Am I Doing This Right?
As I stood up to leave my Science Fiction class on the last day of the semester, I was a bit melancholy. Science Fiction is the one area of literature that I rather disliked. Hated, actually. I hated it. Despised it. I thought it was cheap and pointless and gimmicky. There is enough material to compose a dirge based on the world as it stands, why would an author feel the need to add aliens, or time travel, or elements of some oppressive dystopian society to make people shudder? All George Orwell needed to do was stand in line at the NCDMV once to see that the year already is, and always has been 1984.
I am not too proud to admit it when I am wrong, and I was wrong. My attitude had me snubbing a germane, effervescent, often polemical facet of my enterprise and I will be forever thankful to Professor Phillips for correcting my foolish notions. The last lesson concluded and the space between my seat on the front row and the instructor’s desk was saturated with students inquiring about extra credit. I reached my arm above the crowd, waved, and mouthed ‘thank you’ to the professor, as I did at the end of every class. Dr. Phillips held up a hand for me to halt and called out over the leeches, “Kara—send me an email! I have a list of book recommendations for you!”
Generally, I don’t have time or brain capacity for book recommendations unless they come from Morgan or are PhD-endorsed and can be used as a reference for a paper I’m actively working on. I’m not a prick. I already spend my free hours with my nose between pages and the queue for the next volume is never-ending. Dr. Phillips, however, has earned my pedantic trust and I’m still sneering and blushing about the time that his feedback for my thesis was, “like you, this is phlegmatically pretentious.”
In other contexts, I’d be opposed to having the term pretentious applied to me… but it was an exceptional thesis, and I knew it. Besides, pretention doesn’t connote arrogance, it just means that I have high standards and I expect that others should rise to meet them. Only academically. Pretention is a branch of buoyancy, and I am only buoyant in one area: literature. Well, I’m buoyant in two areas, but there is no room for being pretentious in sobriety—not if you are doing it right.
I’m confident in my recovery. Confident enough that I don’t need to boast that I’m confident. The same indicators apply in online dating; if your tagline says, “I’m funny and intelligent,” you are neither of those things. If you have to tell people, “I’m sober and I have all the answers,” you are on the verge. I know this and yet, whenever an old guy tells me that I’m “doing it wrong,” I unduly consider it.
I don’t practice AA strictly by the book. Apologies. I’m proficient in literary analysis and I cannot sanction the content of pre-war “quit lit” that has no reference to current psychiatric elucidations and refers to women only as “wives.” It is a paradigm, considering. It explains the behaviors, habits, and thought processes of someone in active alcoholism and post-addiction. The Big Book is enigmatic regarding its accuracy/time period ratio. How. Ev. Er. The world has evolved. Just because Scott and I have the same problem with booze does not mean we have the same problems all around, or that we have anything else in common.
From the early stages of sobriety, I knew instinctively that just being sober would never be enough for me. I knew that sobriety was necessary to make anything else in my life work. It needed to be my foundation, not my focal point. Sobriety was going to be the ground that I stood on every day, not the obelisk I crane my neck upward to adulate. “Sober” was going to be a fact about me. Not a dream, not a wish, not a goal. Since I’ve already waxed to pretentious, I must say that I’ve never been too literal. Nurturing my recovery does not require 4 to 5 meetings a week. In fact, I find that counterproductive. Every minute of every day is time I can be reading, researching, expanding curriculums, obsessively memorizing the credentials of past PhD candidates in Duke University’s Comparative Literature Department. And yes, after 9pm I take off my bra and watch tv but I need that as part of my recovery too, damnit.
So, when some other alcoholic tells me that I’m “not committed,” I get anxious and angry. Then I become confused. I am committed. I’m committed to a life that doesn’t require discount escape. I’m committed to exercise, and therapy, and medication management, and character improvement, and (trying) to better for my family. Those are all perfectly valid ways to spend an hour in lieu of listening to other people whine about not being able to drink at their cousin’s wedding while I absorb the odor of viscous cigarette sweat into my blouse.
I am committed to the principles of AA. There are absolutely weak spots in my constitution that I don’t bait or poke. There are also parts of my constitution that are durable. I don’t struggle around other people who are drinking. I am unbothered and non-allured at bars and parties. I am, however, subject to existential recalculation when I’m counted out, or whispered about, or when people feel the need to amend existing plans because they don’t know if I can “handle it.” I can handle it. I can handle anything—trust me. I do a great job of handling the urge to throw a punch when I’m told that my behavior is risky and indicative of someone who isn’t “committed.” If you hang out in a barber shop long enough, you’ll eventually get a haircut. That is the response I get from other alcoholics when I tell them that I don’t turn down invitations to “grab a drink” with my colleagues. They assume my only motive is to get close to a bar. In reality, my motive is to not be sequestered from my peers because of a personal problem that shouldn’t have to be a public problem.
