Tag Archives: sobriety

February 23, 2015 · 8:28 am

‘Coming Out’ as Alcoholics? The Anonymous People

I finally watched The Anonymous People.  It’s a 2013 documentary on the history and current status of the Recovery Movement – something I, at 20 years sober, had never even heard of.  The “War on Drugs,” I was vaguely aware, has caused drug incarcerations to soar, such that today the vast majority of convicts are serving time for addiction-related crimes.  The film’s creators are striving to get addiction recognized and treated as a disease by the health care and judicial systems.  Such a controversy opens a can of worms way too wriggly for me to address in 1000 words.

What I can talk about, however, is my biggest take-away from the film: that through a misinterpretation of “anonymity”as referenced in the 12 Traditions, many of us alcoholics conceal our recovery from the people we know and thus inadvertently propagate public misconceptions of both alcoholism and AA.  In the long run, this secrecy hinders our goal of helping the still-suffering alcoholic.

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Marty Mann*

Nowhere in AA literature are we told to keep our own recovery secret.  The 11th Tradition deals with PR; no one can purport to represent AA.  The 12th Tradition says only that anonymity is the “spiritual foundation of all our traditions.” But way back in the 1930s, Marty Mann busted out in the public eye with Bill and Bob’s blessings, trying to recast the public’s perception of what an alcoholic looked like.  The film hopes to carry on her tradition – as I believe every alcoholic ought.

I’ve been open about my recovery pretty much since I got sober in ’95.  At the time, I’d been very much ‘out’ as a lesbian for years.  I’d seen no reason people who considered me a friend should not know who I was; if they had a problem with my orientation, they had a problem with me.  In the ’80s I used to make a major production of outing myself to my college English classes on the last day of class.  I remember one year I wore a T-shirt under my men’s jacket that read across the back, “Nobody knows I’m gay.”  The class gasped when, after thanking them for the quarter, I turned and dropped the jacket.  One student in particular, I remember, a street-smart African American boy, was absolutely shocked:  How could such a smart, nice teacher be… one of them-?

Copenhagen 91

Teddy-girl me, 1991

That’s why we out ourselves.  We stand up as real people who contradict the phobic stereotypes of public opinion.  All lesbians are ugly shrews who can’t get laid.  All alcoholics are ill-disciplined louts who throw away their lives.  When we out ourselves among people who respect us, we confront prejudice with our human dignity: Look at me and say that.

Flyers I posted on that campus to start up a gay student union were torn down or defaced with hate slurs and warnings about hell.  I’ll never forget walking into that first meeting: the room I’d reserved was far too small.  About 30 kids looked up from every seat plus the floor, tables, and walls, their faces alight with a vulnerable hope.  “We’re gonna show this campus a thing or two,” I told them in my coolest butch tone.  They beamed.  And we did, too.  I left that college after three years, but the group we started still thrives today, 25 years later.

When my son was about two and a half years old, I heard a 5-year-old in the park sandbox scoff at his explaining that he had two moms.  “Who’s your dad?” asked the boy. “Everybody has a dad!”  As bewilderment crumpled my son’s face, I swooped him up, my heart pKeno ounding, and, struggling to remember this other child was also innocent, offered a gentle correction.  After that, I begged my parents to spend a huge wad of my future inheritance to place my son in a pro-diversity preschool where lots of kids had same-sex parents.  By the time he started first grade at a public school, although his moms had separated, he knew firmly in his heart he just was as “normal” as anybody else.  That deep confidence and happy openness about his moms has won friends and warded off bullies.  Even in his absence, I once overheard one of his friends tell another, “Dude, Keno’s other mom’s girlfriend is an awesome cook!”

Keno trout

First trout caught with his AA ‘uncles’; confident boy

My son has in many ways been my teacher. When I directed a writing center at the UW, I was ‘out’ to each year’s team of student tutors about my gay past and current recovery.  Though I’d jumped tracks again and resumed dating men after 14 years (it’s all in the addiction memoir: my lesbian era was something like a geographic), my son still had two moms, so I shared our truth.  The tutors, in turn, came to trust me with issues of their own, such that my desk became something like Lucy’s Psychiatric Help stand in Peanuts.  In the six years since the center closed, one of those students has sought out recovery and several have come out as gay or transgender.  Others have reached out over Facebook asking if we can meet up and talk about life.  A few have even asked me for help with their alcoholic friends.  And one of those friends, I know for a fact, is sober today in part from my help.

In short, I share my recovery with anyone who wants to know me personally.  “I’m so sorry!” some respond.  “Can’t you just have one drink?” ask others.  I keep it simple, but I speak my truth.  I wrote my memoir to share my entire story in hopes that it might help others who struggle with the same experiences and emotions I did.

The rooms of AA have been my “safe school,” where I’ve  learned that alcoholics are individuals normal in every respect but for a potentially fatal disease that should carry no stigma.  Listening to other alcoholics unfold their inner experiences, I’ve learned, too, that all the quirky emotions I’d imagined, in my isolated loneliness, made me terminally unique are in fact just part of being human.  Whatever I’ve done, thought, or suffered has been known to countless others, and we can help each other through it all.  Showing up in our whole truth, without shame or secrecy, is how we change the world.

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* Click here for video on 1930s National Committee for Education on Alcoholism

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February 13, 2015 · 1:43 pm

Enlightened but Dead: Why Alcoholics Need God

Pema Chödrön’s teacher, the venerable Chögyam Trungpa, drank a lot.  Drinking was a staple of his sanga, where he threw big parties among his students, and he was known to carry vodka in a water bottle.  Trungpa explained in one of his spiritual books why his drinking differed from that of an ordinary alcoholic:

“Whether alcohol is to be a poison or a medicine depends on one’s awareness while drinking. Conscious drinking—remaining aware of one’s state of mind—transmutes the effect of alcohol. Here awareness involves a tightening up on one’s system as an intelligent defense mechanism…

“For the yogi, alcohol is fuel for relating with his students and with the world in general, as gasoline allows a motorcar to relate with the road. But naturally the ordinary drinker who tries to compete with or imitate this transcendental style of drinking will turn his alcohol into poison…”*

Sadly, it appears that Trungpa’s liver failed to read the book and appreciate his “transcendental style” of yogi drinking.  Despite diagnoses of cirrhosis and doctors’ warnings that more drinking would kill him, Trungpa continued to drink heavily until it did indeed kill him in April of 1986, when he was just 48 years old.

