Tis the Season

I probably will get coal in my stocking this year, because I've been a very bad blogger. It seems like just yesterday when I was skipping my regular posting so I could finish painting the living room and host Thanksgiving. Now here I am barreling headlong into the Christmas season and I've had to force myself to sit down and write.

If the size of the meetings I attend is any indication, Christmas can be a tough time for alcoholics. Personally, I would never have chosen to get sober right before the holidays.  There was too much excused drinking to be done.  Plenty of time to sober up in January.  Not that I ever did.

When I was growing up, I felt intense pressure for holidays to be "perfect".  They never were.  What happened was this:

On Christmas Eve, the whole family would go to the midnight candlelight service, sing carols, hear the Christmas gospel, and see our friends.  We'd go home filled with the magic of Christmas, and love for our fellow man on this most miraculous of occasions.  We kids would go to bed and try to sleep.  Our parents would stay up to play Santa.

In the morning, we'd open our presents.  They were always good ones, because my parents were big on wish-fulfillment.  Then we'd go to Grandma's house for dinner and more presents.  The adults would sit around and drink while we played with our new treasures.  Then we'd go home and play with our other presents.  The adults would drink some more.  Well-lubricated, one of them would say something passive-aggressive, or criticize the other for behavior or comments at the family dinner and it was off to the races.

I cannot remember a single Christmas in my birth home that did not end in a huge drunken fight.  All the wonderful feelings and the excitement and joy were banished in a hail of ugly words, threats and drunken sneers.  Alcohol had stolen my Christmas as surely as if I'd done it myself.  And, as a child, I certainly thought that there was something I could have done to prevent it.

The long term affect of these Norman Rockwell moments gone Picasso was for me to move heaven and earth to make Christmas perfect for the family I eventually formed.  No one was allowed to be unhappy, or to disagree on that special day.  I spent money I didn't have, gave up sleep I sorely needed, and walked on eggshells until the holiday was past and I could devolve into my normal dysfunctional self.  As a result, I was a ball of tightly wound rubber bands from mid-November until December 26th every year for almost all of them.

Until I got sober, the last fifteen Christmases were dedicated to getting as drunk as I could and still getting the presents under the tree.  The pressure finally got to me and the only way I could deal with Christmas was to be as lit up as it was.  One year, everything I wrapped was just rolled in a length of paper and twisted at the ends because I couldn't fold the corners, even on books.  There are people reading this who probably remember barely legible Christmas cards.  I have beautiful handwriting, but when I'm drunk, a pharmacist couldn't decipher my inebriated scrawls. Fun times.

The good news is that today Christmas is just another day.  When I live my life one day at a time, I'm too busy with today to worry about making things perfect.  I can't project and expect too much, because it invites my disease in. I make a simple plan, and try to remain flexible enough to allow for life to get in the way and change things. When things do change, I go with it, knowing that I'm not the director anymore.  It isn't my job to make Christmas perfect, not for me, or for anyone else in my life.  It's my job to do the next right thing, and I often don't know what that is until it's right in front of me.

I'm not perfect at that, either.  I procrastinate about writing this blog, waiting for my Higher Power to give me inspiration.  But my Higher Power can't type.  It's my fingers that roam across the keyboard.

Keep it simple, in life, and especially on Christmas.  I wish you all the blessings of the season.

On Opinions

One of my good friends in AA likes to call AA "Opinions Anonymous". After attending meetings on a daily basis for over a year, I can certainly see why he says that.  Nearly everyone in the rooms has an opinion on how exactly to work the program, and it's generally based on their own experience, or lack thereof.

For instance, today, a man who is not self-identified as an alcoholic spoke up to ask a question in meeting.  This man has been attending AA meetings on what my sponsor calls "the scholarship program".  In other words, he's been nudged by the judge.  He had, through observation in his alcohol education classes, formed the opinion that alcoholics drink because they are bored and if they'd just all get hobbies, everything would be lollipops and puppy dogs.  He then went on to describe his hobbies.  I will take a moment to note that, in spite of this man's hobbies, he still managed to get a DUI and a jail sentence for drinking and driving.

Now, because I'm all enlightened and shit, I do understand that it's very likely that this man is in denial about his own alcoholism.  Very few people cross the threshold of an AA room by accident, even the ones sent there by the court.  But it does highlight for me the very real fact that alcoholism is a disease which is very poorly understood by the general public, alcoholic or not.

As anyone who has been to an AA meeting can imagine, this man was quickly disabused of the laughable notion that alcoholics drink out of boredom and lack of hobbies. Fortunately, this meeting has a large contingent of people with good sobriety in it, so they were kind and informative, but it could have gotten ugly and cruel.  It is not, after all, Well Peoples Anonymous.

