I’m grateful for a relaxing day. I’m grateful for a trip to the farmers market. I’m grateful for all of the cooking. I’m grateful for what I can do. I’m grateful for occasional flashes of brilliance. I’m grateful for dark mornings and coffee. I’m grateful for Mozart on the turntable. I’m grateful to be sober today.
(last weekend)
I’m grateful for another Friday morning. I’m grateful for a busy week and a sunny morning. I’m grateful for knowing what’s next will be ok. I’m grateful for mistakes and learning new things. I’m grateful for where I am. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Well, the long version or the short version? I had another song picked and it was going to lead to this kind of sappy, romantic, sad story from the olden days and it would include an adorable picture of my beloved dog Moose and it would be one of those elegies to the things I lost on account of alcoholism. Then I spied this song on the playlist and here we are.
If this matters to you, we can say that the “She” in the song refers to drinking or using or whatever and how “she” has ruined our life. Making that substitution gives some recovery zoomph to the line:
“Trust, She F****** hates me.”
I very much appreciate the accelerated nature of the relationship being described in the song and the brevity of the relationship:
What does this have to do with recovery or really anything? Nothing. But this song consistently makes me smile when it plays, and that means quite a bit to me. Speaking of things that mean quite a bit to me:
My birthday/Thanksgiving train ride to Boston (on a rainy day, no less) unleashed a torrent of gratitude. A few years of doing this have hardened me to dispensing gratitude 140 characters at a time, so it felt good to let loose. Also, I will say this, developing a sense of gratitude is probably the single most important element of my recovery.
Recovery from addiction is a pretty complicated cake, with a ton of very finicky ingredients. While all of the ingredients are important, you can’t make the recovery cake without gratitude, lots of it. Why?
Developing a sense of gratitude literally turned my world upside down, the things that hurt me, that made me sad or lonely, actually turned into learning. Gratitude turned those little tragedies into springboards to the next chapter. You can try this at home: Think of something that really upset you, hurt you or angered you. Now, think of one reason to be grateful for whatever that was.
This isn’t about being a doormat to fate or being happy with whatever crumbs fall from the table. This is about seeing that there are specks of beauty and joy in every tragedy. When worlds break apart, they always come back together again. We know this because of the teachings of the wise Steely Dan. While one can be focused on the breaking apart of said world, it is the coming back together again that forms the purpose and maybe even the miracle of that event. Things can’t begin again without endings and endings require beginnings.
I maybe started with the most advanced form of gratitude: The appreciation of shit that we really didn’t want to happen. This is not some faux expression of thankfulness, like the kind one might reserve for a Christmas gift from an ex-wife. Hypothetically. This is actually about finding the nugget of gold in the pile of shit. Because there is one.
I don’t know that I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do believe that it is possible to extract meaning and purpose from the things that happen to me. From the things I didn’t want to happen. I think that is how gratitude transformed me, it helped me find the meaning in my life and helped me see the path that was there for me, if I wanted to walk it.
My recovery has not been about stopping my drinking, it’s been about changing my thinking. Gratitude has been a critical element in that process. Self-understanding and self-acceptance have also been critical parts of the equation and are connected to gratitude. I’m coming to see that drinking/using is really just an adaptation that works way too well for some of us.
My nights are often spent dozing while a series of YouTube videos play. If lucid dreaming is being slightly cognizant of the fact that one is dreaming, then I’ve been lucid-dreaming for quite a while. Unfortunately, my lucid dreams often feature things like trips to the CVS or conversations about how expensive the diner is. Anyway, these videos play in the background and sometimes I wake up to great revelations. This is a video that I found revelatory:
Put aside the headline, the gist of this is that it appears that childhood trauma (and this doesn’t need to be extreme, remember it’s things that happened to a child, so things that seem small today weren’t so small back then) can alter brain development and the way and the amount of dopamine and other brain chemicals are produced. These people, who have deficient dopamine processes develop ADHD at staggering rates, also addictions.
I’m coming to believe that I’ve suffered from an undiagnosed case of ADHD for most of my life. When I look at the list of symptoms, I see myself. I look at my daily work routines and it’s basically an intricate series of dopamine pit stops, designed to produce enough stimulus, enough motivation, to put my head down and focus for another interval. These behaviors, and I think we all have our own, are like brain hacks, designed to produce the chemical reaction that helps us move from Point A to Point B.
I speak, not as a scientist or doctor, but as a recovering alcoholic who tried the very best of the available treatments for more than ten years and to no avail. Why those methods fail, and they largely do, is another topic for another day; long term sobriety rates coming out of rehab still hover around 5%. I think addiction is another example of a dopamine-deficient brain hack—the problem is that it is startlingly effective in people with a certain kind of brain chemistry.
