I'm a person of long-term recovery. Ten years ago this week, on January 7, 2005, I walked into my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and have not had the need to take a drink or drug since. A common saying in AA, when talking about a significant period of sobriety is, I don't say this to impress you but it sure impresses me. As someone who could not go for more than one or two hours without a drink prior to that meeting I can concur that that saying fits. An anniversary of this nature makes one think about his life and what got him to where he is today.
There are a few things that have helped keep me sober for this long. The first thing I had to realize was that my drinking/drugging was a symptom of a bigger problem. I didn't have a drugging or drinking problem I had (still have) a thinking problem. Once I put the proverbial plug in the jug I had to start working on myself. I quickly learned that the key to staying clean is ensuring emotional sobriety. A big part of ensuring my emotional sobriety is making sure that my acceptance is always higher than my expectations. One of my biggest problems in life is a lack of control. Alcoholics Anonymous' Big Book tells us that, "lack of power is our dilemma." If everyone in my life and the world just did as I wanted them to then I would not have a problem. Unfortunately for myself, and millions of other alcoholics/addicts (for many of us share the same illusions) that is not and will never be the case. So if I realize that and accept it and ensure that acceptance is higher than my expectations of people, places and things then I will never get a resentment. Resentments lead to relapse and relapse will lead to death.
Another lesson I learned was I can be right or I can be happy. Before the grace of sobriety was given to me (and for a little time after) I was continuously arguing and trying to prove I was right. I'd be in a drunken conversation with someone and halfway through realize that I was wrong yet I would still argue my case. I found out that this stemmed from fear. Fear of being judged, fear of being not liked, fear of not being good enough. When I realized that I didn't have to be right all the time a big weight was taken off my shoulders.
A big part of my recovery success was identifying with others who had been where I had and allowing newcomers to experience the same thing. In AA we call this qualifying. Here is a bit of my qualification. I was born to middle class family in the City of Oshawa. I have an older brother and a younger sister. I experienced my first resentment at the age of two when my sister was born on the same day as me and from then forward I had to share the spotlight, that so many of us alkies love, with my sister. I lived a normal life and there was nothing traumatic that went on. I did stand out from the crowd in two different ways. I am vertically challenged and uncoordinated and so sucked at sports. Plus my family was Jewish. In Oshawa there aren't many Jewish people around. In fact, there were around five Jews in my high school and three of them were me, my brother and my sister. So my shortness and Jewishness set me apart from the beginning.
From the time I was a kid I liked to escape life. Before I could do that with alcohol I would lose myself in television shows. While the majority of kids were outside playing I was inside watching reruns of shows and getting lost in the characters. Later on in life I was able to lose myself even better when I began to get involved in little theatre. Not only could I escape the world for a bit I could pretend I was an entirely different person all together. I started doing little theatre when I was around 12 and would continue drama to the end of high school. When I entered high school I started to gravitate toward the people I deemed as cool. They were long haired dudes who listened to music I liked (heavy metal), drank and later smoked weed. My friends and I called ourselves weekend alcoholics and we were damn proud of it. My buddy and I even wrote a song about it (I was a guitar player and he a drummer) called Weekend Alcoholic. Despite the drinking and pot smoking I did well in school and graduated a percentage away from honours and moved on to university.
In the last two years of high school my buddies and I would spend spring break in Montreal. Not only was the drinking age 18 but the bars were open until 3:00 AM (as opposed to the, then, 1:00 AM closing in Ontario). This factor, combined with cheap tuition, influenced my decision to attend the University of Concordia in Montreal.
Once I got to university my drinking and pot smoking increased. It went from Fridays and Saturdays to Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays to Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays and before I knew I it was getting wasted six days week. I used to make a joke that I had been inebriated more often than sober in Montreal and had lived there for three years. The sad fact is that that is true. Despite this I was having no adverse effects to my drinking. My grades were great and I completed my BA in three years. As most people find you can't get a job with a BA so I had to go to college. Eventually I finished college, got a job and got an apartment in Toronto. As my drinking progressed my apartments regressed. The last apartment I had in Toronto was a bachelor apartment at Yonge & Sherbourne that was filled with bedbugs. The path that took me to that apartment consisted of using a lot of cocaine, switching to crack and spending a lot of money I didn't have. I also attended two out-patient treatment programs that proved unsuccessful. In my opinion the out-patient programs did not help me remain sober for two reasons. One - I just wasn't ready to give up drinking and the perceived romantic lifestyle I thought it was. Two - those programs did not teach me about the 12 Steps of recovery.
