Flyover country of the soul

Today I am three years sober.

I wrote a post not long ago that referred to my first year of sobriety as feeling as though I was crawling out of my skin. The more I think about it, the more apt that phrase seems. I really did feel as though I could not just sit with all my chaotic feelings about the awful things that were happening.

In retrospect, a lot of the awful things that happened were precisely because I couldn’t sit still with my feelings, because I couldn’t just realize that sometimes bad things happen, and sometimes people are assholes, and sometimes I make costly and embarrassing mistakes.

Bad things still happen. People are still sometimes assholes. And, unfortunately, I still make costly and embarrassing mistakes. But the feelings around all that are different. I no longer feel as though the whole world is against me, that I’m standing in the face of a storm that won’t stop buffeting me long enough for me to catch my breath.

When I make an expensive mistake or a social faux pas or lose my shit with my kids, I remind myself that everybody does stuff like this. I’m not the worst, most pathetic person who ever lived. I am just a person in the world, like everybody else.

When I was drinking and newly sober, I cycled between feeling intense shame because I was The World Person in the World, and righteous indignation because other people didn’t treat me like I was as perfect as I wanted to be and in moments of grandiosity convinced myself I was.

Shame and grandiosity. Self-hatred and narcissism. These are the poles between which we swing when we’re drinking. When we stop drinking and take those first shaky steps on the road to recovery, those poles are all we know. We know nothing of the bland flyover country of the soul, where we are just as valuable – and just as flawed – as every other person. We don’t know how to acknowledge our mistakes without self-flagellation, clean up the mess as best we can, and move on. We don’t know how to forgive other people because they’re only human and doing the best they can, even when they hurt us.

Life is so much better now than when I was drinking. I still have problems. I still get angry. I still get embarrassed. But the problems are not catastrophes, the anger isn’t rage, and the embarrassment isn’t soul-killing shame.

None of this would have happened if I hadn’t developed a drinking problem and then got sober. When I was new in AA and people would introduce themselves as “a grateful alcoholic” I was like, WTF? Now, I get it. I’m grateful that drinking too much broke me open, and sobriety put me back together, better than before.

Step 2: Part 1

Step 2:  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.


I was prepared for Step 1 to take a long time, as my sponsor said it would, prepared to be patient, but then I did the writing assignment she gave me: write how my life is unmanageable and how I feel powerless. But first, ask God to put on the page what He wants there, then write and don't edit.

I prayed, wrote, closed the file and didn't read it until the end of the day. Wow. It was ugly. Really ugly, and scary. I was going to share some of it here, but what's the point? It's all self-hatred and fear and...ugliness.

My sponsor read it (actually, I read it to her over the phone because I have kids and seeing her is a logistics issue, on which see below) and said, "Well, you've done Step 1. That is powerlessness all right." I said I thought I was going to be on it awhile, and she said, "You continue to surprise me."

My ego lit up, of course: I was the good sponsee, the best sponsee, the good girl A student I have always been. And of course my ego told me that I'd sail through Steps 2 and 3, too, and get to the meat of it, Step 4. The big one. The scary one. Well, the first of several scary ones anyway.

So in the week that followed I had been praying, really praying for the first time in a long time. I felt like there really was a power higher than me that could save me, or at least there could be.  So I meet with my sponsor and she says I'm going to be on Step 2 for a while yet. WTF? It says in The Big Book that you just have to be willing to believe that, and I was willing, god damn it, but she said I wasn't there yet.

She said -- and here's the thing that really pissed me off -- that this week, she wanted me to pray to my Higher Power about what it would look like if I wasn't doing this exhausting logistical dance trying to get to meetings and see her without telling my kids where I was going, which has been hard, since I am a single mom with a demanding job and I was juggling enough before I started trying to fit three AA meetings and a meeting with my sponsor into an already insane schedule.

Of course she's right that it would be easier if I told my kids, and my mom who could watch my kids, but I don't want to because telling them would mean telling my ex as well, and I can face being honest with my kids, but not with my ex or my mother, because both of them are very judgmental people who think therapy is Lola Granola bullshit and they'd think I'd be thinking that they'd be thinking, Why does she need to leave her kids and go to all those stupid meetings? Why doesn't she just not drink?

Because my ex has already said, "What kind of mother are you anyway? You're never home. You're always at work." I can just see what he'd say about this. And of course I can't ask my kids to keep something like this from their father.

