730 White Chips Avoided
At this precise time last year, I sat down to write the short memoir of my first year of sobriety. The biggest difference between May 2nd, 2021, and May 2nd, 2022 is that I was prepared in 2021. I’m always prepared to ruminate on addiction and sobriety, then turn those musings into a blog post that will lure an astounding seven readers. Last year, however, I was writing and giving excessive consideration to what I would say that night at my AA meeting when I collected my one-year chip and they asked me, in front of the crowd, “how did you do it?”
In 2022, I 100% forgot about that part. Still having exams to take, now having exams to grade, and a small celebration tonight with people I love (who, for whatever God knows reason, seem to love me too) the obligatory day-of AA meeting was nearly neglected. At 4am I drooped out of bed and into a pair of yoga pants, called an audible to stop for a latte instead of applying eyeliner, and rolled—half asleep—into the nearest sunrise session. When the proper moment came for me to claim my symbolic trinket, I didn’t feel much. Not just because I was partially unconscious, but because I was obsessing about the other things on my chore list that had to be completed today, including writing this here personal essay. Also, the 5am meetings consist mostly of older people with decades of sobriety and two years, to me, seemed like small potatoes.
I took my chip, hugged five people that I’ve never met, and headed back to my seat with purpose. From the front of the room, someone called out, “Hey, wait! How did you do it??”
Midway through lowering my ass into a folding chair, with the rim of my coffee cup in my mouth, I froze.
Extemporaneous speaking is generally my forte, and I do have an anodyne, prosaic go-to answer to the question of “how do you stay sober?” Which is: I put enough space between myself and addiction to realize what mattered and what should be prioritized. Since then, staying sober has been easy.
But that would not have been the right thing to say in that moment.
Just before I picked up my prize for two years of sobriety, the man who had been sitting next to me picked up a white chip. He wasn’t a newcomer, or obligated by a judge to be there, or a scared, shaky youngster trying to isolate the cause of their anxiety… he was a veteran. He knew everyone in the room and his copy of The Big Book had more notes in the margins than my copy of Dante’s Inferno. Fresh off the night shift, with black dirt caked under his fingernails and wearing a shirt with a sew-in nametag, he showed up at a 5am meeting and silently admitted to his peers that he had to start over. Again.
I was not going to stand next to a grown man who was fully committed, but gravely struggling, and say that this shit is easy.
Because this shit isn’t easy. Its not easy at all.
The shame of addiction does not dissipate when the abuse ends. The amount of shame that we feel multiplies in recovery and diffuses across degrees and categories. All of the shame that we were supposed to have felt when we were drunk, and high, and acting on selfishness and desperation… it finally shows up. The farther we get from our addiction, the more we remember about the terrible things we did, and the terrible things we said, and the insignificant things that we prioritized over the important people we neglected. It comes to us in flashes of prior combat, with visons of bloodshed and the sound of gunfire. Hallucinations take over our faculties and we are forced to watch, with our mind’s eye, as the enemy employs every available weapon to extinguish the life out of everyone we love. The bullets, and the grenades, and the napalm still fly as our troops all lay dead or dying and you become enraged, wondering what kind of villain decimates an already exhausted army? Then you look up and see that the villain is you. Holding a bottle. Sitting on a thrown. Gazing around at the devastation and still calling “no quarter.”
Even if we can start to soothe those burns by changing our ways and seeking help from doctors, and counselors, and support groups, there is always more shame to mine. There is no pride in being sober when you are ashamed to be an addict in the first place. It is humiliating to be the kind of person who has to fight the instinct to do something that shouldn’t be instinctive. Instinct is supposed to drive us to kill for food, run from flood waters, and throw our bodies between children and the predator… We should not feel an instinctive need to reach for a methuselah of poison, fermented by man, bottled by man, advertised with palm trees, hammocks and half-naked women and, all-in-all, entirely unnecessary to our survival. Yet, instinct and need are exactly what alcoholism feels like.
There is shame in wanting to be taken seriously by others, but quietly believing that we shouldn’t be taken seriously. We’re a liability. And we know it. Even on the days when we sit at the pinnacle of self-assurance, we know that the monster is always just around the corner. The point is to stay just cognizant enough of the risk to not fall easily back into addiction when it could have just as easily been prevented. And there is no end to alcoholism. Til the day we die, we are alcoholics. So, even if you are in the best possible mindset—a place in recovery where you know your limits, you know that there is no such thing “one drink,” when you know the signs that you need to get to a meeting, or adjust some medication, or step outside of a situation and take a breather… a place where addiction is just on your radar enough to avoid it, but so far away that, other than awareness, it doesn’t cross your mind or have any role in your routine. Even in that place, we’re still drunks.
We get sober so we can participate in life, but once we’re sober, we feel guilty every time we seize the opportunity to participate in life because there is always a chance that we can’t stay sober. People in recovery get a chance at things that addicts can’t/shouldn’t have: friendships, relationships, careers, a family, a grant to go to Oxford University for a month to work on a master’s thesis… we want it all so badly, and part of us feels like we’ve earned it. Another part of us feels like we’re lying to everyone about everything, and we’d be wrong to let them invest in us because we’re not real people. Sober or not, we’re addicts. Always were, always will be.
The weight of it all is heavy. Every morning we wake up feeling refreshed and determined to fight addiction and win. We’re only getting stronger and more confident in that competition. But every morning we also wake up trying to see only how blessed and lucky we are to have beaten addiction, and not to sink into the realization that we’re still stuck in a no-win situation… it’s a dark contest. So, yeah, sure, not drinking has only gotten easier. But nothing else about addiction recovery is easy. I have no idea what factor had me picking up a two-year chip this morning while a man exactly like me was starting over. But I do know that I won’t take it for granted.
There is another blessing in being an addict in recovery, other than simply surviving while others are still suffering. I would almost say that the years, things, and people that alcoholism cost me were a fair price to pay for the perspective. Yes, two years of sobriety is a success. But not I, nor any other addict would measure our success by stacking it next to someone else’s failure. Its not a point of pride and its certainly not a victory. Either we all make it, or none of us does. There is war going on that we seldom talk about. All of us addicts are fighting for our sanity and our lives while we mingle with regular people at the grocery stores, and dinner parties, and fro-yo socials. Some of us wear the mask well. Some of us don’t. Some of us feel the weight of it all, all the time. Some of us have people to help us carry it so it doesn’t feel like such a heavy load. Good people. Great people. The kind of people who have already had to bear my burdens and would still take more, if I told them that I need another hand free because the man next to me with the white chip needs a boost.
I’m not saying that blessings and luck have nothing to do with why I’ve had things so easy, but I don’t want to squelch credit where credit is due… because the dark contest I compete in everyday is balanced with a dazzling, bright contest—one where I say that being sober is easy because I recognize the things that are important. Those important things keep lifting me up, offering help, telling me that I’m doing a great job and that I am enough. All I want to do is keep being enough and still be more of what they need because they deserve the best. When you have the reasons that I do for being better, the no-win situation of being an addict in recovery starts to look like a win-win situation of being an addict in recovery.
