And then it snapped.
It was like the time, in ninth grade, when I finally figured out how chemical formulas worked—one minute, I was sitting across from my science teacher, nearly sobbing with frustration; and then the very next instant, I just got it. More than that, I got how that knowledge opened the door to understanding every chemical reaction in the universe. Is that what counts as a revelation? I knew what I had to do, and I did it. Isn’t that how most so-called miracles work?
Thirty-three
What Works
So here’s the formula, my foolproof formula, for getting sober after you’ve failed over and over again. Have a revelation—or, if you prefer, a mental breakdown. (I can’t tell you how to do this, but trust me, when it happens, you’ll know.) Don’t tell anyone about it—who the hell would believe you anyway? Consider rehab. Reject the idea. You’ve learned everything they’re going to teach you. Instead, call up a mental hospital and ask for a detox bed. As soon as you hear the voice on the other end of the line say, “We’ll see you soon,” call a cab. (Taking three buses across the city might make you lose your nerve.) Stroll down to the nearest convenience store and buy one last bottle of red wine, for the road. Drink half the bottle, then puke it up all over the floor. Mop the floor with bleach while you drink the rest, more slowly this time because you know this—this—is the last drink you will ever have. Run downstairs, forgetting to lock the door, and tell the cabbie the address of the mental hospital where you’re going for detox, this one last time. Realize that your account has a negative balance, then guilt the cabbie into letting you pay the $98 fare with a $150 check, dated for two days in the future, when the latest severance check should hit your bank account. Step out into the damp February air. Hear the whoosh as the automatic doors close behind you. Say hello, without hesitation, to the counselor who recognizes you from the last time you were in detox here at Fairfax, just three months ago. Listen hard in counseling and get the number of a counselor who seems to actually believe you can do it this time, just in case you need it on the outside. Pay attention when they tell you that it’s going to take work, that you’ll have to be the one who does the work, that it’s going to be hard and you can’t do it alone. Stay five full days—longer than you have to; as long as they’ll let you—until you believe in your bones that this time, you’ll be the one in nine who actually makes it.
Breathe, it will seem, for the first time in years.
That’s how I did it.
“So how did you do it?”
“One day at a time!”
That’s the call-and-response you’ll hear at AA meetings, when someone, usually an old-timer, is celebrating their recovery “birthday.” And it’s true: You do it, literally, one day at a time. But you also do it figuratively: By not thinking too much about a week from now or a year from now or twenty long, alcohol-free years down the line. Of all the clichés they teach you in AA, this is the most useful and universally applicable: Whatever your goal, whether it’s losing forty pounds or not drinking for the next forty years, there’s no way to tackle it all at once. If you look at recovery as “never drinking again for the rest of my life,” it can feel like you’re being asked to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon, but if you look at it as something you need to do for just twenty-four more hours, it feels more like setting aside a few dollars a week in a savings account: Before you know it, you’ve accumulated twenty thousand dollars, or five years clean.
But what do I know? Not a lot. I nearly tore my guts up and lost what was left of my mind before it finally dawned on me that I didn’t want to die. Some people get sober and decide they’re going to spend the rest of their lives going to AA meetings every day. Some never go to any support group or therapy at all. Some get new addictions—sugar, food, yoga, religion, men. Some decide they can’t go to bars ever again.
I didn’t gain a hundred pounds and I don’t live at the local AA hall. I didn’t depend on Josh to keep me accountable, or Kevin, though we stayed friends. I go to bars. What I don’t do is wall myself off from other people. Drinking gave me an excuse to cut myself off from the world, to hole up on weekends and eat shitty pizza and pass out on the couch until it was dark, or maybe the next day, and go out for another bottle. When I stopped drinking, my first goal was to make up for lost time—to pick up with friends who’d written me off for dead, and find out what the hell they’d been up to for the last ten years. So I did that. Yeah, I went to meetings too—and therapy, and sometimes yoga. I don’t think you have to do all those things, or any of them, to stay sober. It’s just what worked for me.
Eight months after I quit drinking, I was at the Comet, a former dive bar refurbished for hipsters around the corner from The Stranger office, watching the first 2016 Democratic debate with Josh. We were cracking up about something on my computer—probably somebody making a joke about Bernie Sanders, who had a cultlike following in Seattle—when my phone buzzed. It was a message from Marianne, who was nominally still my AA sponsor. “I see you’re really working on your step work,” she said. “Don’t call me again.” Attached was a photo of me and Josh, taken from the sidewalk just outside. We looked happy. But all Marianne could see was an alcoholic sitting in a bar.
I didn’t call her again.
Instead, I got a new sponsor—Dallana, a five-foot-two drill sergeant from Boston by way of Puerto Rico—and started doing what she told me (which, notably, did not include getting a new set of friends or avoiding places where alcohol was served). I also called the counselor who had helped me during my second stay at Fairfax, the only person there who had taken me seriously when I told her I was really ready to quit this time, and asked her if she knew of any female therapists who specialized in recovery. I didn’t really know what to ask for—I just knew that I didn’t want another Ken, someone who would tell me to just keep doing my best. I needed someone who knew how a person’s brain was affected by addiction, how we shame and second-guess ourselves and convince ourselves that maybe there was nothing wrong with us in the first place, not because of some inborn character defect but because we have a disease that tells us we don’t have a disease. She gave me the name of a woman across town named Timi, who specialized in something called “trauma-informed addiction counseling.” I figured any trauma I had was self-inflicted, but I was intrigued by what the counselor said next. “She’s been in recovery a long time. And she doesn’t think AA is the only answer.”