I talk about my white light moment beside Deak Rummelhart’s trampoline in 1979, it was real. The explosion of brain chemicals in my head was revelatory. You non-alcoholics don’t get that, can’t get that, because that’s not how it works for you. Sure, everyone gets that euphoric effect, the folks who get addicted are the ones who have brains that don’t produce enough of the right mix of chemicals. We addicts learn to use our substances, even the anticipation of using them, as tools to manage our emotional states.
We’re like chemists. We know the dosage and the intervals. I knew that third glass of Sauvignon Blanc was where the magic was hidden. I got panicky when I faced long stretches of activities that I couldn’t moderate with drinking. I didn’t drink because it was fun or enjoyable, I drank because that’s what kept the plates spinning. When things got really bad, like in 2018, I would literally slide into withdrawal after about four hours with no drinking.
Withdrawal is a hideous thing and it used to happen a couple of times a day for me. One of the worst feelings is the sense of just coming apart. I can’t really describe it, but it is a feeling of hopelessness and despair and dread and it just literally feels like I was going to break apart at the seams, like I couldn’t bear another second. I don’t even know what that means, just how it felt. I knew the early onset signs and took them seriously—I headed for a bar immediately to ward off the evil spirits with some of Kim Crawford’s.
Not an effective treatment. Also not effective: Pointing out the cost of my addiction, pointing out how I hurt my loved ones, telling me I need to make better choices, giving me cards that outline the relapse process, etc. I literally needed to change my thinking, and since our “thinking” is an electro-chemical process, that meant addressing the electro-chemical aspects of my addiction. Except no one does that.
Here’s my next leap (please remember, I have no actual scientific evidence of this), the Big Book’sself-improvement exercises (or you can call them “Steps”) somehow work to alter brain chemistry. I think this is how all self-improvement and therapy work, by finding new ways to “think” about things, we slowly discover new ways of managing the complex electro-chemical system that is our brain. “Thoughts” and “feelings” are bursts of matter that can be generated or altered. My 16 year-old brain hack became semi-permanent. The thing that made me feel so connected and so the person I wanted to be at that moment, was simply a very powerful burst of electro-chemical happiness. The problem is that it worked so well, I wore quite a deep trail in my brain to that spring of happiness. Soon, every emotion or feeling required management by alcohol. The more I drank, the more I needed to drink.
Interrupting that cycle is very, very, very difficult. I spent decades in that cycle, not always aware that there even was such a cycle. I’m a Big Book thumper for one reason:
It worked when nothing else did. Is it the only thing that can work? Probably not. But it works and you can test this by going to a random AA meeting anywhere in the world. You will meet at least one person at that meeting for whom working the Steps outlined in the Big Book produced long-term sobriety. The first guy I met at rehab, in the detox center, was there for the sixth time and what he had to share with me was this:
I believe that “changing one’s thinking” changes the mix of brain chemicals. That’s why long term changes in “thinking” can produce such deep satisfaction and even happiness, it’s a complete re-calibration of the brain. That’s also why there is so much personal upheaval, because literally everything is changing. The world feels like it is moving under your feet. That feels terrible for a while, but is actually the most beautiful thing. Trust me on this.
I don’t often make recommendations about things to watch, I have pretty specific and maybe off-beat tastes, but I started watching this show and loved it:
It’s basically the story of an older guy trying something new and kind of crazy and accidentally changing his life. For some reason that resonates very deeply with me. There’s a line in one of later episodes, where the Ted Danson character is talking to the director of the facility and expressing sadness and dislocation, thinks maybe things aren’t going to work out and she looks at him and says:
“Look at you, you lived almost a whole life and then you took a look around and decided to change——everything. It’s about the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I have one tiny quibble with that. It’s actually called courage. Courage is being true to yourself, accepting yourself and letting your heart guide you through life. It’s not a warlike mien, this kind of courage. It’s quiet and flows through me with the constant reminder that I am where I’m supposed to be, that I can do what I need to and that things will be okay in the end. It’s possible that goes by another name: Happiness. It’s also what we alcoholics and addicts pray for over and over again:
The courage to change the things we can.
Happy Friday.
I’m grateful for returning to meetings after a brief hiatus as I’m already feeling the relief of wisdom gained in these rooms impacting my life outside them. I’m grateful for the pithy advice someone gave on how to navigate pain. I’m grateful for reconnecting with a fellow I haven’t seen in a while and making plans to meet up soon. I’m grateful for our internet outage forcing us to change our traditional nighttime activities oriented around the TV. I’m grateful for the reminder to send support to a newcomer who has been struggling. I’m grateful AA is generally a safe space of people who are genuinely trying to better themselves – it’s truly a gift to have access to this on the regular. I’m grateful for a new game of intense catch with Harper that tires him out fairly quick. I’m grateful for exercising the tenet that esteemable acts build self-esteem. I’m grateful for taking stock of what is working in my life and truly feeling content about that rather than focusing on how the grass can always be greener. I’m grateful for digging into why I’m becoming more of a shopaholic of late – while I don’t have the answers or haven’t quite rectified my behavior, I’m glad to be in the process of honest investigation rather than deliberate avoidance.