Trungpa~

Philosopher Alan Watts was considered a sage throughout the ’60s after he rose to prominence with the 1951 publication of The Wisdom of Insecurity – a pivotal text  introducing Eastern concepts to Western society.  The book considers the ego’s dis-ease with the unstable nature of reality and its efforts to create security via constructs of memory and projection coalescing in a story of “I,” which Watts dismisses as unreal: only awareness divorced from self can access reality.  Watts, like Trungpa, was well aware of the futility of escapist drinking:

“One of the worst vicious circles is the problem of the alcoholic.  In very many cases he knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that, for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk… And yet he drinks.  For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not drinking is worse… for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.”

Unfortunately, identifying this vicious circle did not grant Watts the power to exit it.  Like Trungpa, he often gave lectures while sloppy drunk. He, too, developed end-stage alcoholism that deeply concerned his ex-wife and friends, and died of alcoholic cardiomyopathy – e.g. heart failure – at 58.

Watts~

Both of these men were masters of self-knowledge and the meditative disciplines that yield inner peace.  Both could speak brilliantly on the ills of ego and treasures of honesty.  Yet neither could stop drinking.  And they’re just two examples out of jillions.  Why did they fail?  Why would people so insightful not quit what was clearly killing them?  The Big Book explains:

“If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered long ago.  But we found that such codes and philosophies did not save us, no matter how hard we tried.  We… could will these things with all our might, but the needed power wasn’t there. Our human resources, as marshalled by the will, …failed utterly.” (p. 44)

In Shambala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Trungpa makes very clear that no god enters into his vision.  “Over the past seven years, I have been a presenting series of ‘Shambala Teachings’ [on]… secular enlightenment, that is, the possibility of uplifting our personal existence and that of others without the help of any religious outlook.”

Good for him!  I agree wholeheartedly that self-knowledge is great stuff.  But it will not cure alcoholism.

In a 1968 talk, Bill Wilson, one of AA’s founders, described the initial amazement of the psychiatric community at the unprecedented breakthroughs of AA.  Many alcoholism specialists attended meetings and saw their own alcoholic patients, with whom years of psychiatric work had failed, achieve abstinence and mental health in a matter of weeks.  One suggested that Bill assemble a group of such psychiatrists to testify before the Academy of Medicine about AA’s success. So Bill asked them.

“And not a one would do it! …In effect, each said, ‘Look, Bill. You folks have added up in one column more of the resources which have been separately applied to alcoholics than anyone else… [But] the sum of them won’t add up to the speed of these transformations in these very grim cases… So for us, there is an unknown factor at work in AA.  [B]eing scientists, we… call it the X factor.  We believe you people call it the grace of God. And who shall go to the Academy and explain the grace of God?  No one can.'”

questionSorry, folks!  But the X factor, and that alone, is what saves an alcoholic: Connection with a higher power, to god as we understand it.  We ask god to help us, and we’re relieved of a compulsion that no amount of self-knowledge can touch.

Humility is the key ingredient to receiving grace.  We have to ask for it, accepting that we’ve been defeated.  By contrast, Trungpa, for all his wisdom, exhibited a strong tendency toward hubris.  The true warrior, he explains in Shambala, is both Outrageous and Inscrutable.  “…[H]aving overcome hope and fear, the warrior… fathoms the whole of space.  You go beyond any possibilities of holding back at all…. Your wakefulness and intelligence make you self-contained and confident with a confidence that needs no reaffirmation through feedback.” In other words, I got this!  Screw what anyone else thinks!

Watts, meanwhile, purported to embrace God, but his abstractions reduced it to a mere abandonment of I, which enabled connection with the eternal now and rendered us one with God.  For Watts, there could be no “Hey, god (you) please help (me)!” because the you / I division negated the fact that we are god: “[W]e cannot lay ourselves open to grace, for all such split-mindedness is the denial… of our freedom.”

Reluctance to seek god’s help almost killed AA co-founder Bill Wilson, too.  Relatively unknown in AA culture is the fact that Bill was so deeply repulsed by the God element in his friend Ebby’s solution that he went on drinking for three weeks after Ebby’s visit and landed yet again in a sanitarium.  There, after Ebby had visited him again to recap the spiritual solution, he had this experience:

“And again the despair deepened until the last of this prideful obstinacy was momentarily crushed out. And then, like a child crying out in the dark, I said, ‘If there is a God, will he show himself?’ And the place lit up in a great glare, a wondrous white light. Then I began to have images, in the mind’s eye, so to speak, and one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain and a great clean wind was blowing, and this blowing at first went around and then it seemed to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled and I found myself exclaiming, ‘I am a free man! So THIS is the God of the preachers!'”

Light
In my Near-Death Experiences group, I’ve heard several people describe similar experiences, when the “white light” of love brilliantly illuminated the room around them; but, naturally, many of Bill’s contemporaries considered him daft for insisting it had happened.  In his talk, he attributes this phenomenon not to his own specialness, but to the role it enabled him to play in AA, explaining that the powerful faith most AAs develop over months or years was for him simply crammed into a few minutes: “It did give me an instant conviction of the presence of God which has never left me… And I feel that that extra dividend may have made the difference in whether I would have persisted with AA in the early years or not.”

In other words, Bill was given what he needed not only to overcome a lifetime of harrowing addiction, but to co-create AA and persist in carrying its message into the dark world of his fellow alcoholics.  Why?  Because he asked… and frickin’ meant it.

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PS: I have tremendous respect for both these sages as well as for Buddhism.  By no means am I critical of their legacy or beliefs.  Reading both authors did contribute to my self-knowledge, for which I am grateful, because such insight aids in a lifetime quest for serenity.  My point is merely that self-knowledge, no matter how deep or how keen, cannot arrest this disease, as these two tragically premature deaths testify.  See comments below. 

– Louisa

  • (Heart of the Buddha, p. 153)

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February 5, 2015 · 7:03 am

Step 3: A Decision

What if I trusted god?

Doesn’t trust by definition mean not knowing?  Isn’t god by definition something I can’t know?

But what if I truly trusted trust?  Could I place mine in this unknowable god?  What if I surrendered this constant fight to fend off invisible threats and beat every dark fear to the punch?  Maybe I could give it up this constant need to choreograph the people and events around me if I decided it wasn’t necessary.  What might that feel like?  Why is it so difficult?

I could try thinking about how I got here.  embryosHow much say did I have about what I thought ought to happen in my mom’s womb?  Innumerable complexities aligned with inconceivable precision to bring about the organism that is me.  My mom herself had no clue what was happening.  All life originates from a process far beyond anything humans could ever comprehend or rig.  To give that process a name or classify it as “biology” doesn’t make it any less dumbfounding.

