Where the Possession of Money and Material Things was Concerned (Step Twelve continued)

Where the possession of money and material things was concerned, our outlook underwent the same revolutionary change.  With few exceptions, all of us had been spendthrifts.  We threw money about in every direction with the purpose of pleasing ourselves and impressing other people.  In our drinking time, we acted as if the money supply was inexhaustible, though between binges we’d sometimes go to the other extreme and become almost miserly.  Without realizing it we were just accumulating funds for the next spree.  Money was the symbol of pleasure and self-importance.  When our drinking had become much worse, money was only an urgent requirement which could supply us with the next drink and the temporary comfort of oblivion it brought.

I didn’t look ahead in the book and I don’t know what comes next.  I am one of the few exceptions, because I never had a good relationship with money, and I was always saving and not spending in a frightened kind of way.  Of course I did buy alcohol.  At certain times in my life, it was like paying for water or air, I just had to.

I was very young when I stopped drinking.  I didn’t throw money around in high school or in college, though I’m sure some people do.  One of the ways in which getting older has been better, for me, than being young, is that my attitude about money has softened and I’m not as worried about it as I was when I was younger.

I think part of my fear was providing for my children.  They are now both in a better position to provide for themselves than I am to provide for them, though I’m still helping financially, especially my daughter, because she’s still in school and doing well and that’s something it’s a joy to support and contribute to.

Drinking, I was sometimes irresponsible, and not together enough to, for example, pay my car insurance.  That almost got cut off due to plain old drunkenness. Well I’m sure nothing screams “high bottom” quite so loudly as almost having your insurance cut off.

Why Did You Get Sober?

I thought about this in a new way last week at my meeting.  I did not try to stay sober outside of AA.  Any time I was trying to stay sober, I went to AA.  When I wasn’t going to AA, I was trying to drink successfully, not to stay sober.

I got sober because I couldn’t drink successfully.  That’s what I really wanted to do, and tried to do, for years.  I am blessed and lucky that one day, before it killed me, I gave up trying to do it successfully, admitted that I couldn’t, and went back to AA.

I got sober because my choices truly were sobriety, death, or institution.  I chose sobriety.

Using the Program Instead of Alcohol

A long time ago, someone asked this question of me in comments:  How did you replace the alcohol?  I see that people sometimes find the blog by asking that of a search engine.  It is a fundamental question, I think.

At the heart of it, I replaced the alcohol with the program.  The reason I drank was to cope with, well, everything.  I loved life so much better when I was just a little bit drunk.  If that had been a successful strategy, I wouldn’t be writing this.  I’m an alcoholic, so that didn’t work.

Without alcohol to help me cope, life was a very painful thing.  To be honest, even with alcohol to help me cope, life was a very painful thing.  It did not happen over night and it was far from easy.  In my case, it took me six full years to actually stop drinking in Alcoholics Anonymous.  I learned a little bit along that way, but really I’m just lucky I survived.  Many don’t.  I almost didn’t.

But over the years of sobriety, AA actually did teach me to cope with life, for the most part, in a way that far surpasses my strategy of being a little bit drunk.  Even if that had worked, I’m sure I wouldn’t have learned the tough stuff.  Learned how to cope and usually how to be moderately happy.

Now I think the person who first asked the question was still drinking, or had just quit.  At that point replacing alcohol is difficult and there is painful growing ahead.  I’m here to say it’s worth it.

For me, the way of alcohol was the way of death.  I got worse and worse, and I had many examples in life and in the media of how bad things get.  There was a girl, completely disabled by a drunk driver, on the hospital floor with me when I had my wisdom teeth out.  I’m sure the driver who did that did not mean to.  I can’t imagine the hell of either party.  I can’t kid myself that I’m not taking a chance of joining them by drinking.  I am.  I would be.

AA has so many helpful ways to enable a newcomer to make it through to where life becomes bearable:  phone numbers, meetings, literature, sponsors, service.  Online is a huge vista of recovery resources I did not even dream of when I got sober.  Newly-sober and not-so-newly-sober folks find refuge in these things when times are hard and they are made better by them, not worse.

I’m afraid some small measure of faith is needed to begin.  A person simply can’t experience sobriety without being sober.

So both in terms of how to spend my time, and how to cope with life, I replaced the alcohol with AA.  AA takes much less of my time now than it did at the beginning.  That’s a choice I make and a crucial difference, too, is that now when I spend time with it, it’s because I really want to.   Because I finally held on to some sobriety and lived long enough to see it get better.

December 29, 2010 (this day)

I do NOT take criticism well.  Especially, I think, though I’m sure people who know me might see it differently, unjust criticism.  Wow it set my heart to pumping this morning, and since it was unjust (according to me), I fell back on, “What would YOU have done?”

“Well?  What WOULD you have done?”

It was my last day at work until Monday.  We have a party to go to New Year’s Eve – a program, sober party.  New Year’s Day we’re hoping our son will come over, then we have our meeting, then we’re having the party.

This afternoon at work, when we were talking about New Year’s plans, and I said about the party we’re having, someone commented, “Then do you make the people stay at your house?”

