We Think Not

                Surreptitious, cloak-and-dagger, clandestine practices are supposed to be among the many burdens that are lifted from our shoulders when we stop drinking.  It was an exhausting, epic onus to find excuses every night to sneak away and buy alcohol, hide alcohol, steal alcohol, and then find a million little ways to dismiss ourselves for a million little moments to nip the alcohol.  Dr. Henry Jekyll lived in seclusion between dinner parties for a reason, people.  I, too, live in seclusion, but not by choice and not to facilitate a nightly ritual of dark deeds.  I sit alone every night without surveillance and, though I could easily return to my old drunk ways, I do not.  I’m proud of myself for that.  It was a long, hard road to travel in order to live and operate the way I do, and I have been as open and vulnerable as I can be on a public platform to show others that recovery is possible, but also preferable.  Yet, when I am faced with the threat of certain relationships intersecting with unflattering aspects of maintaining my sobriety, I find myself shamefully redacting items from my schedule.

                Being sober does not—and should not—equate to a life of isolation and exclusion.  The fear of that sort of existence is a stumbling block that keeps a lot of people from seeking help for their addiction.  You will have friends. You will have fun.  You will laugh, and dance, and mingle, and wake-up the next day feeling refreshed and remembering all of it because you chose Sprite over Smirnoff (and nobody noticed or gave a fuck that you weren’t drinking). I don’t know if it’s the crippling social anxiety I’ve always harbored or if I’m still inhaling the fumes of a divorce-induced fear of abandonment, but the amount of time I spend alone is a personal choice—not a penalization.  I’ve only allowed a few new people to get semi-close to me in the past two years, and even though they are aware of my alcoholism and supportive of my recovery, I remain vague for the sake of some self-preservation.  For instance, I have had many a conversation that went: “How was your night?” > “It was fine.” > “What did you do?” > “Not much.”  Not much is my code for “I was at an AA meeting.”

                I nit-pick Alcoholics Anonymous quite a bit, which I’m sure hasn’t gone unnoticed by my small audience.  I kvetch about the sexism, the defunctness, the acumen, the disingenuous cliches, and the veiled cynicism.  Like religion and politics, it’s not the majority that are ignorant and hypocritical, but the ignorant hypocrites are the ones who speak loudly and speak often.  As much as I already know and am actively still learning about the human race and its reaction to literature, I will never understand why we consecrate an entire book and then go forth to preach only the portions of it that align with our unsanctified personal preferences…?  Maybe the key to that mystery is hidden in PhD level work.

                Speaking of hypocrites, I are one.  Kind of.  I wouldn’t call The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous a bible (I also wouldn’t call The Bible a bible) but I do order from it à la carte instead of trusting their cumulative recipes.  There is more viable matter in the book than you would think, considering that it predates the medical community’s acknowledgement of addiction as a mental disorder, generally catalyzed by other mental disorders.  The concept of a “higher power” instead of the classically forced Abrahamian God—that was incredibly progressive, as well as inclusive to the majority of alcoholics and addicts who struggle with addiction because they struggle with the feeling of having been failed by God in some way. 

                Then, of course, there are The Twelve Steps, which get as much mockery as whoever is currently the President in a Saturday Night Live cold open.  There isn’t anything particularly funny or pathetic about the steps; the rebukes come from people who dip their toe into AA and realize that the work involved has little to do with loosening your fist from a bottle, and a lot to do with dissecting yourself to locate all the reasons why you are fatally flawed and totally powerless.  Alcoholics no-likey that.  They live on a diet of vodka, aggressive blame, and playing the victim—if you take those away, they’ll starve.  Which is precisely how you suffocate alcoholism, but it makes a terrible pamphlet for recruiting. 

                The downsides of Alcoholics Anonymous: I already listed them vaguely, but it really comes down to the people, not so much the program.  Even though I tire of calling a man “sir,” only for him to refer to me as, “sweet pea,” I have the gift of holding principles above personalities.  If I’m honest, my real issue with AA is an issue I have with sobriety in general.  Since AA has the monopoly on people seeking sobriety, the two tend to overlap and the shared bane of both is this:  there is no way to sell sobriety to someone who does not recognize the profundity of addiction.

                It borders on false advertising for Alcoholics Anonymous to say that “the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.”  It makes it sound like the war ends when you can finally admit that you have a problem.  Unfortunately, no.  Not at all.  Drunks come limping in, a little bruised, a little beaten, saying that drinking got the best of them, and they’ve decided to walk away from it.  Then someone like me has to tell them that walking away isn’t a choice they get to make.  Addiction called “no quarter.”  You turn and fight, or you lay down and die.  There is no third option and there is no satisfying surrender.  The vomit, the DUIs, the stomach pumping, the slurred arguments, the hangovers, the lost jobs, the lost relationships, the humiliation… those weren’t the battles, those were antecedents.  You haven’t seen real carnage—not yet.  Pick up your weapon, son.  Addiction was high cotton.  Recovery is the war.  And you just declared it.

