Recovery is hard
My first month of sobriety felt amazing. Well, most of it anyway. I woke up the morning of June 18th, 2008, with a bad case of the shakes, a vile case of nausea, and the worst case of regret and remorse I’ve ever experienced. Oddly enough, the night before wasn’t my worst binge. I didn’t drive drunk, I didn’t end up somewhere without remembering how I’d gotten there with no way to get home, I didn’t even drunk dial anyone. But the next morning, I finally realized that something was very, very wrong with me.
I imagine that most alcoholics can relate to that experience. By some unexplainable miracle, the denial was gone. I knew that I was an alcoholic, I knew I had to quit drinking, and I knew I needed help. Throughout my drinking career, I’d always looked down on Alcoholics Anonymous. While I believed alcoholism was real, I, like many, believed AA was a cult. I believed that sitting around in a room affirming one’s powerlessness was a bunch of religious garbage. ”Of course you’re powerless if you sit around fixating on being powerless. Of course you can’t control your drinking if you constantly tell yourself you have no restraint when you pick up a glass.”
And then, boom, suddenly–and it was sudden–I had a revelation that I was powerless over alcohol. I became aware of the innumerable instances over the years that I’d set out to “only have [insert number of drinks].” I also became aware that on the rare occasion I was able to limit myself to said amount, it was only because I was concerned about who was, gasp, watching and judging me, and those occasions were almost unbearable. They also usually ended with me stopping at the store to buy a bottle of wine on the way home. So it was with this newfound clarity that I turned to AA. Yes, because I realized I was powerless, but it would be dishonest not to mention that it was in no small part because I didn’t know what else to do.
For the next several days, I checked my local AA website looking for meetings, but was unable to bring myself to go. I had massive anxiety over going; would I see someone I knew? Would I have to talk? Would people talk to me? When I finally made it to my first meeting, these questions were answered: No, no (but I did anyway, if only to volunteer that it was my first meeting ever), and YES.
My first meeting was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a spiritual experience. What I walked away with was a big book, a phone list, and a sense of hope that I haven’t felt since I left for college 12 years ago.
During my first month of sobriety, I went to meetings daily, every time walking away with my hope renewed. My life could get better. I could be happy. I could live happily, and without alcohol to boot. It was this hope that carried me for weeks. I had–at that point–lost my physical cravings for alcohol after a few days of withdrawals, and felt that my addiction, fixation, and compulsion had been cured. Hooray!
Then it came time to find a sponsor and start working the steps. Yeah, it turns out the steps are kinda hard. And it turns out the steps are really, really scary. So a few days after getting my 30 day coin, I mostly stopped going to meetings. I went on my 60th day to get my coin, and committed myself working the steps.
It also turns out that my desire to drink came out of dormancy, and that first month without it was a short-lived blessing. It also turns out that living in sobriety is just as hard as living in drunkenness if you hold on to the same habits and thought patterns you had before you put down the bottle.
So it is with reluctance that I am here now, still on step one but dipping my toe into step two as I try to overcome what has become an almost phobic avoidance of working the steps. My reticence stems from fear of facing my train wreck of a brain, the pain of facing the years I’ve wasted and the wreckage I’ve created, but most of all the depth of my insanity and self-loathing that made my alcoholism initially work for me as a very effective anesthetic. Recovery is hard, and facing the mess I need to acknowledge, overcome, fix, and let go is terrifying. But I want what “The Promises,” well, promise. And I’ve come to the conclusion that if I am going to exist in sobriety stuck in the same old ugliness I did while I was drinking, I might as well keep getting drunk. And to keep getting drunk is not, as much as I want a drink right now, is not what I want anymore.
