obsessions

Recovery Notes #8

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Maybe God does take care of fools and drunks

I always think of the little white house on Yellowknife’s 54th Street as my place of healing. It was my home for the first three years of my sobriety and I was the last person to live there. By the time I left, it had a buckling foundation so it was donated to the fire department and burnt down to serve as training exercise for firefighters. Today it is the site of the Lynn Brooks Transitional Home for women and I like to imagine that the healing energy I found there has made its way to the women who pass through the home.

The house came to me against all odds in the first autumn of my sobriety.

Back in the 1982 when I moved to Yellowknife, the city was growing rapidly and the vacancy rate had been zero for more than a decade. I spent the first month sleeping in somebody’s walk-in closet. Then a single ad for a four-bedroom rental house appeared in the local newspaper the same week I met a miner during a hungover morning-after while drinking the dregs of booze abandoned the night before (don’t ask). After a ridiculous conversation (considering what we were doing) during which we both assured each other that we were practically teetotalers, we decided to share the house and rent out the other two rooms. Bret* also agreed to lend me money for my share of the rent.

We lived there for most of a year during which Bret and I consumed numerous bottles of beer and wine, he reconciled with his estranged wife and daughter and moved them into the house, quit drinking in favour of smoking dope (and left recovery pamphlets around the house which made me cry but not quit) and then started up again, then quit again (both booze and dope this time). I sobered up in August while Bret and his family were on vacation and, in September, we received an eviction notice because the house had been sold.

Bret bought a trailer for his family, leaving me with no place to go. I didn’t know any sober people with a room for rent and renting a room in a drinking house was dangerous for me. The only suitable accommodation I could find were bachelor units rented by the YWCA for $800 a month but, even though I’d gotten a research job at CBC, that was beyond my means. Then, not long before I had to move, the woman who was buying our place called on the off-chance that somebody might want to take over the little house on 54thStreet that she had been renting. The tiny one-bedroom house with a small patio in front was perfect for me and the rent was only $400 which I could afford. Maybe God does take care of fools and drunks.

On moving day my sponsor, Jen, showed up on my doorstep with a crew of inmates from the local jail. (Jen ran a non-profit organization and the guys at the jail were assigned to her for a half-day a week as part of their work program.) Dressed in regulation green work pants and shirts, the guys marched into my house and then marched out carrying all my worldly goods:  the components of my bed and a motley collection of boxes. The whole move was done in less than an hour — the easiest move I’ve ever had.

Then Jen got busy helping me furnish the place, schlepping me over to the house of friends who were leaving town and wanted to get rid of their living room furniture. They were going to give it away for free but Jen had a different idea. She thought it was time I started to pay my own way so she made me wash walls in exchange for the chairs. At the time, I was not impressed. Looking back today, I am grateful.

My first night in the house, I went over to a colleague’s place to do my laundry. Everybody there was going to a Hallowe’en party, dressing up, laughing, drinking beer and I overflowed with the longing to be a part of it, to be a normal person, not somebody who had to spend her evenings attending meetings in dusty old church basements. But I knew I couldn’t do it. I packed my clothes into their green garbage bag and set off to walk the six or so blocks to 54th Street. It had been raining all day and I could feel the pinpricks against my cheeks as the rain turned into sleet. After a while I realized that the sleet was mixed with tears.

My tenancy wouldn’t be official until the next day so there was no electricity in the house when I came in.  I made my way through the chaos of furniture and boxes by the dim streetlight that shone in the window. I lit a candle that I found in one of the boxes, hung a blanket over the window and wrestled my mattress onto the floor. I made the bed and crawled in and as I looked at the play of shadows on the ceiling, I felt peace settle into my bones. My quiet inner voice told me that this was the place where I would heal and that all would be well.

That night I slept deeply for the first time in sobriety.

 

*Not the real name

This blog has been inspired by reactions from readers of “Free Love,” my novel about recovery from alcoholism. I have often been asked why I chose to write about that particular subject. While there are several answers to that question, the most honest one is that I’m a recovering person myself. That opened the door to more questions. So I have started this blog to share some of my thoughts about alcoholism and addiction, based on my experience and observation.

If you’d like to read or gift Free Love, check out my SALE PRICES!

Recovery Notes #7

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“The mind is a dangerous place, don’t go in alone”

Even though the alcoholics kept telling me to “hang in there” and that “things would get better,” nothing seemed to improve in the first months of my sobriety. Without alcohol and drugs to dim the mental noise, I now had a ringside seat to my own insanity. My mind continued to spin out of control with its obsessions and fantasies. I became acquainted with “the committee,” what alcoholics called the imaginary voices that found fault with everything I tried to do. On top of it all, feelings I didn’t know I had began to come to the surface and I often found myself weeping for no reason.

“The mind is a dangerous place, don’t go in alone,” one of the sober drunks liked to say. They told me that if I continued to keep everything to myself, I was likely to start drinking again. I had to open up, to talk about what plagued me. In other words, I had to connect

The alcoholics were far from perfect. They often said upsetting things that made me cringe (and I suppose some of what I said had the same effect on them). Yet, when the chips were down, these drunks spoke from their hearts in a way that I had never heard before. They would admit to being confused, frightened, rejected or foolish – all familiar feelings that I kept buried. They would unflinchingly divulge horrifying truths about themselves and even manage to laugh at them. And in sharing these hidden truths they built community and stopped being alone. They learned to be “one among others,” not better than, not worse than.

