Sometimes I'm not so sure about the whole sober gig. I'm glad I stopped drinking a while back, and I'm glad I have figured out how to not rely on drinking to get me through things. I needed that, and I still need it. But I get suspicious of the recovery world. It just seems rife with the kind of perfectionism that I'm not sure is helpful, a kind of endless self-improvement project that I don't quite trust and can't buy into. Or maybe it's not perfectionism, but the sense that there is a narrow range of how we can be in order to be OK. Whatever it is, I'm not so sure it's for me.
Every now and then I do a whole batch of reading about moderate drinking. You may know the resources. You may read them, too. When I do, I don't talk about it here, as the word "moderate" seems to call up a heated debate, although the positions are pretty clearly marked out in advance, so not much is gained in the argument. But some people do seem to find a way to drink occasionally, and no, those are not people who keep writing sober blogs, since it's kind of de facto in the sober blog world that sober means abstinent. Another school of thought argues that sober means "not intoxicated" and that doesn't mean absolute abstinence. I'm getting curious about that version of sober.
So I'm writing here to say I'm reading this sort of thing these days, and I'm thinking about it. I don't want a warning, or ominous talk about wolves or witches. And I'm not trying to start a debate. I just want to say I'm reading this stuff, and thinking about it. I might drink again to see how it goes. After more than a year away, and with some good support to help me figure this out for myself (which I have) it might be fine. If it isn't, I'll stop again. If it is, I'll be pleased with that.
This sort of thing upsets lots of people, so this post is a kind of fair warning. Please don't read my blog if this is going to bother you. I'm doing this to find my own way, and writing about what I think is part of my way. About every third post I talk about refusing to edit my posts to fit with some idea of a recovery world that I didn't sign on for. But I do get it: reading someone who has stopped drinking thinking about drinking again can be hard if you're using sober blogs as sober support. So I won't take it badly even if you all go away and I'm left back where I started, writing for myself. Promise!
That's about all I have to say on this for now. All is well here. It's a sunny day in May, the first shorts day for me, and life feels good. Whether you're sticking around for a while or you're leaving, keep well.
Monday, 18 May 2015
Saturday, 9 May 2015
A tough few weeks but still happily sober at 16 months!
The past few weeks have been tough ones, and the one thing I keep thinking is this: I'm so glad I'm not drinking anymore.
A few weeks ago, my partner was in a very bad accident. He is going to be OK, so I can write about it now, though this is my blog not his so I don't want to get into his personal info or his story. But there was some scary hospital stuff and major surgery and long waits to see how things would go, and every time I thought I was handling things OK a doctor would tell me some terrifying thing that had just been ruled out or that there was still some risk of. I spent most of a week at the hospital during the days, and I think the only thing that saved me was walking back and forth to transit stops and coffee shops on the way back and forth to the hospital. There's something about walking that keeps things real, and keeping some grip on the real world was very hard to do in the middle of all that.
A couple of days before he was released, I was running around one evening after I left the hospital trying to get in place some of what we would need to get him set up at home, and I became fixated on getting ice cream. He is on a blender diet for a month or so, and I decided that having ice cream in the house was absolutely critical. I had to go to a different grocery because my usual one was closed, and on the way I walked past the liquor store I used to frequent, which was, of course, open. Now, to say I wasn't tempted to drink would be a massive understatement. As I passed the store, all I could think was that if this had happened two years ago, I would have been drinking wine every night after coming from the hospital, and I would have been in no shape to do what I had to do, whether that was help make decisions or offer emotional support or or get the apartment ready for my partner's convalescence or just take care of myself. Two years ago, I would have used wine to "get me through it." Now that seemed so bizarre to me, and I was incredibly grateful that I am sober and present in my life and able to deal with this difficult stuff for my partner and for myself.
I didn't want to turn the accident into a pat silver lining story. It isn't one. It's just a terrible thing. But terrible things happen sometimes, and we live through them. And I'm not saying I'm all that great for coping. I'm just doing what I have to do, what we all do when there's coping to be done. But I am super 100% get-down-on-my-knees-and-pray thankful that I am sober while all this is going on. And I know my partner will recover from this a whole lot better with me being present and helpful, rather than being in any of the drunk/hungover/emotional-nightmare states that used to be what I called normal life.
I'm hoping to get back to my schoolwork this week because I really need to do that. By now we're ticking along OK here, and I'm learning lots of ways to make interesting and healthy soups and stews that might still taste like something after a whirr in the high-speed blender. (Today's special: potato-leek-bacon in pork stock with a little cream and tarragon. Yum!) This week I passed a sober milestone--16 months sober! Hooray for that! So that's where I am these days: there's plenty of soup and love and healing, and that's getting me through. That and gratitude for being sober and being alive.
Peace and love to you all. Be well.
A few weeks ago, my partner was in a very bad accident. He is going to be OK, so I can write about it now, though this is my blog not his so I don't want to get into his personal info or his story. But there was some scary hospital stuff and major surgery and long waits to see how things would go, and every time I thought I was handling things OK a doctor would tell me some terrifying thing that had just been ruled out or that there was still some risk of. I spent most of a week at the hospital during the days, and I think the only thing that saved me was walking back and forth to transit stops and coffee shops on the way back and forth to the hospital. There's something about walking that keeps things real, and keeping some grip on the real world was very hard to do in the middle of all that.
A couple of days before he was released, I was running around one evening after I left the hospital trying to get in place some of what we would need to get him set up at home, and I became fixated on getting ice cream. He is on a blender diet for a month or so, and I decided that having ice cream in the house was absolutely critical. I had to go to a different grocery because my usual one was closed, and on the way I walked past the liquor store I used to frequent, which was, of course, open. Now, to say I wasn't tempted to drink would be a massive understatement. As I passed the store, all I could think was that if this had happened two years ago, I would have been drinking wine every night after coming from the hospital, and I would have been in no shape to do what I had to do, whether that was help make decisions or offer emotional support or or get the apartment ready for my partner's convalescence or just take care of myself. Two years ago, I would have used wine to "get me through it." Now that seemed so bizarre to me, and I was incredibly grateful that I am sober and present in my life and able to deal with this difficult stuff for my partner and for myself.
I didn't want to turn the accident into a pat silver lining story. It isn't one. It's just a terrible thing. But terrible things happen sometimes, and we live through them. And I'm not saying I'm all that great for coping. I'm just doing what I have to do, what we all do when there's coping to be done. But I am super 100% get-down-on-my-knees-and-pray thankful that I am sober while all this is going on. And I know my partner will recover from this a whole lot better with me being present and helpful, rather than being in any of the drunk/hungover/emotional-nightmare states that used to be what I called normal life.
I'm hoping to get back to my schoolwork this week because I really need to do that. By now we're ticking along OK here, and I'm learning lots of ways to make interesting and healthy soups and stews that might still taste like something after a whirr in the high-speed blender. (Today's special: potato-leek-bacon in pork stock with a little cream and tarragon. Yum!) This week I passed a sober milestone--16 months sober! Hooray for that! So that's where I am these days: there's plenty of soup and love and healing, and that's getting me through. That and gratitude for being sober and being alive.