Fast forward to 2005. I had been living back in the parental home since approximately 2002. My Mother had passed away in 2003 from Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. I had given her more worry than help. It was now just my Dad and I. My brother, his wife and newborn baby were in town and happened to be at our place on New Year's weekend. On Sunday my brother and I took a walk around 11:00 AM, I was already half-in-the-bag. I admitted my drinking had gotten out of control and that I was smoking crack. My brother was upset but we talked and I promised to stop. When I made the apology I was sincere but as any alcoholic/addict will know all the promises in the world won't help someone stop. I had already started drinking that day and set of, what I would soon learn, was a physical, for lack of a better word, allergy. You see once an alcoholic takes that first drink nothing will stop stop him from drinking unless he runs out of money, passes out or is physically restrained. I was also upset and the only tool I had used my whole life to deal with feelings (by getting rid of them) was alcohol and/or drugs. My brain demanded them. Later in the evening my brother found me in the garage drinking and using crack. The next day I went to pick up my baby niece and my brother stated that he didn't want someone like me holding her. That was MY rock bottom. It was spiritual and emotional. I had reached what the Big Book calls the jumping off point. I could not longer live with drinking nor live without it. I agreed to get help and attend Alcoholics Anonymous.
I didn't know anything about AA. I thought it was just a bunch of people sitting around commiserating about how they couldn't drink anymore. Luckily that was not the case. My first meeting was called the Bill & Bob's Men's Discussion Group. I shuffled in with my shakes and a scruffy beard to see a bunch of healthy and happy looking men cracking jokes and having a good time without alcohol. The opening of an AA meeting includes the line, "there are no dues or fees", in my paranoia I thought the guy had read, "there are no Jews or fees." I quickly figured out my mistake. After the meeting I left with a little bit of hope, an awareness that something called the Big Book was important and an invitation to a meeting the next day to get a Big Book. And so began my journey.
As I have already described I was powerless over alcohol and any mind altering substance. I couldn't manage my emotions and would do anything to rid myself of them. I soon realized that I was insane because I would wake up every day and tell myself that I would not have more than a few drinks (and no drugs) that day only to break that promise to myself. I was doing the same thing every day expecting a different result - the definition of insane. As I wrote earlier I could barely go one to two hours without self medicating. All of a sudden I had one day of sobriety, then a week and then a month. The only difference, at that point, I could see between these two periods was that I had remained sober hanging out with the people at AA meetings. These people, what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, this positivity, was a power greater than myself and it was helping me stay sober. I believed this greater power's will for me was to continue to remain sober and continue to work the Steps AA was teaching me. I made a moral inventory of myself. Accepted my part in the wrongs I had mistakenly believed were done to me and shared all that with another human being. I learned about my character defects, became ready and started to if not not completely rid myself of them at least lessen them. I began to make amends to those I had harmed. The hardest amends I made was to my Mother. The members of Alcoholics Anonymous told me to go to her grave and talk to her. It took me three tries (the first two I felt silly). After I made amends to my Mother I left my silver chip (desire to stop drinking chip) on her gravestone.
I made a living amends to my Father by keeping my word, helping him as much as I could, showing up and not causing him any more worry. My relationship with my Dad became better than it had ever been and he became my best friend.
As I go through my days today I admit when I'm wrong and make amends to those I need to promptly. I try my best to improve my relationship with the power that causes, what Jung called, synchronicity in the universe. Lastly, I try to help the still suffering alcoholic/addict any way I can. I was taught in order to keep my sobriety I have to give away my knowledge of how I got it.
Today my life is good. Instead of having the really high highs and low lows and my life is more stable. Not only had I been addicted to substances I was also addicted to excitement. As a result today I try to stay calm. A good weekend for me is an uneventful weekend. I have been in a loving relationship for over 10 years now which brought with it a de facto step-son whom I love. My relationships are better. I no longer have bad days but bad moments and good moments throughout the day. And that's okay with me. One of the last lines of the Big Book talks about trudging the Road of Happy Destiny. It doesn't say glide smoothly. For we all have to endure hardships. The only difference between me and others is that I have to face life on life's terms as self-medicating does not work for me.
Dave the Dude
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