I had been lonely ever since I could remember. Alcoholism is a disease of disconnection and the more I drank, the deeper I locked myself into my own world, and the lonelier I got, the more I drank… It was this haunting loneliness that had driven me to thoughts of suicide. I longed for deep connection but I had always been too frightened to let anybody close to me, had never been able to risk making myself vulnerable. Now, the prospect of no longer being alone with the burden of myself seemed like the most wonderful thing in the world.

At the same time, the temptation to run back to the bar was nearly overwhelming. I had never spoken honestly about myself in my entire life. I grew up in a European family at a time when child-raising was considered to consist of providing food, clothing, shelter and education, not responding to the feelings of an oversensitive kid. My childhood had taught me to repress feelings, not to acknowledge or share them.

Pain is a great motivator for change and it was only the feeling that my back was to the wall (if I didn’t open up, I would drink again) that made me push through the fear. Like so many aspects of recovery, this was simple (but not easy). I tried, to the best of my ability, to drop my defenses and be more honest with people about who I was. It was difficult at first because I had no understanding of honesty. But I got better at it in time and it eventually became a way of life. As it did, my sense of connection grew and my loneliness diminished.

 

This blog has been inspired by reactions from readers of “Free Love,” my novel about recovery from alcoholism. I have often been asked why I chose to write about that particular subject. While there are several answers to that question, the most honest one is that I’m a recovering person myself. That opened the door to more questions. So I have started this blog to share some of my thoughts about alcoholism and addiction, based on my experience and observation.

If you’d like to read or gift Free Love, check out my SALE PRICES!

Recovery Notes #6

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Trying (and failing) to be grown-up

I was trapped in a corner of a houseful of recovering alcoholics at a sober party. Everybody was having fun, laughing, talking, singing — except me. I felt like an alien. My hands were sweaty and the wide smile on my face felt like it was about to snap like an overstretched rubber band. I desperately had to pee but I was afraid to get up and walk through the crowd to find the bathroom.

After two weeks of sobriety, I discovered that quitting drinking is the easy part of recovery. The hard part is learning to live life without alcohol, or as the alcoholics say living “life on life’s terms.”

It was explained to me that alcoholics stop developing spiritually and emotionally when they start to drink. Unlike most people who grow into responsible adults by learning how to handle the experiences (good and bad) of living, we dealt with everything by getting drunk so we never grew up. When we quit drinking we find ourselves at the same age (or younger) emotionally as we were when picked up that first drink. I was a 30-year-old woman with the emotional age of a teenager. Furthermore, as a result of the ravages to my self-esteem during my drinking years, I had lost even what few social skills I had back then.

I was incapable of making any kind of tangible plan for my life and could only indulge in grandiose fantasies. I fancied that I would spend only a short time in recovery before going on to become a rich and famous something, like a politician or a best-selling novelist. This sounded just like the idea I had, as an 8-year-old, of becoming a famous figure skater without ever learning to skate. Or like the stories I had spun in the bar about the various ways I was going to save the world. Then as now the fantasies skipped over doing the necessary work to meet the goal.

My mind seemed to have a mind of its own and was completely beyond my control. It would hook onto something and obsess endlessly. One minute it would tell me I was an intellectual giant, destined to do great things and then the next minute it would tell me I was so stupid I didn’t deserve to live (alcoholics referred to this as “an egotist with an inferiority complex”). My moods were like a rollercoaster, up and down, over and under and around. Beneath everything was nameless fear that came over me in waves and paralyzed me. I couldn’t sleep and I had to force myself to eat.

The people in recovery still seemed weird to me and I balked at getting too close to them. I kept trying to be a grown-up and take care of myself. But I couldn’t do it and there was nowhere else for me to go. So I hung on to Jen who had been sober for the eternity of two years and who offered to “babysit” me in the beginning. Months later when I finally worked up the courage to ask her, Jen would become my sponsor but in those early weeks asking somebody that question was unthinkable so I just followed Jen around town like a puppy. She took me to meetings, introduced me to other recovering people and listened to the sad saga of my life ad nauseam. She pushed me to do things that scared me, like making me talk to people I didn’t know and dragging me to sober parties.

Most of all, she (and the other alcoholics) gave me something to hang on to by reassuring me, almost on a daily basis, that I was not unique, they had all felt the way I was feeling, had the same kind of thoughts and obsessions and that in time this would pass and my life would get better. It is not an exaggeration to say that this saved my life.

 

This blog has been inspired by reactions from readers of “Free Love,” my novel about recovery from alcoholism. I have often been asked why I chose to write about that particular subject. While there are several answers to that question, the most honest one is that I’m a recovering person myself. That opened the door to more questions. So I have started this blog to share some of my thoughts about alcoholism and addiction, based on my experience and observation.

If you’d like to read or gift Free Love, check out my SALE PRICES!