Struggles on Walking in Sober Boots

Words for You, Words for Us

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:00:00 -0400

I catch myself again;
Looking for you in the doorway.
Expecting you to walk
out onto the porch,
wrap an arm around
my shoulder, and hold me close
as you did when all the others
died.
Not this time.
No,
not this time,
you are not here.
Still, I won’t believe it;
my aching heart skips another beat,
my stomach somersaults, recognizing
this helpless hope for the
impossible possibility –
that you are
alive.
We have all your evidence:
an instruction set for painters,
heavy typewriters for writing
weighty words, for poetry,
for Gertrude Stein and Whitman,
Bukowski, and Kerouac; in English and
approximate French; poetry written
down on misaligned keys,
characters askew; words for you,
words for us, words because we exist;
paintings on plywood canvas;
lonely sea fences, space bugs,
spoons, and barbed wire; Your voice
making sense, or making nonsense
in our world; Workspace Wednesday.
All that you touched, and
all you created,
everywhere you've been, and
everyone you’ve loved,
bear witness to your
beautiful life.
You were extraordinary,
Frank.
And we,
we were blessed.
No,
I don’t believe you are gone.
When your soul’s fragile shell
failed, death released your
spirit to dance among the
atoms of the Universe.
You are in the water flowing
down the Gunpowder,
in the leaves of the grass
along Stonesifer Road;
riding on cool, sweet air breezes
and blue skies, breaking
August heat in September;
steeping with the Tea in Gainesville;
mixing with the soils of the Earth;
in our breath and in our blood.
For every atom belonging to you
belongs to us.
When we were young,
I would hold you tightly,
burry my nose in your hair, and
inhale your scent,
knowing you were mine
and I was yours.
Brothers.
Caught in this memory, I
barely notice the air
become still, stagnant July
heat on my skin,
rain falls, releasing an
ephemeral rain-soil scent.
Inhaling deeply,
I begin again, becoming whole.

Insidious Thoughts

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 22:08:38 -0400

As a person who’s life could be described as one traumatic event after another, I’m really good at catastrophic thinking. I can plan for the worst with the best of them. I mean, I used to think about the fact that terrorists could hijack a plane and use it as a missile ever time I got on an flight long before 9/11.

Our writer has lost his voice

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 12:04:38 -0500

I feel that I’ve lost my voice in my writing. Since I started this blog, my posts have been largely confessional in nature. Early on, a lot of my posts were about my struggles with various aspects of the 12 Step world as I understood it at the time. Some, but not all, of those misgivings arose from my own misunderstandings of things.

Don't Call It a Comeback

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 11:39:42 -0400

I feel like I lost time this summer. The entire month of July feels like it was lost. Most of August as well. It was hot, and humid, as it always is in Maryland over the summer. I stayed mostly indoors.

Making Amends to Ourselves — a Path to Self Forgiveness

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 20:20:58 -0400

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of self forgiveness lately. I think that self forgiveness presents a challenge for many people, in and out of recovery. As humans, we often judge our own actions through an unrealistic lens and are particularly hard on ourselves.

Resignation Masquerading as Acceptance

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:49:50 -0400

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. … Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy.

Sharing the Load, Permission to Feel, & Impermanence

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 17:54:14 -0500

I’ve struggled to come up with three things to post today. It’s one of those days when the weight of the world feels heavy on my shoulders. I am grateful to know that I don’t have to shoulder that weight alone.

Leaving New York

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:00:47 -0500

We came here knowing that this trip would be different but it was more challenging than we expected. Prior to heading to NY for a week in the Catskills, all three of us had gotten COVID tests in order to conform with the current NY state guidelines. These guidelines stipulated that we could come to the state provided that we’d had a negative COVID test within three days of arrival and we would agreed to quarantine for three days upon arrival. We would be released from quarantine after getting another COVID test with negative results on the fourth day. In theory this sounded feasible. In practice we faced many hurdles.

A Sober Agnostic’s Crisis of Faith

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 12:30:05 -0500

Things are really hard right now. Every day, I feel overwhelmed. Like so many others, I’m navigating uncharted waters without so much as a compass. The uncertainty of the moment weighs heavily on my mind and the challenges we face as a family feel insurmountable. It’s a game of wack-a-mole.

