Sober passions | A Spiritual Evolution

Category Archives: Sober passions

December 31, 2023 · 3:33 pm

You Don’t Have to…

For so much of my youth, through so much of my active alcoholism, I believed I was supposed to do and be certain ways to be cool. I saw signals everywhere meant to teach me what was expected of me from the sector of society I wanted to emulate.

These signals took on a life of their own in my psyche. They became my own measures of success, and I knocked myself out trying to fulfill them.

My son and me

One of the biggest gifts of having been sober a few decades is freedom from all those supposed-to’s. I can choose the parts of life where I want to push myself, and the parts about which I don’t give a flying duck.

I don’t have to…

Whoop it up on New Year’s Eve. I don’t have to stay up ’til midnight, make a big deal, care whether other people want to. The calendar is arbitrary. All holiday customs are voluntary, and these, which entail mainly consuming liquid neurotoxins and making a lot of noise, get obnoxious pretty easily.
Buy New Stuff. In the hiking & mountaineering world, experienced outdoors people can easily spot the newbies. Their gear is all brand spanking new. New pack. New boots. New puffy. Gleaming ice axe. Through our eyes, they look kind of ridiculous, because we know they
My 1975 VW Bus

have little clue what they’re doing. Gear that’s been put to good use shows “cred” — short for credentials. My whole life shows cred, so I feel the same way about my household stuff, clothes, car, etc. It’s been around.

Socialize Competitively. For years, I wanted to be seen at certain events, befriend certain people. Someone somewhere, I imagined, was keeping score of my success. Guess what? Unless you’re unfortunate enough to be in high school, no one is! Today I like whomever I like and love
Apple picking w my sponsor

whomever I love. I try to find ways to spend time with the latter — which somehow seems harder since the pandemic.
Emote to Commercial Media & Social Media. When I was young, for news channels we had ABC, NBC, or CBS, plus PBS / NPR. But that was about it. Today, the entire news industry is chaotic and desperate. It’s snag viewers or die, so most waive bait — inflammatory, bloody, infuriating, and/ or terrifying news bits — before our screen-bound eyes in hopes in hopes of snagging our attention and taking up our time. We don’t have to get caught. Yes, truly horrific things are happening in Ukraine and Gaza, but all we have the power to DO is pray and donate what we can.
Turning 64 soon
Act My Age – I know who I am better than the calendar does.
Date – What a waste of time!
Pretend I’m Always Serene – Life is joyful AND difficult.
Avoid Sugar – Pick your vices; this is mine!
Clean When No One’s Coming Over – “God, I wish I’d cleaned more!” said no one on their deathbed ever.

It goes without saying, readers, that I don’t need to drink. No situation is so bad that drinking won’t make it worse. You can shut your eyes when a train is barreling down the tracks toward you, but it won’t help. You can gnaw away your entire lower lip while it’s numbed by Novocain, but it’s gonna hurt like hell as soon as the nerves wake up. Before a tsunami you can wander wayyy far out into the low tide having a blast, but you’ll drown once the wall of water hits.

Drinking is dumber than all the above. It’s a belief that we can improve our experience by impairing our brain — that exquisite repository of consciousness with which god has gifted us. If we don’t like our life, we can use the 12 Steps to change our responses to it. If we don’t like our relationships, we can use the 12 steps to change how we relate.

This beautiful, tumultuous, painful, vivid, astounding, love-filled gift of living is yours. Don’t shit on it.

And… Happy New Year, dear Alcoholics!!

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Filed under living sober, Recovery, Sober holidays, Sober passions, Twelve Steps

Tagged as Alcoholism, recovery, Sober new years, sobriety

October 4, 2021 · 6:00 am

Build a New Passion

Yes, alcoholism is a horrible disease that slowly destroyed everything good in my life. Even so, if you’re a sober alcoholic, you’ll understand when I say, man, I didn’t just drink — I mean, I DRANK! I was damn good at it. I remember a time in college when my boyfriend bet a big guy $20 that I, at 5’4″ and ballet dancer thin, could drink his ass under the table. Faintly I can still recall the look of disbelief on the guy’s face across the table when, in front of a crowd of onlookers, I asked for another pint — maybe my fourth? — before he could finish his. Hungover as I was the next morning, when I learned I’d won, I felt huge pride. I’d kicked some ass.

