November 21, 2019 (this day)

We celebrated Thanksgiving for our clients at my work today for my first time in a very long time without my work partner.  I’ve been through a lot of change and loss there recently, but I somehow feel like I always say that.

For actual Thanksgiving, my mother will fly to my house as usual.  We’ll then drive her to my daughter’s, where we’ll stay for a few days.  My daughter’s mother-in-law (God bless her) will have all of over including my son and his fiancé.  It’s different.

I have what I like to refer to as nostalgia as a character defect.  The definition includes longing.  When I think of what I long for, it isn’t necessarily Thanksgiving at my great aunt’s or at my aunt’s, I long for some tradition that doesn’t change except that some people die and others are born.  That’s never been real.  But I long for it.

For me, there is fear and loneliness and sadness is still being an only child.

Every aspect of the holiday coming up is a call for gratitude for me.  My mother, wife, children, are all doing well.  They all want to see me, and I want to see them all.  I have (mostly) passed through that season of loss at work, and things look promising.  I am able to stand it, day after day, and of course to find lots of joy in it.

I need to remember the Thanksgivings when I drank to stand being around people.  I may have even skipped one, drunk or hung over badly.  Alcohol tried to take everything away from me, and nearly did, yet today I have everything, and alcohol isn’t a factor.

Grateful.

Alcoholics Especially (Step Four continued)

Alcoholics especially should be able to see that instinct run wild in themselves is the underlying cause of their destructive drinking.  We have drunk to drown feelings of fear, frustration, and depression.  We have drunk to escape the guilt of passions, and then have drunk  again to make more passions possible.  We have drunk for vainglory–that we might more enjoy foolish dreams of pomp and power.  This perverse soul-sickness is not pleasant to look upon.  Instincts on rampage balk at investigation.  The minute we make a serious attempt to probe them, we are liable to suffer severe reactions.

 

Thinking for the past month or so about instincts on rampage when I feel an excess of negative emotion.  Alcohol did briefly and for a blessed second relieve me of negative feelings.  It was that numb spot that I was always aiming for, and because I’m an alcoholic, I was never able to achieve it.  By the time I was there, I had drank too much and it was about to kick in an throw me over into confusion and sickness and wooziness and despair.

It happens quickly for me these days when I feel something negative to identify it as a character defect, no really an instinct, but I can see how they are the same.  I can take joy in the cat who is sitting right here having been coaxed off of my shoulder and into the cat bed.  I can immediately feel the fear of her care and well-being in my hands, that I won’t succeed in caring for her, and that even if I do, the pain of separation will be ours one day when one of us doesn’t come home any longer.

Now investigating and probing, as the paragraph suggests.  Life is a series of separations and failures.  Still, the cat was an orphan at a shelter and in distress.  I was someone who would take joy and comfort in a cat in the years to come.  Here we are, both of us lucky, and blessed by the other.

It chokes me up.  My instinct to shield myself from the coming worry and heartsickness are feelings I have to investigate and probe and, ultimately, ask to have them removed.  Although today I have decided not to drink over them (and really, only because drinking over them did not work), they lessen the quality of my life and they lessen my usefulness.  And the cat wonders what’s wrong.

This fourth step hard, deep look at what’s wrong in me can’t go on at length.  It’s purpose is to free me from myself, from my self-centeredness, so I can’t stay here for long thinking about how bad I am, or how good.  Unaided by alcohol my instincts still try to overwhelm me and take over and protect themselves and run my life.  Even though, for a long time now, I’ve known the answer is to turn away, and even though it’s become semi-automatic to do so, I am still learning.  Now there’s a reason to keep going to meetings after 35 years of sobriety.