I took a short hiatus from attending meetings as regularly as I usually do for a variety of reasons – both reasonable and not so much. However I’m glad to have attended one yesterday evening where the topic was “pain”. Granted the subject is intense, especially in our AA circles, I truly appreciated how solutions-focused the majority of shares were.
One of them in particular hit me hard because I haven’t heard this tidbit of wisdom in a long while. The fellow said for us to get through pain we must practice humility. My ears immediately perked and I turned up the dial on the “active listening” part of my brain. He said there is no magic eraser that can simply or quickly wash away our troubles. We have to accept them, just like we need to accept the rest of life on life’s terms, and that involves believing in humility as a healer of pain. Not everything (or much for that matter) can be eradicated with a bottle. We need to experience necessary character-building in order to gain insights from our past and use them to do better moving forward.
Certainly the above is very reminiscent of Step 7 – especially what is detailed in the Twelve And Twelve (pages. 70-76). The chapter talks about the beautiful evolution of our relationship with humility in this Program. It starts with Step 1, where we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, finally accepting how messed up we become when we imbibe. That realization for many sadly comes after tremendous fatigue and hardship. Then as we go through the Steps the embrace of humility transforms from something initially sought because of despair (“forced feeding on humble pie” as the 12 & 12 says on pg. 74) into a “nourishing ingredient which can give us serenity”.
As our egos get punctured, we realize how much can be gained from the character-building of going through suffering emotionally sober and not fleeing at the smallest slight. Each instance of doing this successfully means we are laying the foundation of fearing pain less and coveting humility more. While said foundation solidifies the longer we remain sober, we almost naturally open up our minds to the idea of a Higher Power taking the reins. Relinquishing control to a HP isn’t an arduous task because we realize being the Stage Manager of our life only leads to chaos. It is no longer invigorating to fill the role, but rather quite exhausting. That responsibility belongs to something greater than ourselves – whether it’s God in the traditional sense or, in my case, the mountains I see during my daily run in Cheesman Park.
By embracing the concept of HP more throughly and more regularly, I am able interact with my mind in ways that mitigate the power of familiar defects like fear, anxiety, or ego. Also when pain enters the picture it isn’t a sensation that needs to be avoided at all costs. It is something that needs to be better understood so I can move past it in healthy ways. Of course my HP is always available to assist if I chose to keep the channels of communication clear with an honest, open and willing mind. Ultimately, humility is the key ingredient for ensuring this can happen in as seamless a way as possible.
I’ll end by sharing the last sentence for Step 7 on page 76 in the Twelve and Twelve because it perfectly encapsulates my feelings on how allowing humility to infuse my spirit can be the gateway for discovering broad relief:
If that degree of humility[during Step 1] could enable us to find the grace by which such a deadly obsession[alcoholism] could be banished, then there must be hope of the same result respecting any other problem we could possibly have.
Amen.
I am so grateful to be sober today. I’m grateful for a fresh week, for my friends and family, for the holiday season, for comfy sweatshirts and slippers. I’m grateful to work from home, for AA, for my sponsor, for revelations, and for change.
Goooood morning my friends (: As always, I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and an even better Thanksgiving!
I’m feeling a little under the weather today, so my tank feels particularly low on energy however I do have a few things to say. But we’ll keep them short and sweet today (;
1) It should be illegal to work the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know, I know capitalism but seriously…. who wants to work. I want to be snuggled under blankets watching Christmas movies for the next three weeks please and thank you.
2) My parents and sister came into town yesterday and we did indeed get to do several Christmasy things which truly is a gift of sobriety. To be able to spend a nice day with my family is all that I can ask for. We stopped by St. Pats Cathedral too and it’s super easy to fall back into Catholicism during the holidays however, I haven’t really talked to any kind of a higher power in a long time. I haven’t really talked to my grandfather in a long time either.
3) The above said, my 3-year anniversary is officially less than a month away so just be prepared for some major reflection. Sitting in St. Pats and thinking about my lack of conversations with God and my preference of church basements just brought me all the way back to what is above all else the most important – that I am an alcoholic and HP whatever that is to me always has my back. HP loves me exactly the way I am, so why can I not love myself exactly the way that I am? The path is already made so why do I have to force myself along in the dark instead of just trusting that if I move forward HP will push me the rest of the way? Why is it that the place I feel so sure of myself, the place I DO feel exceptional is in a church basement full of other addicts and alcoholics? Because that is who I am, and I know that in my bones. There’s no fear of being kicked out, there’s no fear of being judged (99% of the time). There’s no fear of being alone. Because the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous will always remain full of people who are willing to help, to love you until you can love yourself, who just want to see you stay sober and to succeed. Sometimes I think my anxiety, my sadness, the way I feel stuck actually IS God telling me in one of the only ways they can that something isn’t right. Something needs to change. And maybe I’m too tired, too confused, too scared to make any real changes right now. But I can listen – if I believe those feelings are HP talking to me the least, I can do is listen. January 1st isn’t going to come, and the clock isn’t going to magically rest and the slate isn’t automictically going to be whipped clean and I’m not miraculously going to feel better. But maybe if I start really listening now, by the time 1/1 does come, I’ll be in a better place to make a change. To start over, move in a different direct, change my perspective, feel exceptional everywhere not just in basements. Who knows. The possibilities could be endless if I really do start to listen.