Peace and love to you all. Be well.
Saturday, 4 April 2015
Resistance and rage: why I don't always trust peace and calm
The last few posts I've written a lot about listening and acceptance. But in many ways I feel as if, for me, getting sober is a tug of war between acceptance and resistance, peace and rage. Talking about acceptance in sober blog circles goes down well, but I'm not always so sure it's OK to talk about resistance. But I'm going to try, as I want to see if I can make some sense of it: what I'm resisting, and why it matters to me.
So what am I resisting? One of the things I've learned about getting sober is that a person goes through a lot of changes. Of course, I am the same person, but I am also becoming a new person. That's wonderful. There's so much promise in it. But there's danger, too. Who do I want to become? I need to think about that, because I believe the methods I use to take care of myself will in part fashion the self I am becoming. Foucault calls this sort of thing "technologies of the self," and after railing against Foucault for ages it turns out I like his work a lot. But you don't have to go to French philosophy to see that the kinds of things you do to change affect the person you become. That's what's at the heart of the "I want what she's got" approach to getting sober. You find someone who you want to be like, and do what they did to become like that.
But often, I seem to need to do the opposite. I have a big dose of, "Please God don't let me end up like that!" Not when I see someone who's struggling. For some reason--and that's what I'm trying to figure out in this post--I react that way when I see someone who has been set up as a guru, someone who I am supposed to want to emulate, a beacon of peace and calm and so on. Confronted with these gurus, all I can see is their faults, and I recoil. And I rage against that as an ideal.
Here's an example. So many of the sober bloggers seem to love Tara Brach. Sometimes I want to love Tara Brach. People I really respect love her and find her helpful. What can't I just love Tara Brach, dammit? But the thing is, I can't stand her. I have tried listening to her online. I bought her book and read it, and a while later I took another look to see if I could take up what I couldn't get the first time. But she tells a story about her kid interrupting her meditation session because he needed a ride to school, and she sounds so precious and feeble, and I wanted to yell at her, "Get a grip lady! Drive the kid to school, admit you're pissed with him, and move on!" Reading her, I get the feeling I'm supposed to beat myself up when I'm not perfect and then use this meditation stuff to alleviate that self-flagellation. But I think, no, just don't beat yourself up in the first place! Clearly I will once in a while be annoyed with the people around me. I don't want to have to set myself up in a protected bubble where I am calm as hell all the time. To me, Brach performs the most horrific mix of Western psychology and self-indulgent buddhism and sanctimoniousness, all in one calm and patient show. And I don't believe her. To me, she looks like she is as tense and angry as all get out. When I watched her video, I want to get her to walk out of that quiet room and come stand on top of a cliff with me and rage at the ocean and the sky for a while, and maybe then when we got tired of yelling we could sit down and laugh at how ridiculous it all is.
I felt the same years ago when a friend gave me her Eckhardt Tolle book to read. His pious calm enraged me! (I didn't want to take Eckhardt out cliff-yelling, so maybe my Tara Brach reaction is a kind of progress.) Ditto my attempt at yoga class. My blood pressure actually increased in the class. I had to go for a walk or a bike ride afterward to calm down. I have tried several times to get back to being Catholic after years away, but the stuff I hear makes me want to stand up and yell at the priest, and I know that's not on. At the AA meetings I've attended, I wanted to call sexism on the chairman's side comments, and the fact that everyone laughed enraged me even more.
Similarly, a lot of what passes as the "science" of psychology infuriates me. So much simply doesn't stand up all that well to criticism, and so much is takes as true because it's spoken by experts. For example, one hears a lot about the virtues of "self-regulation" but self-regulation has a lot in common with becoming more docile, more easily governed. Maybe a little chaos is healthy, then?
Now this might sound like I'm filled with rage all the time. I'm not. But I have a healthy respect for anger and I appreciate that tension and conflict are helpful and productive at times. Anthropologist Ruth Behar writes about "using your subjectivity" as an analytical tool, and maybe that's what I'm trying to do here. One of the things I know about meditation is that I'm supposed to notice my own reactions. Behar adds to that and says, don't just notice what you feel, use your feelings to help give yourself a new perspective on a situation.
And yes, I know, part of the thing is not being attached to those feelings. But aren't they me? How am I supposed to have a personal engagement with the world if I accept that all my feelings and hopes and fears are all going to pass like so much water under some bridge. Yes, some day I'll be dead, but I'm alive now. How do I know I'm alive? I guess in part because I feel something. So come on feelings! Bring them on! Years ago when I was depressed, I didn't have a whole lot of preferences or feelings. These days I have them in spades. And I welcome them. I think they are probably how I know what to make of what's going on around me. I sure don't want to distance myself from all that!
So I guess the resistance I'm talking about is integral to all that listening I've also been talking about. I pay attention when I am enraged, because in that rage I start to get a sense of what I am actually thinking and feeling.
Sometimes I agree with what I read. Recently, I read an article by Simone de Beauvoir in which she rejects the idea that personal happiness is a good basis for a life, on the grounds that happiness is often conflated with "being at rest," which is a kind of death. Instead, she argues from an existential ethical standpoint that freedom is a more worthwhile basis for life decisions. De Beauvoir writes that liberty "is achieved only through a continual reaching out to other liberties" and she seems to condemn acceptance when it means "the brutish life of subjection to given conditions" (in New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 1980, p. 55). Instead, she talks about possibilities. Now that lifts my spirits! I worry about the project of psychology and the ongoing exhortations to psychologize ourselves. What if it just make me docile? Do I really want to accept the world as it is?
Here's my real worry. I am so bloody happy that I quit drinking. It's been almost 15 months now (hooray me!) and I feel a deep sense of the possibilities that life might have that I simply couldn't get to before. That's fabulous. Now that I'm here, I don't want to stagnate in a mire of self-indulgent concerns and shallow self-improvement. I want to find a good way to live, make good choices, contribute to the world. I'm not sure how to do it, but that's my project. I think it's worthwhile. And I think resistance and rage is helpful to me in this. The world is moving in some scary directions, and it might take some spitting rage to help me push back against what feels like a pressure to be calm and docile and accepting.
So for me, that's the other side of acceptance. It's less pretty and poetic, and it's not likely to be popular. And as always, it's possible I'm wrong about everything and I'll learn that in a while. OK. I'm fine with that. But for now, I want to stand on my cliff and yell and say I don't always want to accept things and I will not calm the fuck down and even in my rage I have to say that I am very, very happy about that!
Wishing you love joy and maybe even a healthy dose of rage.
So what am I resisting? One of the things I've learned about getting sober is that a person goes through a lot of changes. Of course, I am the same person, but I am also becoming a new person. That's wonderful. There's so much promise in it. But there's danger, too. Who do I want to become? I need to think about that, because I believe the methods I use to take care of myself will in part fashion the self I am becoming. Foucault calls this sort of thing "technologies of the self," and after railing against Foucault for ages it turns out I like his work a lot. But you don't have to go to French philosophy to see that the kinds of things you do to change affect the person you become. That's what's at the heart of the "I want what she's got" approach to getting sober. You find someone who you want to be like, and do what they did to become like that.