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

“Because,” the questioner answered, “At my house, if you have more than two beers, you’re not going anywhere.  I don’t let anyone leave.”

I explained that my party won’t involve alcohol, and everyone is not just permitted to leave, they are encouraged to do so.

And I’ll have a better time, and less regrets, and no overnight captives.

Time (Time Takes Time)

Looking for a picture to illustrate something about time, I found this one.  This kitty is 20 years old, and on Thanksgiving we thought he was going to die that day.  He didn’t.  At this point it looks like he will greet the new year with us.  My kids were 2 and 5 when he joined the family, and he’s been there through their entire schooling.  And 20 years of my 26-year sobriety.  This cat has never seen me drunk!

I’ve previously written about Phyllis here, here, and here .  Carole learned that they are not going to treat Phyllis’ cancer any further, and that they give her nine to twelve months to live.  Phyllis is someone who came to the program at age 70, after a life time of drinking, and while she didn’t stop drinking or using drugs completely, she had some periods of sobriety.  And while she didn’t work the program completely (or even very much), on reflection at this point, if this is really to be the last year she has with her family, I believe sobriety and the program has made it and the last several years better than the years before.

We’re neighbors, and before Phyllis presented herself at our meeting, we witnessed several scenes of police or bar friends bringing her home, too drunk to get herself there from a bar a few blocks away.  We heard some of her husband’s shouted pain at those times, and that hasn’t happened since she started coming to meetings.  One of her sons also became the father of twins last February, and Phyllis has been able to participate in their lives as much as her health has allowed, which is a lot.

My “time” sits heavily on my shoulders, at times, and the sober mother I’ve given my kitty (and of course my children) is a blessing beyond measure.  I would never ever down play it.  For some reason Carole felt it necessary to tell me about some of my drunken awfulness that my mother had shared with her.  There are years of my life I don’t remember.  I was truly on the edge of functioning.  My transformation is a miracle.  That first life I was given, with genetics or predisposition or the behavior I learned from my father or the coincidence of being someone who cannot stop drinking no matter how desperate the situation becomes was ended and I was given a new life I don’t deserve.

In that way, I can’t compare my experience as a sober alcoholic in AA with Phyllis’ life as such.  We have very little, yet everything in common.  If I could go back a few years and tell Phyllis at that first meeting that a few years from then, she would be facing terminal cancer, what difference would it make?  She couldn’t have fast-forwarded through her struggles with the program, and worked it better or more completely.  She did what she did when she did it – when she was ready, and not a moment before.

Staying Away from the First Drink

Because it is the first drink that gets you drunk!

In painfully typical alcoholic fashion, I tried to regulate my drinking.  One popular method is to count drinks and stop at some certain point.  This seldom worked for me, and it was truly no kind of solution.  The first drink clouded my mind and usually after starting to drink, I lost my judgment.  One more, a little bit more, just a little something else and I gone.  Without the first drink I can never get drunk.

It’s pretty obvious to me now that alcohol is poison, and I’m not going to win when I try to figure out how much I can have without crossing some line.  I won’t try just a little poison to see if that’s too much.  It is too much, and if I don’t go off the deep end each and every time, I will go sooner or later.

When I tried to regulate my drinking by drinking things that had low alcohol content, within a short time I was drinking the hardest stuff I could find.  I never liked the taste of alcohol, and my pitiful intention to not get so far gone by drinking milder stuff went right out the window when the alcohol hit my brain.  That first drink, no matter how weak, got me drunk.  I don’t have the first one, and I don’t get drunk.

Spread the Message

A wonderfully awesome follow-up to my post about Phyllis.

The speaker at my meeting tonight, Eleanore, had, at one time, 17 years of sobriety and had gone out.  Much failure, loss and carnage had not brought her back in.  One day sitting in some establishment (I don’t think it was a bar, but it might have been) Eleanore ran into Phyllis, who she had known both in the bars and in AA.  Phyllis told Eleanore that Eleanore looked “like hell,” and that Eleanore should go to a meeting.

Eleanore did, and tonight lead the meeting with over a year of new sobriety.

I don’t know what would have happened if Phyllis had not met Eleanore and had not told her to go to a meeting.  My experience tells me there would have been more, worse, failure loss and carnage.

Secrets (You’re only as sick as your secrets)

There’s someone specific on my mind for several reasons.  I’m going to call her Phyllis for this post.  She came to us a few years ago when she was 70 years old.  Circumstances had made her think it was a good time to stop drinking.

She went to lots of meetings and she stopped drinking and using other drugs – pretty much.  She sort of asked someone to be her sponsor, and that didn’t work out.  She kind of tried to work a step or two but that also didn’t work out completely well.  She stopped going to meetings for a time, then came back.  She goes to a few meetings a week now and hardly does any drugs or alcohol.  She doesn’t have a sponsor and she isn’t working steps.  Maybe, she tells us, if she had started out when she was younger.  But at this time, what’s the point?

And what’s the point of AA meetings for someone like this?  She tells us all the time, just about every time she’s at a meeting, that she comes because of the people.  I’ll point out also that no one to my knowledge tells her she can’t come, doesn’t belong, or is making her own quick doom.

