Why the Impulse to Suffer?

August check-ins are here.

Is there something inherently sad about August or do I just have the upside-down version of seasonal depression?

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Onto the check-ins. —TSB Editor

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I’m So Overjoyed I Don’t Have to Live Like That Anymore

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

Two weeks ago I ran into my probation officer while on a walk. I told him I had just celebrated 41 years of sobriety. He was the first person I told that I identified as an alcoholic. I first met him when I was over 3 months sober. I was coming off my third DUI. He asked me if I was an alcoholic and what I was doing about it. I said I hadn't had a drink in over 3 months and was going to AA meetings daily. That meeting gave me confidence in my sobriety and that I could have a new and better life through sobriety. I haven't looked back since. AA saved my life.

*****

I’m 15 months sober and this has been the absolute worst few weeks for urges/cravings yet. Maybe not worse than that first week, but those were physical cravings and these are emotional ones (ugh). I’m in my country song era; the guy I was seeing for 4 months broke it off, my roommate relapsed with her abusive ex and blocked everybody, I asked my mom for help and she refused, the unspoken thing being that she can’t help me because she’s helping my brother so much, a pattern of favoritism that’s been breaking my heart for years. Oh and GeekBars are discontinued. No surprise that every time I’m in the Target self-checkout line buffeted by the giant summer booze displays the little voice is like “it wouldn't really matter.” I guess it’s practiced sobriety though, that’s reminding me that it would matter a lot and that this knot in my chest I’m waking up with every morning won’t actually be untangled with lubrication. God grant me the serenity to sit in all this discomfort, because sometimes life is just so uncomfortable. I’m just doing the next right thing and having faith it will all get better. I guess, deep down, I know that’s true.

*****

My brother texted me a few months ago to invite me to his wedding. The details were limited: I got a date (July 25), a time (12ish) and that we would join a small gathering of friends and family at my father’s water-side home in Gloucester, MA.

I’ve been sober for more than 14 years and this text spooked me. The whole idea of a backyard wedding with my brother and his drinking buddies was anxiety provoking. I immediately reached out to my therapist, my sober community, and my wife to share my fear and anxiety. I worried I might revert back to old behaviors like people pleasing and manipulation or worse, drinking.

After months of worry, future tripping, and an occasional fantasy of the ease a glass of rosé could give me, I showed up. Turns out, the wedding was worse than I expected.

The ceremony lasted four painful minutes. My brother wore shorts and sandals. His wife wore a $5K gown. The couple avoided eye contact and angrily said their vows at each other. The ring exchange was forced and awkward. Their first kiss as a married couple was perfunctory and included a showy ass grab.

No glasses were raised to the bride or groom. No one toasted anyone in the family. No thank you was said to my father and his wife for the generous use of their home. No acknowledgement was made of the presence of his kids from a previous marriage, or for our niece who he acts as a guardian to since my younger sister died.

There was no toast to love. Or the importance of this marriage. The short gathering was really just a prelude to a full weekend of getting drunk on my brother’s big boat.

The whole thing left my family feeling like a gutted fish.

I’m just getting over the emotional hangover. But what I’m left with is an ocean’s worth of gratitude for the abundance of true love I have in my life. I’m so overjoyed I don’t have to live like that any more.

*****

Last month I hit a bottom. I did a 30/30 — went to a meeting every day.

I feel better.

I can think more clearly and feel calmer.

I’ve regained some sobriety.

There is a thin line between losing it completely and living one day at a time.

I’m glad I have a place to go.

*****

I’ve reached the point in sobriety where I’m starting to realize the desire to lubricate wasn’t just a learned habit from watching every adult family member as a child, or some shitty banal Southern gene I inherited, but perhaps something more annoying. Stopping drinking made me realize how much the drinking was attached to masking, and, even without a glass of wine, the instinct to mask is still present. (In fact, my top-notch masking skills probably made it slightly easier for me to tiptoe back into society.) I’m now experimenting with not just “doing social stuff sober” but “doing social stuff sober without masking.” Uh, whoa. It appears that instead of simply being from a line of women that drink whiskey standing up in the kitchen, I’m from a line of . . . autistic women? That drink in the kitchen cause it’s safe in there? Autism . . . maybe that’s the TikTok talking. But whatever is under my mask is raw, awkward, and is coming across as confrontational. That’s my latest front in the alcohol wars — figuring out how to exist sober and without performative normie-ness.