Xx
Jane
I’m grateful for the beginning of December. I’m grateful for a great holiday with people I love. I’m grateful for living a different life. I’m grateful for knowing that all I have to do is my best. I’m grateful for seeing that I’m enough. I’m grateful to be sober today.
(last weekend)
I’m grateful for a rainy morning and grateful for another trip around the Sun. I’m grateful for Thanksgiving and time with my daughter. I’m grateful for a phone call from my far-flung son. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Originally, I wasn’t going to write this week. I had decided that on account of Friday being the day after Thanksgiving (which this year is also the day after my birthday) it might be a good day to take off, maybe mail in a best-of with a few links to the podcast. But here we are.1
I blame the song of the week and a train ride for creating today’s special edition of Thanks for Letting Me Share. I’m headed to Boston to spend Thanksgiving with my lovely and imminently heir-producing daughter and her husband. I was riding down the elevator in my building, affixing the airpods for the walk to the subway, which, of course, includes a stop at the not-on-the-way, but always on the way coffee shop for the obligatory subway cortado.
I had closed Spotify, re-opened it and actually played a different playlist for a few seconds so that I’d get a good shuffle on the main playlist. Why the drama and rigamarole? Well, being as how it was the celebration of my annual pilgrimage around the Sun, this would be the first song of the next year. A fairly significant moment for me—what would the song be and what would it portend for this 63rd orbit. I was actually a little nervous and you already know that I think this is how the Universe communicates with me.
I hit the play button and actually felt my breath constrict in anticipation. And the first song of next year played and I laughed out loud in the elevator:
Hahahha. Oh, 2025, you have know idea what’s in store.
Is that perfect or what? You know what I think about what’s coming, how the Earth is moving under my feet, how this is my Caterpillar Year:
Even my special birthday horoscope augurs great and mysterious things in the offing. The advice is that things are about to happen and that I need to be ready because it’s going to happen fast!
This former Boy Scout is nothing but ready.
And that brings us to the second reason for this appearing in your inbox today: A long train ride. I fought through the crowds clustered for a very rainy edition of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade to make the train to Boston and once ensconced in the Quiet car on a delightful rainy Thanksgiving morning, my mind turned to, well, Thanksgiving. Not the kind with the turkey, but the kind that involves the actual giving of thanks.
The last time my birthday coincided with Thanksgiving was 2019. I was about 40 days sober and pretty much out of my head. While I wasn’t drinking, it felt like my life was unraveling. I was involved in what would charitably be called a catastrophic relationship; in fact, its demise in the Summer of 2020 was what set me on a collision course with my current life in New York.
How did I go from there to here? The short answer is gratitude. I started doing a daily gratitude list in November of 2020–at the behest of a sponsor. As my recipient list grew, I had the idea to put it on Twitter–where it remains to this day. Not to brag, but I think we are coming up on 1400 consecutive days of gratitude over there.
How did gratitude get me sober? Here read this:
The better question, how did gratitude change my life? Finding ways to be grateful every single day taught me:
The point is the learning
The things that are supposed to happen generally do
There is beauty in loss and sadness
Happiness is a consequence of courage and authenticity
There is literally beauty and love all around me every minute of every day, I just have to let myself see it, or better yet, feel it.
And then on this fantastically rainy day of thanks, while I’m happily encapsulated on a Boston-bound train, I started to be overwhelmed by just how much there is to be grateful for. I’ve learned the best thing to do when that overwhelming feeling strikes is to make a list. So here’s a list, presented in no particular order:
I’m grateful for train rides on rainy days
I’m grateful it’s Thanksgiving
I’m grateful for five years of sobriety
I’m grateful for this newsletter
I’m grateful for my sponsees
I’m grateful for my brave, funny son
I’m grateful to be closing in on being a grandfather
I’m grateful for a new career and a chance to build something again
I’m grateful for a beautiful apartment
I’m grateful for my cocoon
I’m grateful for easy access to snacks in my neighborhood.
I’m grateful for my neighborhood.
I’m grateful for playing basketball in the park.
I’m grateful for the people who read this newsletter.
I’m even more grateful for the people who subscribe to this newsletter.
I’m grateful for an apartment filled with books and music
I’m grateful for the life I’ve built
I’m grateful for my talented and lovely daughter
I’m grateful my parents are happy, healthy and independent
I’m grateful for surprises
I’m grateful for cooking
I’m grateful for Saturday trips to the Farmers Market.