At birth our consciousness consists of trust and little more.  What is crying but half a bridge-?  As a survival strategy, it’s founded on the blind, helpless trust that someone will respond, someone will care.  That impulse – a precursor to prayer – is the only power given a human infant, but it’s the only one we need.

All that for what?  So I could grow up to earn money and buy groceries?  So it seems.  What if god has no extravagant “plan” for my life but loves me overwhelmingly regardless, simply for being me?  What if all the love I’ve ever felt and absorbed, every embrace from intimates and each kindness from strangers, every affection to ever move my heart – what if all of that energy pooled together were just the tiniest smidge of god?  What if an ocean of love is what generates every leaf and imbues every living thing with the urge to venture and delight and to rest and heal?

I might decide that, in ways far beyond my understanding, this intelligence orchestrates the outer world as much as inner, shapes every circumstance as much as every cell.  What if I could see that there is even more beauty, grace, and agility in the spirit of the gazelle in that moment when the cheetah’s jaws close on its throat than there was in its spirited flight, as it escapes the bonds of muscles and neurons to rejoin its brilliant source?  What if my perspective let me understand that from the beginning those two have been one, because the cheetah (in its mother’s womb) and the gazelle (in its mother’s womb) are two notes of the same symphony, one wave overtaking another with the same momentum?

earthMaybe then, in the same way, I could be okay with whatever happens.  Maybe I’d get it that my life is just a life, a storyline beaded with random incidents but beautifully embedded in some enterprise both gargantuan and exquisite, more vast than I can ever conceive.  It could be that the universe is indeed unfolding as it should, with me in it, so that I am still, in a sense, within a global womb.

Maybe I should think about the clear-eyed toddler I saw today outside Fred Meyer whose mom had just put her astride a fiberglass horse (without even feeding it quarters), who squealed with the uncontainable delight of now: something AMAZING was happening!  The mom’s love showed in her eyes, but my love for the two of them flooded inward from my smile – just some lady walking by – with intensity neither could guess.  Why?  Because they were me with my son ten years ago, and my mom with me half a century ago.  With them were the echoes of children long since aged and dead from centuries past, their horses of ceramic or wood now crumbled to dust.

That child will die.  My friends and family and pets have died.  And, yes, sometimes shit happens that is not of god.  There’s suffering and loss and disease and unfairness, so that my eyes teared at the child’s tender vulnerability, like mine and like yours.  God can’t guard us from pain and mishap.  But always, always there is love and more love – growing back, surviving, passed down – and the chance it gives us to cast its brightness on the now, to delight in our sheer being, to know joy.  The avalanche takes down trees centuries old, but amid the rubble, with the season, springs a tiny seedling.  These are the ways of god.

 

Fir Seedling

What if I put my trust in that ongoing love – mine, yours, god’s – as a tremendous net I can fall into?  What if all of it is good – not just striving but failing, not just birth but death?  Then I can fill in the dark unknown future with a flickering faith that god’s goodness is the ultimate power underlying all life, that it has always supported me whether I’ve known it or not, and that it always will.

That way I’m freed to seek out my own fiberglass horse in whatever form it takes.  I can rejoice right now just because I’m alive.  I’m here solely to be me and love you, not to stress and plot and worry about stuff I’m powerless over anyway.  I seek god’s guidance, try my best, end of story.  My ideas of how everything should come about or end up are just that – ideas.  As for reality, God’s got it.

I’ll roll with that.

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January 29, 2015 · 9:20 am

The Wisdom of Ordinary Schmucks

Today, Thursday the 29th, I have 20 years clean and sober. Woot!

Here’s a journal entry I wrote 20 years ago after my first AA meeting:

1/29/1995:  “I went to an AA meeting tonight. Was so uncomfortable and out of place, and felt I will never, never stop drinking so why want to? I know drinking so intimately. I know me with a drink – a glass of wine, a beer – better than I know anyone in this world. I love to drink. I love it like freedom and happiness. I want never to stop. I wish I could drink in the morning, at eleven, at lunch, at three, and on after five ‘til the night is gone.”

2015-01-29 08.01.00

journal page

Writing that was a scared, deeply confused and unhappy semi-suicidal woman who thought her mind ought to be able to get her out of any jam. The last thing she suspected was that those people among whom she felt “so uncomfortable and out of place” would not only save her from slow death, they would teach her to transform living into something beautiful and joy-filled. I remember judging every person in that room by the standards my family had ingrained in me. Anyone lacking at least a BA, anyone with a working class job who wasn’t slumming ironically for the sake of some art form, was ignorant. As for the 12 Steps, it took me about 40 seconds to read them off the wall. How could such vague ideas accomplish anything?  Sure, these ordinary schmucks believed in them, but I was way smarter and more special.

Wisdom, however, is neither academic nor cultural. It’s about living – how we respond to the passions of being human, like our desires for love, fulfillment, and specialness.  It concerns how we deal with fear, anger, and the impulse to defend what we love.  And it’s far more a matter of what we let go as false than what we cling to as true.  The ordinary schmucks in AA taught me how to cast off the hoary crust of fear that had blocked me from the truths of god and my fellows, freeing me to be myself and to love you intrinsically because you are, at heart, just like me.

The first things the schmucks taught me were wisdom bytes passed down in AA, which made such an impression that I remember to this day where I sat relative to the person speaking.  “I can’t fix my broken brain with my broken brain,” said a guy at the next table with unruly hair sticking out from under his baseball cap. “That’s why I need the help of something greater than me.”  Whoa! I thought, no wonder I can’t get better!  Too bad I reject everything to do with God!  But then a few days later an overweight woman in polyester pants sitting to my left against the wall said, “If you can’t think God, if that’s objectionable to you, just think Good Orderly Direction.  You can seek that – something deeper than your own thinking.”

There light_bulbare countless other key moments when light bulbs went on for me. “My ego tells me I’m the shit, and my self-loathing insists I’m a piece of shit.  But God grants me the humility to be right-sized – to be a worker among workers, a driver among drivers, a sober drunk among sober drunks.”

But even more important, what the schmucks have shared with me is their experience of living life. The first story I ever identified with was told by a guy (sitting near the door to my right) who ordered Chinese take-out that arrived without chopsticks.  He knew he had a pair in the house, some nice bamboo ones, but couldn’t find them. He went bananas searching for them.  He kept looking in the silverware drawer again and again, lifting out the tray and shoving stuff around. Furious, he checked all kinds of illogical places – the junk drawer, his desk, the broken dishwasher – while his take-out got cold. It seemed to be about a principle.