But often, I seem to need to do the opposite. I have a big dose of, "Please God don't let me end up like that!" Not when I see someone who's struggling. For some reason--and that's what I'm trying to figure out in this post--I react that way when I see someone who has been set up as a guru, someone who I am supposed to want to emulate, a beacon of peace and calm and so on. Confronted with these gurus, all I can see is their faults, and I recoil. And I rage against that as an ideal.
Here's an example. So many of the sober bloggers seem to love Tara Brach. Sometimes I want to love Tara Brach. People I really respect love her and find her helpful. What can't I just love Tara Brach, dammit? But the thing is, I can't stand her. I have tried listening to her online. I bought her book and read it, and a while later I took another look to see if I could take up what I couldn't get the first time. But she tells a story about her kid interrupting her meditation session because he needed a ride to school, and she sounds so precious and feeble, and I wanted to yell at her, "Get a grip lady! Drive the kid to school, admit you're pissed with him, and move on!" Reading her, I get the feeling I'm supposed to beat myself up when I'm not perfect and then use this meditation stuff to alleviate that self-flagellation. But I think, no, just don't beat yourself up in the first place! Clearly I will once in a while be annoyed with the people around me. I don't want to have to set myself up in a protected bubble where I am calm as hell all the time. To me, Brach performs the most horrific mix of Western psychology and self-indulgent buddhism and sanctimoniousness, all in one calm and patient show. And I don't believe her. To me, she looks like she is as tense and angry as all get out. When I watched her video, I want to get her to walk out of that quiet room and come stand on top of a cliff with me and rage at the ocean and the sky for a while, and maybe then when we got tired of yelling we could sit down and laugh at how ridiculous it all is.
I felt the same years ago when a friend gave me her Eckhardt Tolle book to read. His pious calm enraged me! (I didn't want to take Eckhardt out cliff-yelling, so maybe my Tara Brach reaction is a kind of progress.) Ditto my attempt at yoga class. My blood pressure actually increased in the class. I had to go for a walk or a bike ride afterward to calm down. I have tried several times to get back to being Catholic after years away, but the stuff I hear makes me want to stand up and yell at the priest, and I know that's not on. At the AA meetings I've attended, I wanted to call sexism on the chairman's side comments, and the fact that everyone laughed enraged me even more.
Similarly, a lot of what passes as the "science" of psychology infuriates me. So much simply doesn't stand up all that well to criticism, and so much is takes as true because it's spoken by experts. For example, one hears a lot about the virtues of "self-regulation" but self-regulation has a lot in common with becoming more docile, more easily governed. Maybe a little chaos is healthy, then?
Now this might sound like I'm filled with rage all the time. I'm not. But I have a healthy respect for anger and I appreciate that tension and conflict are helpful and productive at times. Anthropologist Ruth Behar writes about "using your subjectivity" as an analytical tool, and maybe that's what I'm trying to do here. One of the things I know about meditation is that I'm supposed to notice my own reactions. Behar adds to that and says, don't just notice what you feel, use your feelings to help give yourself a new perspective on a situation.
And yes, I know, part of the thing is not being attached to those feelings. But aren't they me? How am I supposed to have a personal engagement with the world if I accept that all my feelings and hopes and fears are all going to pass like so much water under some bridge. Yes, some day I'll be dead, but I'm alive now. How do I know I'm alive? I guess in part because I feel something. So come on feelings! Bring them on! Years ago when I was depressed, I didn't have a whole lot of preferences or feelings. These days I have them in spades. And I welcome them. I think they are probably how I know what to make of what's going on around me. I sure don't want to distance myself from all that!
So I guess the resistance I'm talking about is integral to all that listening I've also been talking about. I pay attention when I am enraged, because in that rage I start to get a sense of what I am actually thinking and feeling.
Sometimes I agree with what I read. Recently, I read an article by Simone de Beauvoir in which she rejects the idea that personal happiness is a good basis for a life, on the grounds that happiness is often conflated with "being at rest," which is a kind of death. Instead, she argues from an existential ethical standpoint that freedom is a more worthwhile basis for life decisions. De Beauvoir writes that liberty "is achieved only through a continual reaching out to other liberties" and she seems to condemn acceptance when it means "the brutish life of subjection to given conditions" (in New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 1980, p. 55). Instead, she talks about possibilities. Now that lifts my spirits! I worry about the project of psychology and the ongoing exhortations to psychologize ourselves. What if it just make me docile? Do I really want to accept the world as it is?
Here's my real worry. I am so bloody happy that I quit drinking. It's been almost 15 months now (hooray me!) and I feel a deep sense of the possibilities that life might have that I simply couldn't get to before. That's fabulous. Now that I'm here, I don't want to stagnate in a mire of self-indulgent concerns and shallow self-improvement. I want to find a good way to live, make good choices, contribute to the world. I'm not sure how to do it, but that's my project. I think it's worthwhile. And I think resistance and rage is helpful to me in this. The world is moving in some scary directions, and it might take some spitting rage to help me push back against what feels like a pressure to be calm and docile and accepting.
So for me, that's the other side of acceptance. It's less pretty and poetic, and it's not likely to be popular. And as always, it's possible I'm wrong about everything and I'll learn that in a while. OK. I'm fine with that. But for now, I want to stand on my cliff and yell and say I don't always want to accept things and I will not calm the fuck down and even in my rage I have to say that I am very, very happy about that!
Wishing you love joy and maybe even a healthy dose of rage.
Saturday, 14 March 2015
Real life, real sober! (And some real graffiti!)
Still here, still finding my way. I was away at a conference and busy with school, but I see it's been a month since I posted. It's so unlike me, this silence!
Recently I had written about going to meetings. I think the program is great, and I see the benefit of it. But, for now anyway, it's not for me. I tried for a month, and honestly, though I had some moments of feeling connected with people across the room, I mainly felt alienated and isolated. Now I know, I know, I may be bringing that on myself. But I am me, and I don't think I can just become someone else to make something work out for me. I am a big fan of trying on new perspectives to see if I can take up new ways of thinking and being. But I have a strong sense of when it feels more like fakery than a new way of thinking, and that's how I was feeling with the meetings.
There are a few things behind this, I think. Nearly everyone there spoke about how they came to a meeting out of sheer desperation. And I don't feel that these days. It's as if I missed my window there, when I could just be open and desperate and maybe connection would flow. People who came in looking desperate seemed to have people flock to them. But that's not my situation these days. Many people at the meetings seemed to know and like each other, so there was warmth and hugs and hilarity shared among them. Others, like me, came in and sat and left with almost no interaction. But what I didn't see was how to cross that chasm-- how to get from being isolated to being included. The last meeting I went to, I had made a deal with myself that I would talk to someone there, and I did. But it wasn't welcomed, and the person turned back to someone else right away after I introduced myself, obviously wanting to talk to someone she knew already and not a new person. It was a bit like high school for me, in the worst kind of way. I hear stories of warmth and acceptance and I know they exist. But that wasn't my experience.