I did not drink out of boredom.  I have more hobbies than a toad has warts.  I sewed, crocheting and needle-pointed while shit-faced.  I read and wrote while hammered.  Hell, I hammered and operated power tools when I shouldn't have been trusted with anything more dangerous than a pillow.  I drove, climbed ladders, parented, bailed people out of jail, talked to cops, danced, streaked, screamed, cried, laughed, went to the DMV, went to work, church, weddings and funerals, you name it, all while intoxicated.  In short, if it could be done while awake, I did it drunk.

A true alcoholic does not need an excuse to get drunk.  I got drunk even when I didn't want to get drunk. I couldn't help myself.

This isn't the first time this man has proffered an uninformed opinion at a meeting I've attended.  It's my opinion that he's looking for explanations for his own behavior which don't include the idea that he's an alcoholic. It's my hope that he'll keep coming back until he gets the answer that he needs, whatever that may be.

But for those of us who already know we're alcoholics, there's only one place to go to get answers, and that's the Big Book.  The 12 Steps are the answer to all our dilemmas and questions about our disease, no matter what our experiences.  It's also the place to go to resolve our opinions.  It doesn't always give us the answer we want, but it does give us the answer we need.

The Hocus-Pocus Step

There's nothing quite like working with others to clarify and reinforce the 12 Steps.  I've been working with my new sponsee, and we've just started the third step. It reads as follows: "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood him."

For those who know me, I'm sure it is at least mildly shocking to learn that I have taken this step. My dear husband asked, "You're not going all religious on me, are you?"  I answered, "Not likely."  And it's not.  There's not one whit of religion in this step.  There is only faith that the universe will provide me with exactly what I need, even (or especially) if I don't know what that is.

When I first encountered this step, all my attention was focused on the "turn our will and our lives over to the care of God".  I had over fifty years of self-will behind me and the idea of giving away my will, especially to some nebulous god-creature, was impossible.  Sure, I'd made some bad decisions and some of my thinking was messed up, but hadn't I made some very good decisions?  Hadn't I had some very good thinking, too?  What about all that?

I struggled with this mightily, but the context of this struggle was telling.  You see, I was working my third step in jail.  My self-will run riot had landed me there and my life was a mess.  So, no matter how much I liked to think I was doing a good job running my life, there was strong evidence to the contrary.

Still, as a thinking being, I am all about the proof.  If this step was going to do something for me, I would have to try it on for size.  I could always take my will and my life back later if it didn't work out.  I began saying the Third Step Prayer* over and over again.  Sometimes I shortened it to, "Please help me get out of my own way."

I call this step the Hocus-Pocus Step, because when I was starting to work it, that's exactly what it seemed like, hocus-pocus.  I'd just turn all this stuff over, and *poof*, like magic, life would take care of itself without me.  No more projecting, expecting, scheming and manipulating to make life turn out the way I thought it best would. Hrumph.  Unlikely, right? Nevertheless, I "made a decision" and stepped back to see what would happen.

What happened was nothing short of miraculous.  As soon as I got out of the way and took the role of observer, I started seeing all the crap that I'd been carrying around, all the responsibility I shouldered for things outside of my control, all the guilt I'd manufactured over my transgressions, real and imagined, all the shame over behavior that was the unavoidable symptomology of my disease, and all the crap that wasn't even mine that I'd been lugging around.  The sheer magnitude of it all was staggering.  Who knew?

And that's when the real magic happened.  As the observer, I could see how completely unnecessary all this pain I was causing myself was.  I could see how mercilessly I'd battered myself over even the smallest imagined slight or disappointment.  But, because I was now the actor, and not the director, I could also see that I didn't need this burden anymore, and I began to let go of it.  I literally felt the weight of the world slip away from me.  Before, I'd tried to drink it away, and only succeeded in covering it up for as long as I could remain hammered.  Now I was truly free of it.  I'd made the decision and gotten immediate results.  What more could a self-involved, instant gratification junkie, egotistical narcissist with delusions of grandeur ask for?

One of the most important payoffs of this change was the promise in the Big Book that the desire for alcohol would lift.  It did.  Bear in mind, the drinking thoughts still come now and then.  That's just my disease knocking, hoping I won't see it for what it is and let it in.  But the desire is gone.  Just like they promised, when I think about drinking now, I cringe and shudder.  I "recoil as if from a hot flame".  It's great. I don't have to fight anymore.

No, I don't have any statistical, scientific proof that will satisfy peer review.  Except for me, and millions and millions of other recovered alcoholics who did just what I did and got just what I got.  And that's enough.


