On October 23, 2007 I had my last drink. Today is the 15th anniversary of my sobriety.
Some alcoholics are made, and some are born. I believe I was probably born one. Looking back I was far too pleased with those first sips of wine and brandy at Christmas, and I was far too obsessed with when the next opportunity to drink would occur. Until I was in high school, it was almost always at Christmas and sometimes New Year’s. There was also a trip to Jamaica when I was ten years old when rum and cokes were easily had.
Did I mention my father is a recovering alcoholic? About a year before that trip to Jamaica where I remember getting sometimes buzzed and sometimes blotto, my father had his last drink. Well, almost, but that’s another story. There may be some value in dwelling on that further one day, but so far knowledge of that fact has played a relatively small role in my recovery.
For a while, because of the impressionability of kids, I decided to never drink. Not because of my dad, but my hero when I was 11, Randy Bachman, at the height of his fame and famously a teetotalling Mormon. I thought, what the hell? I had no reason to drink or drug.
It turns out I’m attracted to recklessness. When I was 13, I switched role models from the Mormon Bachman, to junkies like Jim Morrison and Lou Reed. I got curious about drugs, especially hallucinogens at first. I was interested in the consciousness-expanding qualities of drugs and alcohol, but I was even more attracted to the numbing, the self-confidence, that comfortable-in-my-skin feeling that alcohol and drugs gave me.
It quickly became imperative to be drunk whenever it was available and acceptable. I drank to feel normal in social situations, whether at parties, concerts, weddings, or even work.
My teen years were productive on the surface. I did very well in school, I worked part-time (and sometimes more). I played in various school bands. I made zines, wrote stuff, and became obsessed, in a good way, music, literature and cinema. And I even had a girlfriend for a chunk of that time.
I also drank and drugged alone, eventually adding various pills to my alcohol and hash diet. I got wasted in school, wasted at work, wasted at home, wasted on the town. I went to the drunk tank, and I got busted for selling drugs.
There were periods when it seems I was merely a heavy drinker, and this is where denial comes in. In my 20s, in my first real job, I had great opportunities but, looking back, I squandered many of them. I was often in a blackout, and am only now piecing together my life puzzle.
I found myself adjusting reality, not adjusting to it. I found myself lying instinctively, even about things that didn’t require the cover-up.
We often use Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to describe our condition. The alcohol goes in and we go from normal, civilised, professional, Dr. Jekyll and turn into the monster Mr. Hyde. But I was at my most monstrous, or at least as monstrous, when I didn’t have alcohol in my system. I don’t want to exaggerate that, but it’s rather simple: I drank because ! Iiked drunk Jim more than I liked sober Jim. Of course, drunk Jim was often a monster, or at best a blithering idiot, and then sober Jim had so much remorse for what drunk Jim said and did that he had to drink. You’d drink too if you drank as much as I drank.
It didn’t occur to me that I was an alcoholic, but by the time I was 20, I had no control over the amount that I drank, nor what was going to happen when I started to drink. I also found when I really wanted to stop I couldn’t. I found myself living more and more a parallel life, where I drank alone, in hiding, or in bars where nobody knows your name, and then trying to behave normally when I was with friends, family and colleagues
I was powerless over alcohol and I continued to rediscover my powerlessness until I was 44, so 30 years of drinking, and 24 years of flirting with stopping. For 24 years, a part of me knew that I had to quit drinking if I was going to survive, but drinking continued to be compelling.
In the “doctor’s opinion” chapter in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous it describes my situation perfectly:
“The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which they see others taking with impunity. After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.”
In 2007 I was travelling a lot, mostly to NY, enough to warrant getting an apartment in Brooklyn. On the surface I was at a career high, and had a great family and community life. In reality, I was going through periods of intense heavy drinking, much “not drinking” which involved hiding alcohol everywhere, and filling empty cans of fake beer first with real beer, and later with Jack Daniel’s, isolating in New York, blacking out in New York, blaming my depression, and believing that resentments were legitimate grounds for outrageous alcoholic and emotional binges.”
It was clear that I had problems other than alcohol. I didn’t fully comprehend them, but for a brief period I accepted the diagnosis of “anxiety and depression”, which sounded better than alcoholism or addiction. It bought me a few more months of my outrageously alcoholic “not drinking”, but the various cures and panaceas brought to the table by professionals didn't do much other than accelerate my real condition, manic-depression, a term I prefer to bipolar disorder, as it is more visceral, less clinicized. Depression was the obvious part of this equation. Mania just seemed like productive, energetic, maybe a bit obsessive. But I could go days without sleeping and it never bothered me. I was delusional, paranoid, irritable. I was suffering mood swings. I couldn’t think clearly. I was making hideous decisions, and I had no filter.
