We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness April may be the cruelest month, but August is a close second – at least in my book. Here in Maryland, August is hot, humid, and oppressive. This year, it was even more so with record temperatures and long periods of no rain. But that’s not why August was so hard for me this year. It was the constant flood of memories of how things were last year. ...
A little over a year ago I had become a master at hiding my reality. I wouldn’t answer the phone after a certain point in the day. I wouldn’t make calls before a certain point in the day. I didn’t want to be seen by people who knew me. I spread my liquor buying habits out among several stores. I buried my empties deep in the recycling bin. I hid what was really going on from the rest of the world. Only my immediate family could see how bad things were externally, but even they didn’t know the true depths of despair that were the result of my daily drinking. That’s because I didn’t speak about what was going on. And when I did, I spoke in broken code and half truths. ...
When I think about the first 30 days of my sobriety today I have an overwhelming sense of relief. I don’t ever want to go through that again. I mean, it was incredibly difficult to simply turn it off and stop drinking daily. But that’s what I did. I stopped. I remember overwhelming fatigue. Fatigue that hit hard in the middle of the day. Most days of that first 30, I was down for the count for a solid 1 to 2 hours in the middle of the day. Thankfully I work form home and so I got away with it. I don’t know how I’d have dealt with it if I were in an office or on a job site. I remember not wanting to cook dinner. ...
I’ve mentioned before that I really didn’t lose much as a result of my drinking. And it’s true, I didn’t lose any of the things that one might normally measure as losses. I kept my job, my wife, my house, my son, my car, and my health — if only just barely. This past Sunday, I was feeling a bit restless for no particular reason. We’d been to the pool on Saturday, but I felt a need to get out of the house. I went out around 11:30 with the intention of picking up a pair of shorts to replace some that I’d blown out on vacation. Over the past week, my Twitter/Instagram/Facebook friend, Regina Walker had posted a few photos of her son at some art museums —this one of her son contemplating a Jackson Pollock had stirred up a desire to go to an art museum in me. Then over the weekend, she posted this one at MOMA and it kind of sealed the deal. As I left the house, I asked my son if he’d like to go to the Baltimore Museum of Art when I returned. Amazingly, he said, “Yes” ...
We all do it. We all compare ourselves to other people. We compare ourselves to our friends, our enemies, our neighbors, strangers on the street, and celebrities that we will never know personally. In some cases we feel “superior to” and in other cases we feel “less than” — neither view is particularly healthy. Our subjective understanding of ourselves is deeply rooted in our understanding of how we fit in (or don’t) to this world. We come to this understanding by comparing ourselves to others. In early years, this is how we learn to become social animals. It’s how we learn to make friends. I am constantly amazed that my son so easily makes friends when he meets other children his age. I am sure he compares himself to them, but it doesn’t seem to matter. He quickly finds the commonalities and joins in in the fun. Those commonalities may be as specific as the love of Legos or as simple as the mere fact that they are kids and not adults. I have vague recollections of being able to do this myself when I was young. But somewhere along the line I lost the ability to quickly identify similarities and began to focus on the differences. ...
Facebook has a remarkable way of reminding me exactly how crazy things had gotten in my life. You know those “Memories” that it shows. Many of mine are related to what I was drinking that day. Either a picture of a drink, a check in on untapd, or even more disturbing a post about how much I was looking forward to having a drink. It’s been nine months and one day since I took my last drink. ...
It’s June. The 6th month of the year. Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will be celebrating the start of summer with the summer solstice. Those in the Southern Hemisphere are headed into winter. Of course, in the 12 step world, we often focus on a step and a tradition each month. Naturally, meetings are focused on the sixth step in June, where we humbly ask the good of our understanding to remove our defects of character. I’m still fuming. ...
I’m not a big fan of roller coasters, whether they are real or emotional. I’ve been on and emotional one for the last few days and it hasn’t been fun. I am not quite sure when it started but for certain the idea of a drink came into my head several times over the weekend. There was a lot going on over the weekend and my father in law was visiting. I love the man, but there’s no doubt that I need to take him in small doses. I wanted an escape hatch. The easy escape hatch that kept surfacing was to have a drink. I didn’t, but those urges sure were strong at times. ...
Are binge drinking and alcoholism related? I'm sure there are people far better qualified than me to answer this question, but I'll share some insights that I've gleaned from my own reading and I'll share my own experience. Let’s begin with a definition of binge drinking from the CDC’s site: ...
As I drive down Maryland Route 140 from Westminster toward I795, the sun sets in the rear-view mirror. For years I tried to let the sun set on my youth. I felt out of step with the world growing up in rural Maryland. And in a lot of ways, I was out of step with the world. But now, I’m finding that venturing back to where I grew up is not as painful as I might have imagined it. I’ve just had an amazing reunion with a very special teacher, one who saw something in me and helped me set my life on a better path in high school. Through the miracles of technology, we have been reunited and have kept up with each other over the past 8 years or so. We met one other time, before I went off the rails. ...
As I mentioned yesterday, earlier this year I got a number of questions from a concerned fraternity brother about my journey in sobriety that I’d like to address on this blog. I felt the need to paint the picture of my college experience as background for this series of posts. I’m writing my responses to these questions, in hopes that others may learn from my experience, strength, and hope. What should the Psi Chapter Alumni Association (hereafter referred to as we) be doing to help known alcoholics, those living with alcoholics, and those that will one day discover that they have the disease? Well, this isn't going to be easy....
The thoughts that I’d been having over the past few days stuck with me into the evening yesterday. Despite my best efforts to occupy my mind with other things including listening to music, playing my acoustic guitar, opening up my electric guitar to see if I could fix it (it’s busted and probably will not be worth repairing), and taking a long walk in the cold air, I had trouble shaking those thoughts. So, I went to a meeting. And that helped. As I walked into the meeting I thought to myself, “I sure hope this speaker is a good one.” And she was. She had a story to tell, but more importantly she was good at conveying a message of hope. I went to bed last night with good thoughts in my mind. And then this morning came around. ...
I shared my story for the first time as the speaker at a meeting last night. I was nervous at first. Who wouldn’t be? When you share your story, you’re bearing your soul – to a room full of people that you don’t know. But there’s magic in those rooms. The people who fill them understand each other in ways that those on the outside simply do not. Once I got started, I fell into an easy cadence and was able to speak with clarity and confidence. ...
Of all the gifts I gave or received this year for Christmas, the greatest gift is my sobriety. I did a calculation yesterday and figured that this was the first Christmas I’d been sober in 27 years. That is not completely accurate, my wife was expecting in 2007 and I know that I didn’t drink on Christmas day that year because we didn’t know when the baby would get here. If Mr. Grey hadn’t been on the way, I certainly would have been drinking. In those 27 years, I there were many when I drank in moderation, perhaps even normally, but in the past 7 there was nothing moderate or normal about my drinking. And my recollections of those Christmases are somewhat foggy. But not this year. This year, I was sober and it was the greatest gift I could have given – to myself, and to my family. ...
surrender |səˈrendər| verb [ no obj. ] cease resistance to an enemy or opponent In the United States, we live in a culture of winners and losers. Our heroes are sports personalities, celebrities, the military, and super-heroes. Our culture teaches us to be self-reliant and to “never give up,” to “fight the good fight,” and to “win.” Surrender is antithetical to our national identity and is not part of our national lexicon. Only the weak surrender. Surrender is never part of the plan. ...