Auld Lang Resign
There are a surprising number of inherent perks to being sober. There are the obvious: waking up without a hangover, not baiting arrest, having extra conscious time in the day… but those only apply to people who were formerly addicts and are now sober. We have some benefits that I imagine make non-addicts a little jealous. For instance, we forever have an indisputable excuse to get out of events that we don’t want to attend. “Gee, ya know, I’d love to be at your cornhole tournament/bridal shower/tailgate/Harry Potter movie marathon, but people will probably be drinking, so…”
I am very much against lying… but the only lie is the “I’d love to” part, and that’s to preserve someone’s feelings. I can make exceptions for polite white lies when telling the truth would have sounded like, “your shit is stupid and I don’t wanna fuckin’ go.”
Another subsidy of sobriety, especially this time of year, is that we don’t feel pressured to make unattainable, perennial resolutions ever again. We were addicts. Now, we’re sober. That is the apex of self-improvement. Anything else we add is a brick onto our steeple.
Our attitude is not that of people who think they’ve done enough, are perfect, and never need to lift a finger or adjust a principle ever again… our attitude is that we need to live by a standard where we fix what’s wrong with us the very instant that we realize something is wrong. As opposed to the cliché of the New Year where we used to sit and ponder our flaws for 8 or so months before setting a start date of January 1st. Then, of course, return to bad habits a few weeks later when we ceased returning to the gym.
The reasoning for why we don’t feel compelled to participate in canonical resolutions is twofold. First and fundamentally, addiction recovery is a fulltime job. On top of whatever else we do fulltime. Every morning presents a deluge of mental, physical, emotional, precautionary labors that must be performed in order for us to stay on our current, positive path. If you are a non-addict, or an addict who is still struggling, stop that video in your head right now where the person who is sober—for 10 days or 10 years—is shaking and sweating at their desk, obsessing over the condensation on a cold beer or the sound of shaking two tablets of Oxy out of a pill bottle. It’s not like that.
The work we do is standard, but constant. We were not endowed with psychological stability from birth, we have to bake it from scratch. The easy way to feel welcome in our own heads was to drink. Do the drugs. And the easy way was just that; easy. Until it was chaos. Now we have to do it the hard way. Exercise isn’t difficult, AA meetings aren’t difficult, therapy isn’t difficult, but perseverance is extremely difficult. Recovery isn’t like a diet, we can’t splurge on occasion when someone leaves donuts in the breakroom. We can never rest from our bolstering good habits because breaks are like drinks to us; if we take 1, we’ll take 20. That’s just how our addict brains work. We aren’t capable of moderation. It took us far too long to get sober because we were terrified of words like “never” and “always” when they were applied to the only thing that gave us comfort. Hindsight has made our current selves terrified of phrases like, “just this once” and “I’ll start again tomorrow” because those excuses kept us anchored to booze and drugs for years.
The non-negotiable goal is for our head to be in the right place from sunrise to sunset and all the hours in between. Even on our worst days, at our lowest points, during our mental Chernobyls and emotional Pearl Harbors—we cannot waver. If we waver, we are finished. So, we are not just going for our morning jog, we are doing battle preparation. It’s not just a 5am meeting, its dressing ourselves in armor. It’s not just meditation, its endless conditioning for our brains to slow down and choose wisely; choose to bite our tongues instead scream, resist our anxieties instead of feeding them, keep going through every disappointment and attack… All. The. Time. So, no, we don’t need a Peloton to feel like we made an effort every day.
Secondly, people in recovery shouldn’t schedule self-improvement because we should be correcting ourselves instantaneously. I don’t live and die by the steps or the fundamentals of AA or NA, but when a veritably good philosophy crosses my path, I preach it. Step 10 commands, after we became sober, “we continue to take personal (moral) inventory, and when we are wrong, promptly admit it.” This translates seamlessly to debates, arguments, and apologies, but it can work for us beyond that. Whether you follow a program or not, you had to get honest in order to get sober. We know our bad habits and leading behaviors like the back of our hand (or like the grand total of a fifth of our brand of cheap vodka, with tax, down to the penny). Therefore, we need to be vigilant about correcting ourselves the very second that we realize we need correcting.