                When alcoholics realize how much is required in recovery, they want to run back into the arms of the drams.  And they can.  Man has free will and most of them have a car.  Probably not a license, though.  Yah fuckin’ drunks.  I’m no exception; I didn’t understand the full reach of addiction when I first ventured into AA.  Or the second time.  Or the third time.  Or the fo—screw it, I had the “desire to stop drinking” back in 2015, but desire doesn’t come with a set of handcuffs, you feel me?  It didn’t matter how many people told me I had problem, it didn’t matter who begged me to stop, it didn’t even matter that I wanted to stop.  Alcohol was ruining my life, but my life couldn’t happen without alcohol.  What to do? What to do?  

There was nothing to do.  My brain was drenched in Traveler’s Club.  It all had to fall apart for me to see the repercussions and the depth of the treachery that was hiding behind a good buzz.  There were three people in this world that truly loved me.  One was torturing herself to hang on, but she was losing her grip. One quit speaking to me.  One stopped loving me all together.  That’s what it took to get me in the trenches.

I’m not Rhett Butler, I don’t have “a passion for lost causes, once they’re really lost.”  It was just that, in all my strife trying to understand myself and feel sorry for myself and defend the drinking because of how much I hated myself sober, I didn’t leave any room to consider anybody else’s experience.  My family was down to their death rattles in Guernica, but I hadn’t heard it over the music playing in the nearest bar.  You sober-up to devastation.  No one understands that.  We warn you about it, but it gets lost amongst the “one day a time,” and the “easy does it.”  AA, on the surface, says “come join us if you want to quit drinking.”  They forget to tell you to bring a helmet.  Marketing is a bitch when you’re trying to sell something that only gets good after you’re forced turn and look at what you’ve done to your life.  Or, what’s left of your life.  A scene of wreckage and slaughter so inhumane that Dorathea Lange wouldn’t photograph it, at the risk of being unethically exploitative.

I can’t save an alcoholic from that fate.  Neither can AA.  I can scream about it until my nose bleeds, I can set up a flashing caution signal every ten feet for a hundred miles of bad road, and I can gesture at every other alcoholic in the room and myself as proof.  I can email them a link to my blog.  But I can’t—we can’t—make an alcoholic who hasn’t lost everything yet, understand that they will absolutely lose everything.  Its not that they don’t care, its that they don’t know.  I would do anything my higher power, or Satan himself required, if it meant that I could make Alcoholics Anonymous a preventative program, instead of palliative.

Have I listed any upsides yet?  Or stated why I keep coming back?  It’s not just because they tell me to, though they tell me every time between the Serenity Prayer and the parking lot smoke cloud.  I keep coming back for a lot of reasons.  I do it for accountability.  I do it for the community.  I do it to remember—even if its one of those meetings where I feel like I can’t identify with anyone else in the room and I don’t belong in that crowd—girl, yes you do.  You, and everybody else in that American Legion hut share your worst quality and your first quality, and you better not ever fucking forget it.  I do it to be counted.  The bigger the army, the better chance we have at a victory.  I do it so there is a “Sweet Pea” for every tenth “Sir.”  I do it because I’m still hoping the radioactive coffee will give me a useful superpower. 

I keep coming back to AA because Daddy kept going back.  My Grandmother kept going back too.  I do it because I have been the reason that someone wanted to stop drinking, and they tried so hard to stop drinking, but they couldn’t stop drinking. Not because they didn’t love me, or my sister, or my mother, but because alcoholism is a Goddamn beast.  When they were ready, AA said to them, “We know, and we’ve got you.”  I keep coming back because my reason turns three next week.  And now I know how it feels to love something more than life itself and still not know how to be what they need.  Not without the help of those who have been there and understand. There is no Benevolent Overlord of Alcoholism who got tired of watching me sip vodka out of water bottles and anointed me with eternal sobriety. No! I have to choose this.  Every day.  Do I love going to meetings? Not always.  That’s not the point.  The point is that its one hour a day, a few days a week, and it’s a statement I am making to myself and to other alcoholics.  I can’t prevent anyone from disintegrating into addiction.  I can promise to have their six while they fight in the war.  I can promise to reach out a hand when they are dangling from a ledge.  I can promise to never forget how it feels to be lost and stuck between “I should” and “I can’t,” and show grace.  These aren’t extravagant promises, but they are sincere promises from AA’s resident Sweet Pea.