I’m grateful for the East River Ferry.
I’m grateful for the Big Book and the people who have sponsored me
I’m grateful for AA meetings and the people who attend
I’m grateful to be healthy
I’m grateful for coffee, every single day.
I’m grateful for dark mornings waiting for the sunrise
I’m grateful for old friends
I’m grateful for the peace and calm I feel every day
I’m grateful for yoga and meditation
I’m grateful to live in the most beautiful city
I’m grateful for Central Park.
I’m grateful for used record and book stores.
I’m grateful for all of the dogs.
I’m grateful for the secret coffee place.
I’m grateful for swagger on the subway.
I’m grateful for the Compleat Strategist on 33rd Street
I’m grateful for the library
I’m grateful for Academy Records.
I’m grateful for the way people have come into my life.
I’m grateful for all of the lessons I’ve been taught.
I’m grateful for the moments of quiet and being able to stand them now.
I’m grateful to love the moments of quiet now.
I’m grateful for the leaves in Autumn and walks in fresh fallen snow
I’m grateful for long walks with no purpose
I’m grateful for pirate-y bad-assery and swagger
I’m grateful for the pirate balcony.
I’m grateful for a swanky umbrella and the memory of a trip to Paris.
I’m grateful for everything that hurt
I’m grateful for feeling lost and getting lost
I’m grateful to have found the path and grateful for every day on it
I’m grateful for the view from my desk
I’m grateful for afternoons in Bryant Park drinking coffee
I’m grateful for not knowing what’s next
I’m grateful for mystery and surprise
I’m grateful for chances to see things differently
I’m grateful for accepting myself
I’m grateful for seeing that the only thing I could change was me
I’m grateful for the way the city looks on rainy days
I’m grateful for the museums and the chance to get lost in them on a regular basis
I’m grateful for the chance to write
I’m grateful to get to share my experience, strength and hope with others.
I’m grateful for the apple crumble I make after trips to the farmers market
I’m grateful for my kitchen
I’m grateful for pennies in the street and chance encounters
I’m grateful for building faith and never losing hope.
I’m grateful for not giving up.
I’m grateful for what I had to lose.
I’m grateful for my piano and starting to play again
I’m grateful for art and beauty
I’m grateful for Apple Jacks and Hostess Donut Gems
I’m grateful for my view of an island that could be named after me
I’m grateful for seeing that love is usually at the bottom of disappointment.
I’m grateful for rebirth, renewal and redemption.
I’m grateful for letting things be
I’m grateful for seeing what’s worth holding on to
I’m grateful for willingness and more chances to get things right
I’m grateful to realize most of the stories I tell about myself aren’t true
I’m grateful for chances to help other alcoholics
I’m grateful for sunny days, too
I’m grateful for the people who make me laugh
I’m grateful for the people who left love behind for me
I’m grateful for the people who showed me my own reflection
I’m grateful for Elvis Costello and the Cars
I’m grateful to sometimes see the purpose in things
I’m grateful for the ways things unfold, when I let them
I’m grateful for hard work and knowing that I can still do it
I’m grateful for my office in the sky
I’m grateful for hearing train whistles from a long ways away
I’m grateful for chances to make amends to the people I hurt
I’m grateful for finding the path meant for me
I’m grateful to be leading the life meant for me
I’m grateful for what happens when I let go of the things not meant for me
I’m grateful for fear and grief and mourning
I’m grateful for the hard days and what I can learn
I’m grateful for what the hard days teach
I’m grateful for sitting through the hard days
I’m grateful for the Pirate Balcony herb garden
I’m grateful for honey bees in the Lavender
I’m grateful for gratitude lists
I’m grateful for Moleskine notebooks
I’m grateful for inspiration and intuition
I’m grateful for taking risks and trying new things
I’m grateful for hints from the Universe
I’m grateful for Spotify playlists
I’m grateful for loving myself and seeing what I almost left behind
I’m grateful for all of the chances to get back up again
I’m grateful for letting the game come to me
I’m grateful for late-inning at-bats and the sound of a double off the wall
I’m grateful for the people who love me and fill my life with beauty and laughter
I’m grateful for nearly 1400 days of gratitude lists
I’m grateful for five years of sobriety
I’m grateful to be sober today.
There have been very dark days in my life. Today is not one of them. Sure, outside it’s gray and gloomy and the rain is falling. But that’s just the weather. My life is filled with light and love and peace and calm and more than I could ever have imagined or asked for. I’m on the way to be with people I love for my favorite holiday (and my birthday, to boot). In a few short weeks there will be a grandson for me to adore, spoil and corrupt. There is no question but that I’ve been blessed.
The greatest blessing: The capacity to see this beautiful world around me and find new things to be grateful for every single day.
Happy Thanksgiving.
I am taking tomorrow off. That’s why there is a special Thanksgiving Edition.