I don't know. After a while, I was feeling more like an ethnographer than I was like a person. That's not fair to the other people in the room (who are people in their own right, not interesting specimens) but it's also not fair to me, because it removes me too much from my own experience. I've had enough alienation in my life, ad I don't intend to court more of it. Also, I had that classic thing people talk about, feeling like I am not as bad off as the people who told their stories, and I am therefore some kind of impostor. I know, the point is I'm supposed to focus on the similarities and not the differences. And I did. But I can't check my critical thinking at the door, and I can't help but see that there are many differences as well as many similarities. It's not that I think I'm a better person because my situation is different than others. But the "not yet" argument doesn't help me, either. I know things could have gone differently for me. They could yet. I have met many people who suffer(ed) from many different kinds of addiction and abuse and homelessness. I think it might do a disservice to me and to them to say that we are dealing with essentially the same problem. I may be wrong about this. But it's where I am these days.
Also, at meetings, the stories were often told in a way that was designed to entertain the audience. As you know if you're reading here, I resist the impulse to frame my thinking in an entertaining narrative. I could go on about lots of dramatic things that have happened to me, and link them to my drinking, but I'm not sure they're all related, to be honest. I think many people get a lot out of stories that talk about how bad things were. Frankly, I never read them, and I avoid telling them. And I don't want to start, either.
But there's another thing too, and I want to say that clearly for myself if for no one else. I have been very much supported by the blog world--in writing and reading and participating in ongoing exchanges with people I have come to admire and care about deeply, all online. And that's real life, too. I wonder whether I have been deprecating that a little in my (admittedly small) attempt to find an in-person community. Yes, I need real people. My (truly wonderful) partner has been with me in this since the beginning, and he gets this addiction/alcoholism thing as much as anyone can, though it's not a problem he deals with himself. I've also told a few friends and my sister, and they have been supportive and helpful. I get that you have to give it up a bit to get people onside, so I have told some people how things were for me, and why I quit, and how it's worked. But I've done that sparingly. I don't want to be defined by it, any more than I wanted to be defined by other problems I've faced in my past.
This morning, on another blog, I saw a comment that said something like, "Blogs are nice but they don't keep you sober." I appreciate that the comment was made in a different context, and I didn't want to weigh in with my opinion in a place that it would not be appropriate. Just the same, here on my own blog, I want to respectfully disagree with that sentiment. Blogs are more than "nice." By fully participating in this blog world, I have got sober and stayed sober for 14 months and counting. Part of this success may be that I'm highly imaginative, so I have no trouble thinking of the people who blog as real people, just as I often think of book characters as real people. Part is luck, maybe. Part of it is being analytical. I look at what has worked for people and try those things, and I look at what doesn't work and note those. I see that different things work for different people, so I try things out and see what works and keep on with those practices, and I keep trying to find new ways of thinking and doing. I really do think this getting and staying sober isn't something I could have done or could do alone. But I also really don't think I am alone here when I'm online. You're all here too, sometimes reading and commenting, sometimes writing other posts that resonate with me or linking to something I've said that opens up new ways of thinking and being for you and for me, too. I love that. So maybe this post is just to stand my ground here and say, actually, blogs are real life too, and yes, they can get you sober and keep you sober. They might not work for everyone, and of course it makes sense to keep trying new things to see what works. But they can and do work. I am sitting here in my living room wearing a stripey shirt and jeans and blue woolie slippers, sipping tea and typing. Today I went to the farmers' market and the butcher shop, and later I will do a whole lot of reading for school, and then go for a long walk. I guarantee you, I am real. And I am sure if you're reading, you're real, too. (Unless you're a clickbot. If so, hello clickbot! Welcome!)
That said, I really am trying to find ways of being with people, so I'm trying a few other things. I have joined with some people in starting an academic reading group, and that's another whole new way of learning to listen to people and listen to currents in the room. So far that's been going well, though it's a challenge. Also, after having declaimed against meditation, I signed up for a zen training class, as I see that might be a way for me to practice deep listening in a different context. I'm up for trying things. But I wanted to write this to make the point, for myself, and for anyone else it might help, that what I'm doing is actually working, and it does seem to work for some people. Not for everyone. None of us is everyone. But we are all someone.
In the spirit of keeping it real, I thought I'd share a real life picture I took yesterday, evidence of other real folk out there. Looks like some badass sober tagger has been hitting the streets! This made me smile:
Peace and love to you all, bloggers and readers and meeting-goers and everyone else. And you, too, you lovely sober taggers! Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here.
Recently I had written about going to meetings. I think the program is great, and I see the benefit of it. But, for now anyway, it's not for me. I tried for a month, and honestly, though I had some moments of feeling connected with people across the room, I mainly felt alienated and isolated. Now I know, I know, I may be bringing that on myself. But I am me, and I don't think I can just become someone else to make something work out for me. I am a big fan of trying on new perspectives to see if I can take up new ways of thinking and being. But I have a strong sense of when it feels more like fakery than a new way of thinking, and that's how I was feeling with the meetings.
There are a few things behind this, I think. Nearly everyone there spoke about how they came to a meeting out of sheer desperation. And I don't feel that these days. It's as if I missed my window there, when I could just be open and desperate and maybe connection would flow. People who came in looking desperate seemed to have people flock to them. But that's not my situation these days. Many people at the meetings seemed to know and like each other, so there was warmth and hugs and hilarity shared among them. Others, like me, came in and sat and left with almost no interaction. But what I didn't see was how to cross that chasm-- how to get from being isolated to being included. The last meeting I went to, I had made a deal with myself that I would talk to someone there, and I did. But it wasn't welcomed, and the person turned back to someone else right away after I introduced myself, obviously wanting to talk to someone she knew already and not a new person. It was a bit like high school for me, in the worst kind of way. I hear stories of warmth and acceptance and I know they exist. But that wasn't my experience.
I don't know. After a while, I was feeling more like an ethnographer than I was like a person. That's not fair to the other people in the room (who are people in their own right, not interesting specimens) but it's also not fair to me, because it removes me too much from my own experience. I've had enough alienation in my life, ad I don't intend to court more of it. Also, I had that classic thing people talk about, feeling like I am not as bad off as the people who told their stories, and I am therefore some kind of impostor. I know, the point is I'm supposed to focus on the similarities and not the differences. And I did. But I can't check my critical thinking at the door, and I can't help but see that there are many differences as well as many similarities. It's not that I think I'm a better person because my situation is different than others. But the "not yet" argument doesn't help me, either. I know things could have gone differently for me. They could yet. I have met many people who suffer(ed) from many different kinds of addiction and abuse and homelessness. I think it might do a disservice to me and to them to say that we are dealing with essentially the same problem. I may be wrong about this. But it's where I am these days.
Also, at meetings, the stories were often told in a way that was designed to entertain the audience. As you know if you're reading here, I resist the impulse to frame my thinking in an entertaining narrative. I could go on about lots of dramatic things that have happened to me, and link them to my drinking, but I'm not sure they're all related, to be honest. I think many people get a lot out of stories that talk about how bad things were. Frankly, I never read them, and I avoid telling them. And I don't want to start, either.