This was in maybe my second week sober, but I still hear that guy’s words every time I go bonkers trying to find something.  “It’s just my ego refusing to accept what is” echoes in my mind.  “It’s just me being human and flawed.”  I’ve since heard countless stories of ways to be human and flawed, issues I once thought were mine alone.  Incrementally, they push me toward acceptance of things I cannot change.  But what about that courage to change the things I can?

The 12 steps grew from empty suggestions to a revolution in life perspective once I worked them with a hard-ass sponsor who pushed me to see beyond my story.  They changed me, dredging up insights from the depths of my inner knowledge and compelling me to face them.  When I didn’t like what I saw, I was willing to ask my god for help, much as I’d asked in theoak-tree beginning to be relieved of the compulsion to drink.  I was willing to work with god to become what it (i.e. love/Good Orderly Direction) would have me be.  I write this now when I have almost no time in my week because of my commitment to follow through on that direction.

Telling the truth – the human truth. That’s what I heard the schmucks doing over and over once I’d awoken through the steps.  They taught me with their shares that there’s almost always a deeper, more honest revelation underneath whatever story we’ve cooked up about ourselves and others.  Pretty much any problem boils down to “I’m afraid” of not getting what I think I need or losing what I have.  And any happiness boils down to “I love.”

I’m no longer the woman who wrote of clinging to her glass, to her liquid freedom and happiness that had, unfortunately, quit working.  Some wisdom comes simply with age.  We begin to see the old in the young and vice versa, see the broke in the rich, and to have compassion for people living though pains we have known.  Whether one is in AA or not, pain can be the greatest teacher if it moves us to replace our defunct illusions with love and tolerance rather than tout them with righteous judgement.  Gradually, we come to see the trajectory of birth to death resembles a meteor’s streak through the night sky: the small and insignificant burn bright, casting light where there was none, and then go out.  We can’t begrudge anyone the color or angle of their flare.  We are all miraculous and unique ordinary schmucks.

Thanks for 20 years, guys!

20 year coin

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January 17, 2015 · 7:49 am

Is Plain Old Living Fun?

Active alcoholics, it seems to me, often crave action, adventure, glamour, and a lot of craziness, usually as ways of getting attention.  johnny-cash-finger-2I know I chased all these things – and loved to mentally flip off anyone who told me to settle down.  I see this tendency still in newcomers and chronic relapsers.  Hell, yeah, mothahfuckah, I’m a bad ass!  I’m wild!  Carpe F-in’ Diem is my middle name!

In my addiction memoir, I talk about the god-inspired (and abrupt dog-death inspired) aha moment when I realized the Pied Piper of the ultimate party, a phantom I’d been chasing all my life, was actually a demon who would lead me to my death.  Another face of that demon is dissatisfaction.  It’s discounting all that you have as not good enough while elevating the lure of something shiny – a party, a romance, a feat, some moment in the spotlight – as the prize that will fulfill you.

I’ve written before about the crisis that washed over me in 2012 with the one-two punch of my siblings venting emailed rage about my memoir (I was a narcissistic, AA-brainwashed liar dishonoring our family) and the news that I had breast cancer, both in the same month.  I’ve also written a bit on the way the intensity of that pain/fear acted on me like a forge, recasting me with a changed outlook.  Pain, the Big Book tells us, is the touchstone of growth, and all of us have to pass through our own to gain wisdom.  But the view from this side is something I can try to describe – something that may be of use.

Back in the day, I was constantly trying to fill the gaping hole in my chest with SOMETHING.  Alcohol, drugs, relationships, excitement, drama-analysis, fglamorood.  I knew my life shouldn’t be what it was.   I could read our culture; I could perceive what was rated glamorous or worthy; I understood the goal.  Media of all kinds broadcast examples of who and what was interesting and enviable.  I internalized all that and judged myself inadequate.

And yet at the same time, I drank to rebel against all that shit.  Drinking made whatever the hell was going on now just fine.  Sitting home alone or at a dive bar, I was a rugged individual who didn’t give a rat’s ass what anybody thought of me.  One of the best magical spells worked by alcohol was its jacking up my ego ipso facto.  I didn’t have to do anything but swallow to render my life a poignant drama worthy of attention.

So… I’ll be 20 years sober in two weeks, on the 29th.  I’ve walked a long road since those days, calling on god and gradually strengthening that relationship, so that while I used to “check in” with god through prayer, now god and me hang out 24/7 (although I think now more in terms of my guardian angel).  In any case, with spirit filling that hole, what life is about becomes a whole lot different.

Beautiful

To love life itself is an active enterprise.  Love flows only one way – from your heart outward.  But the marvelous thing is that it bounces back as reflection, whether from people, physical things, or even memories.  The more you love, the more love fills your life.

At some point, I realized how deeply in love I am with ordinary, boring, day-to-day life.  When I take the time to consciously love it, even the most mundane details reflect back their beauty and infinite preciousness.  Why infinite?  Because life is a chunk of a few decades cast against eternity.  Though I believe our spirits live on beyond our bodies, I also think that being in our bodies – spirit made flesh – is an amazing trip, a hybrid 3-D extravaganza of multi-tiered awareness.  Consciousness itself is a wild ride.

My cancer was caught early.  For a lot of people, like pancakesmy sister and friends, it wasn’t.  I get to be here.  What tremendous fun it is to make a pot of tea!  Will you look at this cozy I crocheted for the tea pot?  It’s yarn of bright colors, blue and yellow, and stained under the spout.  A little slice of living; the way things work. The trees out my window are earnestly being trees – those same things we drew as children, the green ball on the brown stick.  God, I love them!  My rug is worn threadbare from all the life that has tramped through this house – my son and I, friends and sponsees.  I have to go to work.  I don’t like work.  But I love the whole experience – getting to be a person who says, “Shit!  I have to go to work now…”  A person who drives just like everyone else.  Who hopes to be liked Carand to understand things and yet worries.  I buy apples and bring them home.  All the tiny chips of this life mosaic grab my attention one by one – but only for this little chunk of years.

I guess words are failing me as I try to describe this shift from taking everything for granted to seeing it, living it, loving it.  Mindfulness is the noticing of everything.  Gratitude recognizes the good things we have. But to really savor life is to go beyond both: it’s to notice each detail and call it good, delight in the sheer fun of it.  It’s to adore the whole kit and kaboodle.

