What Would Change?

I have seen many relapses in my (relatively) short time in sobriety and have often pondered the consequences or effects of a relapse in my life. What will happen? How will my life change? How will I change? Let’s look at each of these questions and drill into an honest answer.

1.       What will happen if I relapse?

This scenario has truthfully played out in my mind hundreds of times, in passing thoughts or in response to stressful situations. Without fail, it proceeds thusly: somehow I am convinced that I should forget everything I know about the inanity of the first drink for the alcoholic. I’m at no point operating under the false assumption that I’ve learned how to drink like normal folks; I never wanted to drink like a normal person from the very beginning. I am overcome with guilt and shame and begin to punish myself for that first drink with many, many more. I also become a recluse because I cannot face the literally hundreds of people who’ve come to know my sobriety as a fundamental part of who I am.

2.       How will my life change if I relapse?

The first thing is physically I become weak and sick. I go to bed earlier and wake up later and feel like crap in between. The drugs follow shortly after the drink and most likely I end up out of a job within two months (if I am lucky). I also become a recluse because I cannot face the literally hundreds of people who’ve come to know my sobriety as a fundamental part of who I am. I know that I am not out and about nearly as often these days, but I will become a ghost if relapse becomes a part of my story.

3.       How will I change if I relapse?

The positivity is gone. The desire to be of service to others vanishes. The fragile sense of self-worth becomes extinct. My life as I know it is over.

Now, I won’t say that there’s no way I could come back from this or that redemption would then be impossible. I will say that the odds are in favor of me drinking and drugging so hard, so fast that I don’t live longer than 6 months after I pick up again if it ever happens. My guilt would consume me and my shame would hang on my head like a lead weight. The life I would have left would consist of me being alive, but not really living. The good things in my life would melt away and I’d be left in the company of my own self-loathing.

This thought horrifies me. I can honestly, unashamedly say it frightens me to my core. However, it is also not what I choose to use as my reason to stay clean and sober, although fear is indeed a powerful motivator. Today I choose to move forward, drawn by the beauty of my life rather than away from the dark reality of the possibilities if I relapse. I will also freely admit that if in the pivotal moment this fear is all that stands between me and the first drink or drug, I will use it to stay sober for that day. I won’t choose to stay there, because that fear too would consume me eventually and bear the same consequences.

I choose to move towards the light and towards the love today, and I also choose to not lose sight of what relapse would bring.

Six Years

Six years. Just for today, times 2,192 and countless other “please let me just get through the next fifteen minutes” moments.

At times, my sobriety feels like my oldest and dearest friend, while at others it is not nearly so comfortable. Sometimes it is natural and a lot of the time it isn’t easy at all. As some of those reading this already know, I’ve had some fantastically beautiful moments and some devastatingly difficult ones as well over this time. Living clean and sober is not always easy, but without fail it has been worth it.

You see, I spent fourteen or fifteen years operating from a place where I had no desire to face anything or anyone, including myself. I was boisterously fraudulent to others and a small, scared kid within my own mind. I lied, manipulated and many times could think of nothing besides my own desires. Selfish and self-centered at my core, my occasional grand generous gestures were performed with a payoff in mind.

I had surprisingly low self-esteem and even today I am often haunted by self-doubt. There are many things these days that just feel so out of my depth and I know that I can’t handle them alone. It would be the easiest thing in the world to pick up and act out instead of facing these things.

There are days when everything inside me wants a half-gallon as if it were food or water.  I want to get stoned and watch movies all day, or get high and bounce around the planet for a while. Many of you reading this post don’t want to see that or believe it, but I don’t lie these days and I don’t try to hide things about me that are scary. My sobriety is not guaranteed.  

Sometimes I have no idea how I got through a day at the end of it. Sometimes the past is a crushing weight on my mind. Sometimes I miss my dad and my sister more than I can bear and I just sit and hurt and cry and scream. Sometimes (a lot of the time, actually) I miss being able to not feel the pain or the joy or the agony or the thrill. Some days I am THISCLOSE to the liquor store and then I turn around and tell someone else how to stay sober, just for today. Sometimes I just want the rollercoaster to slow down long enough for me to jump off.

My peace today comes from knowing that at any given moment, I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I know that what I think I want is definitely not always what I really need, and that my own designs have been and will always be flawed at their best. I do myself a favor when I allow awareness to be present and can then self-correct when I am comparing myself to others too much or I am getting inside my own head too much. I am at my best when I am sharing the experience, strength and hope with which my struggles have blessed me; when I am focused more on others than myself, I am focused an happy. The balance can be delicate (as expressed in a recent post) but service to others is ultimately service to myself and my sobriety.