Because my mother has already called me selfish, said I thought more about myself than I did about my kids. And even though she's not the model of motherhood I want to emulate, and even though I keep telling myself her criticism shouldn't affect me, it does.

Because I am afraid of being vulnerable to these people, who have knocked me down in the past when I dropped my armor and made a conscious decision to trust them and be vulnerable, expose myself to things that trigger my Bad Mother Shame.

Later that day, I got really angry. Angry at my sponsor, because AA is Alcoholics Anonymous. I was supposed to be safe here. I was supposed to be allowed to be anonymous and safe. And here she's telling me to tell the most judgmental people in my life my most painful secret.

Normally I would stuff that anger down and get resentful, but I called her instead, and was honest. Instead of getting defensive, she pointed out that she wasn't telling me to tell them. She was telling me to ask my Higher Power about it. And I said, "Oh, and God's going to tell me to go on being a chickenshit coward and do what I want instead of doing the hard work I need to? We both know there's only one answer to that question."

"And that's why you're not done with Step 2," she said gently. "You were so sure you knew the answer already, you didn't even ask God."

She's right, of course. I didn't. I didn't ask God. I didn't trust God enough to ask Him and hear whatever answer I got, in part because I didn't think I'd be able to tell what was God and what wasn't, but in part because -- oh, God, she so totally nailed it -- I think I know what's in the mind of God already.

So here I am, mired in Step 2. Trying to figure out how to let go of my fear and arrogance and ego enough to really, truly, humbly ask.

Step 1: Part 3

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

In the months that followed, I talked myself out of the God shot and into the coincidence. I talked myself out of the fear that had brought me to that meeting, telling myself I wasn’t that bad. Because I didn’t get a DUI or get fired or end up in strange men’s beds I didn’t really have that bad a problem. Yes, I got to work on time, and with make-up on. Yes, I put on a good show for the world, but I should have known better than to believe my own masquerade.

The fact was, when I poured “a glass” of wine and swore to myself it would be just a glass, it wasn’t. I worried about destroying my liver, because drinking an entire bottle of wine at least three nights a week had to be overtaxing its capacity to cleanse my blood of all the Malbec I was pouring into my system.

After I stopped drinking, I went to a meeting here and there, but didn’t do it consistently, didn’t get a sponsor. I told myself that I had stopped drinking because I wanted to, because I chose to, because I was strong enough to. I joined an online group where women like me – women who had good haircuts and drank good wine, who didn’t have bad teeth or bad grammar – supported each other in their sobriety. Some of them were in AA, working the steps, sponsoring and being sponsored, but others weren’t, having decided that online groups, podcasts and blogs were all the support they needed.

I thought so for a while, too. One of the blogs I read was by a woman who said enough and got sober, all on her own, with only her blog comments and Twitter feed for support. After three years of sobriety, she got a book contract to tell the story she’d been telling on her blog. It was a story of determination and accomplishment: I chose sobriety; I did it. It was the antithesis of AA, and I loved it, because I wanted to be the antithesis of AA. Yes, AA helped my dad get sober, saved his life, even, but I could save my own life, thanks.

Less than two months after that scary, awful, wonderful early morning meeting, I decided I wasn’t that bad, and was going to try moderation again. Aristotle said that every virtue is the mean between two extremes. “Moderation in all things – including moderation,” said with a sly wink, had been my motto, and I was going to prove myself a good Aristotelian who could moderate if it killed me.

I had “a” glass of wine, which turned into three or five or whatever it was that left me hung over, sick with shame and determined to go cold turkey again. I did it without meetings or the steps and so I didn’t do it for more than another couple of months, when I decided to “moderate” again. This time I was successful. I did have just one glass, and not every day, just now and then, one or two, being very Aristotelian and proud of myself. But having to think about it, which was exhausting and demoralizing.

The morning after the first time I had an entire bottle, I quit for good again. I can’t remember if I went to a meeting that morning, but I started going again, in a half-assed kind of way, not getting a sponsor, not doing anything that would require commitment or accountability, which being the daughter of a 12-stepper I knew was a bullshit way to do AA.