*****

I got laid off this spring, which sucked, but I found another role after only 101 applications and 12 weeks of searching, which in this market, is really not bad. The existential crisis of unemployment gave me something on which to hang my hat of despair and ennui (something I literally, word for word, said to my therapist, yikes).

For reasons I’m still trying to suss out, 2 nights ago I had 3 sips of my partner’s beer over the course of as many hours. Other than that, I’m 3.5 years alcohol free. My partner is a heavy drinker (does it professionally, in fact, in that he’s head brewer at a local craft brewery) and I’m resentful as hell. I feel like I’m always inventing problems for myself. He’s the rock and I’m the crazy one. I’m so fucking sick of this dynamic.

*****

Still drinking here, and yet I just committed two months of training and the rest of my life to a safety-sensitive occupation for which I just discovered — surprise!! — they can test you for long-term alcohol use. I have always kept my drinking carefully separate from work, and had expected to make changes to abstain for the upcoming work times. I was fine with that. But I did not expect to possibly have to quit cold turkey just to get my foot in the door. This was not in the plan and I was not ready to go through all that.

Because, while I want to want to quit, I don’t want to quit yet. Even though that would obviously be the best, smartest, thing.

My old dog sustained a mysterious injury this week and is doing very poorly, and I suspect it is my fault because I stupidly didn’t try something a neighbor suggested. I am trying to do what I can for her, but it appears to be too little too late.

Which seems to be the story of my life. Occasionally there appear dirty windows of clarity that reveal the swath of destruction I leave behind, especially financially, but also especially emotionally. Those times are the times when I know Something Is Wrong and see that normal, healthy, people take care of their dogs and know how to keep jobs and retirement accounts and how not to lose new friends.

Between the prospective, stressful, changes with the new occupation, and my poor old girl hurting, and with this unhappy certainty that I am who I am and am unlikely to change at this age, I am very sad, quite fussy, and unsure. I don’t want to give up, and I won’t, and I’m trying to not feel sorry for myself. But damn, this is lonely.

*****

I’m four years clean, maybe five. A recovery stalwart, ruefully coming to, coming to believe. I’m at daily meetings: astonished how hard I’m listening, how shares routinely rip my heart out. Here in New Zealand some call meetings “bleats,” a dark tribute to the fact that our hills are alive with the sound of sheep. Oh, and with weed plantations (and meth labs) dotted across them.

Anyway, the daily shares that year, the ubiquitous message, is all about “growing,” a bit cheesy for barbed wire cynics like me. But threaded through it all, I’m hearing loud and clear, is this possibility of growing: better not bitter. Too late to stop now: “Grow or Go.”

And I’m on the ferry to an offshore island, with my new wife and kids. I spot an old using buddy leaning on the rail. He’s living on the island, on a vineyard, all he can drink, a new partner. And he lowers his voice: “But I’m still growing.” And I pause, a minute to clock. Oh shit, he’s talking about weed. And I smile inwardly. Yup, perhaps I’m getting better.

*****

On August 18, I’ll hit six months. That feels . . . significant? I guess?

I’m not calling my sponsor every day like she’s asked. I’m not glowing with purpose, but I’m skinnier, so my vanity itch is scratched. I’ve got an empty step work notebook and a lot of confusion about what’s God’s will and what’s just me trying to control everything because I’m terrified of financial insecurity.

I don’t have cravings, but I’m still waiting for the spiritual part to click. A burning bush would be nice, but I’d take smoke signals.

What I do have is a few AA friends I genuinely like, a meeting routine that makes me feel less alone, and the ability to get through a bad day without making it worse.

*****

Back in April, I faced the dilemma of going to a work retreat or losing my family. It was a tough choice; three days of open bars with a bunch of people who didn’t know I’ve been trying to get sober for five years, or a stable family (or at least a chance of one). That is the ridiculous place my crumbling mental health had taken me. I got to the point in my disease where that was a really difficult decision. But ultimately I decided to bail on the retreat and take my ass to rehab, where I did one unfathomable thing after the other. Flew to fucking Florida. Did 30 days of inpatient. Got intervention by the inpatient staff to stay in Florida for another month to do PHP. Got interventioned AGAIN to stay for another month and live in a sober living apartment with five other women while doing IOP. Then freedom, right? No! Got interventioned a-fucking-gain to live in sober living when I got to my home city (mind you I have a house and a family two miles away). I’ve got another few weeks until I go home-home. But ya know what, I have 100 days tomorrow. Good job, me.