But there's another thing too, and I want to say that clearly for myself if for no one else. I have been very much supported by the blog world--in writing and reading and participating in ongoing exchanges with people I have come to admire and care about deeply, all online. And that's real life, too. I wonder whether I have been deprecating that a little in my (admittedly small) attempt to find an in-person community. Yes, I need real people. My (truly wonderful) partner has been with me in this since the beginning, and he gets this addiction/alcoholism thing as much as anyone can, though it's not a problem he deals with himself. I've also told a few friends and my sister, and they have been supportive and helpful. I get that you have to give it up a bit to get people onside, so I have told some people how things were for me, and why I quit, and how it's worked. But I've done that sparingly. I don't want to be defined by it, any more than I wanted to be defined by other problems I've faced in my past.
This morning, on another blog, I saw a comment that said something like, "Blogs are nice but they don't keep you sober." I appreciate that the comment was made in a different context, and I didn't want to weigh in with my opinion in a place that it would not be appropriate. Just the same, here on my own blog, I want to respectfully disagree with that sentiment. Blogs are more than "nice." By fully participating in this blog world, I have got sober and stayed sober for 14 months and counting. Part of this success may be that I'm highly imaginative, so I have no trouble thinking of the people who blog as real people, just as I often think of book characters as real people. Part is luck, maybe. Part of it is being analytical. I look at what has worked for people and try those things, and I look at what doesn't work and note those. I see that different things work for different people, so I try things out and see what works and keep on with those practices, and I keep trying to find new ways of thinking and doing. I really do think this getting and staying sober isn't something I could have done or could do alone. But I also really don't think I am alone here when I'm online. You're all here too, sometimes reading and commenting, sometimes writing other posts that resonate with me or linking to something I've said that opens up new ways of thinking and being for you and for me, too. I love that. So maybe this post is just to stand my ground here and say, actually, blogs are real life too, and yes, they can get you sober and keep you sober. They might not work for everyone, and of course it makes sense to keep trying new things to see what works. But they can and do work. I am sitting here in my living room wearing a stripey shirt and jeans and blue woolie slippers, sipping tea and typing. Today I went to the farmers' market and the butcher shop, and later I will do a whole lot of reading for school, and then go for a long walk. I guarantee you, I am real. And I am sure if you're reading, you're real, too. (Unless you're a clickbot. If so, hello clickbot! Welcome!)
That said, I really am trying to find ways of being with people, so I'm trying a few other things. I have joined with some people in starting an academic reading group, and that's another whole new way of learning to listen to people and listen to currents in the room. So far that's been going well, though it's a challenge. Also, after having declaimed against meditation, I signed up for a zen training class, as I see that might be a way for me to practice deep listening in a different context. I'm up for trying things. But I wanted to write this to make the point, for myself, and for anyone else it might help, that what I'm doing is actually working, and it does seem to work for some people. Not for everyone. None of us is everyone. But we are all someone.
In the spirit of keeping it real, I thought I'd share a real life picture I took yesterday, evidence of other real folk out there. Looks like some badass sober tagger has been hitting the streets! This made me smile:
Peace and love to you all, bloggers and readers and meeting-goers and everyone else. And you, too, you lovely sober taggers! Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here.
Saturday, 7 February 2015
Listening to others, listening to myself
I went to another meeting. Once again, nothing terrifying happened. I think I was right that putting myself face to face (or rather side by side) with other people is something I need to do. I didn't actually talk to anyone or anything as bold as that. There's no hurry. What I did do is listen to the people who spoke, and watch the people in the room, and notice my reactions. And that was illuminating.
Here's what I noticed: my reactions to being there swung wildly back and forth between thinking it was a good idea to vowing I could never come back. And that was just in the five minutes or so before the meeting started, when I was just sitting in a chair, waiting. Also, I was watching people get settled, deciding who I thought was interesting and who wasn't. How hilarious is that? Apparently I know this sort of thing about people on first glance. I didn't know I did that! I caught myself thinking all this, and realized I was reacting to everyone else because I was nervous, and it's way easier to decide who's great and who isn't based on appearances than it is to just feel nervous, isn't it? So for a couple of minutes, I was just uncomfortably nervous. And I survived.
The meeting started when someone read a text, and I once again reacted strongly to the words. Oh, I could argue with that text! But I looked around, and I could see that lots of people seemed to be sitting politely but not getting all caught up in the words, so I thought maybe I could do that, too. I just ignored it, thinking maybe that's not for me right now. No argument required.
Then some guy talked. I managed to stop myself see-sawing between thinking "I belong here" and "I am never coming back" and actually listen. And he said some things that really helped me. Yesterday, Primrose wrote what I thought was a great post about being willing to change, and how that seems to have to include getting connected to other people. I loved what she had to say there. The speaker talked about such similar stuff, so it really resonated with me. Then a few other people spoke, and at different points, everyone said something that struck me deeply. One woman talked about Carl Jung as having said (quoting roughly), 'If you find spirituality in the second half of your life, the first half was worth it.' At that, both me and the young woman next to me teared up and caught each other's eyes for a moment, and smiled. Hard to say why that was so powerful, because the words don't cover it. Words matter, but this is about way more than the words. The experience of sitting listening with people is where the power comes from. I'm not much given to certainty, but I feel sure of this.
A number of years ago, I used to do some serious Zen meditation, but I decided sitting meditation wasn't for me. I spend enough time alone in my own mind, so silently observing my thoughts any more than I do can send me into a spiral that isn't so great for me. More recently, I have tried to listen to the various meditation gurus that get talked about on sober blogs, but they just make me angry. And yes, I know that anger is all about me, not them, but that doesn't stop it from happening. But I try to use the zen training in my own way. For me, it's better to watch my thoughts while I'm out walking or biking, or when I'm sitting in a classroom. It's a kind of meditation in action, and it suits me better. Seeing how I react in real time, that's what I've been trying to do.
And on that score, I think the meeting was good. Because just listening and paying close attention to my own reactions showed me how wildly I do react to what people say, or just the way they look, how quickly I jump on some opinion in my mind, even while I seem calm and balanced. And I could see that when I get uncomfortable, I am very, very quick to interpret my discomfort as disliking someone or something. It's easier, right? If some person or event is annoying and that's why I'm annoyed then I have a kind of equilibrium. It's false, though. And when I caught myself getting annoyed--as I did about a hundred times in the hour--instead of falling into believing that the person talking was at fault, I was able to notice my reaction, and accept that I was feeling uncomfortable, and then try to open my heart to my own discomfort and to the person speaking. And in that openness, sometimes I felt connected. The speakers were uncomfortable sometimes, too. And sometimes they were funny, and everybody laughed. More than once most people were in tears, as was I. Whatever was happening, we all seemed to sit in it together, sharing a little bit of human connection on a rainy Saturday morning.
While I was there, I realized that today I am 13 months sober. It was nice to quietly share that in person with people who would get it. And I did feel like I was sharing it, even though I didn't talk to anyone. So that's my second meeting. I still don't know my way about in all this, but I think I'm OK with that. I'm paying attention, anyway, and sitting with other people. And maybe that's enough.
Thanks for reading. Peace and joy to you. And love.