Throwing alcohol and drugs on the manic-depressive problem is a disaster, of course, but I had been doing it since I was a teenager it turns out. At the same time, I believe that misdiagnosing and failing to treat my manic depression was going to sabotage my efforts to get sober. After months of hospitalisation, detoxes, private counselling, more hiding and lying, acupuncture, Ativan, guilt, shame, remorse, a day-tox group (that was actually life-saving), I was fortunate to get concurrent treatment at Homewood in Guelph in the summer of 2007. I was taken off a handful of meds that were at odds with my recovery from both addiction and manic-depression, and put on a few others including lithium carbonate, which I have been on ever since. It is like finding “5” on my psychic settings: not too slow, and not too fast, and never varying more than maybe one notch. Of course, I occasionally romance the manic highs that I used to have, the energy and the extreme productivity, but only occasionally: that condition was going to kill me, and it was certainly not going to help me get clean and sober.
When it came to addiction, Homewood basically conceded that patients there were in a holding pattern, maybe getting a bit of education, recreation and 12 step orientation but ultimately their recovery was going to depend on long-term commitment to 12 step fellowship, service and recovery. Most would not make it. Most do not go to AA, NA, CA, etc. and most who do don’t stay. I only know what I know, but the odds of staying clean and sober without connecting in the recovery rooms, without identifying with other addicts, seems pretty slim.
I do know that the friends I’ve made in 12 step recovery rooms, and the opportunity to do service to help fellow sufferers, are the main reason I’m sober today.
There is just one brain, though it is complex. After beginning my dual disorder recovery, another problem that I can trace back to my teen years became impossible to ignore, impossible to just tame with massive amounts of booze. In this case, it was a neurological condition that causes involuntary movements and makes it impossible to sleep, to sit down or sit still. Untreated, it feels like it’s the biggest threat to my sobriety. It can feel like it’s sabotaging my manic-depressive equilibrium. I haven’t been tempted to drink because of it since I got sober, but it is how I used to treat it back in the day, before I even knew that it was a thing. I have very good care with a team of neurologists, but it has certainly been a treacherous journey. Like my manic-depression, I can’t afford to treat it as an “outside issue” (a term a small number of people in my program misunderstand, in my opinion).
So, fifteen years ago, after relapsing for several days, blacking out as usual, I dragged my tired body and soul to a recovery meeting. I went to another one that night. I kept going. Somehow, I kept going and didn’t drink again for fifteen years. One day at a time.
There is much good advice in the recovery literature and rooms. I have only been consistently diligent about two suggestions:
Don’t drink.
Go to meetings.
When I go to meetings, I meet other alcoholics and addicts. I discover that I can identify with them in ways that I will never be understood by people who are “normal”. Our stories are not normal: they are sometimes insane. Even when that’s the case, we tend to laugh at them where other people would be baffled and even horrified. But I identify at a primal level, even when the story is far from my experience on the surface. Deep down, I get the craziness. I get the rationalization, the minimization, the blaming, the self-pity, and the denial. It’s normal to me. It’s also neutralized in the rooms. As long as I stay sober, connect with other alcoholics in the rooms, and embark on a program of recovery in order to get out of self and be helpful to others, I don’t have to get drunk or high and accumulate more insane stories.
What is this higher power that you hear about in accounts of 12 step groups? I’m an atheist and though many people in the rooms are religious, I don’t find this to be an issue. That being said, I do understand that I had a higher power for many years, and it was alcohol: it was more powerful than anything else in my life. The theory is that, to get sober, I need to have faith in something larger than myself, and definitely larger than alcohol and drugs, something that will sustain me spiritually.
I don’t have anything that resembles a supernatural god in my life. Ultimately I don’t even believe in an underlying life force like energy, and if I did, I’m not sure that I would accord it the same power that I gave alcohol. On the other hand, in sobriety I have learned to have respect and gratitude for the multiple manifestations of powers that are greater than me: life, the universe, nature, consciousness, conscience, community, art, science, rebellion. These all humble me and inspire me in their various ways. AA (eventually I have to say the name) is the least abstract: I am sober, sane and even alive because of it. Rather than becoming my god-substitute, however, it has taught me to live without the gods of alcohol and drugs and, in so doing, all gods. That is not my interpretation of the program, but it is my lived experience. I’m not afraid of the term “spiritual”, however, even though I don’t have gods. Through getting sober in AA, I have had a spiritual transformation. There are many facets to it. Aside from having no interest in alcohol or drugs, the one I treasure the most is in the AA Promises, where it says, “We will intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us.”
Thank you to my 12 step fellow travelers, and thank you to my family, friends, colleagues, and others who have helped me on this path.
Have a good day.