What Works For Me Might Work For You
When I let my dress fall to the stage floor and exposed my liabilities to the world (the internet, more specifically), it was my fervent hope that others would participate in the conversation. I readied myself for comments and questions and they came—in a deluge. Even though I didn’t know what to expect in that regard, I still received the unexpected. The vast majority of communications were akin to, “oh my God, I had no idea you were… are you okay?” The “I had no idea” part either bothers me or encourages me, depending on the day.
I shouldn’t enjoy it, but I do, when girls my age will politely and sheepishly ask about my lifestyle and what made me decide to quit drinking. I have a rehearsed, surface-level (but very honest) go-to response that incites some derivative of, “You’re so committed. Good for you. I wish I was that disciplined.” A week or so later, those same girls will come back and relay the tale of how they drank too much over the holidays and, quiver-lipped, ask me, “do you think I have a problem?” I, again, surface-level, find a nice way to phrase, “No, Stacey. Your mother is vapid, your father is absent, your sister is more successful than you and Christmas with the family means either drinking or imploding. You’re good.”
I love that people come to me with concerns for their afflicted loved ones. I hate telling them the truth. It swirls in the same eddy as my issue from last week where I told a man that if he wanted to keep his wife, he needed to leave his wife. That was only the most recent in series of moments when I heard something come out of my mouth, yet I felt like I was comprehending it for the first time. Over a year ago, I got a phone call from a friend whose vocation within the medical field is liver disease specifically. This is a woman who I adore and respect and have known my entire life. She is brilliant, she is experienced, she knows medicine and she understands the science. She had to sink to coming to me with the question, “These people are dying—all they have to do is quit drinking—why won’t they quit drinking? How do I convince them to stop drinking?” My answer: “You can’t. They won’t.”
Addiction is so damn nuanced—down to the point that competent people will pose a perfectly concise question and I have to tell them that what they think they are asking, and what they are actually asking, are two separate inquiries. For instance: “Is it hard not to drink?” and “Do you still struggle with your addiction?” They sound like two shades of the same question, but in my alcoholic brain, they bait completely different answers.
“Is it hard not to drink?” No. It’s not. I’m simultaneously lucky and unlucky in that regard. I often feel guilty about how “not a problem” it is because so many of my comrades sweat through cravings every single day. That’s not my relationship with booze anymore. I’m not bigger or better than temptation, it’s just that alcohol and I exist on different planes of the same universe. I feel like an Amazonian predator whose favorite meal used to be tiny amphibians. Now, I glimpse the electric colors of a Dart Frog and I don’t even take a second look. I know poison when I see it. I’ll stick to lettuce and Croix; that feast is not for me.
“Do you still struggle with your addiction?” Absolutely. Utterly. Every minute of every day.
My addiction dictates my every move, just not in the manner that people assume it does. Addiction is part of me—on an atomic level— and there is no curing it or scrubbing myself clean. In a way, that’s a good thing. It pushes me to run faster, worker harder, think rationally, and try my best to always do the next right thing. If addiction didn’t hound me like a stalker, then I might apply looser vigilance and risk falling back into old patterns.
For me, though, addiction isn’t a threat that looms as often as it is a wound that aches. That’s the heft of my struggle. I’m good, my life is good, my family is good… but not for a lack of trying on my part to ruin it all. Even the best days occur under a cloud of remorse and the unrelenting desire to go back in time and undo all the damage that is done. I succeed, but I grieve. I march toward the future, but I pine for the past. And the success and the forward march are only possible by the efforts and grace of people who too kind to remind me everyday that I hurt them deeply, even though they have every right to. In recovery, we often say that “hurt-people hurt.” Its more accurate to say, “we hurt people, and that’s what hurts.”
So, yes. I still struggle with my addiction. I always will. While telling the truth is part of my constitution, I don’t always enjoy doing it. In addition to the questions I field from loved-ones of drunks, possible (but not probable) drunks, and the questions I willingly answer about myself, I also get questions from alcoholics who genuinely want and need help. My honest answers frequently fall short.
Did I mention that addiction is nuanced? It is. There is no cure-all, one-size-fits-all, quick fix, or easy remedies. Its different for every person and it kills me that my morsel of sober success cannot benefit anybody but me. Not only that, but when people ask me how I got sober, I have a concrete answer but it is not a method that I would ever endorse…
“Kara, I’m trying to get sober. Can you tell me how you did it?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, easy—I just drank and drank and drank, ignoring every warning and blowing every chance I was given until I alienated everyone around me, destroyed all of my relationships, and cultivated a life so miserable and pathetic that drinking couldn’t even ease the pain of what I had lost and my desire for alcohol just went away.” *This stunt was performed by a trained professional alcoholic. DO NOT try this at home.*
If you were to ask me how I stay sober, I have an answer for that too. It’s gut-wrenching, its profound, its effective, and its personal enough that I will likely never say it here. I will, however, tell it to any alcoholic who asks. Many have asked. Even so, my vulnerable, erudite resolve has little to no effect on any alcoholic that isn’t me. Respective reasons don’t translate. It distresses me, and others in recovery, to no end to watch another alcoholic lose everything despite us drowning them in empirical evidence that they needed to change, or they would lose everything.
There’s a Jimmy Buffett album from the 1980s called Off to See the Lizard and my dad’s cassette tape was still functional well into the 1990s when my little brain started retaining what I heard. In the titular song, there is a line that says, “answers are the easy part, questions raise the doubt.” Since I figured out that people don’t always ask me the questions they think they are asking me, and that no answer to an alcoholic’s question is going to affect their behavior, I’ll just answer the important question that no one has asked me:
Getting sober is absolutely worth it. This is coming from someone who didn’t think that moving forward in life without the aid of alcohol was possible. Its arduous to get sober, its incessant work to stay sober, and its incredibly painful to look backward with a clear head. It’s still worth it. Its not even a matter of “drunk” or “sober.” It’s a matter of “stay awful” or “be better.” Be better. Not perfect, just better. Your worst day sober will still be an improvement from your best day spent drunk. Its time to walk amongst the living. Be present in the world. Feel the bad feelings so you can bask in the great feelings… and remember them. Life has been patiently waiting for you. Keep the appointment.
