Broken Glass
I left it waiting for me, sent it off into the future, a time capsule with a To Do List.
There were 10 days until I could get a room at the treatment center, so I had time to write a few weeks' worth of columns. Piece of cake, simple stuff. That essay I wrote for Liz's magazine? Use some of that. That blog entry about Strider? That'll work. No sweat.
But I left the last one. One to think on. It was due three days before I got home, so I had the better part of three weeks to think about it. What I would be thinking by that time was anybody's guess, but it was waiting for me.
It was an easy call, as it turned out. I wrote it in longhand, then had Julie type it up at home. I danced around at bit, trying to find the right way in, but eventually there was no getting away from it.
"My name is Chuck, and I'm an alcoholic."
How many people read that? Was it the 50,000 the marketers like to advertise? A quarter of that? A tenth? I have no idea.
At least one. He mentioned it on my second night home, in an AA meeting, having no idea he was sitting across from the author. Or maybe he did.
See, I write a general interest newspaper column. A lot of it centers around my life, what I see and what I think about that. To leave unsaid what I'd been experiencing felt like sort of a lie.
Also, I had to write something. Deadlines are good inspiration for fessing up.
There was more, though. Not a need. Not an obligation, really. More of an opportunity. Because after all the education, opinion, awareness, drive, ambition, prejudices, pride and pathology get a shot at spinning, all we're really left with to share are our stories.
This is mine, by the way.
--------------------
It was almost amusing to be crazy. For a while, anyway. I was just so...surprised. If I'd woke up one morning and grown another ear, I wouldn't have been more shocked. I'd spent four decades of fairly normal life, productive, successful, disappointed, sad, happy. The usual suspects. And then I was different.
I'm not stupid. Dumb a lot, sure; not stupid. I recognized compulsion; that was what was so funny. I couldn't stop thinking about it, couldn't stop planning, couldn't stop drinking. And it seemed to start spontaneously, just one ordinary day.
This isn't uncommon, by the way. Some people take that first drink, or other drug, at an early age and within a few years they're in big trouble, or dead, or incarcerated. Others, though, are late bloomers.
I tried. Long story, not very interesting. Let me share another one, my favorite story from The Big Book of AA. A man, around 30, finds himself in trouble with alcohol. He drinks too much, too often, and he has big plans. He wants to succeed in business. So he stops drinking. He stops completely. For 25 years. At the age of 55, he retires after a wildly successful career, healthy, wealthy and one would hope wise. Now he can enjoy the good life and relax. He decides to have a drink.
In four weeks he's in the hospital.
In four years he's dead.
Your run-of-the-mill lack of willpower situation, you think?
I figured it out. It wasn't hard. I used the Internet and everything. I told my wife what I thought. I tried different techniques and approaches. Finally, three years ago, I realized it wasn't working, and was getting worse. So I got all mature and responsible and stuff, asked for advice, called up an outpatient treatment center and signed up.
It was great, too. I learned a lot. I was amazingly happy. I wrote like the wind. I was an inspiration to others. I was the star patient.
Three hours a night, three days a week. AA meetings on most other nights. Reading, writing, thinking. Praying. I learned about the biology and the neurology and the psychology. I studied the pitfalls and the triggers for relapse.
At the end of two months, on December 11, 2003, I graduated. They gave me a coin with the serenity prayer on it, and everybody said nice things. I thanked them all, my fellow alcoholics, for their support and their example, and for my sobriety. I told them how happy I was to be heading out to the airport that night to pick up my daughter, coming home for Christmas after her first semester away in college.
I told them that my father had died that morning.
Relapse is thought, not action. Once you go back out, take that first drink, you're not in relapse. You're just drinking again. Relapse is mental, and sneaky. It can be cockiness, over-confidence. It can be secrecy, or shame. It can be not going to meetings as much, or not talking about your feelings. It can be lots of things.
Maybe mine started back in October, when I learned my father had weeks to live. When I saw pain waiting for me. Maybe it was the day he died.
What I know, though, is that I stood there on a freezing day in Arizona, staring at a casket, numb in so many ways, and I was lost. It was my 65th day of sobriety.
