May 8, 2012 (this day)

We live on the edge of a city and, because of things going on in the city, were thwarted in our efforts to cross through it to the other side to walk a trail.  Instead we walked around a few blocks near our edge of the city.  It was cool to do, but some strangers are afraid of our dog.

Our dog has been acting sickly though she seems better at the moment.  Carole took her to the vet yesterday.  She’s been not eating right away, which she has never done in all her years with us before, and she’s been throwing up.  The vet said she could have reflux (which, if she does, she got from Carole.  I have an iron stomach and haven’t had an issue in decades).

The dog may be nine years old, or maybe 10.  Today, like every day, could be her birthday.  For reasons that are probably all recorded here somewhere, I am extremely attached to this dog.  I’m very grateful that we got to give her some good years.  I really hope we get to give her many more.  And I’m still hoping to have one of my pets go quietly in their sleep of old age.  Hasn’t happened for me yet.

Last year we brought these into our lives, and the other night they knocked the smoke detector off the ceiling.

Today I’m off from work first, to go for my womanly yearly.  My cycle has been so messed up I’ve thought of not tracking.  The menopause chronicles are there for anyone interested.  To summarize, I bled for 35 days in 2008, 93 days in 2009, 56 days in 2010, 49 days in 2011, and so far I’ve bled most of this year.  After all the tests to see if I had cancer or something else really wrong, I’ve gone without drugs or surgery.  I really don’t know anyone else who has gone without drugs or surgery and so there’s no one to talk to about it.  But, what to say?  Whenever symptoms appear I remind myself (and those lucky enough to be listening to me) that I’m upset because my body is working properly.  Really.  I’ll be 50 at the end of the month.

After the doctor we are heading out on a mission of mercy to buy a used, special chair for someone we know who needs one.  The state of funding for people with disabilities is terrible right now.  I cannot believe that in this land of plenty, we (society) cannot provide a special chair to someone who needs one.  I hope the chair works out but, sadly, I know that if it doesn’t work for this particular person, it will work for someone else who needs it and doesn’t have it.

So today I’m grateful for the ability to help get the chair.  I’m grateful that the dog seems OK and if she’s not, I can provide medical care for her, if that’s what she needs.  I’m grateful that I’m going for my yearly and haven’t been to the lady doctor in a year because, well, my body works properly!

February 24, 2012 (this day)

So many times, when I talk about struggling or slipping, I want to communicate to someone (maybe a particular someone, maybe not) that it is possible to go from “chronic relapser” status to “oldtimer.”  Talking to Carole last night I was saying that I have trouble identifying with people who come to the program and stop drinking and that’s it.  That was far from it for me, and I think it’s a different (though similar) kind of deflation for the chronic relapser to show up at meetings having slipped again and again and again.  And I really beg the people at that meeting not to be anything but welcoming and maybe a little bit sad or scared.  But not judgmental.  That makes it tougher to come back.

It’s an anniversary night at my meeting tomorrow and that will be nice.  I got some news that another of my cousins died young and mysteriously.  I’ve had only sporadic contact with my father’s side of my family since he died when I was six.  He was 33.  One of my cousins died a year ago at 46, and this one recently at 51.  I know he died from alcoholism but I don’t know what they died from.  It shakes me up a bit.  In a way, I wish I knew that they did die from alcoholism because today, I’m able to recoil from alcohol as from poison.  A bad heart or veins or something is trickier (for me) to deal with than alcohol.

I go to meetings and talk to others and work the steps.  Chronic relaspers, join me!

January 15, 2012 (this day)

The neighborhood rapist hasn’t been heard from again, so far, plus it got too cold to walk before work.  I draw the line at 20 degrees, though the dog would draw it at a colder temperature.

Yesterday, we went to our meeting, and the format used the “topic bag” where you pull a topic out of a bag and then talk on it.  That way, you don’t know your topic until you pull it, so you don’t sit there and think about what you’re going to say until it’s your turn.  I pulled “fear of success,” and honestly I couldn’t relate, even though Carole was sitting next to me gesturing and whispering that, apparently, I have a huge fear of success, plainly visible to her and to my mother.  They talked about it, recently, when my mother was here.  Oh joy.

Then we went to the hospital to make sure Carole’s heart is OK.  It is.