Fourteen alcoholic years later, after I’d lost the ability to write well, read or think deeply, marvel at beauty, or love anyone or anything in the world besides my next drink (or hit), some of that pride still bolstered my identity. So when I got sober, alcohol’s absence left a huge void in my psyche, not only in terms of how to cope with life or what to do with all the time I once spent “partying” — it also ran deeper, a confusion about who Louisa was and what drove her.

I had to learn to live for something other than alcohol. I had to discover who I could be.

Yesterday, I returned home from a ten-day adventure with five friends in Colorado and Utah. We rode our mountain bikes 220 miles from Telluride, CO, through the San Juan and La Sal ranges of the Rocky Mountains, to Moab, UT. The trip was intense, to say the least. We climbed and lost an average of 2,500 feet per day over 30-mile stretches, exerting our muscles with little oxygen at elevations of 8 – 10 thousand feet, and not on pavement, but often on rutted, rain-eroded rocky roads and sometimes single track trails in the backcountry. We each carried around 30 lbs of gear.

The aspens were just turning color. The weather was ideal. We progressed along a route among well-stocked huts where we cooked great meals and slept in bunk beds. I’d trained for the trip by climbing lots of steep hills in Seattle. But climbing at sea level is nothing to climbing at altitude.

Breathing as hard as I could, countless times I rounded a corner or crested a rise only to see a huge, steep, relentless hill in front of me. Each time I’d feel an irrational surge of anger at the nerve of this route, to demand I find even more strength. A few times, I and the others had to dismount and push our bikes, but more often than not I’d drop to low gear, breathe my hardest, and inch my way up that frickin’ hill until there was no more to climb. At last I could could crest, pedal a few more times, and then sit back and fly down the other side, wind roaring in my ears and cooling my sweat, gorgeous walls of yellow aspens flying past on either side at some parts, and at others open vistas of steely mountains or red mesas rolling under the brilliant blue sky.

Bumpy video from my phone holder here.

Five other sober alcoholics made this trip with me, the youngest 49 and the oldest, me, at 61. This was my first mountain biking experience, but the others had skills and often tackled single-track routes filled with mad turns and rocks and roots and streams to cross.

Some, like my mom, might call us thrill seekers. But what we’re actually seeking is the experience of living fully, connected not only to nature’s splendor but to our physical bodies and the determination at our cores. We want to thrive, to challenge ourselves, to carpe the damn diem. For whatever reasons, we are HUNGRY for life in a way no day-to-day humdrum walk in the park can satisfy. We chase our passions.

It’s my belief that, once we get sober, each of us must find and cultivate some passion that can fill the void left by chasing the buzz, chasing the high, chasing the illusion of cool. We have to embrace something that we love as much as we loved getting wasted, or actually more so, because it’s an activity that feeds us rather than poisoning us. I’m lucky to live in Seattle, where we have a sober outdoor activities group called OSAT — One Step At a Time. We alcoholics hike, mountain climb, rock climb, kayak, and bike together, all of us sober. OSAT is where I met my biking friends — all except one, who got sober on her own.

But you, too, can create something like OSAT in your town, something centered on whatever activity you love. You and your sober fellows can do far more together than gather for AA meetings or fellowship. You can meet to sculpt and paint, to write and critique, to play or go see sports — an all-sober club. You can create a fellowship around whatever passion illuminates your life. All you have to do is reach out and organize.

Remember in “A Vision For You” where the text reads,

Little clusters of twos and threes and fives of us have sprung up in other communities… Thus we grow. And so can you, though you be but one [person] with this book in your hand. We know what you are thinking. You are saying to yourself, “I’m jittery and alone. I couldn’t do that.” But you can. You forget that you have just now tapped a source of power much greater than yourself. To duplicate, with this backing, what we have accomplished is only a matter of willingness, patience, and labor. [p. 162-3]

The same goes for starting any AA-based group that does whatever you love to do — sober peeps to cheer you on as you work at whatever you love; sober people to skate with you, weld with you, check out art with you. Remember, the main cause and symptom of addiction is not substance abuse; it’s isolation — being cut off from the whole, from community, from the the oneness of which we are a spiritually interconnected part.

Joy rarely blooms in lonely solitude. And the joy I found with my friends in the gorgeous Rocky Mountains didn’t just happen! It evolved slowly, all of us building friendships in sobriety with people who love the same things, daring to propose an outrageous adventure, and planning for it step by step.

There’s nothing to stop you from doing the same!