Sixty-five days is a drop in the bucket. Sixty-five days is only a taste of sobriety, a sip of serenity. It's something, all right, but it's still only 65 days.
Oh, I had months of non-drinking days ahead of me. Some drinking ones, too, horrible days, days of self-loathing and rage and fear and despair.
And I gave up, then, finally. I figured I would either find my way back to recovery, or die, and most likely die.
Alcoholism is a progressive disease. It will never stay the same, and never give you a break. It will get worse, and it will get worse whether you drink or not. You can be sober, as the man in the story above, for decades, and when you start to drink again you'll be right back where you left off, and worse than that.
I knew this all, too. I'd been given a good education.
And I left myself some bread crumbs, maybe. Unlike Dorian Gray, I kept my painting with me at all times. I stopped taking out the empties. The bottles began to accumulate on my desk, in the drawers, in the corners. On the floor. Dozens of them.
And they began to break.
Every morning I would wake up, get some tea, and walk downstairs to my office. Then I would go back up again to put on shoes, so I could get to my desk and computer. Crunch crunch. Every morning I walked to work over broken glass.
Complete your own metaphor here.
There are plenty of cliches in recovery circles for what happened to me. Did enough research. Had enough pain. Surrendered. Whatever. I asked for help, and I found it living with me. My son and wife took charge. My daughter sent me love and support. My friends offered advice, and one of them picked me up early in the morning and drove me across the pass, where I found a future if I wanted it, and a column just waiting to be written.
I had two drinks that morning, by the way. The dregs of a bottle of cheap Chardonnay I'd tried to kill the night before, home alone, scared and unsure. My last drinks.
That was 66 days ago.
So I have a reason for writing today. But then, I have lots of them.
I will tell you what I don't need. I don't need your pity, or your sympathy, although I appreciate the thought if it's there. I don't need your support or your friendship, although these are valuable to me, and important. Still, people are funny. I've lost at least one friend who didn't mind drinking with me but didn't quite get the recovery thing. Some people are uncomfortable, and want to stay away. To paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, some people will only walk you halfway through the wood. And others want to lead me where they want me to go, and my journey will always be mine.
And I don't need you to understand. I'm surrounded now by sober, recovering people who watch me and listen to me, who help me when I ask and wait for me when I hesitate. I'm in a good place, a peaceful place, where I can stay wary and still serene, one day at a time. Sometimes one hour at a time.
But I think it'd be nice if you understood. I'll try to help, here in this space, as I can and when I do. I don't blame at all those of you who see this as a weakness, a moral failing, an unexcused absence from God, a lifetime of bad decisions. Some of that is true, but like all truth there are corners that sometimes don't see the light of day without a little help. So maybe I can do something about that.
Mostly, though, I'd wish, regardless if you accept the disease model or think it's just a bad habit, that you'd stop to imagine another life. Not mine; I've been fortunate and, as I said, I have all the support I can use, and then some. But another life.
Father Joseph Martin, a Catholic priest who spent much of his life helping alcoholics, once described a hypothetical situation. You notice a lady in your office is having a bad morning. She's a little shaky, and doesn't look that hot. You watch her sneak a flask into her purse before she heads for the restroom, and you roll your eyes and snicker. Father Martin shakes his head sadly.
"You know," he would say, "she's going to die."
Compassion is hard. We talk about it, preach about it, and sometimes even practice it, but we're all human and judgment comes easy. That log in our eye doesn't seem that big, not compared to this, and we can spoon up soup to the hungry and still be thinking that they ought to get jobs, y'know?
So take it from me, if you can. There are more than four corners, and there are always stories. You might be surprised if you allowed yourself to listen, and imagine, and study The Other. The one who misbehaves, who is too loud, who is embarrassing, who can't hold a job, who reeks of cheap choices, who interrupts your routine, who asks you for money, who sleeps on the sidewalk, who is strange and unfamiliar, who speaks another language, who looks different and lives differently and walks funny because his path has been dangerous for a long time and his feet are bleeding, goddammit.
2:02:03 PM 
|
|