Six years into what I pray daily is a lifelong journey I wouldn’t change a thing. Six years’ worth of highs, lows and all that comes in between GENUINELY felt and experienced; I was actually there for all of it and none of it was chemically rendered or tinted. Real life, guys and dolls and I am grateful for every wonderful, awful, amazing bit of it. It’s not often easy, but it is always worth it. 

External Validation

As much as I hate to admit it, I must own the fact that I need external validation/approval much more than it might seem. When I sit and think about it, the root of this need (desire) is fairly simple to trace: as much as I love my father, he was not one to make it very clear to me that he was proud of me (or proud of anyone to their face). That fact was my favorite thing to drink and drug over for years. 

He told anyone else who would listen how proud of me he was. He was deeply proud of the way I handled blowing out my knee my senior year in football and he almost admired the resiliency I showed in bouncing back from my car wreck. I never got to hear these things first hand and he will never have the chance to tell me. This is a void that can't ever truly be filled, although I have tried desperately to do so. I try to fill that void now without admitting it - until this post, that is. 

I shun or deflect praise whenever I receive it, but the truth is that I crave it more than you can or will ever know.

Sometimes I really feel like my mom has gone out of her way to try and make up for those expressions of pride that my dad left unsaid. Growing up there was never any doubt that my mom was proud, and I have no room to doubt it now. Some of that probably also comes from her mom (my grandmother, obviously) making a conscious effort, as she once told me, to never let someone feel too good about themselves lest they get a big head. She told me this years ago and it’s plain to see the effect it has had on my mother.

The truth is that if I only have my own best estimate to guide me, my worth is much less than you’d imagine. I need reassurances that the average adult has grown beyond seeking. I still usually feel weak and only occasionally worthwhile. I mostly just dislike myself.

If I care for you and if I think you’re disappointed in me or have started to dislike me too, it literally makes me feel as though my soul is collapsing in on itself and I want to die. The darkness is crushing.

I have a very fragile sort of strength when it comes to “me.” I obviously make it by day-to-day and have a fulfilling life that involves helping others, which is all I’ve truly wanted since I was a child. I can be a magnificent resource in that way for others, but I have a difficult-nigh-impossible time being kind to myself so I need you to do that for me. To depend on another human in that way, selfish and self-centered beings that we are, is to set myself up for repeated disappointment because that is no one else’s obligation.

The first kindness that I owe is to myself and I simply must do a better job of paying it. Does any of this resonate with you? If so, this may be a bill you owe to yourself as well and maybe we can grow better at this together. 

Feeling Overwhelmed

Work. School. Meetings. Spouse. Volunteering. Kids. Exercise. Sponsorship. Tee ball practice. Pets. Life. Sometimes it’s just too much for even the best of us, and the first thing we neglect is ourselves.

I feel this sensation of overwhelm much more often than I will own in conversation. I don’t like to admit that sometimes it’s just too much, or that at times folks collectively ask too much of me. I allow myself to be pulled in eight different directions at any given time and often wish that I could be doing more for more people. The fact is that I can’t really do what I am already doing most of the time- I find a way, but at the expense of my own serenity and joy (not to mention the time away from my wife).

I allow myself to get over-committed because I feel the siren’s song of overactive service as a means of making amends to the entire world for my years as a Grade-A self-centered schmuck. I feel like I owe a debt to everyone that I can never possibly repay, but that I also cannot neglect to make “payments” towards.

A big part of healthy sobriety is sponsorship and service to others (in or out of the context of recovery). Part of my service is because I must get outside of myself to maintain my sobriety, and part of it is because I feel called to do it out of an obligation to be unselfish. I never feel like I do enough even though I basically always do way too much.

The reason it never feels like enough is that I am chasing a ghost I can never catch- I cannot possibly get back the opportunities to do the right thing that I missed while in the throes of my active addiction, but I refuse to believe that not being able to “win” is ever a good enough reason to not try. I never want to be unavailable to the call of another person in need, because in many cases I am uniquely capable of offering support in a way that others cannot. I know that, so I answer the call.

The question becomes this: If I am doing so much for others in the name of maintaining my sobriety that I am actually putting my sobriety at risk, is it still the right thing to do?

Many of you don’t believe I will ever drink or drug again, but that is out of a lack of understanding about addiction. I promise you that you can’t fathom how close I have already come to relapse in my own mind. There are days I can taste the whiskey and feel the “drip” and all I want is to disappear into a soul-crushing black hole of my own creation. You can’t imagine how inexplicably drawn I am to crawling under a rock and hanging out with the rest of the decay.

Some moments of some days all I want to do is upset the apple cart of your expectations with my own tendency towards self-destruction JUST TO SHOW YOU THAT I CAN. In those times, I want to disappoint everyone and wreck everything just to destroy everyone’s expectations. I want to make you realize how unpredictable I am while at the same time craving your trust. I want to rage against the life I have built for myself because my base instinct will always be to self-destruct. I am addicted to self-pity. Part of me will always want to back myself into a corner so I can fight my way back out of it.