I’m grateful for an early run where the streets were super quiet and I was able to focus on recording higher than usual elevation gains. I’m grateful for my mobility on a daily basis. I’m grateful for a reading about instincts and how they’ve changed since my addiction ended, how old ones still rear their head, and how I can practice better ones moving forward. I’m grateful for new, welcome additions to our gallery wall and lighting fixtures that provide much needed brightness to certain rooms. I’m grateful for how much joy it brings me to keep iterating on our home, it feels like a cool puzzle I can keep tinkering with to optimize aesthetics and utility. I’m grateful for new passions that are discovered in sobriety. I’m grateful for understanding how quickly my state of mind can shift as that realization keeps me seeking equilibrium rather than dwelling in the extremes. I’m grateful for the extra exercise I get playing catch with Harper.
I hopped on the pop culture bandwagon this weekend and watched Wicked. It was a fun ride! Ever since the pandemic I no longer go to the movie theater much. Steeper ticket prices plus not wanting to leave Harper home alone for long periods means when I do go it has to be for something special. Wicked, in this case, was something special. Not only does it feature one of my favorite pop stars in Ariana Grande, it is also the first Broadway musical I ever saw – as an adult. I have a vague recollection of going to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on a middle school trip, but I’m not going to count that seriously because it’s such a blip in my memory.
Back to the point though – Wicked – it was amazing. There are several deep, dark themes in the story (perhaps too many, but I’m not writing a critical review here). One of the themes I wanted to touch upon is empathy. Without delving into spoilers, a big character shift occurs when the two competing protagonists come to find each other’s humanity, each other’s vulnerability, following a pivotal event at a dance hall. For someone who feels like they are decent at keeping it buttoned up, I was shedding some silent tears in that theater.
There are a myriad of reasons why I was moved during the film, but a primary one is because it reminded me of a time in my life that has long since passed. I saw the Broadway musical back in 2006 as a college senior with one of my best friends who I’ve lost since due to my alcoholism. Till that point I hadn’t even had my first drink. I had remained pretty strait-laced (no pun intended). I had hidden myself from a lot of the world because I was hiding my sexuality. That would change soon once I graduated, began drinking, and moved to San Francisco.
There is a lot of advice I would give to my younger self now as I hit 40 in a couple of months. I would say to not be afraid of embracing my authenticity. To not constantly mold myself to what others think the best version of me is. To not let fear and anxiety overwhelm every short and long term decision I make. Honestly my mid-20s to mid-30s is quite the blur, but a constant I can recollect is that I didn’t like myself. Drinking only exacerbated the feeling, especially as shameful acts started piling up. As they say in the rooms to build self-esteem I need to do esteemable acts. Those were few and far between for the better part of a decade.
But back to empathy. It has taken a very long time to come to a place where I have gained empathy for my past self. Vodka made it easy to be categorized as irredeemable. When I finally put the bottle down, shame decided to settle in for a while. However I slowly learnt to let other thoughts enter. As I infused my mind with the constructive, caring language brought upon by being in AA, I learnt about the work I needed to do to repair my relationship with me. I had to clearly look at my past to comprehend what I was thinking and why. I had to uncover the root causes for my insecurities and maladjusted actions.
That is where self-empathy stepped in as a crucial savior. I had to find ways of dropping the shame and be kind to me in the way I would to another person who’d gone through hardships. I had to create a gentle, safe space when it came to reliving painful experiences in efforts to discover ways to move past them and be stronger. After watching Wicked I was once again transported to a mindset where I had to practice self-empathy. Thinking about who I was in 2006 there were so many missteps I had yet to make, but I was a ticking time bomb. I hadn’t procured the right tools around living an informed, sustainable life. I was at the whims of this world’s harsh realities. In many ways I needed to experience the pain and be pushed to uncomfortable limits. Luckily through the grace of some Higher Power machinations, I managed to not only survive the tumultuous journey, but also find a place in AA that shows me how to reflect on it productively. Now when I’m reminded of old transgressions, or even older versions of me, I have the ability to demonstrate empathy for myself first. In doing that I am gifted the opportunity to perform a self-appraisal that permits me to learn and not linger in regret. Seeing Wicked again was an unforeseen, but welcome exercise in reminding me that while I can never change the past, I can find ways of embracing it and thereby embracing me even tighter.
I am so grateful to be sober. I’m grateful for my friends, my family, for doing service and for AA. I’m grateful for reading, for the heat in our apartment, for coffee and for early mornings at the park with the pup. I’m grateful for a short work week, for our little Charlie Brown Christmas tree, honesty and for places where I feel safe.
Goooood morning my friends! As always hope everyone had a nice weekend (:
The dog is currently in timeout so I’m taking these few minutes of peace to write and also as per usual I’m not sure what I want to write about.