*****

I’ve been having this puzzling feeling lately in that I’m observing my behavior and not agreeing with it and doing it anyway.

That kind of thought got me drinking and using and all sorts of other unseemly things.

In the same way, I can't explain what thoughts finally clicked for me to stop doing damage.

Having done my fair share of reading Big Books, research, and self-help, it was fucking Ben Affleck of all people that explained it in the way I most agreed with: “The cure for addiction is suffering. You suffer enough that something inside you goes, ‘I’m done.’”

I’m making decisions that could cause damage. Suffering looks a lot different for me in sobriety. I truly feel I’m ready to be finished suffering as a relatively happy, healthy adult man.

I’m talking about this all more honestly with ChatGPT than I am with my therapist.

Why the impulse to suffer? I don’t know, man, I just don’t trust myself right now to make good decisions and I can’t understand it.

None of this makes sense in my head and surely not here in print but that’s ok with me.

*****

Facing the financial wreckage that I made over the past decade even as my work as a writer and editor was so helpful, rewarding, and resulted in big wins for the people I helped, is still one of the biggest, scariest things of my recovery. But the power I call God sent me regular people who are also angels of helpfulness to help me navigate the wreckage. Some in program, some not. But they speak God and forgiveness and action, not excuses for my throwing sand in the sandbox behavior with money — willy nilly and with no regard to who’s affected, mostly me. What the program has given me is a hopeful way to live because I’m not the only one clearing up the crap on my side of the street and my experience can be useful. So I remain grateful.

*****

I feel like I’m not supposed to admit this, like it’s traitorous to the collective trudgy mentality of the we’re-all-in-this-together recovery struggle, etc., but . . .

I’m so fucking happy. It’s not a pink cloud. It’s pretty much the direct result of a shit ton of inner work over many years + recently increased efforts to, like, actively trust and surrender to Guidance (or God or Goddess or Higher Power or whatever). Things aren’t perfect, but they are really fucking good, and more importantly, I am not worrying about when the other shoe will drop. If it drops, okay. But till then — probably even after? — I’m just saying thank you, more please.

Is it coincidental that I’m in the middle of a solid fourth step, that I’m switching up my meetings to be more literature-focused, that I’m mumbling the third step prayer at least once a day? Who cares. That old gem of a cliche, “It works if you work it” has proven true time and again, and I’m currently really feeling it.

*****

My life has been in the spin cycle for the past 6 months. Big breakup in winter. Moved from the southwest back to the east coast in June where I stayed with my (very difficult) mother for 7 weeks, then moved to a new city a week ago.

While home, I went on a weird-but-good date with an alcoholic in active addiction. We fooled around, we said nice things to each other; it was good. But then he didn’t want to see me again, and it made me feel bad — creepy for having a physical encounter with a non-sober person, but also depressed knowing that what I’d perceived as a lovely and tender shared experience wasn’t actually shared. Not really. Not fully. I now feel unhappy and undesirable and unethical. My entire psyche has taken a blow.

I also paid for movers for the first time in my life. They delivered my stuff on my birthday. I signed for it (like an idiot) and they left. In the subsequent hours I realized that they’d damaged SO much of my shit. I had a panic attack and canceled plans with the only two friends I have in my new home. Happy 35th to me!!

I couldn’t calm down. I took a baby bit of Xanax because I genuinely needed it. I wish I hadn’t, cuz I now remember what it’s like to pop a pill and make the pain go away. Make the world go away. Even though I feel secure in my sobriety (9 years!), having a substance to help weather this very stormy season of life would be really fucking chill.

But I will continue to choose sobriety. I will do life the hard way, knowing that it will ultimately help things get better. Tortoise and the hare type shit. Y’all know.

*****

I moved to New Orleans nine months into my sobriety (611 days so far). Most people would not recommend living in the bastion of excessive alcohol consumption especially this early in my recovery process, but I can honestly say it has not felt more difficult than if I moved anywhere else.

That was until Tales of the Cocktail came to town.

