🎶My Way 🎶

I am working on trying to not overexplain everything, or to set up a story in such detail that no one wants to hear it by the time I start. I'm breaking that rule on post two because this is a touch of a heavy one. This post is about the booze, and the mess, and being an alcoholic, and I need to make a few things very, crystal, perfectly clear:

• This post is not a knock on AA. If you are struggling with addiction, that is the first place I would direct you to, and I know a lot of really good people whose lives have been saved by it.

• I am not a doctor. I am not a medical professional. I am not a therapist. I am not licensed in addiction counseling, I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist, I have no formal education in any of the above. I am a yoga teacher and an alcoholic with a distinct interest in keeping myself alive and thriving.

• I am sober from alcohol three years and four months as of this writing. I have had no slips, I drink seltzer from a wine glass almost every night, I go to bars and social events with booze all the time, and I do not miss it one little bit.

• I use cannabis on a daily basis to cope with a few different things. Some say that's California sober, or not sober at all; some say it's cheating and transferring one addiction to another, and I am just fine with all of that. I am sober from my addiction to alcohol, and that is the only thing that matters to me.

• I am someone who used to mercilessly mock things like Dry January and suggestions of mocktails, a favorite response being, "Yeah, I could do Dry January or I could go clean out a closet and die of boredom." I would not have believed what I am writing four years ago, so if you're wanting to skip this because you can't relate, and you're struggling - don't fucking skip it.

• It's going to be a long post, because I'm only doing this one once.

  
  

I tried AA, I really did. I tried, because I was supposed to try, and my illness had turned me into Little Miss Obedient. I did fucking everything I was told to. Not because I felt like it was going to help, but because my way of dealing with things hadn’t worked, so I had to try someone else’s. It was a bigger revelation and a harder one to come to than one would think. That’s the problem with addiction. If you don’t suffer from it, it all sounds so fucking easy, a step by step process that boils down to willpower, right? Here are the things you can do, this is what you have to do, and just don’t drink. That’s all there is to it. You tried drinking, and it didn't work, so stop it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

And swallowing that weird bit of pride you had left, the piece of you you were holding onto that knows who you are at the core - saying out loud that you couldn’t do it? You couldn’t handle the stress of everyday life like a normal person? It is actually difficult, difficult, lemon fucking hard. And it hurts. * I recommend coming to this realization before you are lying in a hospital bed staring down a massive, terrifying surgery. I cannot stress this enough.*

AA was strongly recommended in my IOP program the hospital required I attend in exchange for giving me a working liver, which was more than fair. In the first meeting I attended, the following passage was discussed:

 “Now and then a serious drinker, being dry at the moment says, "I don't miss it at all. Feel better. Work better. Having a better time." As ex-problem drinkers, we smile at such a sally. We know our friend is like a boy whistling in the dark to keep up his spirits. He fools himself. Inwardly he would give anything to take half a dozen drinks and get away with them. He will presently try the old game again, for he isn't happy about his sobriety. He cannot picture life without alcohol. Some day he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol or without it. Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping-off place. He will wish for the end.” Chapter 11 Big Book

This did not feel like positivity and hope for a happy life beyond alcohol. This felt like - and this is how AA continued to feel for me - a promise that you would have a healthier and pure life, but you would always be miserable, just waiting for that booze to catch you. You would spend your life sober and always on edge, always looking behind curtains and corners, in every doorway and social engagement, anywhere you go, alcohol was just waiting for you, waiting to suck you under. Constant vigilance, never to be out of the front of your mind. Your brain needs to be a giant “I’M AN ALCOHOLIC” neon flashing sign, and it must never stop flashing and beeping.

Everyone told me to give it another try, give it another meeting, go to one in person, etc. And I did try a couple more. While there was certainly information and experience to be gained in each, I felt no bond, no calling to try again, nothing to make me feel at all right with this being a daily or weekly part of my life going forward. Most importantly, I didn’t feel like this was something I was going to stick with when I wasn’t being “monitored,” so to speak, and that scared the absolute shit out of me. Because from everything I’d heard there, it was absolutely impossible to do it without the constant vigilance; if I went off guard for one minute, stopped talking or thinking about it for one minute, I would be back in a wine bottle.

I could in no way seeing myself embracing this community, and that was terrifying. I'm a joiner; I had hoped that I could go all in, the way I like to, try to get into receiving chips and reveling in sober joy with my new friends. But after that first meeting, I was in a panic. The only thought racing through my brain was, “I will never be able to do this. I don’t want to be on this side of it. This can't be the rest of my life.”