Off and on the topic, when I count the people I’ve known in AA who died young and died from drugs and alcohol, all but one that I can think of used pills as well.  And maybe the one I’m thinking of who didn’t, who ran out of her house drunk and got hit by a car, was also using pills.  Maybe my father didn’t use pills.  I don’t know if he did.  It just seems to easy, to me, for people to get a doctor to prescribe them.  I’ve heard it said that doctors don’t understand addiction and maybe some do and maybe some don’t.  Addicts understand it, though, and they know how to use doctors.

Or just take what the doctor says and run with it.  Doctors (and vets) really want to fix things, that’s what they are there for.  What fixes things in the majority of people could have a fatal effect for an alcoholic.  The return of sanity, in this regard, is some kind of impossible.  I may be completely sane as far as alcohol and drugs are concerned, but once I take a drink or a drug, my sanity is gone.

I’m not sure why I went there, but tonight I am profoundly grateful that my attitude about drugs and alcohol has evolved into what it is, because that has kept me safe from those things now for decades.

Why Are You Here?

I came for the pie!

You’re here because someone made you come.

You’re here because you want to stop drinking.

You’re here because you don’t want to go to jail.

You’re here because you want to save your marriage.

You’re here because the court made you come.

You’re here because your way (your many ways) aren’t working.

You’re here because it’s your last hope.

You’re here because you have nothing else to do.

You’re here because you think you might have a problem.

You’re here because someone asked you to check it out.

You’re here because you love it here.

You’re here because it’s your home.

You’re here because you lost a bet.

You’re here because your therapist made you come.

You’re here to make your wife/husband/kids/parents shut up.

You’re here to remember what it was like.

You’re here so you don’t slip.

You’re here to give it back, pay it forward and pass it on.

You’re here because it works.

I was told, when I first showed up at meetings and found myself to be very, very different from most of the people there (in some ways, exactly alike in others) that no one ends up there by accident or mistake.  I believe it.

What Outside Forces Keep You Sober?

The good AA answer to this is that none do.  I keep myself sober by following, participating in and practicing the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, but even then, it is a truism of the program that at certain, unpredictable times, there will be nothing between me and a drink except my higher power.

I wrote about my closest call so far and honestly, it may or may not have been the hand of my higher power that saved me.  I don’t know.  I don’t need to know.  The other time that comes to mind is when my ex left me with two small children and a terror of sending them to child care.  I was really frightened and at times the thought of drinking crossed my mind.  I had about seven years of sobriety at that time.  I would, then, think the drink through and picture my six-year-old daughter trying to get up and get herself ready for school.  I believe that she would have done that.  The thought was unacceptable to me, and so I didn’t drink, but this very thought process shows me that sanity had returned.

When I slipped and slipped and slipped, I may have admitted that it would probably not end well, but I held out the hope that it would.  So I tried.  By the time I thought of drinking with seven years sober, I knew that it wouldn’t end well.  I knew that the scenario where my daughter tried to get herself to school was a very good scenario.  More likely, I would damage her in a drunk driving accident, or burn the house down, or something even more tragic.  A power greater than me had restored my sanity.

That’s what kept me sober then.  I knew that if I drank, I would sacrifice everything on my gratitude list, if I was lucky.  If I was unlucky, I would suffer one or more of the tragedies I’ve heard about in the rooms, but haven’t experienced for myself, yet.

The things, outside of the program, that help enhance my sobriety (but do not keep me sober) are many.  I will include books and friends and church.  But it all comes back to the program, because there I learned to interact with and benefit from books and friends and church and such.

What Have You Gained from the Program?

I’m afraid some of these lists get repetitive.    What I’ve gained from the program is everything in my life, and my very life itself, from May 1, 1984, until now.  So that encompasses quite a lot.

More than that.  A plan.  I love that the program gives me a plan for my life, something to strive for, a way to evaluate things, and infinite help understanding and interpreting all that.

Hope.  I haven’t really faced anything hopeless since I got it.  Everything and everyone ends, I understand that to some extent, and it frightens me to some extent.  But I have hope I can survive these things, including my own end, with an amount of serenity I couldn’t imagine without the program.

The friends of the program are better friends than I can imagine anywhere else, and I don’t think that I, personally, had I somehow managed to survive, would have had friends anything like them.  I know for sure I wouldn’t know nearly the number of people that I do as intimately as I do.  My understanding of people must have been multiplied a million times by AA.

