I read on somebody’s blog recently that they would NEVER sink to the level of doing a “list” article. I think the argument was that it was a cheap way to get readers (aka, he or she is probably a pompous asshole that knows more than everybody else,) but it obviously didn’t resonate with me since you can pretty much judge by the title that this is a list article. And I don’t really care if it’s a cheap way to get readers because, you know, I need readers (and my list article is going to be awesome, so there’s that.) But regardless of anybody’s opinion, and since my blog is so new you can still drink out of the toilets, I ran with it. And it was a LOT of running. This article was HARD!!
When I first came up with the idea for this article several weeks ago, I liked it because it REALLY made me think. I took it as a challenge to come up with ten things that were just as important for “normal” people as they were for recovering addicts because if they were going to be things I learned about LIFE, they had to apply to both addicts and “normal” people because both of those types of people participate in this thing we call life. I read a couple of articles about what recovery taught people, but I found nothing that was able to relate the experience of addiction to what it might teach us about life in the big, scary outside world.
One of my goals with blogging about addiction and sobriety is to close the gap on the stigma of addiction and hopefully use that to make the conversation a little louder and a little more welcoming to those stuck in such a dark dungeon of depression and reclusion that it has left them unwilling or unable to leave or speak up that they need help. In other words, I want to get addicts to come away from everything I write feeling like they ARE normal. Ten percent of the population is NOT a low number. Forty million people is NOT a low number. Addicts absolutely ARE normal. Just like left-handed people. Or Duke fans.
There have to be lessons in any struggle, right? That’s sort of the nature of how we grow and change. We can make a quick list right now and I don’t even have to go over the lessons each one teaches us. I’m not about to belittle your intelligence by explaining the lessons you might learn from the challenges associated with a speeding ticket, a new diet, cramming for college exams at the last minute, a sex injury, getting lost, falling asleep during a long sermon, a toothache caused by a new sugar addiction, a learning disability, walking twelve miles to school uphill in snow carrying a small cow while suffering from Plantar Fasciitis. All of them are struggles or challenges, and all have a very specific set of lessons that can be learned in the aftermath.
Addiction is no different. The problem with finding the lessons learned when looking through the rearview at an addictive past if that only the pedestrian lessons come into focus for most of us. Those stupid cliches like “life is too short to ruin it with addiction” or “addiction is a lifelong battle” or “your family will benefit from your quitting.” Anything in that realm is just too obvious and I don’t really have much interest in writing what everybody else writes or thinks.
And the thing about addiction is that we addicts ALREADY KNEW the cliche lessons before we ever quit. That’s just the nature of addiction. We already know what will be better in our lives once we quit, we know what the challenges will be, we know the lessons normal people have already learned because we envy them so much, we even know what we would say if we were confronted with a medical issue caused by our addictions. But we still drank. We had already learned every life lesson any counselor or veteran sober guy could tell us, because our brains screamed them at us EVERY day, but we still drank. It’s really f**king stupid when you think about it.
So I didn’t want or need to discover the wearisome stuff I learned about life because of addiction. I knew all of those lessons when I was still a drunk. I wanted to uncover the stuff that is never really uncovered by the majority of addicts, and even what I believe to be a majority of “normal” people.
For weeks I have tussled with this topic in my mind. I was determined I would come up with ten things specific to recovering addicts but shared with “normal” people, but I was determined to come up with ten LEGITIMATE things. I wasn’t going to get to eight and then throw in some stupid fluff like “I learned how to love again (super blah)” just to make it to ten. I actually ended up coming up with about fifteen and had a to knock a few off to get the really good ones. So anyway, here it is. Ten unique things addiction taught me about life.
1. The belief in a higher power is born from experience, not instruction.
So I have a few issues with the whole church, God, Jesus, belief stuff. I always have, even though I grew up in church and sang in choirs that sang god music and have basically just been a part of it in some way for as long as I can remember. I have also felt an obligation my entire life (and it’s reiterated heavily in AA) to believe in God and to “love” his son, a man I have not met. He died before I came around. So I’ve always been a little baffled as to how a person can actually “love” him. People will tell me that they love him because he died on the cross for our sins and gave us the chance at everlasting life, but that’s just never been my definition of love.