Bullshit notwithstanding, I stayed sober five months. Sober, but miserable, what they call a dry drunk in AA. As the one year anniversary of that first meeting, which sadly was no longer my sobriety date, approached, I was reading another sobriety blog, this one by a guy who had twenty years of sobriety and for all that time had been working the steps, both with a sponsor and as a sponsor. The things he wrote about service and sponsorship reminded me of the things my dad used to say when he was in his first decade of sobriety.  Back then, I would think, Oh, Lord, there he goes again with the 12-stepping, and try to look interested in “being of service” and all the rest of the recovery-speak. Two decades and countless gallons of ruby-hued poison with notes of ripe blackberry, warm spice and oak later, that recovery-speak sounded very different.  I looked at my reasonably affluent, reasonably successful middle-class self and thought, what the fuck is the matter with you? I knew what was the matter. Self-pity and ego and bullshit was the matter. I needed to work the steps was the matter.

So I went to a meeting early Saturday morning. I wanted to share, wanted to say I needed a sponsor, but there were a lot of talkers and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I went again the next morning. It was a huge meeting, the biggest I’d ever been to. One of my neighbors was there, and a lady from my Zumba class. No sharing that day either, but someone who did share was a woman, who had been a speaker at an earlier meeting I had attended. I’d gone to hear her because someone I met at my very first ever meeting texted to tell me I should go because she was an amazing speaker. She was. The things she said that day had stayed with me, and when she shared at that Sunday morning meeting, I worked up the nerve to ask her to sponsor me, and she said yes.

It was like that first meeting, almost exactly a year earlier. I got scared enough, desperate enough, to step outside my comfort zone and do something I felt as though I needed to do, because I couldn’t do it on my own anymore. That is admitting powerlessness. That is Step One. I thought I had taken it a year ago, then stepped back and spent a year in self-pity and ego and bullshit. I thought I had taken it again last week, but my sponsor said I might be on it a while. I said, as long as it takes.

Step 1: Part 2

Step 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

I admitted that a year ago when I woke up hung over at 4:30 AM and Googled “AA [my city]” instead of going back to bed in hopes another couple hours of sleep would help. They wouldn’t. For the first time, I knew, really and truly knew, that the only thing that would help was not drinking anymore, ever. Not exercising moderation better. I had tried and failed at that. My only hope was sobriety. It had saved my father, and it could save me.

I had just had a cancer scare. The day I got the wonderful news that the biopsy was negative, I learned a man I knew was dying of liver cancer. He was around my age, a good-looking, smart, successful professional whom no one would have guessed was that bad. I felt a cold lump of fear: that could be me.

So I went to a crack of dawn meeting, walked into that room with so many more men than women, some of them kind of rough looking, and forced myself to share. I was afraid that if I didn’t share, I would walk out of there without having talked to anyone, made any kind of connection, and might never come back. Might go home determined not to drink but by mid-afternoon would be heading to the grocery story to replace the wine I had poured down the sink that morning.

Sharing that morning was one of the hardest things I ever did. I am not afraid to speak in front of crowds. On the contrary; I love public speaking. But this was different. This wasn’t me in a smart suit and high heels clicking away at a PowerPoint. This was me hung over, clutching my coffee cup as though it was some kind of security blanket and being totally honest and vulnerable in front of these strangers, many of whom looked so different from me, and told stories of hitting a much lower and scarier bottom than I had with alcohol, but whom I could sense were kindred spirits.

I said those words: “I’m [my name], and I’m an alcoholic.” “Hi, [my name],” they all chorused warmly, because that’s what people do at AA. And I told them how scared I was, scared enough to come here and ask for help – their help, God’s help, whoever’s help – because I didn’t know what else to do.

After the meeting, several kind women came up to talk to me. One of them had written her phone number on an AA flyer, with a note that addressed me by name. When I looked at my name in her neat printing, spelled correctly, my breathing slowed. I couldn’t speak for a moment, kept looking at it, not quite able to fathom what I saw. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal. So she spelled my name right. So what? This is what: in some-odd decades on this earth, no one – not a single human being – has ever spelled my name correctly without my spelling it for them. And sometimes, even when I do spell it for them, they don’t write what I say. I’ve sat there and watched them spell it wrong, even as I’m spelling it aloud for them.

But that woman at the AA meeting spelled it right. On her own. I asked her why she had spelled it that way, and she said, “It’s funny. When I was starting to write it, I lifted up the pen and paused, not sure how to spell it. So I asked God.”

That may sound corny and ridiculous, but it didn’t feel that way to me at the time. It felt like the sign we always ask God for but never get, a sign that I was doing the right thing and I was going to be okay. That is what people in AA call a “God shot” and I would normally call a coincidence. But that wasn’t a normal day. That was the day I admitted my drinking was out of control and I needed help. That day, a ray of hope penetrated the spiritual darkness that had engulfed me since my divorce, and I called it a God shot, too.