While I know I mentioned it last week, with Thanksgiving upon us it’s important to remember that it’s just another day you can get through. Call, text, email, carrier pigeon – whatever you need to get in touch with your sober people do it because drinking or using is just not worth it this fine holiday.
I took the weekend to do absolutely nothing which I really needed and could use some more of, grateful for the days off coming up to rest and before we know it, it will be Christmas.
So, our apartment is already decorated, and I’ve been binge watching Christmas because every year the time just goes by fast and faster and if there’s anything I want from Santa this year it’s just for time to slow down a little.
I’m still feeling funky, I said to Tim yesterday that I feel like I’m in a hole and every time I try to get out of it I find myself deeper in said hole. And we were talking about how in just split seconds my mind takes me from A (normal thought) to B (catastrophic thought) and it just feels impossible to keep up with.
Someone asked me how I was doing yesterday, and I said okay and they asked why just okay and the only thing I could say is that there’s been a lot of change this year. Which is true there has been a LOT of change and time just keeps moving on and on and on.
So yes, all I would like for Christmas is for time to slow down, or for ME to slow down. To process and adjust and collect myself accordingly. To rest and spend time with the people I love. To catch up on reading, make a bunch of meetings, maybe meet a few newcomers and to remember that life isn’t always about what is immediately in front of you.
Anddddd maybe like a million dollars but that’s irrelevant (; Overall let’s just remember this week to slow down, we are exactly where we are supposed to be and above all else we don’t have to drink – Happy Tday everyone!
Xx
Jane
I’m grateful for a lazy Saturday. I’m grateful for the farmers market and the bookstore. I’m grateful for letting things be. I’m grateful for an inky dark morning and really good coffee. I’m grateful for a fire in the fireplace and peace in my heart. I’m grateful to be sober today.
(last weekend)
I’m grateful for easing off the gas. I’m grateful for rainy days and chances to brandish the swanky umbrella. I’m grateful for the swagger that comes from knowing myself. I’m grateful for quiet nights and gentle mornings. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Here we are, nearly the end of November of a pretty eventful year—and not just for me. It has been a year of change and challenge for me. Lots of ups, fair number of downs, and a lot of evens. Maybe some stories didn’t end like they should, to quote a song. A lot has changed for me, and as I have noted (perhaps too many times), a lot is changing for me. I’ve been pushing very hard this year, launching a new career at a time when a lot of contemporaries are actually considering RV purchases. It’s been an incredibly rewarding year. It’s been an incredibly tiring year.
I’m finally taking my foot off the gas pedal a little bit and trying to look around. There is so much to be grateful for. My beautiful, talented, ruthlessly incisive and organized MBA daughter is having a baby—it’s a Q1 event. I’m lucky enough to get to spend Thanksgiving helping to turn a closet into a nursery. I have some ambivalence about the title, none whatsoever about the role. It’s going to be a boy and I have already devised a mini-curriculum for the lad’s unofficial education. I, of course, had an excellent role model in this regard:
And also, as happens every few years, as everyone gathers to celebrate next Thursday, they will be inadvertently and unknowingly celebrating my birthday. I’ve been receiving pretty regular updates from my mariner son—including a surprise phone call from a hotel room in Helsinki. What he’s doing is unbelievably challenging and I couldn’t be prouder.1 There’s an awful lot to be grateful for as I look back over 2024, and I am profoundly grateful for a year that saw me get to observe a pretty unthinkable milestone: Five years without drinking. Five years of sobriety. Five years of living the life that was meant for me.
Oh wait, the song of the week. I’ve been loving this song and listening to this song since 1979. Maybe it’s a little dark, hopefully it’s not appropriate for the times, but it is just a pretty cool song. I’m also a pretty big student of military history. My newspaper route produced the funds necessary to maintain my membership in the Military History Book Club—where they shipped a new volume every month on approval. I had the biggest WWII library at Ernest Horn Elementary for sure.
Anyway, I tend to see the world a bit through that prism, and sometimes organize my life into “campaigns,” and “offensives.” I often employed WWI-style frontal assaults on my alcoholism; they would last 30-60 days, produce a fair amount of misery and ultimately ended up gaining very little ground. Of course, Ulysses S. Grant, huge alcoholic and defender of the Union, is a personal hero.2 At some level, maybe only an alcoholic could do the monstrous job Grant had to do.
Anyway, what with it being the season of giving thanks and reflections on the year that has been and soon will be “was,” I could reflect back on the last eleven months, as I slow down a little bit. And that’s where this was headed, earlier in the week. But then, weirdly, this phrase suddenly popped into my head:
A very famous saying, the story should be better known. John Paul Jones uttered these immortal words in 1779, during the Revolutionary War, in response to a request by the captain of the faster, sleeker, newer, better-armed HMS Serapis, that he strike his colors and save the rest of his crew. John Paul Jones to Captain Pearson: “F*** me, no—F8*** you!” What he actually said is way better:
Here’s what happened: Jones’ ship, the Bonhomme Richard fought the Serapisall night and suffered horrific damage and casualties—but Jones’ tenaciousness and fierceness prevailed and it was Pearson and the Serapis that surrendered to John Paul Jones and his gang of American privateers—who also seized the convoy of merchant ships that the Serapishad been unsuccessfully escorting.