Yes, that is absolutely crazy. So am I.

Thanks goodness that my memory is not nearly as short as my ability to control my impulses. I can’t afford to forget what that life was like and how horribly miserable that non-existence actually was. Do I need to be more effective at setting boundaries? 100% in the affirmative. Is that a good enough reason to drink today? 100% in the negative and it never will be.

Attraction, Rather Than Promotion

Many of the most successful fellowships supporting those with addictions, obsessions or compulsions operate off of the principle of attraction rather than promotion regarding those outside the four walls of the meeting.  No one is supposed to be out in the community at large "evangelizing" on behalf of AA, NA or any of the other numerous Twelve Step-based programs (I'm only addressing those types of programs here, although as an aside I readily acknowledge that many other successful programs of recovery exist). This idea is based on the eleventh tradition as authored in the early years of Alcoholics Anonymous. Today I’d like to dive into some of the reasons why this is the rule and some of the strengths of this “policy.”

The things about a choice-based lifestyle change (positive change, obviously) is that a person has to want to do it for reasons that will genuinely make it stick. “The right reasons” don’t often coincide with advertisement or solicitation, (or court order for that matter) although they can and sometimes do. When a person has come to a turning point they are typically looking for hope, support and the chance to grow. All of these things can be found in recovery fellowships if they are healthy, and that should be evident in the everyday lives of the members of the fellowship. Good sobriety typically begets maturity, understanding and serenity and these qualities are pretty attractive when lived out.

There are a good many groups who could learn a thing or two from the practical application of this idea of attraction rather than promotion. It’s based on not just having a “thing” that people are seeking, but having members who are more engrossed by living out the principles of the group than trying to win the crowd. It’s “I am who I am, and if you like who I am, I can tell you a bit about how I got to be this way if you ask.”

There’s not supposed to be the constant attempt to publicly spoon-feed anyone anything if individual members are honoring this tradition. No advertising or promoting is needed because those who are actively living this way of life have something good that is also contagious. If you hear something that resonates and you want to give that way of life a shot, there’s a pretty clear path forward - you keep coming back. If not, maybe you don’t; the fact is that the ones who are in need and ready to change tend to find their way back sooner rather than later.

No one needs to rent billboard space to say “Come see what all the fuss is about!” If you are ready, you seek and then you find that which you sought. 

Resentment Prevention

Resentment is the number one offender- that’s what the AA Big Book tells us and as the text that spells out the original formula for the most successful program of recovery, we ought to give what it says some real consideration. Untended resentments are at the root of many, many relapses in the world of addiction and as (mostly) functioning and intelligent adults we ought to have a plan in place to deal with them before they have the chance to deal with us. This would be a proactive, preventative way of handling potential resentments before they have the opportunity to ferment into “the big nasty” itself.

In order to form an effective strategy for preventing resentments before they have the chance to fully form, we have to discover the roots. From what behaviors, events or circumstances do our resentments form? How do we recognize those things in time to act in a way that will keep them from boiling up and over into a full-blown resentment?

We also have to qualify that a bit; we must practice some accountability and acceptance around things in our life first in order to keep events and circumstances in the right perspective. The easiest way to avoid most resentments is to realize that you have to “accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

We must do all we can to not allow something we cannot change to eat away at us; this in some ways is the ol’ “Poor me, poor me, pour me another shot” mentality. If you can’t do anything about it, you kinda have to accept it. You can choose to be mad about it, but that won’t usually do anything positive. If you can do something to affect positive movement on the issue, then stand up and act or forfeit your right to feel the effects.

If something has happened and you feel wronged, (or that a loved one has been wronged) take a moment to consider your (or the loved one’s) role in the situation first. If after an honest evaluation you feel certain that you or your loved one are in the right and you’re in a position to advocate on your own behalf or the behalf of your loved one, you must do so in a calm but resolute way. You really can’t afford to let it fester long enough to become a sore spot, so you must speak up in the right way at the right moment.

If we allow a potential resentment to bubble up until it reaches the point of boiling over, we have done ourselves and our sobriety a great disservice. Our serenity and satisfaction are too valuable to sacrifice by a lack of willingness to speak up. This is often difficult, but when carefully measured and delivered it is powerful. We must guard against resentments with the same vigor with which we would defend our most treasured family or friends, because an unresolved resentment could result in a direct assault on our relationships, our joy and our sobriety.

Wellness

Most substance abuse/addiction rehabilitation plans focus almost entirely on the mental and spiritual well-being of the addict. While these are obviously foundational elements of recovery, the whole person needs rehabilitation. This means nutritionally and physically working to repair the myriad traumas to which we have subjected our bodies. In my experience it is all-too-common to find buckets full of cigarette butts outside every door of a treatment or regular meeting facility while inside gallon after gallon of coffee is consumed ravenously.