Serenity.  I don’t have tons of it.  But what I do have I owe completely to AA.  And each and every time something is disturbing me, I have the knowledge that I need to change, I have a way to figure out what and how, and a seriously good chance of changing for the better, at least a little bit.

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.

April 25, 2011 (this day)

A note from the trenches.

Carole, Nicholas and I sped over (seven hours or so in the car) to see Erika for Easter.  We arrived late at night.  Carole and I slept on the floor, Erika on the couch, and Nicholas in her bed.  This year their Easter baskets had not much candy and some kitchen implements.

Carole and I went to a church in Erika’s city.  It was surprisingly diverse for a regular Lutheran church.  After church though we got a message from the dog sitter that the old one was fading fast.

Stream of consciousness here:  not fast enough.  This is Monday now.  I sit here, working at home, Carole’s gone to work and the old dog continues to go down by inches.  He doesn’t seem to be in pain or distress.  We look for that like hawks and will take him right away if that happens.  But he’s not even drinking now.  He rests for long periods of time but not long enough.

The process is so awful.  We want ………. we want ………… we want …………. This is what we get.  A very long time with a very pampered pooch.  Vets and money to pay them.  No amount of money or expertise will spare us from this.

So my thoughts in the midst of it.  I know it will pass.  It won’t be like this forever, or even for very long.  We have had an extremely privileged life with this dog, and we’re having a privileged death, but we aren’t being spared from at least some of the process.

I had a cat when I was drinking.  Thankfully she lived long and saw me sober as well.  But I know some little something of drunken pet ownership.  Sobriety has given us fairly clear heads and present bodies ready and able to do what’s best.  Sobriety has given us a huge support network and they’ve been supporting us as much as they can.  Sobriety has given us the gift of no major regrets.  We have some small regrets about the way things have gone with this particular dog but no big ones.  At the bottom of it, sobriety has given us the ability to make a living to support a dog and now to let him go the best possible way.

I have no idea what that way is right now, but I am getting an excellent lesson in living in the moment.  It truly is moment by moment here and I guess it will be for a short while, and then it will pass.

Can We Have The Same Kind of Confidence (Step Twelve continued)

Can we have the same kind of confidence and faith in these people who have been infected and sometimes crippled by our own illness that we have in our sponsors?

Again, unfortunately, I have to say no.

My situation is a little different from most in that I was very young when I stopped drinking, and I didn’t have really any adult fall out to deal with.

But.  I don’t have the confidence and faith in anyone outside of AA that I have in AA folks.  I know some people who I think work Al-Anon over the years, but I don’t know any of them well.  The only people I know who continually try very hard over years and decades to improve themselves in a systematic way, who I can understand, are in AA.

I imagine others do this through church or therapy or . . . something.  But my main faith and confidence is in the people of AA.  Unfortunately, there are times when I wish I could give someone a drinking problem, so that the person could have a recovery.  It’s the best way of life that I can imagine.

Stick with the Winners

All of us who make it through the door on any given day have won to some degree.  It’s advice for newcomers, to stick with the winners.  AA has many a winning loser who can lead the impressionable new person astray.

What is it about being new that makes us seek out the other new people for advice and comfort?  I don’t remember doing this in AA, but I know I did it when I was new to my job.  I guess I was new in AA for so very long that I was old.  In so many ways it is the blind leading the blind, and it’s probably pride in reverse that keeps us from asking the experienced, successful people for help.

To me, the winners have

• a love of AA that keeps them coming
• a program that continues to get deeper and more meaningful
• a plan for adversity
• a long sober history
• a grasp of the basics
• humility that results in them not lamenting what has become of AA and longing for the good old days
• a meaningful life, probably successful, though maybe not

As regular AA members, though, not newcomers, I know that we stick with the losers as well.  I’ve wondered, especially as the years go by and as we see people struggle and fail and struggled and fail.  What makes someone a winner or, more precisely, what turns a loser into a winner?  If I could only say that phrase that would make it turn for some of these people.  I come back to surrender.  It took a tremendous beating for me to surrender.  After they drink, it always seems that these folks did not in fact surrender.

And so the paradox.  The winners have surrendered.