I knew I would keep going to AA, that AA would be part of whatever solution saved my life. But I also knew that I had a lot of shit to deal with that I couldn’t talk about in meetings. (Meetings are about sharing your “experience, strength, and hope,” and what I had was a lot of inexperience, weakness, and despair.) So I went to Timi, too. And I discovered that for some reason, unlike every other therapist I’d had in Seattle, I could tell Timi the truth. We talked about how I spent my whole life resenting Cindy for leaving when I was too young to get to know her; how certain I was that no one would ever forgive me; my feeling that because I’d had a lot of good luck in life, I had no right to complain about how anyone else had fallen short. I couldn’t tell people in meetings that I didn’t think I deserved to survive when so many others hadn’t. But I could tell Timi, and she helped me work through it.
I showed up in therapy, and back in AA, with the idea that I needed to fix everything, right away, this minute, now. Get a job, get out of debt, get my friends back, get my parents to trust me again, get over even the idea of drinking, starting with the cravings that still asserted themselves when I least expected. Imagine that you’ve been in a coma for ten years, and you wake up, and there are your friends and family, maybe your husband or girlfriend or partner, and they’ve gone on living for the past ten years while you’ve been in suspended animation. All you want to do is catch up, so that things can be normal again, the way they were. But nothing’s normal, not from your perspective—the technology is all different, and your par
tner remarried, and your parents are suddenly so much older, or dead. The career path you chose for yourself in college may not exist anymore, or may not be open to old drunks who have burned through every chance. All you want is to have those ten years back, but that’s the one thing that’s impossible. The years are gone. All you can do is start living now—relearning how to exist in a world that may feel sharp edged and unrecognizable. But how can you even figure out where to start?
I started with gratitude lists—literally writing down everything for which I was grateful every single day, like I had with Marianne but for real this time, and for myself. A few themes emerged. The first is that I was grateful, sublimely grateful, not to wake up every morning with a hangover. The old routine—running to the bathroom, vomiting, dabbing the cold sweat from my forehead, putting on makeup with shaky hands—was gone. The second was relief that I didn’t have to start lying the moment I got out of bed anymore. Drinking, especially drinking when you’re not “supposed” to, casts a pall of uneasiness over every encounter—Did I talk too much? Too fast? Are my eyes bloodshot? Am I walking straight? Can everybody tell? When you stop drinking, the secret burden of holding it together is lifted.
But the biggest theme that emerges from these early lists is how grateful I was for the chance to see the world every day with new eyes. I don’t mean to say that I was awed by every blade of grass. I mean that all the old, familiar places—the Safeway where I used to buy wine every morning, the community garden where I’d vomited in the dirt, the back seat of the bus where I would sneak sips when I thought no one was looking—looked almost like alien landscapes, places I’d need to learn how to navigate without a bag of rocks on my back. How do you check out in a grocery store if you aren’t trying to buy your wine as quickly as possible and leave before you run into anyone you know? Where do you sit on the bus if you’re not trying to sneak sips from a bottle in your backpack, and how many layers do you wear in the winter when you don’t have to worry about sweating through your clothes? How assertive can you be with the landlord when he refuses to fix the dishwasher, knowing that he’s disliked you, with some justification, for most of the six and a half years you’ve lived in the place, but that you’re also well within your right to complain? How mad are you allowed to get at your best friend when he accuses you—incorrectly, for maybe the first time ever—of seeming “off,” because you’re acting a bit too giddy? A normal amount? Just a little? Not at all?
No one told me, when I first got sober, that I would need a whole new map to navigate the world, my city, my neighborhood, even my apartment. AA, treatment, books on staying sober—they all tell you how to avoid and manage “triggers,” but they don’t tell you that you’ll need to learn a whole new geography. Unemployed, with nothing but hours stretching out before me, I walked through a city littered with secret landmarks and tried to build new memories. On my way to the library, to fill out job applications and work on the blog I started, and abandoned, before I stopped drinking. The apartment where I spent countless hours passed out and throwing up and forgetting food on the stove and drunk-dialing my friends and drinking and drinking and drinking. The convenience store where I bought minis when I couldn’t make it to the Safeway, sometimes leaving Kevin back at my apartment while I “went out for the mail.” City Hall, where I sweated and bumbled my way through interviews, drunk or hungover or both. Alleys I’d ducked into to drink from a bottle in broad daylight or vomit behind Dumpsters. Everything had to be made new, by experiencing it with sober eyes.