We addicts aren’t exactly awesome at moderation (how else did we end up here?!?) and we most often substitute one seemingly less-harmful addiction for that from which we are trying to recover. In the course of our active addiction we necessarily put our bodies through hell and that might not stop upon our earnest attempt to get clean and sober. While we work to change our “stinking thinking,” we don’t often work to make ourselves truly, wholly healthy.

There doesn’t seem to be a very typical occurrence of even the most basic of attempts within the recovery community to educate folks on the necessity of overall wellness; we will literally spend hours at a time talking through our “spiritual malady” and our diseased thinking but not often do we touch on taking care of the bodies that we have driven to terminal velocity for years. It is a very rare person who has the opportunity to carry the message forward when dealing with constantly ill health.

We must start to emphasize for ourselves a bit of physical health if we want to do all of the living that we haven’t done over the years or decades of addiction. Just like getting sober, sometimes we have to take it 10 minutes or one hour at a time. Start small and then progress towards a place of balanced, healthy living for our bodies, minds and spirits.

As humans we are that total package of mind, body and spirit and the neglect of any aspect of our heath is us doing ourselves a grave disservice. I am not advocating that everyone in recovery from an addiction or compulsion become an ultra-marathoner or Iron(wo)man triathlete; I do know that we must start slowly and being to take care of our bodies in the way in which we were intended. We must be as kind to our physical selves are we are to our spiritual. 

Don't Start

As an addict there are things that we aren’t equipped to stop doing once we have started. The first drink, snort, fried pie or video clip sends us down into an irreversible tailspin from which there is a very real threat of never recovering. The fact is that we don’t have to concern ourselves today with the 12th shot of whiskey or the last dust off the eightball because our primary issue is with the first ANYTHING. We’ll never reach a blackout if we don’t get started.

We have to realize that with anything we cannot stop, we must not start. The first is worse than the last because our last doesn’t exist without our first. The insanity of the first _____ is something that for years we couldn’t avoid, but now dodging it is the most necessary of all the things we do. We cannot reach the part of our recovery wherein we may repair our lives if we never fully stop the behavior. How can we hope to see the end of the tunnel otherwise?

How does one avoid the first ______ ? It starts with self-awareness. I know that my sobriety neither requires nor necessitate anyone elses’ and I don’t expect others to modify the way they live on my behalf- my sobriety is my responsibility and no one besides me can keep it or jeopardize it. I have to know when something doesn’t feel right and act accordingly.

At times it means “keeping gas in the car and air in your tires”- you have to know when a situation becomes one that you must leave immediately. Sobriety is the foundation for everything in the lives of recovering addicts and as such it must be carefully guarded.

For everyone in recovery the exact answer is different, but for many it involves speaking with or getting around our fellows. We must be so in-tune with our own thinking that we recognize when it is just time to pick up the phone or get our butts to a meeting or other recovery fellowship. You do what you must to get where you must be.

A relapse never sneaks up on anyone, although many or most don’t see it until they have the benefit of hindsight. When you aren’t “taking your medicine” you will get sick and it is your responsibility alone to be sure you do what you know you need to. There are certain elements that are absolutes when it comes to sobriety and while everyone has a different relapse prevention plan, it all will always involve avoiding “the first” by any means.

Towards or Away From?

For me, the decision to change my life and get sober was one made out of necessity; I knew I was going nowhere fast and I had to either make a drastic change or risk dying young after I’d shaped a legacy I couldn’t respect. I was honestly moving away from mediocrity more strongly than I was towards a new life. I was tired of the guilt and shame, perpetually underachieving and being the ultimate “If only he would” guy.

I was also scared to go backwards, because I had a strong feeling that I knew what was waiting for me if I did. In those earlier days that fear was at times all that kept me sober - if it comes down to it, I’ll gladly stay sober only out of fear today if that is all that stands between me and the next drink or drug. I’ll take it if that’s all I’ve got because it beats the heck out of the alternative.

On my best days I have transformed into a man who is moving towards the life of my dreams rather than running away from my living nightmare. I am drawn by hope and the promise of a life worth living rather than being repelled by remorse and the realization that if I go “back out” I may not live long enough to make it “back in.” I am convinced that I stand a 99% chance of not surviving a relapse if it ever happens, and today (thankfully every day so far) I can’t reconcile with that thought.

I have changed my way of viewing things in sobriety and the most noteworthy evidence of that is a shift in the way I view sobriety itself. It’s not about what I’m not doing any longer; sobriety is about who I am NOW. It’s where I’m going rather that where I’ve been, although my best shot at making this life keep working includes never forgetting where and why it changed.