Now I haven’t asked Phyllis about this, and I never spent any time at all in bars, and I imagine that drunken disclosures can be quite personal.  If they’re true.  I know the things I said when I was drunk were not always rooted in reality.  But the things Phyllis has disclosed to us over these few years are amazing.  I just bet that she never imagined she would tell strangers the things she has told us.  Most of us aren’t strangers, of course, but at an open meeting, there could be any number of strangers.

I don’t have any secrets.  I have one wacky circumstance wherein my work partner does not know I’m in AA, and I just feel ridiculous after all this time telling her.  I conceal one other fact from her, a friend I have whom I know she disapproves of, but I don’t hide it to the point of lying.  And for some strange reason I feel like I even have to only record those things because if I don’t, my wife will call me on them.

At times I’ve hidden my cigarette smoking from my children and my mother.  Thank goodness that hasn’t been an issue for quite some time.  I might not exactly hide, but not exactly broadcast it, if I cheat on my diet.  Smoking and eating in a disordered way.  Those things are sick, I think.  In those cases I am as sick as my secrets.

The fifth step has us disclose everything, at least once, to at least one person.  The exact nature of our wrongs.  Then then tenth has us admit when we are wrong.  It’s my own mind that is putting together secrets with wrongs.

I’m trying hard and I think all I have these days that I don’t want to disclose are sometimes disturbing dreams or thoughts.  At other times I don’t want to tell someone what I’m doing or what I’ve done because I know the person will disapprove or be angry, but I don’t usually feel I’ve done something wrong.  I haven’t seen it, in the rooms, where people are encouraged to confess all kinds of personal stuff to strangers, I really haven’t.  I have seen them, again and again, actually do so, though.  It seems natural to me to question why I or someone else wants to keep something a secret.  Something very personal, like a trauma or a medication or something, I can understand keeping close, and having few people who know about it.  That isn’t the same to me as a secret.

The level of disclosure I’ve experienced over the years is amazing.  Mary writes about a man who lived a good and productive life all the way through until an early death, a life uninterrupted by alcoholism.  I feel even luckier than that.  My life was interrupted and almost ended by alcoholism, but I have had so very many years of not just sobriety, but living the steps and knowing the wonderful people of the program it makes it more than worth it.  I can’t find words to explain the good fortune.  After all this time I still get to meet and know and pray for and worry about people like Phyllis.

Sanity

How it works for me, today.

The books tell us that sanity means soundness of the mind.  Sound means –free from injury, damage, defect, disease, etc.; in good condition; healthy; robust: a sound heart; a sound mind.  AA’s definition is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

The ultimate insanity for me was trying over and over to drink successfully, despite all I knew about alcoholism and the obvious fact that over time, my drinking got worse, never better.  Just like they told me would happen.

Now as far as trying something, I will say I’ve moved a step beyond even the understanding of “if you do what you did you will get what you got.”  Not only should I change the things I do in order to get a different result, I should also let go of the results, and not expect anything for certain.

When my mind is sound, and healthy, and I’m mostly sane, I think I have as clear a picture as I can of the world and my place in it.  Sanity to me means knowing that no matter what, my gratitude list is far longer than any list of complaints I could assemble.

It involves seeing “my part” as much as I can, and accurately appraising people and situations.  It means being humble and “right-sized.”

I don’t know if I ever was “sane” before I started drinking, and returning to sanity may be just trying to get back some of the good sense I was born with.  My actively drinking life was total insanity, and I guess I do need to consider that it takes a certain kind of person to do what I did.  I hope that the memory of that can make me gentler with others who still suffer.

February 6, 2010 (this day)

This is the church where my meeting is tonight.  Think anyone will be there?  I will be, which is one  thing about starting a meeting across the street from where I live.  I’m chairing, and I’ve called my lead to let him know he can come, or take a rain check.  Carole and I will walk over and open the door, should some poor soul need a meeting and manage to get there.

Yes, in my drinking days I would have braved the snow to get alcohol, in theory I would have.  In actuality, I was always prepared for such an event with plenty of booze on hand for the big dig out.  And I lived with my mother, so had I really run out, I could take some of hers and she wouldn’t know.

Today, I’m very grateful that’s not the case plus it’s an awesome day to count other blessings.

• Both my kids are “home” where they live and not in the snow, not that I know of.
• Everyone, staff and clients, all got out of work yesterday, four hours after the snow had started falling and in plenty of time to not be in danger.
• I don’t have to be anywhere, other than across the street, until Monday morning, and I’m confident we’ll be dug out by then.
• I’m not experiencing this alone.  Lots of people we know, and in a way, even the kids (at least I think), are on their own, though safe.  It’s great to have Carole here to work it and enjoy it with me.  I remember being snowed in on my own when the kids were too young to help me dig out.
• We have heat and electricity so far.  Not everyone does.
• We’re physically capable of dealing with the snow.

Finally, there is more snow than even Xandra can handle.  The snow energizes her and makes her so happy.  Until today, we hadn’t really seen her in a big snow, since we’ve only had her for 2.5 years.  Today is first time she didn’t look at all pleased to be out there.