I’ve never dealt with sadness soberly.  Alcohol is such a powerful and effective anesthetic that I’ve never had to.  Stressed?  Have a drink!  Anxious?  Have a drink!  Totally, utterly consumed by sorrow?  Well, now I can’t have a drink, and I’m having to deal with this pain in sobriety.  And it sucks.

• Similarly, not looking at your phone call log and wondering just exactly what you said when you called your ex 12 times between 3:34 and 4:17 a.m.

• Where’d this stain on my brand new Marc Jacobs blouse come from?  Is it related to the stain on my comforter?  And are either of them related to the half-eaten chalupa on my pillow?

• Not trying to catch a cab at 2:15 when every other drunk person in the city is trying to as well.  Parking is cheaper than the fare home, too.  Especially considering you waited in the Taco Bell drive-thru line to get the aforementioned chalupa with the meter running… when every other drunk person in the city is doing so as well.

• No, I did not try and beat up that bouncer.  Really?  No, seriously, are you making that up?  OH MY GOD.

Well, not completely.  Just until a couple of weeks ago.  That’s when I had my first “feel bad about it” drinking dream, and it was awful.  It was a dream so intense that I woke up feeling as if I really had gotten drunk.  After several minutes, I woke all the way up and realized that it had thankfully just been a dream.  

Last night I had another such dream.  In it, I was sitting in a bar by myself, with some sort of clear mixed drink in a high ball on the counter in front of me.  I don’t think my dream actually involved me ingesting the libation, instead it focused on right before and right after.  Before I drank it, I was thinking about having just celebrated 90 days of sobriety, and if I really wanted to drink it.  Which, incidentally, I did.  After consuming it, I felt awful because I realized I had just thrown away those 90 days.  What followed was a very intense internal dialogue about whether or not I’d tell anyone I’d just relapsed.  Should I declare that I’d slipped up and change my sobriety date or just pretend that it never happened and move on?  

My good friend J says that she had dreams like this when she quit smoking.  She’d smoke and smoke and smoke, and then suddenly become aware that she’d quit.  When she woke up, she felt grateful that it had only been a dream and go through the rest of her day being so happy she wasn’t a smoker.  She shared this with me when I told her about my first really intense drinking dream, and gave me her opinion that dreams like this are your subconscious rooting for you.  What??   “I woke up feel so beyond awful, like I’d done something terribly wrong.  Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I was shaken all day.”  How could that possibly be my subconscious telling me it’s on my side?  ”Think about how awful you felt relapsing.  You don’t have to really do it to know how it would make you feel now.”  Oh.  Hmm, yes, that makes a lot of sense.

Last night’s dream was on my mind throughout much of today, but fortunately this time I was able to frame it in J’s terms.  One of the things that has thus far kept my sober is the thought of having to tell everyone that I’d relapsed.  When you quit drinking, everyone is so happy and relieved.  They believe in you and encourage you.  I very much imagine that instead of such a response rarely comes when you relapse and then get back on the proverbial wagon.  In my dream, I experienced what it was like to relapse, and the anguish it caused me.  It’s enough, for now, to remind me that sober is what I want to be.

Having 90 days feels really good.  I didn’t honestly think I’d make it this far, but now that I am on my way, I can’t imagine turning back.  Slowly but surely my ways of thinking are starting to change, I’m starting to look at myself honestly and each day I’m just a little bit less overwhelmed by the huge amount of work I have ahead of me.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

Sounds simple enough, right? The third step even comes with its own nifty little prayer to help you out, on page 63 of the big book (please not that I’ve updated the language as all the thees and thys confuse me):

“God, I offer myself to you–to build with me and do with me as you will. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do your will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of your power, your love, and your way of life. May I do your will always!”

There’s a huge problem here, however, for people like me who don’t really have any understanding at all of a God. As a teenager I attended church youth group, and would have identified myself as a Christian if you’d asked, but mostly I just went because I liked the people and the activities. For years after that, I considered myself an atheist which was for me–and I mean no disrespect to atheists, I know many who believe (for lack of a better word) very strongly in their atheism–a knee jerk reaction to realizing the whole Jesus business made absolutely no logical sense to me beyond being a nice, if inconsistent, mythology.

In the last couple of years, I’ve come back around to the idea of a higher power, that there’s something out there. My best friend, J, who is very spiritual, calls her higher power “Source.” I think her idea is closer to what my own beliefs are; God is the source of all things, the source of love, the source of kindness and wisdom. It’s not particularly well-defined, but at least it’s something.

So, that brings us up to the past week past week when, after a few weeks of holding on to my sobriety an hour (and sometimes even a minute) at a time, I began to pray. At first, it felt dishonest because I had not even been able to grasp step two yet. How can I be praying when I don’t even believe that there’s a power greater than myself who can restore me to sanity? How can I be praying when I don’t even know who or what I’m praying to? It was with a “fake it till ya make it” attitude that I incorporated prayer, and it was only because in my desperation not to drink, I decided to try what seems to work so well for all of those people filling up my meetings.

So, I’ve been praying. And I’m still sober. And some oddly synchronicitous things have been happening. I’ve been praying for God to make me useful again, because I feel like such a failure these days, and I want a purpose. Two days ago I was asked to chair a meeting five minutes before it started and despite my protests, the many ways as I said “no” and their accompanying excuses wouldn’t be accepted. Yesterday after a meeting, a man my age in our fellowship, T, introduced me a woman my age, C, who after a month of sobriety went back out, and has just come back in. Today I got a call from an old boss to do some freelance work this weekend. It just so happens I’ve also been praying for God to help me work hard with honestly and integrity to get myself out of the enormous financial mess I’ve gotten myself into.

These things are great, but I think the best part is that praying has helped me to accept step two, so that I am now able to embrace step three. And it only took three months!

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.