The sober mind of an addict is hard at work trying to convince us that the bad times weren’t so bad and that the fun times made it all worth it. Wouldn’t it all be worth it again? Perhaps it would, if only I hadn’t realized that the fun was temporary and not genuine; I was looking at an illusion through the lens of a bender. I felt good only because of the chemicals in my body, and today I choose to feel happy because of something more lasting.

Fear is a powerful motivator and can often drive positive change. I consider fear to be a negative emotion and as such it isn’t really something that I choose to acknowledge often in my life these days. I certainly do have things that I fear but I don’t dwell in that space. I prefer to be motivated by the fulfillment I seek as opposed to being driven by fear I seek to escape.

Is fear motivating you into moving away from something today? I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, although I believe that it ceases to be positive if that becomes your normal. I would encourage anything to find something good to move towards as a replacement. For me it means a happier and better life, and that may become your reality as well. Give it a chance, because it will make a difference.

Staying Right-Sized

One concept of recovery that doesn’t seem to have as much emphasis or discussion is the idea of “staying right-sized.” What exactly does it mean and how does a person go about it? Why isn’t it spoken about as frequently as “first things first” or “one day at a time?” This saying has been on my heart and mind lately, which to me is an indication that I need to take steps to process through it and begin to apply it.

Staying right-sized to me refers to the idea of not allowing yourself or your role to become too big or too small in your own mind. After all, it is our mind that can effectively ensnare us or cause us to take the first steps towards freedom. Our mindset is key on many levels, addict or not. Each of us is a powerful, capable and dynamic force. None of us can control another person’s thoughts, feelings or emotions. We exist in the median between the mundane and the spectacular, neither as insignificant nor as vital as we sometimes begin to feel. The false ego of the addict touches both ends of that spectrum as we project our greatness while grappling with crippling insecurities.

While it may come to pass for a moment in anyone’s life that we hold space on one extreme or the other, the most likely scenario involves our being big enough to matter, yet small enough to stay connected to reality. The fact is that our lives are but a blinking of a whisper of a trail of dust when compared with the grandiose size of all that is, was and will ever be. Our lives have value, but the significance is lost entirely when we live only for ourselves. Our lives simply don’t stretch out enough for them to be worth living if our aim is self-aggrandizement.

We are valuable and our worth is most directly reflected in the lives of those whose suffering is abated by ours. If we cannot reconcile the past and use it to help others, then all the trauma was for naught. We addicts must face our wrongdoing, forgive ourselves and pivot around into usefulness on behalf of our fellows. If we can’t make good on all that our experiences (should have) taught us, then that struggle was for naught. Our time getting wasted was wasted time if all it gave us was a collection of regrets, and honestly our time as sober, productive humans is just as empty if we are only helping ourselves.

Our time on Earth is woefully short. We must make it mean something or we are no different from the grass, birds or plankton, and even those beings seem to somehow understand that a life well-lived is lived in service of others.

Right and Wrong?

As many have written and talked about previously, life can be looked at as a series of choices. The right and wrong choice is sometimes clear and sometimes muddled, and often we have not only right and wrong to weigh but other varying degrees of more-or-less-right and more-or-less-wrong choices in the middle to ponder. I’d like to explore a bit about the right to make your own choice and live your own values and the duty to respect that right in others. This is especially applicable in recovery and sobriety because as a recovering addict I cannot afford to often be caught in the trap of taking another’s inventory or trying to impose my own values on anyone else.

There do exist scenarios in this life where right and wrong are clear-cut and indisputable, but they are few and far between. Theft? Rape? Abuse? Murder? In a traditional sense these crimes against other humans are not defensible, but in our society the line has become so blurred even in all of those cases that there no longer exists an absolute and concrete idea of any of them, it seems. If we are fortunate, in the course of a typical human life we won’t be directly faced with these situations often if at all.  

Bigotry and hatred? That's a bit of a different story. If I am wrong it is only due to ignorance, but I am not aware that any belief structure or group ideology that enables or encourages this type of thought and action belongs to any group that is worthy of any respect or subscription. That is to say that no one, right, left or in the middle (with most of us) has the right to perpetrate hatred upon his or her fellow humans. The basic human right to live free from bigotry, persecution and the spiritual sickness of hatred is the fabric that makes up this post. 

Our struggles exist between the extremes in the day-to-day living with our fellow humans. We bicker, judge and pontificate from our side of the fence and spend more time obsessed with why “the other guy” is wrong than we do with our own right living. We obsess over our witty, "quippy" online image more than we attend to our daily interactions with other humans in the physical world. After all, if I can one-up the other side with my fanatical re-posting of social commentaries, then I’ll eventually bombard them into conversion, RIGHT?!

We all basically feel that we are right in our beliefs and (at least some of the time) in our actions; since wrong is the opposite or right, anyone who doesn’t agree with us has to be wrong, we surmise, and that is as far as many of us ever get. But what if I was to tell you that what is right for me might not be right for you (and vise-versa) but that doesn’t make me (or you) wrong (or right)? My truth is mine, yours is yours and they can both be right for us and not right for each other.

If your truth doesn’t harm me, then how does it hurt me to let you live it without trying to convince you with endless barrages of words (written, spoken, sung, re-posted, Tweeted or texted) to change? In truth, my actions are the only voice you should ever hear. If my actions convey to you that I live a life of fulfillment and happiness and you are interested in how or why, I’d be happy to share that with you. If not, I’d be happy to just be happy and let you do your thing.

Now, this isn’t to say that everyone is right and no one is wrong; this is to say that you and I are not in a position to impose our personal values and beliefs on others in the form of judgement. Understand that this judgement comes from all sides, although society is most quick to point out the judgement of the religious due to centuries of feeling beaten down by extra-doctrinal and controlling dogma. It would be inaccurate to say that even the irreligious don’t have their own brand of belief and can be just as caught up in pointing out how wrong and unintelligent they think the religious types are as those religious types can be in condemning them to an eternity in Hades.

It would seem that social commentary today doesn’t inspire thought and change so much as rage and separation. If we all become too busy being on a side to just love each other, before too long we will all only be on our own “side” and life will be wasted in joyless isolation. For the addict, this isolation will quickly lead to misery and death.

Right or wrong, we are all in this together. Step away from your computer, your pulpit or podium and be too busy living rightly and loving fully to obsess about how wrong everyone else is. What might you do if in the course of the day you somehow find yourself to be wrong in a situation (you will)? Promptly admit it and get right. Then, do the right thing the next time you get a chance.

Simple. Peaceful. Right. Together.

Who Wants to be Normal?

Normal

Adjective

Conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.

Normal. What does that even mean in practical terms? What would it mean to be a normal person? Is a normal person mostly happy? Do normal people make good citizens? Does a normal person hold a steady job, pay bills on time and enjoy the occasional movie? Have a normal life? Live by normal means in a normal world, with normal struggles and normal triumphs to which they react in a normal fashion?

To answer my very first question, me. Sometimes.

Some days it pains and angers me without end to know that I’m just not normal. To be honest I don’t really know what normal is (or even if normal really is even normal) but I know that, if even only for one day, I would like to be it.

You see, to an alcoholic addict normal means someone who can drink like a normal person. A normal person can have a drink or two and not have it soon take over their life. He or she can basically take it or leave it without a second thought. This person can drink without losing jobs, homes or families and can drink without ending up on a booking log. He or she can drink without alienating friends and loved ones and without ever even considering the morning drink.

I can’t in truth do any of these things. I can’t ever have a drink or a drug again without convicting myself once more to a living death. I can’t ever use any mood altering substance of abuse without it eventually ending in my untimely death. I can’t even make it through a single day without having a thought the nature of which will cause me to wonder what in the world is wrong with me.

I remember too that I never wanted to be normal. I never wanted to be typical or walk down the middle of the straight and narrow path.  As a young man I didn't often use the word “average” without prefacing it with the modifier “pathetically,” although this was most often to flash the hubris that eventually would help me to be humiliated into humility.

Sometimes I curse my own existence and wonder why it has to be exactly as it is; I then remember that it is exactly as it must be for me to be alive and to contribute to this world in a meaningful way. My life has been abnormal to an unbearable level at times but I wouldn't trade it for another. If I’d lived a normal life right up until this very moment I would have no real story to tell and I don’t know that I would have any real love to give. I may not have any true compassion and I’d probably not be as passionate about the things in which I believe. Loyalty wouldn't be so important and I would never feel driven by having something to prove. I simply wouldn't be me and there would not be as much of myself to give.

Normal? Upon further review, I’ll stay out in the ether and on the fringes. Maybe I will see you there. 

The Weight

Acceptance is the key.

Those in the rooms of recovery who are making a genuine attempt at sobriety oftentimes live by this mantra, and everyone who has entered one of those rooms has heard it. It is part of our new way of thinking and it is a cornerstone of that new and mentally health mindset. It is one of those statements whose meaning you begin to grasp when you look for the way to live “normally” and try to deal with life’s issues in a constructive way. For me it has meant peace and balance in the worst of times and an anchor in the rest.

A philosophy of acceptance can lead you many good places, but acceptance without due time and attention to processing and grief can provide only a temporary respite from the storm. By itself it can keep you sober, but if that is as far as you get you might be setting yourself up for relapse when the unresolved junk bubbles back up to the surface. It is the first step but truthfully should not be the only one taken, much like stopping the drinking, using or acting out behaviors is the required beginning of your walk down the path of sobriety but that alone is simply not enough.

Acceptance with no follow-up can be a temporary victory. As many of those in my life are aware, I've seen my share of difficulty both in and outside of the context of addiction or recovery. I have dealt with tragic loss and my own physical and mental limitations. It is only very recently that I came to realize that I had a great deal of anger and hurt that was seemingly lying dormant inside; these negative emotions popped back up in full force because I’d not allowed myself the space to work through feelings and emotions that resulted from some difficult circumstances.

That energy doesn't just go away. You have to respect your own need to think, feel and process in order to work through the difficulties and trials you will inevitably face.

A few days ago I heard something profoundly powerful in a twelve step meeting: sometimes you just have to sit and hurt. In dealing with the roller coaster of beginning a new career and learning of my sister’s death within an hour of each other, I haven’t ever really just allowed myself to sit and hurt because I am deathly afraid of getting stuck there. As with most things, I see it as very all-or-nothing and struggle to find moderation. I didn't really acknowledge my own feelings and by extension didn't really deal with them.

In this sense I have not progressed that much from my days as a raging alcoholic and ravenous drug abuser who was running from the pain of losing my father barely more than a year after I myself nearly died - I have still been avoiding my feelings and emotions rather than dealing with them.

Progress, not perfection.

This is another mantra of sobriety, and it may just be the one that gets me through today.

Panic

Many of the readers of this blog know that it's as much a valuable part of my recovery as it can be for anyone else's. I utilize my posts to help me process through sobriety’s challenges or insights shared in rooms of recovery. I like to be vulnerable in my posts in order to feel liberated from some struggles and to also hopefully help someone feel as though they are not alone. The theme of this post is a bit different than my usual but no less important and maybe even more applicable to those who aren't in some phase of addiction.

Several months ago I experienced something that left me pretty confused and more than a little alarmed. Driving one morning on my way to Nashville to work out of the office I began having difficulty breathing and my heart began racing. I started to feel myself about to black out. In and of themselves, these symptoms are cause for concern; I also happened to be going 70+ miles an hour down the interstate.

I pulled over on the shoulder and breathed deeply until I felt myself calming down and beginning to feel normal. Naturally it scared me, but not knowing exactly what had happened or what had caused it I didn't really seek help or tell may people. I truly wondered if I’d had a heart attack or a stroke. This was a powerful incident that I hoped would never repeat itself, but my addict instinct took over and I figured that if I ignored it, it would go away.

A few Saturdays ago I ventured out into the pouring rain and thawing icy snow-slush to head to Nashville for a commitment I had made earlier in the week. I got up early for my 9:30 appointment and waited until about 8 to leave so that the rain might melt as much of the snow and ice as possible. On my way on I-24, I hit several spots of standing water and my vehicle hydroplaned a bit.

I felt myself slipping into another one of those crazy “episodes” and this time the panic nearly won out as due to the snow and ice there was no place to pull over. I drove about twenty miles in some stage of this whatever-the-heck and pulled into a gas station parking lot just on the outskirts of downtown Nashville. I sat in my car for ten minutes or so just trying to collect myself; I then pulled into a parking spot, went inside the bathroom and threw up. Twice.

I proceeded (with caution) to my commitment and fulfilled my obligations. On the way home, the weirdness started to happen again so I stopped at a gas station, grabbed some food and water and sat until thought I might be ready to drive without risking my brain flipping out and it causing me to wreck. I managed to make it home and was in no rush to leave my house for the next few hours. Or days. Or maybe even a week.

Upon doing a bit of research I figured out that I had been having panic attacks; truth be told upon making this discovery I almost wished it had been a heart attack. I saw panic attack and immediately thought: “But, I don’t panic about stuff. I don’t freak out and I don’t really even allow myself to feel afraid often. What the hell? Does this mean I’m really a fake? Does this mean I've turned into a sissy? Who have I become?”

I questioned many things about myself before I allowed it to sink in that this was a reaction over which I had zero control. I remembered that some years ago after my (horrible, awful, no good very bad) wreck I was diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress and that it was something that could maybe pop back up sometime.

I sought out a bit of additional support in the form of therapeutic treatment - it goes without saying that medication is not an option that as a recovering addict I will readily take (if there is no other choice I will at least give it some more thought before I say no) but therapy is something in which I believe and I know that it works for many people. I am in the very beginning stages of wading through the layers of what may be going on, but I feel good about our direction and the topics we are addressing.

Believe me when I say that our first hour-long session brought up more than one topic that could be the basis of a future post, but for now I will keep them where they are and continue the work in front of me.

Friendship

The path of friendship can be especially winding for an addict and at times morseo once in recovery. You see, we are told quite often that we have to change our “playmates, playgrounds and playthings,” meaning we must not simply return to life as normal while attempting to no longer drink, drug or act out. We must change our way of life along with our way of thinking and neither task is either easy or painless.