Tales of the Cocktail is a weeklong celebration of fancy alcohol and the people who dispense it. I have always been able to turn my nose up to shitty light beers and watery mixed drinks. But tell me that a glass holds some ancient spirit recipe and the juice of a berry that can only be found in a formerly untouched jungle in Belize under a full harvest moon, and I have to have it. Or perhaps the taps are all flowing with a triple pineapple IPA with an ABV slightly higher than the legal limit, I will go through half a keg myself on a question to figure out the exact tasting notes.

Tales is the Super Bowl of my former life taking place in my current one.

All the places I frequent in my neighborhood for Shirley Temples and Phony Negronis were rented out for events. I could have pulled out my old “get in anywhere” skills, but even in the depths of a wicked craving for yet another midwestern dude’s latest attempt at making Malort mainstream, I knew better. In a moment of former party girl desperation, I tried to find the NA events, but had somehow missed all of them. That disappointment festered until it sank to the bottom of my stomach and morphed itself into resentment, and that resentment kept me home.

The celebrations are over, but my sober streak is not.

*****

I can’t say I’m sober but weed makes me paranoid, more than one drink makes me feel puffy and poisoned. I have a sort of gratitude that I don’t wish to drink myself blind anymore but at the same time I miss the escape hatch of a Substance. So I am numbing out on TV, phone games, Instagram — all those unsexy addictions that make me feel like a real nothing person. Art feels pointless. Music feels pointless.

There is nothing wrong with my life, not really — I am blessed with a good job, perfect cats, decent health, a husband who loves me — but I am so sad, so empty, frightened all the time that some shoe is going to drop and the rug will be pulled out from under me like it has been pulled out from under so many over the past few years.

Honestly, I am lonely. I have no “people.” I put my problems aside to help my husband with his, then when I am alone again, the black hole has doubled in size. I look into my cats’ faces and feel perfect trust, then I realize how crazy that is.

Bad thing was that the new meds seemed to make me feel worse this week as I was starting them and between that and work stress I almost lost my mind. I was ready to just quit work without a backup job or put in for some leave because I felt like the work was going to fall apart and my life was going to end. I thought about drinking to help with the anxiety but one thing I feel quite sure of at this point after 18 months sober is that it will make the anxiety worse in the end. Thankfully I was able to take a couple days off work at the end of the week and get some rest and am feeling better going into this week. I hope everyone else can turn the corner if you are having a hard time. Solidarity to everyone that’s struggling out there in the world.

*****

My first time checking in here.

I’m 115 days sober as of writing this and I need to leave the United States by the end of July.

I won’t go into details about why I’m being deported, but it’s not something dramatic, it’s just a stupid bureaucratic thing. Drug addiction, complicated immigration paperwork, and strict, unyielding deadlines are a recipe for disaster, or in my case, deportation. It would have happened under the previous administration too.

I found out 30 days ago . . . In the last 30 days, I’ve been speaking to a ton of lawyers and reading up on the law to see if there’s anything I can do now. I can appeal maybe but it’ll all be incredibly hard and the results will still be uncertain. As my lawyer says, we can't guarantee anything anymore.

I have to figure out which will be more conducive to my recovery, stay here and deal with the uncertainty of a long expensive legal battle, or just go back and readjust. Life on life’s terms??

*****

Ten months sober and only just finished my step 5. It was a long battle to this point, but I realised that things happen when they’re meant to, and last year I definitely would not have been able to see the part I played in various dynamics.

There’s still a lot of work to be done for my dry drunk behaviour. Sex, desire, food are still issues. I recently started dating someone and had to end it because I was using him in the way I used drink — to make myself feel better, to feed my ego. It was less about a connection than about needing validation and control.

I am sad and scared sometimes, a lot of the time. I still struggle with accepting myself, my body, and the fact I’m 32 and living at home, with no savings or career path. I’m scared that I won’t really know how to be in love when desire has always been tangled up with escapism for me.

I still try not to compare myself to other people who seem to have their shit together, and know how to date without being so needy and intense, or are good with money, or haven’t burned friendships down to the ground.

But then there are the moments of light that feel like breakthroughs, like when I pray for my mother in the shower after an argument that would have devastated me months ago, or when I reflect on past loves that have hurt me and feel like laughing instead of red hot rage. The warmth I feel toward the world now, instead of the way booze and drugs shrank the world down to just me and my internal thoughts.

And those moments make me glad to be sober, and glad to have AA.

*****

fin

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