*God, I offer myself to thee--to build with me and do with me as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy power, thy love, and thy way of life. May I do thy will always!

Being Led

So much has happened in the past few days that it's hard to know where to begin. When last I left you, I was about to tell my story at a speaker meeting for the first time, so I'll kick off from there.

When I got to the meeting, before I even got inside the door, I was met by my sponsor, her daughter and several friends of mine in the program.  A moment later, another friend came up to me and said she couldn't stay for the meeting, but could I give a woman she'd driven over there a ride home?  I asked who she was, and found out it was someone I knew to be new in the rooms and said yes.  Then my sponsor asked me if I knew the woman I was providing the ride for was drunk, and I said yes, because she was the woman I'd talked to on the phone earlier that day.  She'd been well on her way when I talked to her.

So, my sponsor took the drunk woman in tow, and we all went in to get settled before the meeting. I checked in with the chairperson, then went to the rest room.  I didn't particularly have to go, I just wanted a minute alone with my higher power so I could turn my part of the meeting over and let my words go to the one who needed them.

I don't remember a whole lot of what I said in the meeting. I do know that I didn't find it hard to say what I said, and I remember seeing a lot of nods and smiles and occasional laughter as I recounted my story. I think a lot of people who don't go to meetings think they must be rather serious, and sometimes they are, but more frequently, we laugh, because we are happy people, once we are sober.

After the meeting, I was thanked by some people I knew, and hugged, and then a woman I didn't know came up and introduced herself to me.  She said that she was currently in our local rehab and that I had just told her story.  This is always a good thing, because we need to identify into AA.  We need to know that we are just like other AAs, that we are not alone.  She then asked me to be her temporary sponsor, and I said yes.  She got my contact information, and then my attention returned to the woman I was supposed to take home.

Fortunately, all the way around,  my sponsor had been there to take care of her when I couldn't, and my husband was there to take care of me while I took care of her.  I got her home, kept her from taking meds she shouldn't while she was drunk, and got her into bed.  For the next couple of days, the focus was on her, until it became apparent that, at least right then, she wasn't ready to quit drinking.

The Big Book tells us that we shouldn't expend too much energy on people who aren't ready, because it takes our time and effort away from those we really could be helping.  In the meanwhile, I had a shiny new sponsee who needed my experience, strength and hope.

A sponsor's job is to take the sponsee through the 12 steps while emphasizing the spiritual nature of the program of recovery.  By the second exchange of emails with my sponsee, I learned that she was on the second step, so I've been reviewing that step.  For those unfamiliar, the second step is "We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves would restore us to sanity".

I had already told my sponsor that, in honor of my first year of sobriety, I wanted to go back through the 12 steps.  So, my higher power sent me a sponsee to do that with.  Nothing solidifies the steps better than having to explain them to someone else who is just starting them.  And just in case I needed further review and reminder, the subject of my Monday step meeting was, you guessed it, Step Two.

Today, I had my first meeting with my sponsee and I took her to a meeting.  We spent the time before and after talking.  What I tried to convey to her is simple, as are all great truths. I told her she didn't need to believe in God or a Higher Power, just understand that she was neither, and that what she really needed to believe was that the program of AA could work for her.

That's how I got my second step.  I knew something was wrong with me, I accepted that it was alcoholism and that I couldn't fix it.  I saw other people like me who had what I wanted and that they'd gotten it through the program.  Eventually, I came to believe it could work for me, too.  And I was on to Step Three.

There have been too many "coincidences" this week to enumerate them here, but I do know that I get clues to what is the next right thing to do, when I'm paying attention. All I have to do is ask for them and then be open to where the answer will come from.

They want me(!?!?) to speak?

A few hours from now, I will sit in front of an AA meeting and tell my story for the first time.  It's a speaker meeting, and I'm the invited speaker.

When I accepted the invitation a few weeks ago, I wasn't worried, and I'm still not.  The day I can't talk about myself for just short of an hour is the day someone won't let me.  I'm not bringing notes or an outline or a prepared speech.  The format is simple.  Tell them what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now.

The purpose is simpler still.  I share my experience, strength and hope with others and trust that my higher power will direct my words to the person(s) who needs to hear it most. It is the essence of the AA experience. I consider it a privilege to be asked to speak, and also a duty to accept. Telling my story is a service, and service work keeps me sober and helps others to stay sober as well.