Here's what I noticed: my reactions to being there swung wildly back and forth between thinking it was a good idea to vowing I could never come back. And that was just in the five minutes or so before the meeting started, when I was just sitting in a chair, waiting. Also, I was watching people get settled, deciding who I thought was interesting and who wasn't. How hilarious is that? Apparently I know this sort of thing about people on first glance. I didn't know I did that! I caught myself thinking all this, and realized I was reacting to everyone else because I was nervous, and it's way easier to decide who's great and who isn't based on appearances than it is to just feel nervous, isn't it? So for a couple of minutes, I was just uncomfortably nervous. And I survived.
The meeting started when someone read a text, and I once again reacted strongly to the words. Oh, I could argue with that text! But I looked around, and I could see that lots of people seemed to be sitting politely but not getting all caught up in the words, so I thought maybe I could do that, too. I just ignored it, thinking maybe that's not for me right now. No argument required.
Then some guy talked. I managed to stop myself see-sawing between thinking "I belong here" and "I am never coming back" and actually listen. And he said some things that really helped me. Yesterday, Primrose wrote what I thought was a great post about being willing to change, and how that seems to have to include getting connected to other people. I loved what she had to say there. The speaker talked about such similar stuff, so it really resonated with me. Then a few other people spoke, and at different points, everyone said something that struck me deeply. One woman talked about Carl Jung as having said (quoting roughly), 'If you find spirituality in the second half of your life, the first half was worth it.' At that, both me and the young woman next to me teared up and caught each other's eyes for a moment, and smiled. Hard to say why that was so powerful, because the words don't cover it. Words matter, but this is about way more than the words. The experience of sitting listening with people is where the power comes from. I'm not much given to certainty, but I feel sure of this.
A number of years ago, I used to do some serious Zen meditation, but I decided sitting meditation wasn't for me. I spend enough time alone in my own mind, so silently observing my thoughts any more than I do can send me into a spiral that isn't so great for me. More recently, I have tried to listen to the various meditation gurus that get talked about on sober blogs, but they just make me angry. And yes, I know that anger is all about me, not them, but that doesn't stop it from happening. But I try to use the zen training in my own way. For me, it's better to watch my thoughts while I'm out walking or biking, or when I'm sitting in a classroom. It's a kind of meditation in action, and it suits me better. Seeing how I react in real time, that's what I've been trying to do.
And on that score, I think the meeting was good. Because just listening and paying close attention to my own reactions showed me how wildly I do react to what people say, or just the way they look, how quickly I jump on some opinion in my mind, even while I seem calm and balanced. And I could see that when I get uncomfortable, I am very, very quick to interpret my discomfort as disliking someone or something. It's easier, right? If some person or event is annoying and that's why I'm annoyed then I have a kind of equilibrium. It's false, though. And when I caught myself getting annoyed--as I did about a hundred times in the hour--instead of falling into believing that the person talking was at fault, I was able to notice my reaction, and accept that I was feeling uncomfortable, and then try to open my heart to my own discomfort and to the person speaking. And in that openness, sometimes I felt connected. The speakers were uncomfortable sometimes, too. And sometimes they were funny, and everybody laughed. More than once most people were in tears, as was I. Whatever was happening, we all seemed to sit in it together, sharing a little bit of human connection on a rainy Saturday morning.
While I was there, I realized that today I am 13 months sober. It was nice to quietly share that in person with people who would get it. And I did feel like I was sharing it, even though I didn't talk to anyone. So that's my second meeting. I still don't know my way about in all this, but I think I'm OK with that. I'm paying attention, anyway, and sitting with other people. And maybe that's enough.
Thanks for reading. Peace and joy to you. And love.
Saturday, 31 January 2015
Other people
I'm starting to think I'm in a second stage of getting sober, or of being sober. The first year, it was all about how to live with myself. I was pretty big on acceptance all year long. And that's going to be an ongoing process, but I tell you, I'm doing a lot better now on that score than I was a year ago. But these past few weeks, there's something new going on, and I think it's a different kind of acceptance: accepting other people. Lately, I'm paying more attention to learning how to live with others, something it seems I don't know all that much about.
People have said that things shift once you get a little sober time. And they do. I'm less reactive than I was. I feel myself getting caught in problems, but it's slower, and I have some time to pull away and think. But a few months ago, I got kind of swamped by the emotional tensions in a group situation that weren't all that much of my own making, and I didn't see it clearly until well after the fact. I tried to talk to a counsellor about this, but I felt like I talking wasn't going to be the answer on this one. The thing is, I think I don't much know how to be with other people. There are exceptions, of course. My partner and I have a great relationship, and I get on well very with his family, and I have some friends who I genuinely feel close to. But these all seem like exceptions to me. In the general run of things, when I am in a group of people, I often feel as though I am somehow a little off to one side, as though I'm somehow not really there. Classes are usually an exception to this, because then I'm engaging intellectually, and I'm very comfortable in that realm, as long as it stays there. But when the situation is more social or emotional, I don't quite know how it's supposed to go. I used to call this doing "people as a second language," and I have probably written about that here before. Like lots of people working in a second language, I can do it, but I'm not completely fluent. I don't always know the idioms. What happens next?
None of this is new to me. But now, I've been sober just over a year. (And that only came after kicking against the fears and the wisdom of other people on the folly of drinking again and then realizing, after drinking, that it didn't much matter what they said. Booze was sucking the life out of me. The very life.) Now, sober, I'm feeling that my sense of alienation is a restriction I don't much need anymore. I don't quite know how to get rid of it, but I do think that's the next thing I need to work on.
Blogging has been amazing for me. It's let me learn from others and figure things out for myself and get to know some amazing people online. Still, when I'm here, I am sitting alone in a room, typing. I have laughed and cried and felt real warmth from people online. But that's not the same thing as being in the same room as other people and feeling that. It's not bad, and it's not fake. It's just one step removed, somehow. When sober bloggers have met face to face, and talked about how amazing the experience has been, I've felt envious. And when people who attend meetings talk about fellowship, I have felt a longing for something like that.
Anyway, I decided to do something about this, something more direct than thinking about it or talking about it. So I went to a meeting. And it was all right. Yes, I was nervous. But it felt pretty good to sit in a room full of people, all in different stages of dealing with pretty much the same problem. People had all different kinds of ways of listening to the speaker. Some were entranced. Some fidgeted. Some smiled in recognition at different bits that were said, and some looked at each other significantly. As it happens, I liked the main speaker, and felt a kind of connection to her story. She was talking about living in her head for so long, and how she has had to learn to live in her body, too. Now that doesn't sound like much when I repeat it. But it was powerful, sitting in the same room, feeling connected. There were a lot of people and I was nearly late, so I sat near the back and off to one side. I could barely see the front of the room, as there were maybe a hundred people there! (So many alcoholics! Who knew?) At one point, someone in front of me shifted how she was sitting, and I had a direct view of the speaker. And I had one of those moments I sometimes have, where the world seems to break open for a moment, and everything feels different. It's hard to describe, but it happens to me sometimes, moments like this. I have come to think of them as grace, maybe. Time slows down, and everything sounds different, clearer, and the world seems to glow. Or maybe vibrate. Anyway, at the meeting, I had one of those moments, and in that moment, I felt like the woman at the table in the front of the room was speaking directly to me. And I was listening.
Of course, she was speaking to everyone. Soon the crowd shifted slightly and I couldn't see anymore, and the room settled back to normal. Then some guy talked, and he was annoying, the way people sometimes are, and that was fine, too. Afterward, I didn't stay and chat with anyone. This was enough for me for one day. I think I will go back though. There is something here for me to learn. And I think it's a kind of physical learning, something I just can't get from reading or writing, as good as those things are. I know we are a social species, and there's a lot about the non-verbal ways we communicate that's not so well understood. Of course, I would like to understand it. But the most important thing might be for me to actually experience being with others, being a part of something they are also a part of, and not trying all that much to figure out how it works.
I've been reading a little of the Belgian philosopher, Isabelle Stengers, and in one interview she talks about the "care of the possible," something she takes from William James. I like that a lot. Her point, as I understand it, is that we pass over so much experience, but a different approach might be to consider the possibilities that our actual experience opens for us, rather than only acknowledging what we accept as the facts. (I have not at all done justice to Stengers' wonderful work here, but I am making sense of the world with it as best I can, and I'm OK with that.) I used to care a lot about what was called addiction and what wasn't, and whether I was an alcoholic or not. When I thought about those things, I thought about them as if they were somehow real categories, things that either applied to me, in truth, or did not. I think this is the way we are taught to think. Now I am trying something different. It seems to me that "alcoholic" is a pretty good concept, in that it opens the door to a new way of life, once you accept it. If you don't like it, don't worry. Find a concept that works for you. And in going to a meeting, I'm not worrying too much about any single version of the truth. I expect the truth is more in the practice, in the experience of getting together with people and listening to them (and yes, one day maybe even talking to someone there!) What I need to learn from it is more in the experience of being with the others, and feeling a glimmer of belonging. The experience of that, not the objective proof of it's efficacy.
I'll see how it all goes. This feels like a new kind of acceptance to me, one that includes other people: their wisdom and their follies, yes, but mostly their very presence.
This was a bit more complicated to write about than I had thought it might be, and I'm not sure it's all clear, even to me. I'm just figuring this out. So if you're still here, thanks for reading! Peace and joy to you. xo
People have said that things shift once you get a little sober time. And they do. I'm less reactive than I was. I feel myself getting caught in problems, but it's slower, and I have some time to pull away and think. But a few months ago, I got kind of swamped by the emotional tensions in a group situation that weren't all that much of my own making, and I didn't see it clearly until well after the fact. I tried to talk to a counsellor about this, but I felt like I talking wasn't going to be the answer on this one. The thing is, I think I don't much know how to be with other people. There are exceptions, of course. My partner and I have a great relationship, and I get on well very with his family, and I have some friends who I genuinely feel close to. But these all seem like exceptions to me. In the general run of things, when I am in a group of people, I often feel as though I am somehow a little off to one side, as though I'm somehow not really there. Classes are usually an exception to this, because then I'm engaging intellectually, and I'm very comfortable in that realm, as long as it stays there. But when the situation is more social or emotional, I don't quite know how it's supposed to go. I used to call this doing "people as a second language," and I have probably written about that here before. Like lots of people working in a second language, I can do it, but I'm not completely fluent. I don't always know the idioms. What happens next?
None of this is new to me. But now, I've been sober just over a year. (And that only came after kicking against the fears and the wisdom of other people on the folly of drinking again and then realizing, after drinking, that it didn't much matter what they said. Booze was sucking the life out of me. The very life.) Now, sober, I'm feeling that my sense of alienation is a restriction I don't much need anymore. I don't quite know how to get rid of it, but I do think that's the next thing I need to work on.
Blogging has been amazing for me. It's let me learn from others and figure things out for myself and get to know some amazing people online. Still, when I'm here, I am sitting alone in a room, typing. I have laughed and cried and felt real warmth from people online. But that's not the same thing as being in the same room as other people and feeling that. It's not bad, and it's not fake. It's just one step removed, somehow. When sober bloggers have met face to face, and talked about how amazing the experience has been, I've felt envious. And when people who attend meetings talk about fellowship, I have felt a longing for something like that.
Anyway, I decided to do something about this, something more direct than thinking about it or talking about it. So I went to a meeting. And it was all right. Yes, I was nervous. But it felt pretty good to sit in a room full of people, all in different stages of dealing with pretty much the same problem. People had all different kinds of ways of listening to the speaker. Some were entranced. Some fidgeted. Some smiled in recognition at different bits that were said, and some looked at each other significantly. As it happens, I liked the main speaker, and felt a kind of connection to her story. She was talking about living in her head for so long, and how she has had to learn to live in her body, too. Now that doesn't sound like much when I repeat it. But it was powerful, sitting in the same room, feeling connected. There were a lot of people and I was nearly late, so I sat near the back and off to one side. I could barely see the front of the room, as there were maybe a hundred people there! (So many alcoholics! Who knew?) At one point, someone in front of me shifted how she was sitting, and I had a direct view of the speaker. And I had one of those moments I sometimes have, where the world seems to break open for a moment, and everything feels different. It's hard to describe, but it happens to me sometimes, moments like this. I have come to think of them as grace, maybe. Time slows down, and everything sounds different, clearer, and the world seems to glow. Or maybe vibrate. Anyway, at the meeting, I had one of those moments, and in that moment, I felt like the woman at the table in the front of the room was speaking directly to me. And I was listening.
Of course, she was speaking to everyone. Soon the crowd shifted slightly and I couldn't see anymore, and the room settled back to normal. Then some guy talked, and he was annoying, the way people sometimes are, and that was fine, too. Afterward, I didn't stay and chat with anyone. This was enough for me for one day. I think I will go back though. There is something here for me to learn. And I think it's a kind of physical learning, something I just can't get from reading or writing, as good as those things are. I know we are a social species, and there's a lot about the non-verbal ways we communicate that's not so well understood. Of course, I would like to understand it. But the most important thing might be for me to actually experience being with others, being a part of something they are also a part of, and not trying all that much to figure out how it works.
I've been reading a little of the Belgian philosopher, Isabelle Stengers, and in one interview she talks about the "care of the possible," something she takes from William James. I like that a lot. Her point, as I understand it, is that we pass over so much experience, but a different approach might be to consider the possibilities that our actual experience opens for us, rather than only acknowledging what we accept as the facts. (I have not at all done justice to Stengers' wonderful work here, but I am making sense of the world with it as best I can, and I'm OK with that.) I used to care a lot about what was called addiction and what wasn't, and whether I was an alcoholic or not. When I thought about those things, I thought about them as if they were somehow real categories, things that either applied to me, in truth, or did not. I think this is the way we are taught to think. Now I am trying something different. It seems to me that "alcoholic" is a pretty good concept, in that it opens the door to a new way of life, once you accept it. If you don't like it, don't worry. Find a concept that works for you. And in going to a meeting, I'm not worrying too much about any single version of the truth. I expect the truth is more in the practice, in the experience of getting together with people and listening to them (and yes, one day maybe even talking to someone there!) What I need to learn from it is more in the experience of being with the others, and feeling a glimmer of belonging. The experience of that, not the objective proof of it's efficacy.
I'll see how it all goes. This feels like a new kind of acceptance to me, one that includes other people: their wisdom and their follies, yes, but mostly their very presence.
This was a bit more complicated to write about than I had thought it might be, and I'm not sure it's all clear, even to me. I'm just figuring this out. So if you're still here, thanks for reading! Peace and joy to you. xo
Wednesday, 7 January 2015
One year sober!!!
Yesterday was my 365th day in a row without booze. By now it's a habit, of course, just as drinking far too much was a habit for so long. A year ago yesterday, I woke up early and planned to quit that day. But I had a day off, and instead I went for a long walk and bought wine, and came home and drank some. Nothing dramatic happened. I'd quit the previous summer, and then tried drinking again after four months away, and it was obvious to me that it mostly wasn't working. Nothing terrible was happening to me. Still, I was miserable. And I knew I'd felt better when I wasn't drinking, before that siren song called me back yet again. The next day, I woke up with the same idea. And that day, a year ago, I really did quit. It stared out as a modest plan: one week, no booze. But I'm still here and I'm staying.
These days booze has no appeal for me. I can't stand the smell any more. I have no interest in the fuzzy mind I know I'd have if I drank. I've figured out how to make interesting drinks that are so good, sometimes the drinkers wan to try one instead of having wine or beer. At this point, no one could convince me that drinking was a good idea. No matter what.
When I was thinking about quitting, I strongly resisted the idea that I had been somehow escaping from life by drinking. Now I see that I was. And I resisted the received wisdom that I would find myself changing once I quit, that without booze, I would change emotionally. But I did. I wasn't interested in most of what people had to say about recovery, and I was always ready to rail against talk about "alcoholism" or "addiction." But I've found that some of it applies to me, and some of it is helpful, and the rest just doesn't bother me any more.
I used to do too much of my thinking about quitting in the abstract, impersonal mode. Eventually, I found that didn't help me much. Instead, this time, I paid attention to myself--what worked for me, what didn't, how I felt, what I thought might help me get through the next minute or hour or day. Mostly I read lots and wrote lots and walked in the park and rode my bike and talked to my partner way, way too much about how it was all going. I fulfilled my school and work obligations, but for the first few months, I wasn't exactly a star in either domain. It didn't matter. When I started to feel stronger, I was able to do more, but I took my time.
A lot of the advice people gave didn't work for me. I tried the whole "treats" thing that gets talked about, but I never did get the hang of it. I did buy myself a lot of books, but only when I saw one I thought I might read, never as a reward for anything. I developed a fondness for the gluten-free carrot cake at the local bakery, and had to put myself on rations on that score. (Once a week is fine. Twice if I'm on a big deadline. Any more than that, I figure I'm just escaping into cake instead of booze, and I eat some yoghurt with honey instead. Which isn't so bad, you know!)
This was supposed to be a big happy celebratory post about how happy I am to be sober, and here I am writing about what didn't work for me! What gives? The thing is, I am happy. I feel a whole lot better without booze in my life. My mental health is better (and it was really pretty darn bad a year ago). I avoid doctors, but I think I'm physically healthier. (I hardly ever get colds now, and I didn't get my annual December bronchitis, but winter isn't done yet!) I used to be pretty twisted up with anxiety, but these days I feel so much more clear and calm, and even when I do get anxious, I work it out without spiralling into the Pit of Despair. It's not all perfect all of a sudden, and it's been a lot of work. But I am figuring out how to live in the world, and I sometimes even feel at home here. That's new to me, and I'm holding onto it.
I guess what I wanted to say was that most of what I thought about getting sober was wrong, and a lot of what I believed about it when I started didn't much matter. But I was able to figure it out as I went, day to day, by being attentive to myself, and listening to others, and by leaning very hard on the support of the fine folks online who read and comment and write their own stories about getting sober, or trying to get sober. We're all in this together, and what a beautiful thing that is. Just a whole lot of people who used to drink too much, finding a better way to live without booze. Thanks for all your help and support and humour and friendship. I'm deeply grateful for it all, and for my life. It's been a great year. Tough, but worthwhile, and often wonderful.
Peace and joy to you. And many thanks. xo
These days booze has no appeal for me. I can't stand the smell any more. I have no interest in the fuzzy mind I know I'd have if I drank. I've figured out how to make interesting drinks that are so good, sometimes the drinkers wan to try one instead of having wine or beer. At this point, no one could convince me that drinking was a good idea. No matter what.
When I was thinking about quitting, I strongly resisted the idea that I had been somehow escaping from life by drinking. Now I see that I was. And I resisted the received wisdom that I would find myself changing once I quit, that without booze, I would change emotionally. But I did. I wasn't interested in most of what people had to say about recovery, and I was always ready to rail against talk about "alcoholism" or "addiction." But I've found that some of it applies to me, and some of it is helpful, and the rest just doesn't bother me any more.
I used to do too much of my thinking about quitting in the abstract, impersonal mode. Eventually, I found that didn't help me much. Instead, this time, I paid attention to myself--what worked for me, what didn't, how I felt, what I thought might help me get through the next minute or hour or day. Mostly I read lots and wrote lots and walked in the park and rode my bike and talked to my partner way, way too much about how it was all going. I fulfilled my school and work obligations, but for the first few months, I wasn't exactly a star in either domain. It didn't matter. When I started to feel stronger, I was able to do more, but I took my time.
A lot of the advice people gave didn't work for me. I tried the whole "treats" thing that gets talked about, but I never did get the hang of it. I did buy myself a lot of books, but only when I saw one I thought I might read, never as a reward for anything. I developed a fondness for the gluten-free carrot cake at the local bakery, and had to put myself on rations on that score. (Once a week is fine. Twice if I'm on a big deadline. Any more than that, I figure I'm just escaping into cake instead of booze, and I eat some yoghurt with honey instead. Which isn't so bad, you know!)
This was supposed to be a big happy celebratory post about how happy I am to be sober, and here I am writing about what didn't work for me! What gives? The thing is, I am happy. I feel a whole lot better without booze in my life. My mental health is better (and it was really pretty darn bad a year ago). I avoid doctors, but I think I'm physically healthier. (I hardly ever get colds now, and I didn't get my annual December bronchitis, but winter isn't done yet!) I used to be pretty twisted up with anxiety, but these days I feel so much more clear and calm, and even when I do get anxious, I work it out without spiralling into the Pit of Despair. It's not all perfect all of a sudden, and it's been a lot of work. But I am figuring out how to live in the world, and I sometimes even feel at home here. That's new to me, and I'm holding onto it.
I guess what I wanted to say was that most of what I thought about getting sober was wrong, and a lot of what I believed about it when I started didn't much matter. But I was able to figure it out as I went, day to day, by being attentive to myself, and listening to others, and by leaning very hard on the support of the fine folks online who read and comment and write their own stories about getting sober, or trying to get sober. We're all in this together, and what a beautiful thing that is. Just a whole lot of people who used to drink too much, finding a better way to live without booze. Thanks for all your help and support and humour and friendship. I'm deeply grateful for it all, and for my life. It's been a great year. Tough, but worthwhile, and often wonderful.
Peace and joy to you. And many thanks. xo
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