After a month or so, I decided it was time to start looking for a job—and, as it turned out, it took only a few weeks. I realize, oh, do I realize, that this is not the circumstance in which most alcoholics who throw away their careers find themselves. But this is how it actually happened: I put out the call, and right away I was inundated by calls and texts and emails from politically connected women offering to help me out. I started another consulting gig, with a friend of a friend who needed some help researching a local zoning issue. I started picking up a little bit of campaign writing work. And then a local consultant friend told me about a job I was perfect for—running the communications shop at the state chapter of NARAL, the pro-choice advocacy group—and promised to put in a word with the executive director, who happened to be her very close friend. I’d like to pretend that everything in the world happens on merit alone, but we all know that’s not true. Every workplace I’ve ever been in had a group of managers (men, usually) who rose through the ranks largely because of who they knew. I was no different, except that my helpers were women. Anyway, why am I apologizing? In April 2015 I got a promotion from “unemployed alcoholic” to “sober person with a full-time job.” It felt like a miracle.
I moved into a new apartment. If there’s one truly ridiculous thing I believe in without reservation, it’s bad vibes, and the place where I had made some of my worst memories was full of them. AA people call this “doing a geographical”—trying to solve your problems with a new environment—but I didn’t go far, just a few miles up the street, to an apartment in an old Victorian house where the floors slanted and the walls were crooked and the shelves in the freezer were made of wood. The place was off-kilter and a bit precarious, much like me. It was perfect.
I still had a lot of work to do. One of the first things Dallana made me do, besides calling her every single day, was to carry a notebook with me and make a note of every time I encountered alcohol in the wild—not the thing itself, necessarily, but objects or people or encounters that made me think about it. This was my first step, a real one this time—realizing, and spelling out, the ways in which I was powerless over alcohol in the most literal possible sense. It turns out the entire world is an advertising platform for this amazing activity called getting drunk. (Or, as I used to joke to Josh, pushing a vodka soda or a whiskey across the table after a rough day at work: “Here, try this. It’s a magical drink made of alcohol!”)
My notebook—a black-and-white paisley Vera Bradley number, given to me by my birth grandmother, Charlene, when I first met her and set aside on a shelf ever since—quickly filled with examples: “An ex texted me this weekend from a party, obviously drunk, wanting to hook up.” “Was looking at an apartment and the rental agent showed me the terrace, which he described as ‘a great place to have a glass of wine.’” “A recipe called for a half cup of white wine.” (Imagine, if you will, the impossible alchemy required for a sober alcoholic to conjure up a half cup of wine.)
Then there was my internal landscape, with its unceasing monologue: “No one sat next to me at the show and I figured it was probably because everyone there had seen me drunk.” “My office is full of booze donations for the auction and I think everyone worries I’ll steal something.” “Karaoke last night—sang the first song and made a joke about being sober, which I worried made people uncomfortable.” You can, as a newly sober person, decide to believe that your inner critic is simply wrong—of course no one’s looking at you weird; of course no one thinks you’ll guzzle the uncorked bottle in the fridge the second everyone’s backs are turned—or you can just decide it doesn’t matter. The truth is, people do treat you differently when they know you used to drink and don’t anymore. They try too hard in one direction or another—either self-consciously ordering water or nonalcoholic beer (something no one has ever done casually, ever) or taking pains to tell you about their cousin or high-school friend or work acquaintance who had their own struggle with addiction, as if we do that with any other disease. It’s normal, I suppose, for people to treat a newly sober alcoholic, especially one they’ve seen drunk a dozen or a thousand times, with some trepidation, but all I wanted in those first months of sobriety was for my friends, family members, guys I was dating who had never seen me drink a drop, to treat me like a normal person.
But I’m not normal. I have this thing hanging over my head—not a guillotine, exactly, but a lead weight that could drop at any moment and render me as us
eless, worse than useless, as I was four years ago, when the friends who still thought of me often worried (they told me later) that I wouldn’t live through the year.
Another thing you learn when you stop drinking is that not everybody drinks all the time, and it’s not just because they had to stop like you did. Alcoholics, especially those of us in professions (journalism, politics, law, medicine, maybe all of them) where heavy drinking is the norm, tend to surround ourselves with other drinkers and assume that just because everyone in the bar is drinking, that must mean that everybody drinks.
For years, I didn’t date a single person who didn’t like to get shit-faced, at least on occasion—not one. Nondrinkers (not that I knew any) struck me as insufferable bores, the kind of people who get up at five in the morning to go to the gym and come home twelve hours later to make poached salmon and steamed broccoli for their husband and two kids. Turns out I was wrong. Nondrinkers are also people like me, the kind who stay up until two in the morning and sleep until nine and still hang out in bars because it’s where our people are. I didn’t think this at first, but I’ve met enough of them now that I’m forced to acknowledge I’m not as unique as I thought.
After I did my first step, I decided to keep on going. (Whether you’re doing the 12 steps or not, most recovery programs start with recognizing that you have a problem that you haven’t been able to solve on your own, proceed through actions to help you address the problem, and conclude with a program for maintaining your recovery, however that term is defined.) The fourth step involved writing down every single person or institution I resented, from the QFC that banned me for a year after I got caught shoplifting to “James, the asshole who fired me,” then write down what I had contributed to that conflict.
Quitter Page 25