I’ve come to see that this is a building time for me, it’s a time for hard work and for letting things come together the way they were meant to. The people who keep showing up in my life move me from point to unexpected point, providing sudden opportunities where none previously existed, proving the same point again and again and again:
Oh, trust me, I’m not sitting in the lotus position, sagely awaiting my fortune, I push pretty hard, but it’s in a different direction. I’m just trying to be the best version of myself that I can muster. I do the things that I think are right, even when there’s no prospect of a reward, I do the things that make me feel happy and peaceful inside. I am working to let go of my attachments to things I can’t control (and shouldn’t try). I’m building a peaceful, quiet, calm life to replace the one of chaos and regret that I lived for so many years.
There have certainly been times when I’ve seen my struggles with alcohol as a battle to be won, but that’s not how I look at it these days and that’s not why the quote really hits me. John Paul Jones arrived at a moment that was meant for him, that stood ready to be defined by his action. That’s where I think I’m arriving, too—at a moment meant for me. A moment where I’ll have a chance to follow the path I’ve been on, even though it might seem very, very challenging.
I know I employ a lot of pirate talk and metaphors. To be fair, the “Pirate Balcony” has its name not because of the occupant in the camp chair at the very end, but because it’s very narrow and resembles a gang-plank. Or, maybe there is a pirate who sits in a camp chair at the end of the balcony and watches sunrises and quiet nights and plots the next chapter of his life. And there is definitely a pirate-y attitude behind saying something like, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
I’m not fighting a war these days, that’s not what that means to me. It means, get ready, I’m shifting gears. I’m not quitting or giving up or slowing down, I feel like I’ve finally arrived at the starting line for the race I was supposed to run. I have a lot of regrets about what happened over the last many years and lots of regrets about what didn’t happen, too. But my life is no longer defined by regret, only by what’s next.
When you play pick-up basketball, you “call games,” in advance. The phrase, “I’ve got next,” means when this game is over, my team will be playing the winners for the right to stay on the court and keep playing. Maybe there’s even a martial aspect to that, taking the court and then defending it. Here’s what I know: Right now, I may be hunkered down in something of a cocoon, being transformed into what I was meant to be. That definitely fits my mood these days, feels like the right way to live. I’ve got next.
Things are changing, the way they always do. The world never stops spinning and I’m nowhere near ready to find a relaxing verdant pasture. I don’t know what’s coming next for me, what will happen, how I will be challenged, where I will end up. Those were the worries and concerns that dominated my thinking in the olden days and drove my drinking in the olden days. If you had asked me at this time last year, I would never have predicted this year.
A year of challenge and discovery and hard work and sitting through a fair amount of fear, apprehension and foreboding about whether I could make this all work. Well, here I am. Pretty battle-hardened after more than a decade of fighting to get sober, still pretty sad about some of the losses we endured during the fighting, proud of what I’ve accomplished and mostly grateful for not giving up. People in AA like to use the phrase “surrender” and often extoll it as a necessary step in the process of gaining sobriety. I still have enough of my old alcoholic ego to choke a bit on the word.
Sure, I gave up a lot to get here. I gave up the view of the world, and of my place in it, that had animated me for the first 57 years of my life. I had to leave a lot behind, a lot of cherished beliefs and hopes, and even dreams. I didn’t have a choice but to jettison them, they weren’t actually mine and the longer I chased them, the further from the path I strayed. What I really gave up was the conceit that I had a plan, or was capable of doing the planning.
As 19th century Prussian military strategist Helmuth Von Moltke wrote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Maybe, Mike Tyson has the better version, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I don’t have a masterplan or strategy, I’m not slowly revealing some intricate mechanism that will catapult me to the top of some heap. I’ve got a capacity for hard work and a willingness to look at things differently. I’ve let go of a lot of my expectations and replaced them with acceptance. I’m embracing the uncertainty in front of me, like an old friend.
Maybe I should feel scared, I’m a bit unmoored and not really sure where things might go. But I’m not. I’ve never felt more alive, more vital, more creative, more me. I didn’t just recover from the disease of alcoholism, I recovered myself—and that’s why everything is different. We united the warring factions, established a united front. We know that bad-assery always prevails over dumb-assery and we are ready.
Here are two things I know for sure as I stand on the Pirate Balcony, almost 62 years behind me, on a windy, rainy November morning, surveying the world laid out in front of me:
and
Happy Friday.
They actually let the boy drive the ship, and not just in empty parking lots, like I restricted him to.
His memoirs are actually really insightful and well-written. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was his editor and publisher and secured the then-huge advance that was meant to take care of his family, as he was dying of throat cancer.
