Recovery

He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how. — F. Nietzsche Twenty-eight years ago, I was attending high school at a small Catholic school in a small town in Pennsylvania and we had daily religion class. Religion class was something I’d always dreaded from the time I started attending Catholic school in the fourth grade up until 1988, when religion class suddenly wasn’t about “religion.” In the final two years of high school, the religion class curricula focused on real issues rather than ancient biblical text and stories of some rabble-rouser preacher who claimed to be the son of God. In 11th grade the main topic was that of finding meaning in life as related by two Holocaust survivors. In 12th grade, the topics were to social justice and a study of marriage and vocations. The text for our 11th grade religion class consisted of Night by Elle Wiesel and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Both books detail the experiences of young Jewish men who were taken captive by the Nazi’s and who survived the concentration camps. Night was short and we read it first. To be honest, I don’t recall much of the book because it was over-shadowed by our study of Frankl’s book, which we studied from approximately October to May of the year. ...

A cool breeze drifted in through the window, mingling with the meaty goodness coming from the short ribs roasting slowly in the cast iron skillet in the oven. The room was darker than it had been a month ago at the same time on a Sunday, the sun’s late afternoon orange glow casting longer shadows on the wood floor. Save the faint sound of a lawnmower in the distance and the occasional plane passing overhead, the house was silent, and I was reading. My wife had taken my son to a birthday party and I was blessed with nearly three hours of uninterrupted quiet. I didn’t even put music on — an out of character move on my part, but welcome. Despite having a freshly brewed pour over coffee, I drifted off to sleep for a short 15 minute luxurious nap on the couch. This was exactly how I’d hoped that my Sunday would be; calm, peaceful, serene. No pressures, no agendas, no plans other than a slow pot of soup to make. ...

Recently, Jeff Vande Zane, contacted me to see if I might be interested in reading his novel Detroit Muscle and offered to send me a PDF version. Since, I’d heard good things about this novel from several friends on Twitter, I was immediately game. In fact, the book was already on my “to read” shelf on goodreads.com. Since I can’t stand to read PDFs even on an e-reader, I bought a copy from Amazon for my kindle. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was a bit concerned that I might not identify with the protagonist in the story, Robby Cooper, because his story was so different from my own. However, I quickly knew that I would identify with Robby because after all addiction is addiction regardless of the user’s drug of choice. Yes, my drug of choice was Alcohol, and Robby’s was Oxy, but that became immaterial once I got into the story. The book catalogues Robby’s first few weeks after he gets back to Detroit from a rehab facility. Vande Zande clearly knows Detroit well and includes details about the city and it’s landmarks that pull the reader into the scenes. A story about Detroit would not be complete if it didn’t feature a car and this one does, a 1968 Pontiac Firebird that Robby’s father had restored with his grandfather. ...

Yesterday, I was blessed to attend my Aunt Debbie’s wedding at Quiet Water’s Park in Annapolis, MD. It was a beautiful ceremony followed by a very nice reception. We had music, and dancing. I was surrounded by my family as well as my cousin’s family and I caught myself smiling several times. I can’t say that I didn’t think about drinking at all — I did, how could one not when there was wine and beer available and others were imbibing — but I didn’t want any alcohol. I was at ease with myself and with the event. I was in the present moment, enjoying just that moment for all that it was worth. That’s a wonderful way to live. ...

Last night, I drifted off to sleep thinking of the song Helplessly Hoping by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The ideas of helplessness, hopelessness, and hope kept swirling around in my head after I received a kind comment from a woman who’s living through the hell of watching her husband struggle with opioid addiction. I thought about how helpless my wife must have felt when I was drinking. There was nothing she could do to help me; she was just as trapped as I was in the cycle, maybe even more than I. Though it may not have seemed viable a the time, she had the choice to remain with me and to hope that I’d someday get it together. She could have left me. Lord knows many people do leave their loved ones when addiction holds them in its grasp. I thought about how hopeless I felt when I was in the end of my drinking days. Indeed, it was a deep feeling of despair and hopelessness that permeated my existence. Day after day, despite knowing that nothing good would come of it, I found myself drinking. And day after day, I hated what was happening. I couldn’t see a way out. The idea of not drinking felt like abandoning a friend. Albeit a friend who continuously beat the crap out of me, who toyed with my emotions and who took every opportunity to convince me that I needed him. Mixed in with the feelings of hopelessness, was a healthy dose of helplessness. ...

For all the talk in the rooms about smashing the ego, recovery really is all about the self. I mean, really, it’s all about becoming the best self that you can be. Recovery encompasses so much more than just not using intoxicants, it’s about learning to love yourself and to accept yourself as you are and helping others to do the same. ...

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. ...

On July 28th, I had one of those big blow out fights with a Facebook friend over politics. It got ugly. I got angry, really angry and ultimately removed that friend from my friends list. I also made an announcement that I’d be leaving Facebook for a while and that the best way to reach me would be by phone or Facebook Messenger – since like a lot of people there are “friends” on my list that I don’t actually have any contact information for and who don’t have my phone number. I stewed over this event throughout the weekend. The committee in my head told me all sorts of things about this person and all sorts of things about myself. I was stressed out and not handling myself well. I’d lost my serenity. And I was still posting on Facebook. A friend in my 12-step group noticed and mentioned that he’d noticed – in a kind and loving way. I don’t recall exactly when the conversation happened, but my wife suggested that perhaps, just maybe, I didn’t need to engage in Facebook. Or on Instagram, or on twitter, or read the New York Times daily. Her logic was that these things weren’t really adding value to my life. In fact they were stressing me out and I was not that great to be around. I committed to reducing my interactions with Facebook. ...

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. ...

I’ve been very proud of myself for how things have been going with my sobriety. Maybe too proud. Sometime around 6 months in, things just seemed to click and it got easier. I no longer longed for a beer. I was quite comfortable to be around others who were enjoying a drink or two - not hanging out at booze fests mind you, just casual beers with dinner and such. It had started to feel easy. ...

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. ...

When I came into recovery, I did not know how much I lacked compassion for other people. I was full of judgement. I saw others as “less than” and framed the world in nice tidy compartments. Drug addicts were bad people — it never occurred to me that alcohol is a drug. Homeless people must have done something to end up in their situation, and it was probably due to bad choices. People with less education than myself were stupid. I framed the world in terms of “otherness.” I quickly learned that I wasn’t so different from these “other” people. My addiction to alcohol was just as debilitating as another’s addiction to heroin or cocaine. ...

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. ...