Courage, Rebellion, and a Universe that has Your Back

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 13:24:31 -0400

Something that isn’t talked about enough in the rooms of the recovery community — courage. It takes courage to admit that we have a problem. It takes courage to ask for help. It takes courage to leave behind old habits and old coping mechanisms. It takes courage to get honest with ourselves and others. It takes courage to get sober or get clean.

Strengthening Our Hearts

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 09:14:20 -0400

Of all the muscles in the body, the heart is probably the most essential. In conjunction with the diaphragm, the heart works to delivering oxygen and nutrients to every other system in the body by pumping blood 24 hours a day.

Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight

Wed, 06 May 2020 14:50:17 -0400

Are you Struggling?

Yesterday, one of my Twitter friends sent a tweet saying that she would be deleting her account because she was drinking wine again. A few weeks ago, another friend on Twitter posted that he’d relapsed and he would be deleting his account because he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t keep half-assing sobriety. Perhaps you have seen these messages. Perhaps you’ve sent a similar message. Perhaps you feel an incredible desire to pickup a drink or a drug. Perhaps, you are struggling.

Permission to Grieve

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 21:35:06 -0400

Before I begin, I want to say, categorically, that I’m not going to pick up a drink. When I think about the escape that alcohol provides, I can’t help but remember the emotional prison where it held me hostage for so long.

Resilience in the Time of COVID-19

Sun, 22 Mar 2020 20:24:24 -0400

The mysterious universe seems to be built upon cycles. Stars are born out of gas clouds and cosmic dust. As the dust spins and collides, heat begins to build, and a proto-star is born. These proto-stars grow in size to become stars. Over the lifetime of a star it expands as it burns off fuel. Stars burn for eons until the fuel is consumed, at which point, they collapse upon themselves forming either white dwarves or black holes.

Recover Your Joy

Thu, 12 Mar 2020 20:16:31 -0400

Our world has felt heavy to me for a long time. If I’m honest, it has felt heavy ever since 9/11/2001. That was the day that everything changed. Collectively, we lost our innocence in the United States on that day.

Skiing with the Scouts

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 15:02:13 -0500

A mounting sense of dread came over me as the weekend approached and I came to terms with the facts. I’d be driving four hours each way to a scout trip where the main activity would be skiing or snowboarding. I’d be giving up control of my weekend for the sake of my son and that of the troop.

Feelings and Fentanyl

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 19:04:33 -0500

It’s been over a week since I was released from the hospital. Generally, I’m feeling much better. I’m still a little weaker than normal, a fact I was reminded of by a short hike yesterday.

While I was in the hospital I had some strong feelings. Feelings that I haven’t had in a long time. Old feelings that no longer serve me. And yet there they were. Gnawing at me from the inside.

Fragility, Acceptance, and Patience

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 11:05:13 -0500

We are fragile creatures. We like to think that we are at the top of the food chain, the apex predator, the all powerful human beings, but in reality we are sensitive little organisms going about our lives as this tiny planet spins around on its axis orbiting one of billions of stars in the expansive universe. And we can be conquered by organisms that we can’t even see with our naked eye.

Step 11: This Too Is Prayer

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 10:35:16 -0500

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

“Seriously? We haven’t talked about God for a while so we better bring Him back into the picture.” This was how I felt when I looked at Step 11 for a long time. The only saving grace for me was that the payer recommended in the Twelve and Twelve was the Prayer of Saint Francis, which despite being a Catholic prayer, has always been a personal favorite and that peculiar word “meditation” in the step.

Step 6: Willing to Work?

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 07:28:44 -0500

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

When I first read the steps, step six seemed to be the step that would cause me to go over the edge. On the surface this step appears to be pulled directly from a nineteenth century revivalist sermon. The language is extraordinarily troublesome for a guy like me.

Step 4: Honestly Recognizing Our Own Humanity

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 07:26:45 -0500

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

This step scares most people. The language feels foreboding, heavy, daunting. It sounds really hard. And for many people it is really hard.