I still like wild fun and adventure.  It was an adrenaline rush to zipline through a rainforest canopy on my vacation, to be the first in our group to jump from a 200 foot platform and shoot down the mountainside.  I love wilderness hiking, treks that some people would call extreme, either alone or with my boyfriend.  (He rode his bicycle alone 1800 miles from the Yukon Territory to his home on an island north of Seattle – that’s a bit much for me.)  I love dancing advanced ballet (and well), sweating alongside teens who could be my granddaughters.  In all these things, the stream of stimuli comes fast and thick.  Sometimes overload still thrills me.

But it’s not what I live for anymore.  Today, I live to be alive.

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still life

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December 20, 2014 · 7:37 am

Freedom: the Gift of Recovery

Got a few resentments in AA?  Certain personalities in meetings annoying you?   Big Book thumpers causing internal eye-rolling?  Somewhere inside, are you thinking you may be able to manage your alcoholism yourself – that it’s really not such a big deal?

Maybe it’s time for a little ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT with the help of this visual aid I lifted from the Wikipedia page on alcoholism.  It’s an engraving from the mid-1800s called “King Alcohol and his Prime Minister.”  Check it.  (It’s enlargeable. )

King_Alcohol_and_his_Prime_Minister

CLICK to zoom: King Alcohol & his Prime Minister, engraving by John Warner Barber (1820-1880) .

In the background on the left, we’ve got the normies drinking with impunity.  A little closer we’ve got the socialites making cocktails look 19th Century glamorous.  But once we get to the Dram Shop, which is the old term for bar or tavern, things ain’t lookin’ so good.  Sure, there’s a pretty barmaid serving, but one patron is looking pretty disheveled, two are brawling on the floor, and another is passed out.  In the foreground the Virgin Mary is seen bumming about it all (at least, I think it’s she).  The anchor could refer to maritime alcoholism?

On the right we see some consequences listed: Poverty, misery, crime, and death.  There’s the jail, the poorhouse to which with someone is escorting a drunk, a cop with his nightstick dealing with another. We see a home gone to shit, a dad passed out while his wife and kids stand by, and closest to us, a rich guy all dressed up but still on his face.  Closer still are the graves, one of them immediately outside the home.  Jails, institutions, and death – as we often hear in the rooms.  The only thing I don’t see is an asylum.

Lastly, check out King Alcohol and his sidekick Death, themselves.  Death’s bottle is corked: he doesn’t touch the stuff, only offers it to recruits.  The King himself looks confused and miserable in spite of his lavish banner.  His face has marks all over it, his brow is furrowed, his hair and beard a mess.  Around his neck what seems an amulet is actually a locked chain, and chains run down his robe in place of royal ermine.  He holds aloft a large goblet, almost like a chalice, but encircled by a snake.  Above it hovers a reference to Proverbs 23, line 32:

31 Do not gaze at wine when it is red,
    when it sparkles in the cup,
    when it goes down smoothly!
32 In the end it bites like a snake
    and poisons like a viper.

Whoa.

If you lived in the 1800s, that would be the full extent of your program:  “Do not….”  Don’t look at booze, don’t drink booze.  Just don’t.  Just stop.  Look at the facts.  Use your willpower.

“Do not…”  If I’d been born during that time, I’d be a perma-drunk or dead.  Because I tried “do not” for 14 years and ended up bombed every night, like my father before me, because the “wine” I would “gaze at” lived in my mind.  As soon as enough of the poison had cleared from the night before, I’d think, “Yes!  I’m talking about just one pretty, perfect cocktail/ beer/ glass of wine!”  Next thing I knew, I was reaching for that snake-entwined goblet, oblivious to the bite and poison.

And I did that again.

And again.

And again…

It cracks me up that at the top of King Alcohol’s barrel list is “strong beer” – as if “weak beer” might be okay.  In other words, even in his desire to capture the entirety of alcoholism, Barber lacked a basic understanding of addiction: the allergy in me – which makes me break out in endless “more!” – can be triggered by as little as a single dose of cough medicine.

What Barber did understand, though, was that we die.  We’ve been dying for millennia, at least throughout the 10,000 years that humans have been brewing alcohol.  Slowly, century by century, those of us with alcoholic genes have been winnowed from those European cultures where alcohol has long been a staple – a fact highlighted by rampant alcoholism among Native American populations where alcohol has been introduced only in modern history.  Why do 10% of Native Americans die of alcoholism, compared to 0.2% of Italians?  Because most Italian alcoholics are already dead!  They died centuries ago leaving fewer descendents.  Still, around the world, how many of us are killing ourselves slowly, blurring our thinking, drowning our love of life?

You might wonder, why did Barber choose to depict alcohol as a king, rather than a slave driver or a warlord?  The answer is in addiction.  Alcohol rules our lives, but at the same time, we venerate it as our savior.  Left to our own human powers, there is no way out.

BUT HERE’S THE GOOD NEWS!  I’m sober!  You’re sober!

In June of 1935, the world of the alcoholic changed forever.  Fifteen minutes is how long alcoholic Bob Smith agreed to talk with that sober guy, Bill Wilson.  Three months is how long they ended up hanging out before Wilson even went home. They had discovered something amazing: the connection between one alcoholic and another when speaking the truth of our condition.  They also put together the physical allergy piece Bill knew with the spiritual malady piece Bob knew and – SHAZAM!!!  For the first time in human history, alcoholics had a way out!

Never again will we as a class of afflicted people have no solution.  Shivering denizens no more, we’ve found a way to overthrow the tyrant with a far greater power – one of love, of life, of goodness.  Whether you live near a slew of AA meetings or it’s just you with your Big Book and computer, you possess two insights that Barber and the dying drunks throughout history never had:  1) That your body reacts differently to alcohol than a normal body does, and 2) that alcoholism can be treated via a 12 Step program of spiritual growth, usually (but not always) in connection with fellow alcoholics.

What I know is this: Living sober has brought me and countless other hopelessly doomed alcoholics a joy of living beyond our wildest dreams.  We are free.

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December 7, 2014 · 8:15 am

Authenticity in the Rooms: Striking a Sober Balance

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
——————————————— Polonius – ass-kisser & schemer (Shakespeare)

“The paradox of self-honesty is that I need the help of others to achieve it.”
———————————————(Courage to Change, 296)

Inscribed on many AA coins is the wisdom byte, “To thine own self be true,” which was probably already time-worn when Shakespeare put it in Polonius’ Shakespeareadvice speech in Hamlet. Whoever Shakespeare was, I’m sure he was crafting irony by doing so: Polonius is false to everyone, including himself.  Shakespeare’s message, as I see it, is that being true to oneself is far more easily said than done.  In fact, striving for personal authenticity is the work of a lifetime.

Many of us believe we’re being true to ourselves when we regurgitate whatever the dominant culture – or our faction thereof – has inculcated in us.  Oprah said it.  Parenting magazine.  Dad and the NRA.  For that matter, individualism itself is an ideal of Western culture.  Because we’re all an amalgamation of the belief systems we’ve been raised with, spouting what these systems maintain in the face of other systems feels like authenticity, even if it doesn’t come from our spirit.

As James Fowler outlines in his book, Stages of Faith*, the search for deeper levels of meaning requires an ability to stand back from our beliefs and evaluate them critically, changing what no longer rings true – even if it requires a break from our past or our clan.  Otherwise, our faith remains childlike.  He identifies Stage 1 faith, for example, in a Catholic woman he interviewed who, interpreting every symbol of her religion literally, staked an almost philomenamonetary worth in telling her beads (points “in the bank”) and worried about pissing off various saints by neglecting to pray to them.  At the other end of the spectrum, Fowler places visionaries like Gandhi or King who staked their lives on a faith in love beyond the norms of their society, valuing good for humanity over good for self.

It’s the difference between obedient adherence to mere form versus courageous application of import. The more we develop toward the latter, Fowler says, the deeper our faith, and the more meaningful our lives.

When I came to AA, my belief system was a mess of contradictions.  Most of what I’d cobbled together to live by had to be straight up chucked in favor of love & respect for people from all walks of life and an ethic of usefulness – values that proved their worth as they lifted me from despair to vitality.  AA sponsors, friends, and sometimes strangers who spoke in meetings – these people taught me how to live.  It’s a process that continues to this day.  Listening, I’m transported outside my own experience into the perspectives of women and men who differ from me in countless ways, yet share my diseased alcoholic mind.  My fellows in AA and Al-Anon have become a sounding board for my tentative thoughts as I navigate the unknowns of today.  Their feedback pushes me beyond what I want to see, pressing me to be ever more honest with myself.Year1AA

Even so, I need to examine AA meetings with some critical distance, as well.  AA is amorphous, because meetings are only as constructive as the alcoholics attending them.  A group of sick people makes a sick meeting.

Dry Drunk** Meetings, for example, have cast aside the Big Book in favor of some kind of open-season group therapy.  Shares focus solely on “checking in,” usually venting frustrations or confessing destructive behavior, all of which is swept aside with the phrase, “but at least I didn’t drink!”  Here plug-in-the-jug abstinence is touted as an asset, even if I’m still an asshole tortured by the fear and self-loathing I once treated with alcohol.  I myself spent the first two years of my sobriety in such meetings, which brought on a debilitating depression.

At the opposite extreme are Competitive Sobriety Meetings, which feature the same schtick over and over: My life sucked, but now I work the 12 Steps constantly, and everything is wonderful!  Yes, dammit, wonderful, because I have 7 sponsees, 5 service positions, 3 home groups, write a 10th step every fucking night and read 86-88 every morning, etc. – so my sobriety is way better than yours!  Here the search for authenticity has been abandoned.  In fear of relapse, I cling to the RIGHT ANSWER.  The second two years of my sobriety were spent developing resentments in such meetings.  The solution was there – yes – a solution that saved my life.  Still, much like Fowler’s Stage 1 woman with her virtual Ken and Barbie saint collection, such meetings tend to make a golden calf of the AA program and its history.

Where is balance to be found?  What rings true?  That’s up to… thine own self, baby!  Today, I have a home group that feels like home.  For me, the most important growth guide is based, not in set rules or standards, but rather in my ways of being, my modes of consciousness – in my awareness of my awareness.  To what degree am I willing to be vulnerable and loving, to admit that I don’t know, but to keep trying regardless? At a dry drunk meeting, can I offer the solution to those who want it, without judging those who don’t?  In competitive sobriety meetings, do I have the courage to speak of my continuing human struggles?

J.K. Rowling may seem a questionable sage, but as I’ve been reading Harry Potter to my son, I’ve noticed how frequently she has Dumbledore preface statements with “I think…”  Unlike Polonius, Dumbledore understands that he is fallible, mourns past mistakes, and acknowledges that he cannot trust himself with power.  His wisdom shows itself as recurring acknowledgement that he may be wrong.c23-horcruxes

In sum, we’re always trying, never done.  Sobriety and spiritual growth are, like life itself, forever touch and go, a muscle that begins to atrophy as soon as we rest it, a puzzle we work on daily even as pieces constantly vanish and reappear.

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* Much of this book deals in depth with developmental psychology, but it’s still an interesting layman’s read.
**For more on Dry Drunk syndrome, see this great article by Liberty Ranch recovery.

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November 30, 2014 · 7:52 am

The Codependent Alcoholic’s Quandary

Sometimes I feel pulled in opposite directions by my two programs – AA and Al-Anon – though the confusion actually arises, not from contradiction between them, but from my muddled thinking as a codependent alcoholic.

Bill and Lois

Lois and Bill Wilson, co-founders of Al-Anon and  AA, respectively

AA tells the alcoholic in me that “Our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend on our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs” (20).   On the other hand, Al-Anon tells me that “…many of us develop the habit of putting [another] person’s needs first… To recover we have to learn to keep the focus on ourselves” (9).

How can I do both?  How do I constantly think of your needs and keep the focus on me?

When I was new to AA, I resented the idea that selfishness was the “root of [my] troubles” (62).  I was a victim.  Other people hurt me.  It took years of meetings and a fairly forceful sponsor to open my eyes to the ways I victimized myself.  Living in ego, I was “[d]riven by a hundred forms of fear” (62) that there wasn’t enough to go ’round and I wouldn’t get mine.  My sponsor taught me how my egocentric expectations that others do whatever would make me most comfortable laid the foundations for a life of discontent.  (See What a 4th Step is and Ain’t)

In AA, to stop being a black hole of need, we have to literally reverse the direction of our energy flow.  I had to learn to see others, not as appliances, but as fellow children of god to be loved.  Luckily for me, god set me up a bunch of tutorials in this matter.  Here’s one:  In early sobriety, I used to envy a beautiful young woman who secretaried a huge meeting, ever popular and lusted after, dressed to the hilt week after week.  She later relapsed, fled to her friends’ home, and while they were out, chugged a bottle of Drano from under their sink in an effort to die.  Last I spoke with her several years later, she was still missing much of her esophagus and needed a feeding tube to eat.  Her heart itself was scarred.

