mouth, the gum pain suddenly stopped. I spit out a molar that had been bothering me all month. No blood — just a dead tooth finally letting go.

It hit me harder than I expected. Something that rotten shouldn’t have been able to weigh that much, but it did. And when it was gone, I felt clear. It was another piece of an old version of me falling away. Somehow, despite all the damage I once did, I’m still here and I’m okay. Every step, good or bad, led me to this point.

March 1st is our 12th wedding anniversary — though my wife and I realized we’ve been telling people 13. And the 11th is my actual 13 years clean and sober.

Now the goal is simple: Make it to next February with a little more grace than the last one.

I spent 29 days off Instagram, one day short of my account actually getting deleted this time. Hours moved slower. Each week felt softer. I took up painting and started writing poems to no one again. I didn’t know about the blizzard until a few friends reached out. My fear compounded with each text. I bailed on a morning birthday celebration in the city. The snow didn’t start falling hard until 4 p.m. Yesterday, I spent ten hours consuming short form videos like the cigarettes I used to chainsmoke after drinking table bottles of wine and finishing everything in the bag. The thing that scares me the most is that social media doesn’t have an end. You can stay infinitely breathing in. I watched an interview where a celebrity said we only have 4,000 weeks if we live to be 80-years-old. I scrolled to the next video. Whenever I pass people wearing headphones, faces buried in their own two hands, I wonder how much life they’ve missed. How much life have I missed? How much can we recover? How much can we save? I reset my day count this morning, wrote this paragraph, inhaled, remembered to breathe out again.

I started a little business selling art in college, and it was just successful enough to keep going with it as my full time gig. It was never actually good money if you looked at the hourly rate, but to someone that had never had a job that paid more than $11 an hour, it felt like really good money. I had enough of a following that I could make a bunch of items over a day or two, announce the “drop,” and an hour later everything would be sold out and I’d suddenly have $1000. It always felt so close to working, just a few little tweaks away from being profitable and sustainable, a shiny puzzle that felt perpetually solvable, even on the worst days. I finally admitted defeat after 13 years and accepted a full time job in 2024. Along the way, I became a gambler, setting a bunch of little financial fires that I could put out but only if I worked 7 days a week and timed my sales to happen right before I had bills due. It was always a crisis, there was always something urgent but barely doable that was due. This meant, as a person with ADHD, that I always had that last-minute adrenaline, and I was suddenly capable of being “a person who works super hard all the time,” an identity I desperately wanted. I clung to that, put blinders on, and neglected everyone and everything else in my life. I started gambling by running up credit cards and paying them off before the interest hit. I ended with multiple working capital loans that each pulled a hefty percentage from every sale, carrying near-max balances on 8 credit cards, and $1770 minimum monthly payments for buy now pay later loans on top of that.

The new full time job wasn’t going to be enough to replace the income from my shop, so for a year and a half I continued gambling, betting that I could make and sell enough art on nights and weekends to be able to pay all the minimums. This gambling was less fun, and I didn’t feel like a badass when I was successful. I hit a mental breaking point. By then, the working capital loans were already long gone. I haven’t used a credit card in 6 or 7 months. I don’t feel “clean” since I’m still splitting a couple of regular bills into four payments, but I haven’t purchased anything unnecessary with installments or any form of credit since October. At this point, I don’t trust “future me,” so I set up consequences for her. I submit an awkward weekly screen recording proving I haven’t made any fun purchases with credit or else I’m instantly charged a significant fine. Four months into this, my monthly minimum payments are nearly $1000 lower. 

Last week, burned out on a deep level from working so much for so long and desperate to make a real change, I closed my shop and deleted a big chunk of the website (hundreds of hours of work) so that it would be difficult to reopen.

Should I have kept my small business open to pay off debt faster? Probably yes, but so far, always having the option to make extra money has only helped me rationalize spending more, working more and avoiding everything that’s actually important to me.