This step is all about getting honest with ourselves. Some of us have suffered grave consequences and some of us have not. But we all know in our hearts that our addiction has caused harm. And so we must get honest about what we’ve done in our lives. Honest about how we’ve hurt ourselves and others. Honest about how our addiction affected others in our lives.

Step 3: This is Going To Require Some Help

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 08:11:22 -0500

‌Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

I must admit that upon reaching this step my thoughts were something along the lines of this: “So, here we are. Face to face with the religion inherent in these steps. God. Him. I’ll never be able to deal with this.

Step 2: It’s Not What I Thought

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 13:59:15 -0500

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

I cringed when I first read this step. In my mind, that capitalization of the word power clearly meant something. And that something was an interventionist God that was going to fix me. I was having none of it.

August is the Cruelest Month, Mr. Eliot

Sat, 17 Aug 2019 09:33:24 -0400

It’s August. That’s part of it. I’m approaching four years of sobriety and I can feel the squirrels prancing around in my brain.

I didn’t recognize it at first. I knew that something was off, but it didn’t occur to me that this “offness” could be rooted in the fact that I’m nearing in on 1460 days without a drink. Actually 1461 because of leap year, but who’s counting?

Running, Tears, and EMDR Therapy

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 22:44:13 -0400

It’s been a rough 2019. We’ve been through a lot as a family this year My wife and I had to appear in court on behalf of our son this week. We both gave statements in a case that resulted from the traumatic events we experienced in March. It was a hard day. Emotions ranged from anger to rage, to frustration, to compassion, to forgiveness. I suffered a migraine on the day of the court hearing.

I Haven’t Written a Post In 2019, Here’s an Update

Wed, 15 May 2019 08:53:03 -0400

At the end of 2018 I was thinking of combining this blog with an older one and renaming it. I was considering the change because I wasn’t sure that the idea of a sober blog, a sober persona online, was serving me. I’ve long struggled with the idea of identity. And so I’d shut down one twitter handle and renamed my primary handle.

Don’t Bite the Hook

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 08:55:26 -0400

Feelings can be so intense. This morning I was supposed to take my son fishing on a charter out of Menemsha harbor. I woke at 6:30, made coffee, prepared lunch and snacks, and got him up for the adventure. We walked down to the appointed meeting point, the Menemsha Texaco, arriving at 7:50. Plenty of time to grab an extra snack and a T shirt for the boy who was wearing a sweatshirt with nothing underneath in August. Plenty of time to catch the boat.

Accepting the Language of Others

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 08:32:09 -0400

I thought I’d laid my angst with the God talk to rest when I had my breakthrough last winter and came to understand that my challenge was with the God of my childhood rather than with the God of my understanding. I thought I’d finally gotten to the point that I could hear others talk about how God was doing things in their lives that they couldn’t do for themselves without having a visceral reaction. I thought that I’d made progress. And then I went to a Step meeting on a Friday.

I’m Not Gonna Bitch and Moan — Well, Not Much

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 15:52:04 -0400

I’m in grave danger of writing a post that’s just a bitch fest. I’ve had a hard week and I want to bitch and moan about it. I’ll just say that both Mrs. TKD and I have been very sick for about a week and it’s been a struggle to get well, hold the house together, get the boy to school, and get out Day jobs done. It’s hard when one of us gets sick, but when we’re both laid out it’s even worse. It can feel like everything is falling apart.

False Narratives: Overcoming the Internal Voice that says, “You Can’t”

Mon, 28 May 2018 20:20:59 -0400

“I only run if someone is chasing me, like you know, the cops.”

I’ve said that thousands of times, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. Usually, I said it either when someone suggested that I go for a run with them, or when they were bragging about their latest extraordinary run. Fitting that I’d move to a running town, made famous by some fool who runs in all sorts of weather wearing nothing but a Speedo. One of the few successful shops on Main Street in Annapolis is a running store. It’s been there as long as I can remember. You can’t take a drive for more than 30 minutes without seeing at least 25 of those obnoxious 26.2 euro style stickers on cars. I’ve always enjoyed seeing the occasional 0.0 sticker, thinking to myself “I’m not the only one who doesn’t run.”