If our drug of choice is alcohol, we pretty obviously cannot regularly go hang out in bars and you typically find pretty quickly that the “friends” who accompanied your “good times” aren’t too interested in watching movies or going for a run. They may or may not have the same drinking problem you do, but your change in lifestyle requires the same of no one else. Some folks will stay and many folks will drift out of your life; they leave with no malice but they probably feel that they don’t really have much in common with you any longer.  

The parallels with any other manifested addiction are obvious – many of the people who partook with you probably won’t want to hang out with you after that partaking is out of the picture, and that is fine. It is their choice and there is little that can be done about it shy of using or acting out again, and then their reborn loyalty will not be enough to shield you from the inevitability of consequences.

You begin to make new friends who are both fellow recovering addicts and “normals.” It is a unique day indeed when you realize that you have an entire segment of friends that have never known you as an active addict. It can also be scary - those folks have only a limited appreciation of how far you have come and can often laugh off your “war stories” as hilarious hijinks more of a comedic nature than the blood and bone desperate sickness that it truly belies.

It can be hard to be close to many people. It is difficult to begin a new life as an adult and make a whole new set of friends. The beautiful thing about this new life is that we are no longer strictly self-seekers whose selfishness smothers our every good impulse. Much like in most of our sober undertakings, an addict makes a heckuva great and loyal friend. It is in our new nature to be of service, humbly grateful and to be rigorously honest.

It is an amazing gift for new people to be willing to become our friends in spite of our past. The gracious warmth of understanding, unconditional friendship is almost overwhelmingly good. It is humbling and means an untold amount to us. Most days I still cannot fathom what so many of my newest old friends see in me but they are truly among my life's greatest blessings. While they may not have known me as the self-destructive force of yesteryear, they might in fact know me as my truest self. I am not a lying, manipulating ball of self-loathing falsity. I am genuinely who I am, and I'm pretty okay with that today.

For those who were able to weather the storm of our insanity and remain our true friends in our sobriety the payoff in gratitude is unable to be quantified. You stuck by our side when we least deserved it and you will never truly know what that means. You saw us walk through the fire and come out transformed on the other side of our awakening.  Your willingness to stick with us is probably one of the fundamental things that made this all doable.

Humankind was meant to live in community. The addict is not different and like most things for us the need is probably magnified. Thanks to all the old and the new friends for being willing to walk this winding path beside us. We never know where it may go, but the fact that we aren't alone makes all the difference.

I Can't Go Back

Everyone in recovery, from that newcomer who picks up their 24-hour chip at a local AA meeting to the seasoned “Old Timer” with 20+ years of clean time has their moments of craving. I’ll grant you that they become less frequent over time, but for the addict they never completely disappear. There will always be the memory of the fun and the escape and sometimes that memory is enough to drown out the screams of logic that remind you of the days after, the legal fees and the shabby employment record. 

When we lose track of the things that brought us to the breaking point we can lose sight of how much different things have become. We forget the day-to-day, minute-to-minute misery of the spiritual malady we sought to cure with the main thing making it worse.

If I told you today that I never had fun drinking and drugging I would be lying, and lying isn't in my MO any longer. I have memories of some very fun misadventures and hilarious stories for days. I have my moments today of considering just how much fun it could be to drink or use again; some days it’s as though I can taste the whiskey and cocaine and it actually makes my heart beat a bit faster. The smallest segment of my consciousness tries to tell me that I could do it again.

Then the weight of everything that comes with picking up and acting out comes crashing down upon me. I remember once more just how sick I was- I hated myself and most everyone else nearly every waking minute. I had a laundry list of failings and hurts that were all your fault and I complained about them to anyone who would even act like they were listing. I became a terribly negative person and I was truly spiritually dead. I didn't really live for the moment as much as I lived for the buzz. I was grateful for nothing and resentful of everything. Envy, anger and guilt were my closest friends and were with me every moment.

I was empty. I had fun but I had no happiness.  I had friends but I had zero self-worth. As much fun as I might convince myself another drink or drug may be, the cost of returning to that old way of thinking and living is far too much to pay. I had no hope. I had no purpose. I had no joy and felt no love that could compare with that which I feel today. When viewed through that honest lens, the choice makes itself.

I am blessed to be living the life I’d always imagined and I do what I must today to stay here. That involves not picking up or acting out as well as paying specific attention to my gratitude, spirituality and mental and physical health. I must be of service to my fellows and I must do the next right thing every time I get the chance. When I am wrong or do wrong, I must admit it and set it right as soon as possible. I must be sure that I am not the center of my own universe and I must love others even when they are unlovable. If I do all of those things today, I may just make it.

I must do all of those things because I simply can’t go back to the way things were.