I’m about 2.5 months sober, my longest amount of time since I can remember. My mom is currently in rehab for her drinking. She is 70 years old, and was taken to the hospital about a month ago after she was found passed out in her front yard with a BAC of .37. We spoke on the phone a few days ago for the first time. I asked her questions about her routine and how she was feeling. I didn’t share that I was also working on my sobriety — it feels too intimate and frankly, I don’t want it to be something that we work on together. My parents have always been alcoholics, and my own alcoholism has been something they’ve witnessed but never talked about with me, even after I got arrested years ago for a DUI, or tried to broach the conversation about all of the addiction in our family. The center of our family has always been their terrible marriage and drinking problems. I’m doing well right now, and I feel a little guilty about it, but I don’t want to share my recovery with her. I guess maybe I don’t want to relate to her in this way, because my biggest fear is becoming like her. How do you tell your alcoholic mother that a big motivation to get sober was how much you see her life as a guide of what not to do?

I got laid off again. Second time in 18 months. Second time by a too big to fail media company that is, indeed, failing. They say it’s not my fault but it sure feels an awful lot like failing. I won’t drink or use over it. 

This time last year I was in an existential crisis. I was controlled almost entirely by my inability to control . . . anything. Fear was my primary emotion. I thought my wife must be so ashamed of me. My kids, too young to be disappointed in their Dad, but if only they knew how I was incapable of providing financial security for them. Savings dwindling. Confidence shattered. Pretty hopeless, but I managed to quiet the screaming in my head long enough to keep at it, one day at a time.

In July I got work. Good work. Work that challenged me and made me feel proud. “PUT IT ON MY TOMBSTONE,” I thought. This is what I’m about. Tell my daughters how Daddy pulled himself from the muck and got right again. Maybe true? Maybe delusions of grandeur? But I was proud of myself for — by my count — the fifth time in my life. When I graduated college. When I got married. When I had two kids. When I looked at that guy in the mirror every day and did what had to be done. I was ready to dine out on that for years. Decades. “THIS IS WHO WE ARE,” I’d tell my kids when they shared their own unfair life experiences in years to come.

Seven months later it was gone again. Felt more like a blunt object this go round. Didn’t think I’d be doing ALL THAT again so soon. Hoped to be never. But here we are again.

What am I LEARNING from ALL THIS? Isn’t that what we do in recovery? Fail. Fall down. Get back up. Rinse. Repeat. I won’t drink and use over it. Damn near the only thing I’m certain of these days is that will make it worse. 

I’m grateful to TSB for letting me do this each month. I found, not by design but in practice, I tend to write these and tie them up in a tidy little hopeful bow at the end. I can’t this month. But thanks for letting me share.

The words are difficult. Just a few days ago they were so easy.

But as I said to my friend, Jay, “I’m not going back.”

“Never,” he said.

At this point I’m more resolute in my refusal to go back than I am in my drive to go forward.

“Never.”

I moved in with my 79 year-old father in January, both for my own financial reasons and to help him get ready to move into an independent living facility. He’s had Parkinson’s for about ten years now, and that’s a disease that only goes one direction. On the one hand it’s gutting because I’m watching a man I love and admire slowly deteriorate in a way that nobody can stop, and I’ll have a front row seat to his continued physical and mental decline. But at the same time, it's such a gift to be present for him and to be genuinely helpful. I’ve not been present for anyone in the last few years, and I caused people I love a lot of pain trying to run away from my fears and my feelings. I’ve been dishonest, I’ve been deeply selfish, and I’ve caused such suffering in the process. I’m here for him now, though, working through those things and seeing myself live by the values I’ve always had but so frequently been incapable of upholding. A new therapist, a renewed AA program, genuine honesty, and a meaningful spiritual life, and I’m able to be grateful for this opportunity to be of service to a man who has saved my life both literally and figuratively on more than one occasion. He’s far from perfect, all of us are I suppose, but he’s my Dad, he’s sick, and I get to be here for him. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, that would mean that the pain I caused other people was necessary for my development and that’s a selfish framing I’ll never accept, but today I’m where I need to be and I’m where I’m needed. It’s so far from how I planned it, but maybe that’s ok.

fin

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN