15 years

Fifteen years ago today was the last time I was ever drunk or stoned. Fifteen years ago tomorrow was the first day I spent sober where I started my new life as a recovered alcoholic. I didn't recover immediately, but I did recover. Recovery to me means the desire to drink was lifted. It's gone. I'm no longer obsessed with the idea that I might safely drink (or use drugs) again. For me, alcoholism is a disease more about my mind (spirit, if you will) than about my drinking. The problem wasn't that I drank and bad stuff happened, although sometimes it did. The problem wasn't even that when I started drinking I got this OH YES GIVE ME MORE feeling (sometimes subtle, sometimes powerful). The problem was that no matter what happened in my life, I always thought that "this time" would be different. I spent a lot of time, I'm remembering now, working out how I could drink without things going wrong when I did. I thought those "going wrong" things were the problem. I didn't realize then that it's just not part of who I am to drink in moderation. Non-alcoholics, as I understand it, drink some and feel kind of loose and light-headed but then feel sort of out of control and usually stop drinking. When I drank it was one of the only times in my life that I felt I was in control. That was the key for me. My alcoholism is a spiritual (mind) disease tied to my desperate need to control life.

So much has changed for me in the last 15 years. I've been married and am divorcing. I've got two children. I've moved from Minneapolis to Houston to Maine. I have no idea what my life would have been like if I had continued drinking and getting high, and I'm frankly not concerned with the "what ifs." What is is what is. One dramatic change in my life, my recovery, has been how I use the tools of the 12 step program that saved my life back in 1996.

Recently I talked with a man who is very active in the same program and it was a joy. The enthusiasm and passion for service (helping other alcoholics) was refreshing and inspiring. He sounds like the me of my early years. That got me thinking, though, about the transition from being a very active participant in the groups that taught me how to live to being someone who lives without daily or even weekly involvement in any formal recovery group. I remember back then being scared for the people who didn't go to meetings anymore. I was so sure they were going to drink. A lot of them may have, in fact. I also know that someone who is very active in the program may not feel comfortable with someone whose sobriety doesn't hinge on the same kind of active participation. Even on my worst days, I rely on skills I learned in the first couple years of sobriety. It's my theory that I was in such despair that my brain was somehow more permeable or child-like in its ability to absorb new ways of thinking. The way it has stayed with me is remarkable. Here are the things I learned from those early days and years in that beautiful recovery program that I carry into my recovered but not active in the 12-step program life:

We are not alone.

As someone who prefers being alone, the idea that "we are not alone" in the usual sense doesn't provide much comfort. My reaction to someone saying I'm not alone is usually, "Yuck, ick, get away from me. You're crowding my space." My version of being "not alone" has more to do with the fact that I am not unique. Of course I am unique in the way each human is entirely unique, but my flaws in particular are shared by many people. That I am flawed is what we all have in common. I learned early on that by sharing my humanity (weaknesses, fears, fuck-ups) other people felt better. Knowing that simply by sharing how imperfect I am other people can benefit was one of the greatest gifts recovery gave me.

When I make mistakes in public or with individuals, other people benefit by either realizing it's okay to make mistakes, believing they are better than me because I'm so flawed, or finding permission to share their own mistakes with other people. All three of these versions of benefit for other people make me happy. It's a win-win. I get to not hide who I am and how everything I do is trial and error, and other people get to feel better in some way or another.

12-step programs are cult-like.

I say this with deep love for the program that I rely on every day. The truth is, though, there is a shared reality in 12-step programs that must be maintained to some degree for the program to work. This isn't just about 12-step programs, though. It's about sports fans and their teams, organized religion, atheists and Republicans and body art enthusiasts. Our brains require confirmation that our reality is shared so we seek social settings and interactions that support our concepts of reality. This isn't to say the reality isn't real, but it is acknowledging the importance of a shared reality in the effectiveness of the 12-step programs.

I liken this statement to the ones I make about abortion: Abortion kills a child. AND, any woman anywhere for any reason has a right to a safe abortion. The two realities coexist and are felt in different ways by different groups. For the 12-step program to work for me back in the late 90s, I needed to believe it was the only solution. I still believe that the instructions for living that are presented in the book called Alcoholics Anonymous are the only way I will successfully navigate my life. I will always be an alcoholic and the guys who figured out how to recover did the best job of anyone. It works for me.

The only drawback for the cult-like quality of the 12-step programs is the tension caused by those of us who accept the necessary truths but are also no longer a part of the official community. Unfortunately, if someone's sobriety depends on only the shared reality aspects of the 12-step program they may not want to hang around me. That's okay. I didn't want to hang out with non-12-steppers either for a long time. I believe it would have hurt my chances at really recovering from alcoholism (the obsession that I might be able to drink disappearing) if I had spent much time outside of the 12-step circles. I know now, though, that there is life outside the program and that doesn't have to mean I'm rejecting it. I'm not. I'm simply growing in different directions and it's working for me. Every single day I use the last three steps of the 12 steps to guide my living. I use the other steps regularly, too, to help cope with life. I also refer to the traditions of the 12-step program in my relationships with other people. I want to always be of service to anyone, anywhere, who needs help that I can give. For me, though, a lot of the help I can give comes from that lesson above where just being openly flawed and public about my humanity is a gift to people.

There is a higher power.

This works for atheists, too. It doesn't to be called god and, for me, it's not something that even needs debating. It just is. There is an unknowable power (in my case there is nothing anthropomorphic or omniscient or omnipotent or "being" related at all to this, it's beyond physics, beyond any verbalizable quality of reality) that can provide strength where I can't find it in any other way. The biggest problem with this most important concept is that by discussing it, it becomes Not. There isn't a single person I have ever talked to who doesn't have their own concept of a "higher power" that provides them some emotional strength they find no other way. Some people call it will power, nature, science… it doesn't matter. There Is.

It will get better.

Just like "we are not alone" the idea that "it will get better" was rarely a comfort for me. And when someone is in real pain, who the hell wants to be told it will get better? No. The pain is now, don't fuck with my pain. I'm having my pain. Don't mess with it by your happy dancing in the wildflowers notions of things getting better. But, truly, when the pain is overwhelming, incapacitating, and I'm not sure I can go on I now know at the foundation of my being it will get better. I spent Thursday night and much of yesterday hardly able to move from one position. Things are really bad for me right now. I've done silly things (mostly online, and thank god for that outlet) and I've made a lot of mistakes. I've embarrassed myself. I'm doing all sorts of ridiculous things to try and either avoid the hurting and fear or to numb it so I can function. It's a mess, honestly. But before I recovered from alcoholism and, perhaps more importantly, before I learned how to use the steps of the 12-step program to function, I might not have been able to pull myself out of the toilet of darkness I'm getting flushed down into. I'm now able to hold in my mind the multiple realities that it will get better and that the pain is so real and so overwhelming I can't see how I'll do anything but sit in one place madly refreshing browser pages like a rat pushing the lever to get that hit of dopamine/pellet.

Gratitude works.

I want to be careful not to imply that I think cheery rosy thinking will make things better. A "positive outlook" or a "smile on my face" or even a "fake it 'til you make it" attitude tends to gloss over authentic feelings and I've written before about how damaging I think this way of living can be. But, sincerely feeling gratitude for things in life can help. Always. When that young man shared with me his eagerness to help me, I was grateful. Another kind soul saw me talking about how much I dislike photos of myself and told me I was beautiful. Talk about feelings of gratitude. Someone else has been having a public conflict with himself and with every thought he shares, I know we are not alone. He is revealing his struggle and that makes us all more human. I'm grateful to him for sharing his mess with us. I won't even get into the gratitude that comes from parenting because I'd end up writing for hours.

Other truths I live by:

I'm the only person who has any say over how I feel.

I have no say over what anyone else feels or does.

Finding the beauty in life is a fair way to keep from drowning in pain as long as I don't use it as frosting to smother the cake of honesty.

Continuing to make mistakes and sharing my humanity keeps me real and will likely help someone else (though I'll never be able to predict who).

How I am is okay, no matter what.

People talk about how living one day at a time is the only thing that counts in recovery. It's true for me and for my life. The fact that I have been sober for 15 years (as of tomorrow) is remarkable in some respects, but it seems so common sense to me now it's strange to be reminded of how it used to be. My "time" sober isn't of consequence, though. All I can do is live my life as true to myself as I can and hope that it helps other people as I do.