Truthfully, I have thought a little bit about what I'm going to say. I don't think I would be human if I didn't.  But most of what comes to me is the idea that my story is evolving, that it will never be the same from one moment to the next.  So the talk I give this evening will just be a snapshot of the scenery as I trudge the road of happy destiny. That's how it should be, and how I want it to be.  Standing still in sobriety makes me a target for my disease.  It wants me stalled, or comfortable, or self-satisfied.  That makes me vulnerable to the limitless resources it can throw at me to shake my confidence. The last thing I should do is believe that I've beat this thing.  And the first thing I try to do is gather my tribe, my tools, and my leader around me. I never try to do this alone, or unarmed.

Today I took a sobriety call from someone who has not yet managed to string together 24 hours of sobriety. Those calls take me back to the very basics, the minute by minute struggle to stay with the program until the obsession to drink is lifted.  I had to remember what my first days were like, and doing so reminds me that it could be me in that position.  I asked her if she'd eaten.  Hungry, angry, lonely, tired.  Hungry is first.  It is as ground level as remembering to eat something when you're strung out.  Not surprisingly, she hadn't.  We forget to eat when the alcohol is fooling us with empty calories.

I also heard today from someone who has over twenty years of sobriety.  She said that there are times when she has to remember that her disease is alive and well, just waiting for the chance to come back and take over its host once again. Alcoholism is a parasite.  Unchecked, it will rage on, growing stronger and more virulent until it kills me, then it will move on to the next victim, maybe my child, or my neighbor, or my brother.  But it will not rest, for that is how it lives.

So I can't rest either.  I have to live and grow in the program, and live and grow in the world. My story must evolve, the layers of the onion ever peeling as I achieve new understanding of myself, my disease, and my life. I spend one hour of the day in a meeting.  That leaves 23 more that need to be filled with living life.

Today I choose to spend as much of that time as possible in the present, whether I am preparing for the future, repairing the past to the best of my ability, or in the process of doing something new, or something old, but being in the now, whatever that may be.  The program teaches me to focus on doing the next right thing.

The exciting part is that I often don't know what that thing is until it arrives.  So, tonight will be instructive, and not just for those who want to hear my story.  Because I haven't heard it yet either. Wish me luck.

The Good Child

My sponsor often tells me that everyone works the program of AA in their own way. That doesn't mean they don't work the 12 steps, go to meetings or stay away from a drink one day at a time.  Those are the guidelines we all follow that lead to our success as sober, recovering alcoholics. It means that we all approach the basic program from our own individual perspectives. My story is slightly different than the stories of members to my left and to my right.  It might be more similar to your story and it might be less. What unites us are the similarities.  The differences are necessary, however, because no story is entirely unique.  My particular story might resonate with another member enough to help them come to grips with their alcoholism.  Yours might with the next person.

I was the good child growing up.  Or, as my shrink would call it, the "hero" child. I grew up in an alcoholic home that was part of a larger alcoholic family in a larger alcoholic culture that was the norm of my parents and their friends in the 60s. Drinking was a big part of their life and, not knowing any differently, I never thought to question it.  Grownups got drunk, either occasionally or frequently, and that was just the way it was. I didn't know any grownups who didn't.

Because I was a child, when there were problems in the home, I assumed that I was at least partly to blame. So, I strove to be as good as I could be in the hopes that my goodness would solve the problems.  I got straight A's in school, I generally obeyed the rules, was nice to other children, respectful and helpful to adults. If I failed on occasion to live up to those self-created ideals, I was harsh with myself because I knew right from wrong and wrong was bad. The wrongs were magnified far beyond their actual maleficence, and the rights were diminished because to be good was to be what I was supposed to be.  It wasn't something special.

As I grew older and was better able to discern cause and effect, I began to see that people other than me were sometimes to blame for problems. But the conditioning of my early years allowed me to harbor a secret belief that it was still all my fault. So, when it clearly wasn't, I'd get unreasonably angry about the faults of others because they were really mine. On and on, for years upon year, this psychology grew and festered and twisted and branched out, with me at the center, always responsible, ultimately, always to blame, no matter what. No matter how hard I tried to straighten out my world, it never did, because I wasn't in control of other people.  So I was just harder and harder on myself, often to the point that I didn't even realize I was being so.

Up until my thirties, I didn't drink much.  I had periods of my life when I would occasionally abuse alcohol, but I wasn't a daily, weekly, or even monthly drinker until I was about thirty-five. I didn't go on binges, I didn't black out, and I didn't crave alcohol. But about the time my children were nearly grown and my second husband was dying, I started to give up.  The years of mental abuse I'd heaped on myself had taken its toll and I began to drink more and more. By the time my husband died, I was drinking nearly every day.

