In the Time of XXVII

I remember when my first year of sobriety was approaching, I couldn’t wait to go to all the different AA meetings I went to and collect coins, share my tremendous invaluable wisdom, and be accepted by AA since at the time I was just some dirtbag teenager who hadn’t drank as much as the adults spilled. When the adults shared about whisky and wine, I had to relate by pretending they were talking about heroin and gold spray paint. 

The day of my anniversary arrived and I awoke to over a foot of snow. At the time I was 18 years old without a driver’s license and living with my parents in southwest Portland along a Tryon Creek tributary, and therefore stuck there. I wasn’t able to attend an AA meeting until a week later and by then other people were getting their year coins.

Today I am in an old farmhouse on a hill in the Dalles surrounded by a haunted cherry orchard watching a snowstorm dump about a foot of snow on us. I have a driver’s license today along with a car, but today it isn’t the snowstorm that has me unable to expound my endless amount of wisdom and get a coin from an AA meeting. 

In fact, because of the COVID pandemic, I have only attended a handful of online AA meetings this whole year. My only in-person connection with another recovering alcoholic has been a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran MAGA Q-anon whom I worked with. I can’t tell you how much he had meant to me despite his glaring defects of character – not that I was taking his inventory; I was. I would have little spurts of texts and social media messages with people and too tired and depressed to make any phone calls but would make myself pick up the phone every once in a while. 

It has made the idea of why I was in AA in the first place very abstract. I am far removed from who I was at the time I decided I needed to be sober, I am much older, and I have gone through many more trials and tribulations. Even through this last year, I have not wanted to drink. It hasn’t really crossed my mind at all. I have wanted to smoke, but never drink. 

I was 17 years old and in a treatment center in Louisiana drinking with my roommate and knew that I was done, but for some reason, I just couldn’t stop. It was the scariest moment of my life and one that many treatment councilors, AA members, and therapists had warned me about. I couldn’t stop even though I wanted to.

Luckily I was in a treatment center and all I had to do was ask for help. That was how bad it had gotten, I had become willing to ask for help. I was able to be teachable. I was a teenager begging to be told what to do. I went to a meeting, admitted defeat by getting a 24-hour coin, and letting some guy become my sponsor.

Life got harder after that. I had a really hard time not wanting to say fuck it and drink again, depression and anger strangled me, I felt so isolated and alone. It got worse when I got out of treatment and came home. I went to meetings and felt different. I was too young, too into drugs, too weird. I felt like Robin Williams in Deconstructing Harry who kept sliding out of focus. 

I wanted to drink every day for the first few years. I think after a very bad depressive episode in my third year did I start doing some work and suddenly didn’t want to drink as much. Looking back at those first few years, I can honestly say I have not the slightest idea how I got through all of that sober. I kept believing people that it was going to get better.

Then life just kept happening. I would get heartbroken all the time – I’ve loved them all, and I would stay sober. I got fired, and I stayed sober. I dealt with mental illnesses, and I stayed sober. I have lost loved ones and stayed sober even though I thought the pain of grief would never end. I had to stop telling lies and tell the truth and stayed sober. I had to stop stealing. I had to stop fighting. I had to give up certain ideas, outlooks, and attitudes that seemed to be my personality but were just harmful and toxic. I am still shedding those things. I got cancer and stayed sober. I got married, got a dog, got a car, got to go to Europe several times, Africa, and all over the Americas, and stayed sober. I got to nurture and keep a very strong and loving relationship with my parents and my brother and his family and stayed sober. I got to find out my biological mother was dead and then found out that she wasn’t my biological mother but this other person is my biological mother and start a relationship with her and stayed sober. I spent a year in a small town isolated by a global pandemic in a country on the verge of a violent uprising working at a place that caters to MAGA Q-anons who buy guns to protect themselves from Antifa communists and stayed sober.

It really came down to two very important messages I got early on. The first was I didn’t have to drink again even if I want to; I never have to be alone again even if I want to. The other is everything will be okay. I now have a life worth living and the idea of drinking is a strange alien concept to me. Nothing has turned out to be too hard to get through without drinking – and drinking would have made all of it worse. 

I hope that if you are in a place where you can’t stop drinking even if you want to, you know that there is help for you. Hit me up if you think there is no one out there. While we live in a culture where our differences define us, we can find our similarities and heal.