I do falter when accused of lacking commitment because I know that adhering to AA has worked and will work for a large number of alcoholics. If someone with 20 years of sobriety tells me that I’m “doing it wrong” …am I doing it wrong? I would never claim to be doing it right, and that’s why I don’t sponsor or sermonize. But am I actually, unknowingly standing on a ledge because I don’t write all of my character flaws down in a $30 workbook once a year? I have also been told that I am “obviously capable of dedicating myself” because of the dedication and fastidiousness I give to my vocation. They tell me that I should be giving half of my energy and focus to AA in order to be stable in my recovery. That I should siphon time from my studies and my nephew to invent a God that works for me and answer 3am phone calls from court-ordered meeting attendants who, by the way, aren’t calling so I’ll stop them from drinking—they’re calling to make sure that my lifestyle is still less desirable than malt liquor from a gas station (It is. No need to call and check). I have a nasty premonition that some drunk will go on an all-night bender, take a quick storm drain nap, start again when the liquor store opens at 9am, wander into a quiet neighborhood, inevitably get naked, climb over a fence and fall genitals-first into a child’s backyard birthday party. When they plead guilty to charges of public intoxication, indecent exposure, and endangering a minor, the judge will ask, “Why? Why did this happen?” The answer will be: “Because. My sponsor, Kara Elyse Werts McMillan Werts, wasn’t persuasive.”
Its hard to tell what a person’s motives are. When someone recites the words, “We were together. I forget the rest” and credits Walt Whitman, why do I feel the need to correct them? Why do I scrunch up my nose, put my hands on my hips and pompously announce, “He never wrote that—it’s a paraphrasing from Enfans d’Adam #9, ‘Once I passed through a populous city…’”
Am I saving that person from the embarrassment of an encore misquoting? Or defending the reverence of poetry verbatim? Am I just being a prick? The same kind of prick that I swore I wasn’t about ten paragraphs ago. Or am I scared to death of being a failure? Again? That I’ve wrapped my life around a plan that won’t come to fruition because I’m not as smart as I think I am, and I don’t have the stamina for a doctorate nor the aptitude. My insights are pedestrian, my analyses are mediocre, I’ve reached my erudition ceiling and all that’s left to do is wait a year for a deluge of rejection letters from every literature program in the country (and a few additional countries) so I can drown in my botched attempt at academia, which I only attempted because I botched my last enterprise which was just to be an average human woman… and I deal with that fear of failure by snottily telling a 22-year-old guy that the platitude he wrote in his girlfriend’s Valentine’s Day card is misattributed to an old dead dude. So, for a second, I can feel superior.
Likewise, do alcoholics shame me and tell me that I’m not “committed” because I have to follow the 12 Steps exactly, or sobriety somehow won’t work… because they are still desperate to convince themselves that its working for them? Are we all just forcing the things we understand onto others to battle the fear we feel over the unknown variables of the many things we don’t understand? Do we want some sense of control so badly that we are hammering with wrenches and screwing with pliers because we only have a few tools in our belt and we have to force it all to work for us? Maybe that’s why I only get pretentious with poetry—that part of my life still needs some hammer-wrenching. My sobriety does not.
If I could find an effective way to help other alcoholics get sober, I would. It would overtake my reading time. If answering 3am phone calls worked, I’d answer. If policing people and telling them they can’t go to parties, can’t go to bars, can’t drive past their ex’s house, can’t go to a baseball game, can’t do anything to threaten the senses, would make an impact, I’d be on them like white on rice. It doesn’t work that way. I know that. The people who tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing know that what they’re doing doesn’t always work either. You know, though… its been two years… it hasn’t felt any longer. I’m not scratching my skin off or clawing my eyes out. I’m not exhausted, I feel like I’m just waking up and I’m ready to go. I’m not naïve, I know that the monster can come out of nowhere, I check my rearview and my peripherals like a woman obsessed. But if he does come around, I’m not going to try and fight him with a wrench and pair of pliers—I know how to ask for help and I know when to ask for help. I don’t crave control bad enough to shoo-away my army right before the war. And I can’t possibly be “doing it wrong,” if I’m doing it at all… right?