I didn't think anything of it at the time.  If you'd been going through what I was going through, you'd drink, too, I thought.  And once I'd done my grieving and straightened out my life, things would go back to normal and I wouldn't drink so much. After all, I was the exception to the family rule.  I'd seen all my siblings go through various forms of addiction, and I was the one who'd gotten away.  I'd gotten a free pass from alcoholism.  I was immune.

For fifteen years I drank alcoholically on the premise of that immunity.  I would quit someday, when this happened or that happened, or I finally did this or that.  On the rare occasion that it came to my attention that I really might be an alcoholic, I waved away the thought, because I was immune. I could quit when I wanted, and often did for a day or a week or two.  See? I just didn't want to quit, because I liked drinking.  It's what I did, and eventually, it was who I was.

What I didn't know was what an alcoholic actually was.  But when I got serious about getting sober and started really listening to other alcoholics and reading the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and identifying with it, I eventually realized that I was not the exception. I was just as much of an alcoholic as those who'd been drinking their whole lives.  I count myself lucky that it kicked in late, and that I got out relatively early. But that doesn't make me different.  That just makes me lucky.

I'm still the good child.  I want to do the right thing, and the program of AA helps me to do the right thing more easily and successfully.  The difference is that now I do it knowing that I am not all-powerful and I can only do as much as I can and that is enough.  Sometimes I will fail to do the right thing, and that's ok, too.  It doesn't make me a bad person.  It makes me a human person.  The gift comes in that I'm not being utterly horrible to myself anymore. The bonus is that the gift multiplies in that it makes me better towards others. And we all win.

Another Trip Around the Sun

Tomorrow I will pick up my first anniversary chip as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. It has now been over a year since I quit drinking, but I count from the day I picked up my white chip(the 24-hour chip), October 6, 2009. Until then, I hadn't yet committed to maintaining my sobriety, one day at a time.

If you had told me a year ago that I would be writing these words, I wouldn't have thought it possible. A year ago I was in serious hot water with the law, depressed, scared, and wondering how the hell my life had taken such a dark and dangerous turn. I certainly couldn't see going a year without a drink.  It was all I knew after fifteen years of heavy drinking.

But here I am, and day after day for this entire year I have started and ended my day sober, hundreds of times.  Hundreds. The biggest miracle is not that I have managed, with the help of the AA program, to stop drinking.  It's that I've proven to myself, and others in my life, that people can change.  I haven't just changed my drinking habits, I've changed my thinking.  Those changes have and continue to change my life.

I had a conversation with a friend this morning.  She was feeling bothered about a situation where she knew another alcoholic who was pretending she was still sober when my friend had seen her out drinking.  Early on in my sobriety, that would have bothered me, too. I would have felt righteously indignant that there I was, genuinely sober, and this other person was faking it and getting pats on the back and congratulations she didn't deserve.  Because I was still invested in the rat race, in being better than other people, instead of realizing our shared humanity.  Now I feel sad for the woman who is pretending, because I remember what it feels like to hide your drinking. It's a dark and lonely place.

Yesterday I had a small panic attack. Someone once said that if you think you're enlightened, spend some time with your parents. My mother called with this plan she's hatching and wants my help with.  When my mother gets something in her head, you can't get it out with a jackhammer.  She wants to arrange for my brother, his wife, and his four boisterous children to join the rest of the family here at my house on Thanksgiving. At the time, I could only think of the expense, the inconvenience, and the stress.  It was only later that I thought of the fact that my 79 year old mother might possibly want to get all her children, grandchildren, and her first great-grandchild together for what could be the last time.

I have changed.  Now I try to think things through instead of simply reacting.  I think of others, and not just from the perspective of how I want them to behave or how I want things to work out.  Before AA, the entire world revolved around me and my whim of the moment. Now I realize that not only am I not the queen of the world, but that most of the world doesn't often think of me.  And when they do, it probably isn't what I think they think, good or bad.  Either way, that's none of my business.

In fact, the new me has a new perspective on the whole concept of good and bad.  Things are not inherently good or bad.  They just are.  It's my take on the situation that creates the goodness or badness of it.  My take is flawed, limited by my experience, my capacity to see the relevant factors, and to evaluate those things.  Who am I, really, to judge?  I can only do what I perceive to be the next most right thing I know to do.  I must leave the outcomes to the universe, where all the factors are known and accounted for.

Yes, this change in me is the biggest miracle and greatest blessing of my sobriety.  Practicing the principles in all my affairs lets me be in the world, and not of it.  It lets me live my life, one day at a time, hundreds of times. Best of all, it makes me happy to do so.

So, here's to another trip around the sun.  Let's do it all again tomorrow, shall we?