That’s the pain of alcoholism we share, sans a spiritual solution. Once I could begin to know and internalize that others struggled with the same invisible demons that I did, I could begin to give from the heart.  What the founders of AA knew was that sometimes you have to prime the pump by going through the actions before you feel the spirit.  heart-chakraThat’s why service work is such a foundational part of our program.  When I feel the outpouring of my own good intentions in making coffee or taking time for a sponsee, I begin to actually want good things for you – to love you.  As my love flows out to you, love from god flows into me, filling my emptiness – and I am healed!

That’s just a spiritual law.

Meanwhile, back at Al-Anon, the core of the program is “Live and Let Live.”  That’s actually two sets of instructions.  The first one, “Live,” means be true to yourself – know yourself, be yourself, love yourself.  Each of these is, for me, a 400-level grad school course that meets 365 days per year.  It’s tough!  When I was new to Al-Anon, I resented my sponsor’s conjecture that I probably didn’t know what I wanted.  How ridiculous!  I’m a very passionate person!  Of course I know I want… I want…

What do you think I should want?  I kinda like ABC – is that okay?  Do you like it?  Really?  So, you must like me!  Yay, I win!

In Al-Anon I realized that I had little to no center, that I’d been a reactor allwhoami my life. I set up relationships of turmoil to keep myself busy so I’d never have to take responsibility for my own happiness.  The greatest distraction from my assigned work of “Live” was harping on how you ought to live.  Really – look at yourself!  You’d be so much better off if you just did X, Y, and Z!  And I can’t do ABC because you hold me back!

Here comes the second half of the Al-Anon slogan: “Let live.”  Okay.  You are sole boss of you.  I haven’t lived your life up until this point, so I can’t know what’s best for you.  That’s between you and your higher power.  I can only tell you how your actions impact me and what I need, and then, based on your response, make choices for my own behavior (which may include parting ways).

But guys, you know what’s still hardest for me?  Weathering disapproval from people who believe they know better than I what I should and shouldn’t do.  You may have your own set of judges, but mine are my siblings; my recovery in AA put us terribly out of step.  Apparently I love, climb, parent, and write wrongly.  For many years I struggled to win their approval, mistaking that effort for “how [I could] help meet their needs.”  But the truth is, no one needs to approve of me!

This is where Al-Anon’s “focus on ourselves” comes in, to help me recognize internal factors – hello! fear of conflict! external locus of self-worth! – that are harming me and helping no one. I can easily detach in other parts of life, but to practice detachment with our first family requires, I’m beginning to think, a black belt in Al-Anon.  I’m still very much a work in progress.

The goal in both AA and Al-Anon is to grow toward my god rather than as dictated by my ego or someone else’s.  God moves me to love and help others, but never toward what I decide they “ought” to be, or in ways that harm my own serenity.  To achieve balance, I have to accept that my doing good for anyone depends on the foundational practice of self-care and self-love, so I can show up with my unique strengths and radiance – complete, confident, and compassionate.

Some day, that’ll be me with my sibs!

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November 11, 2014 · 9:24 am

Off the Beam – Head Static Returns

Sorry, there’s no inspiring blog this week because Louisa doesn’t have her shit together.  That’s right, I’ve wandered off the spiritual path and found myself befuddled in some remote, unspiritual bog surrounded by brambles and having just accidentally used my only map as TP.

Why am I so off the beam?  I guess because I’ve been deluged with work, something I kept praying for with those stupid Santa prayers that aren’t supposed work.  For the past few weeks I’ve been zooming around town meeting clients and editing like a mo-fo in between, so my eyes are all bloodshot and my poor brain feels encased in pantyhose.  Every now and then I feel a lurch of vertigo that would flare into a full blown panic attack if I couldn’t spot their wolf-cryin’ asses a mile away by now.  Hyperventilating, again!  In other words, I’m running on fear.

So, how does being off the beam show up?  Regression!  It’s ridiculous.  I get to go through high school all over again.  Take the other night, when I went to my mountain climbing group’s annual gratitude embarrassedbanquet, where the faces of the (cool kids’) Glacier Climbing Course I was once so active in have all changed for the younger.  I arrived late, so there were no seats.  I felt like a has-been.  But then my ego got a great idea to fix this: I tracked down two of the new leaders and said I’d be happy to deliver some of this year’s presentations if they needed someone – you know, sort of like Barry Manilow offering to perform at the Grammys.

Or at least, so it seemed to me the next morning.  I was mortified.  With dozens of new grads able to present, why had I nosed in?  Ach!  What should’ve been dismissed with a quick “f*ck it” prayer seemed like a huge deal and colossal embarrassment.  My old buddies – wounded pride, concern with what others think of me, and self-loathing – stopped by for breakfast and hung out all morning.  We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so we chatted for hours about how pathetic I was, how dumb I must’ve looked – lots of productive stuff.  There was even a dark, dreary day plus some menopausal symptoms toThe-Scream set the stage.  Good times!

To knock that stuff the hell off when I’m in spiritual disarray seems next to impossible.  No matter what I tell myself, I’m back to square one, worrying about the same shit.  It’s like waving away a determined yellow jacket.

Contrast me in this tizzy with the Native American panhandler I talked to last week while the light was red at the Aurora Denny exit.  He described the “irony” of having felt lucky the day before to find a sheet of plastic so he could wrap his backpack against the rain, only to return from walking the car line and find it – everything he had – stolen.  “Who would do that?!” I asked, incensed.  He flashed me a toothless smile.  “Just somebody being a jerk,” he shrugged.  “I’ll be okay, though.  Today’s been a good day.”

This man’s acceptance blew me away.  He wasn’t drunk.  He was just unafraid of life with nothing.  Can I say that again?  Unafraid.  Of life.  With nothing.  Every bit as poor as Jesus or the Buddha, his outlook was brighter than the majority of us schmucks lined up in  traffic.

In only one area do I have that man’s caliber of faith, and that’s around my sobriety.  I know I’ll be okay, so long as I hang on to god.  No matter how frazzled I get, whether by small stuff or big stuff, this description from the Big Book’s pages 84-85 still applies:

“For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame… We have not even sworn off.  Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us… That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.”

How does that work?  I know that on one level, I have nothing to do with this gift.  As described in the Robin Williams post, I’m sober because of grace alone, for reasons I’ll never understand – a miracle that is never guaranteed.

Yet there is such a thing as underlying spiritual fitness, which offers grace a landing strip to show up in our Starry Night Skylives, even during tizzies.  Mine shows up as an understanding that I’m never in charge, ever, of anything – least of all emotions that come over me.  I’ve somehow internalized Step 3.  In the past, thoughts, emotions, and judgements that defined my reality amounted to an unacknowledged false god, one that used to tell me I could fix stuff with booze.  Through practicing the steps consistently, however, I’ve withdrawn my trust from those voices and given it instead to a higher power, a god of love.  Nothing that happens to me can shake that.  It’s in my bones, even when self-defeating thoughts ricochet around my silly brain.