Once again, it comes down to a resolution—either to start a good habit or snuff a bad one, but it can’t wait for a minute, let alone wait until January. Father Time knows what Baby New Year doesn’t: you will always regret the time you’ve lost to frivolous things. Alcohol, drugs, grudges, crappy jobs, bad relationships, your own stubbornness, doing things you hate and putting things you love on the backburner. Stop it. Stop it right now. Better yet, halt the tiny felonies you are committing that lead to those large existential cataclysms.
It’s not a perfect example, but yesterday, while one of my professors was lecturing, I found my eyes wandering around the classroom. I started fixating on the other students’ foreheads: smooth, supple, creaseless… young. I panicked because I know my forehead doesn’t look that way—I slather it in Goat’s Milk serum and take an ice-roller to it every morning trying to slow the oncoming pruney epoch. One of my biggest anxieties is that I’m embarrassing myself by being the unaware elderly woman in the college classroom, trotting along like I can accomplish something. Meanwhile my child-classmates are whispering behind my back how “sad” and “pathetic” I am. While that may actually be the case…. I had to shut my obsession with it down immediately.
I’m an alcoholic, I can’t spend a single second fretting about the things I cannot help or change that aren’t serving me. I know my brain. I will follow that train of thought into a pit of despair. I will get to the bottom that rabbit hole and then keep digging. It will go from me imagining my classmates saying I’m pathetic and sad, to me saying to myself that I’m pathetic and sad. “Pathetic,” “sad,” “worthless,” “incapable,” “foolish,” “wasteful.” I’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression. Which means that if I sit in those thoughts for even a moderate amount of time, I will lose the will the try. Maybe I just won’t leave my apartment for a day, maybe three days. Maybe I’ll stop showering. Maybe I’ll feel a little better but my fear of going outside and encountering another obstacle will keep me planted behind a locked door. Maybe I’ll cry hard for a few days and get it all out of my system, but in the process I’ll bust another blood vessel in my eye and not want to risk anybody seeing that. So then maybe I’ll just stay in bed for another three days...
The more you make a habit of stopping problems before they start, the easier things become. Trust me. It would be easy to let my mind go wherever it wants and just write on a Post-It “be kinder to yourself in 2022!!!” But we already discussed how “doing the easy thing” is never easy in the long run. Yes, checking your thoughts and behaviors all day is a lot of work. Crawling your way up a jagged cliff from rock bottom is more work, and for some, its impossible. Pick your struggle.
I began by labeling these constant inconveniences as “perks,” and I stand by it. Recovering addicts stared death in the face and then had the luxury and the option of turning around. Most people aren’t entitled to that whopper of an existential perspective. We know the impact of being lazy with our self-care (if that’s what you want to call basic homeostasis.) I used to worry that people would think of me as selfish for making time for things like therapy, meditation, jogging, personal space, and omitting myself from events that make me uncomfortable. Those are not luxuries. Those are prerequisites to me controlling my mental health and having a day-to-day life that does not include drinking in a closet to feel like a normal human being. I had to let go of wondering what other people would think, though. They haven’t been there, so they don’t understand that negotiating my coping mechanisms is a deadly game. No exaggeration.
This perspective is a perk and I’m lucky. Yes. Every day I feel lucky. I mean, addiction is devasting, I lost a lot, I destroyed the rest, and I exist in a state of constant grief that I’ll never breach, but I still know I’m lucky. I played the tape for you earlier of how easily I, and others, go from one negative thought to a complete implosion. I have it memorized so now I can knowingly simplify my habits to “Hey, Kara, go for a run or die in a crack house—pick now, pick quick.”
The sad fact is that self-care is considered self-ish to people who haven’t yet seen the impact of letting it slip. I worry about the abundant attitude of, “there are other things I need to be doing.” They don’t see the philosophy behind, “I need to do some things for me so I don’t collapse and take everyone down with me.” As addicts, we have the perk of knowing that will actually happen because it already happened, and we do these things so it won’t happen again… So, yes, there is a benefit to appreciating today and knowing better than to wait until tomorrow. Or next week. Or January. Staying sober is good goal, but its not the only good goal. Go for run to feel healthier for your kids. Mediate to be more patient with your employees. Attend that support group so you can heal, and help others heal in the process. Resolve to do it right now—today-- and every day from now on. Time you take for yourself is time you are investing in being better for everyone else. And don’t feel guilty about saying “no” to that dinner party. Lie and tell them you’re an alcoholic. I’m fine with it. Or better yet, tell them the truth: “I need that time for me. …and I don’t wanna go to that shit.”