Every single thing I was doing was wrong, things like drinking seltzer out of a wineglass and trying mocktails, and going places I used to go. The one time I did talk, I got the sense that the overall unspoken discussion was that I was too new and in the “pink haze” of recovery, that there’s a point where it all feels easy, but it’s just a honeymoon period, just you wait, the misery and hard is coming. And despite really feeling in my bones that I was doing well, that my way was working, I didn’t trust myself for shit anymore. How could I?

Just a month or so after my transplant, the first place I went was a bar for a memorial gathering. There was a mutual acquaintance who was in AA, and he had reached out while I was recovering from my surgery, although we hadn’t touched base yet. I was introduced to him, “Here, talk to Mike, he’s an alcoholic too!!!” (this also happens, be ready for it) and he was very nice; I appreciated his willingness to reach out and share. Within seconds, though, he made the comment, “Yeah, the two of us, we shouldn’t even be here,” gesturing at the bar, showed me he was drinking water several times, and when someone took the microphone, joked, “Heh, forgot where I was and thought I was in a meeting, I was getting ready for the Serenity Prayer!”

Mike worked that program the way it was intended, and successfully. And I am grateful that for him, AA is the answer he needs.

But I need something to be really clear right here and now. I had zero fucking intention of being anything like Mike the rest of my life, and I decided right then and there I would continue staying sober my way. That could not be the only way people stayed alcohol free, and it wasn’t going to be part of my journey any further. I didn’t want alcohol to be front and center for the rest of my life. It had already been there for way too long and I will be damned if it’s going to take more of my space going forward. The few people I knew who were sober fought for it, still went to meetings twenty and thirty years later, and the main thing they had in common was whenever someone mentioned them in conversation, convention nearly dictated that their name was often followed by some variation of “You know, the one who’s an alcoholic. Sober ten years now, still goes to a meeting every week.”

No thank you please, in the brilliant words of my then two-year old niece.

That is just not what I wanted my name to be synonymous with. I didn't have a problem with people knowing my story, and I didn't take issue with being called an alcoholic. But I refused the notion that alcohol will always be at the forefront of my life because of my addiction. All of the principles of recovery that I’d been taught so far dictated otherwise, and I didn’t have a solid track record in taking care of my own life, but I knew that one thing. Alcohol was no longer going to have power over me, and it would not rob me of any more joy.

Because that’s what it does. It starts slowly, robbing you of tiny moments now and again, and then quietly and methodically starts taking away the bigger things, all so slowly and sneakily that you don’t even realize what’s happening; before you know it, you’re sitting in a completely empty room without understanding how the booze got EVERYTHING while you were right there, watching it happen.

If you want my opinion, and maybe you don’t but if you've read this far, might as well forge on now, the meeting approach is not all encompassing and I’d argue can actually be detrimental as a jumping off point, for some people. Think of it this way, especially if you have not struggled with alcohol or another addiction. Say you love, I don’t know, pears. And for whatever reason, you cannot ever have pears again. Ever. One pear will ruin your entire life at best and kill you at worst. Okay. Now, three hours a day, you are to go to a meeting and talk about pears and why you loved them, but also why you can’t have them anymore.

At that meeting, you’ll meet other people who love pears but also can’t have them. They tell you that it’s been twenty years, and they still talk about pears for at least an hour every single week, and if they skip it, they’ll immediately reach for a pear even though they know it could kill them. So they go back to the meeting and talk about how much they wanted the pear and whether they did or didn’t have it.

If they succumbed to the temptation of the pear, the other pear addicts would tell them how that was bad, and how the person failed at pears and had to start all over again and should start talking about pears for three hours a day again until it was safe to be around pears again. If they managed to resist the pear, praise is meted out with the understanding that they were lucky this time, and they better start talking more about the pears for the next few weeks to stay on top of it.

Meanwhile, you really didn’t want any pears. In fact, you weren’t thinking about pears at all, but suddenly you start remembering how much you loved them and how one would taste pretty good right about now.

Is this an oversimplification? Yes. Is it unfair to the AA program? Probably. But that was my lived experience, and I suspect I'm not alone. I am telling you all of this for one reason: no one ever told me. I know what it's like to be so scared you don't even know what to think. I know what it's like to feel like you are doing everything wrong, and I know how fucking hard it is to believe yourself again when you can't even remember who you are and it seems like everything is upside down and in the wrong places. I’m telling you because despite the odds, despite the numbers, despite every logical arrow pointing one way, I chose another.

And this time, my way was right.