If I live to be 100, I think I’ll always have episodes like this, when I transform into SUPER TWIT and anguish for hours over a visible booger or even an imagined visible booger.  I’m kind of glad about that: I’ll always be a fool.  Being a fool – freaking out about piddly-shit – is actually one of the most endearing aspects of being a fallible human being.  Part of me misses it already, and I’m not even dead.

I know I need to slow down, maybe even decline some work to make time for self-care.  I will.  But listen, my lovely alcoholic readers, I do want to add this:  No matter how busy or pressed for time, I always go to my meetings, meet with my sponsees, and pray all over the place.  No matter how wacky I get, I know these actions are my only recourse against the disease that wants to ruin my life.  On them, I never compromise, because if that monster ever escapes from my brain stem, it won’t compromise with me.

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POST SCRIPT, 2/8/15:  It turns out I was asked to give a presentation on gear to this year’s Glacier Climbing Class, which I delivered yesterday.  And out turns out it did prove valuable to climbers both new and old, for which everyone was grateful.  Who knew?

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November 4, 2014 · 10:27 am

Hitting Bottom, Remembered

Looking back can make us grateful

I grew up in an alcoholic home where we could never say, “Dad’s drunk again,” because it might sound like we didn’t love dad.  And truly we all loved Dad, so we showed it by keeping silent.

I grew up in an alcoholic home where we couldn’t say, “Mom’s frustrated with Dad’s drinking,” because it might sound like Mom didn’t love Dad.  And we all knew Mom loved Dad, so we respected them by keeping silent.

I grew up in an alcoholic home where I could never say, “I’m afraid I’m not good enough to be loved,” because it might sound like there was something wrong with me or my family’s ways.  I knew I needed to do what others wanted in hopes of being loved, so I stayed silent… until gradually I forgot how to know what I felt.

As a child I grew to resemble an android navigating templates of what I thoughtstar-wars-stormtrooper-deluxe-statue copy others wanted me to do.  Inside my polished shell, a sea of vibrant emotions and passions raged, a crazy frothing of all different colors longing to get out.  I’d been taught to censor whatever didn’t fit the judgements my family held, but as my body grew up, forbidden urges sometimes burst out of me, shameful and bizarre compulsions that frightened me.  I hid them.  There was no way to integrate my outer good girl and that inner chaos – no way that I, at least could see.

Until here came the magic of alcohol.  Alcohol dilated the zillion pores in my shell-like skin so the truth of me could gush out into the world, like it or not!  Alcohol dissolved those walls of shoulds and musts, blasted to hell that relentless rubric of inner criticisms.  I flowed; I fit; I flourished!  Soon life had only two states: drinking, and waiting to drink.  Naturally, I could never say, “I’m ill with alcoholism,” because that would cast aspersions on the one thing that made life livable.

Plus it would throw light on a family disease, declare that my father and I were equally ill.  And the song we all knew, the chorus we sang whenever we still gathered, was all about how nothing was wrong with any of us – though plenty was wrong with outsiders.

But, as the years passed, my android shell, because it was made of unnatural materials and not grown from within, began to obsolesce – to fall apart.  More and more it cracked at the joints – my elbows, my waist – so that my inner mess, which had churned around unsupervised through ghostbusters_25012the years until all its vibrant colors merged to a muddy ugliness, began to spew on the sensible arrangements of my life.  It smelled bad.  It hurt people.  But I told myself, “Ah, well!  Everybody spews!”

Now the mess for alcohol to clear got heavier – landslides filled with large, trashed objects it had to plow aside to reopen the flow.  And given that it had only masqueraded as love, but really grew from self-hate, it began to slack in its duties. The magic grew thin.  Ludolf_Bakhuizen_-_Ships_Running_Aground_in_a_Storm_-_WGA01131And so I hit bottom.  The keel of my consciousness ran aground on the rock of despair.  I’d tried all I knew with all that I had and ended here: failure.  Existence sucked.  And Option B, to abandon ship, began to seem the saner solution.

But, wait…  Wasn’t there something I’d forgotten? Hadn’t there been – before the android sealed me off, before my passions turned putrid – something?  So distant a memory but faintly recalled – that once there was a time when I believed in… goodness.  And now, if all roads were marked with skull and crossbones but one, a path signed “Goodness →,” would I follow it, no matter how cliché and pointlessly breakfast-cereal-box-maze-like it looked?

AA~?!  Me, going to AA?!  Ha!  What a grim joke.  These people’s problems were generic.  Mine were unique.  And yet, among all these stupid, brainwashed nobodies who failed to see the world rightly as my family did, around these cultish zealots with their scrolls of numbered steps and traditions on the walls, was I just imagining it, or was it in the air?  Goodness.  And maybe from under the floorboards, subsonic, maybe diffused in some elaborate code these people sprinkled through their words, that ancient, sacred radiance I’d long since dismissed as worthless: Love.

A plant with just one dangling leaf may still rejuvenate.  Slowly, the love from these strangers permeated the cracked husks of my old armor.  “You can lay that stuff down,” they smiled. “If you work these 12 steps and stand up in honesty with all your deformities and wounds exposed, the sunlight will heal them.”

Wonderland Trail

Sunlight?!  Of course I didn’t believe in sunlight!  So what if I’d never even tried looking up! I saw stuff because it was there – not because of some hokey-ass Light Bulb in the sky!  And yet, reluctantly, one piece at a time I shed those dented old plates and cuffs meant to protect me.  Then I felt it: something warmed my skin, my face, and before I’d even realized it, my heart – sunlight!  Colors revived, my sores healed, and the textures of the world that I’d been numb to for so long became vivid.  I remembered how to play.

So began a lifelong inner expedition that continues to this day, bumbling around the dim passageways of my consciousness, discovering how I really feel, what I really love, and who I really am – each step illuminated by my own small lantern of sunlight, which I need to recharge daily.  In the rooms of AA, Al-Anon, and ACA, I meet people who grew up in the very same house I did.  Imagine that!  They’ve given me field guides to flora and fauna to help me to identify those strange creatures I come across in my psyche, some older than I am, spawned by my ancestors.

My father died in regret, and my siblings text that I’m wrong – but I know joy, and I know its source.  I’m now loved freely in a raucous, imperfect new family where I like to sing out loud – as you may have noticed!

This is the story I tell in my addiction memoir.

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