I mean, I appreciate the whole bit about him dying to save us from our sins, but what if God already had that in the works anyway? Maybe bad stuff really does just happen for no reason and God doesn’t really try to stop it, even when it’s his own son. Maybe he brought Jesus back to life just to have some fun and scare the turd balls out of Pontius Pilate and the Romans. Not trying to be blasphemous, just throwing out some what-ifs. And I guess they ARE a little blasphemous, but blasphemy is an opinion, so I can’t really apologize for that. This is how I think. Just ask my wife. She truly has no idea if I’ll ever be allowed into heaven.
Anyway, you can’t TELL me to believe in a book that humans wrote, has parts that sound like mythological fables or magical fairy tales, has entire chapters that are ignored or explained away by even the staunchest believers (even preachers,) and discredits or contradicts itself across chapters without apology or explanation. It may be holy, but it’s filled with some dark and transparent holes, too. And you can’t TELL me to believe when an unusually high number of Christians spew hatred and live so hypocritically that I wonder how and why God doesn’t light their asses up with lightning bolts every time they spew their hate speech. But I guess he’d do the same for my blasphemy, so I’m okay if he wants to hang on to his lightning.
Anyway, all of that does not mean I don’t believe in God. I have said my entire life that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, around me makes ANY sense whatsoever unless somebody was responsible. That someone, in this case, would be God. But experience still trumps instruction. I’ve been TOLD to believe in God my whole life. I just seldom listen to things I’m told to do without asking LOTS of questions and basing my beliefs on what I FEEL.
But if you experience a baby being born, if you sit outside and watch a storm develop, destroy, and then dissipate, if you see enough of this Earth to really see the majesty of it, if you ride twenty foot seas on a boat that should be sinking and gain an appreciation for the power of both water and prayer because you’re somehow still alive, if you experience love that somehow fought off the cold bitterness that attacked it and stayed just as sweet as damn sugar, and if you hang around long enough to experience a calling, you don’t have to be instructed to believe. You simply allow yourself to.
2. People DO change. It’s actually a requirement.
The sayings “People can change” and “People don’t change” are actually pretty obtuse and stupid. Not only CAN we change, we DO change. All of us. Every single person on this Earth now and since God said, “Poof,” has changed. So we can pretty much stop using those sayings now. A person that stops changing is dead.
I have changed a LOT since I quit drinking. I’m a better husband and father, I’m a better teacher, I’ve gained twenty pounds because food and sweet tea replaced beer and Kodiak, I’m slowly losing the anxiety and stress that came with addiction, I feel good in the mornings because I’m not hungover, anytime I have the beer shits I know it has come from an entirely different source. I’ve changed since I started writing this article a few weeks ago because I’ve forced myself to look at different aspects of my life, my mind, and the world around me. Especially my mind.
The fact that we do, in fact, change, if actually pretty empowering, too. It means we have some control over our lives. We might not have a lot, but we have some. When we have control over our lives, even for a only a whiff of time, we have the power to change something about ourselves. And the good news about that is that most of us actually have a shitload of stuff that needs changing.
I was an addict for twenty years and I did my damnedest to control EVERYTHING. Because of that, I kept change at bay. I had no real interest in changing anything. And now I’ve come full circle (well, maybe half circle; I’m still a pretty phuched up human.) For twenty years, I kept myself from changing no matter what. Now sixteen months sober, I’m searching for all the many ways I actually CAN change something about me. If I lose that desire to change and get better, you will know I’m either dead or drinking again. I’d vote for dead if those were my only two choices.
So go change something about yourself if you want. Who the hell is going to stop you? I mean, I guess you can stop yourself, but why the hell would you want to do that?
3. The human brain can be a REALLY dangerous place to reside.
In the quest to preserve an addiction, the human brain is an enabler. Plain and simple. It is trained, by all of us, to be that way. If you’ve never experienced addiction, you might not understand that. But have you experienced anxiety, depression, the loss of someone very close to you, or a chronic illness? If so, guess where you reside most of the time while in the midst of any of them? Your brain. You talk to yourself nonstop, and the more negative you feel, the longer and more damaging the thoughts become.
So not only do you have mental anguish because of this new negative thing that has come into your life, but you have such an enabler in your head that it will lead you down whatever path you want it to lead you down. Most of the time, that is to a deeper negative state, a more debilitating anxious or depressive state, or a pitiful “woe is me” attitude that becomes cancerous not only to you, but to everyone you come in contact with. That’s why depression and anxiety are just as progressive as alcoholism to some people. They can’t get out of their damn heads!!!!
The human brain can become a very inhospitable and downright contentious place when a person is struggling. Have you ever wondered why such a high percentage of addicts relapse? And most relapse over and over again until the last one, whether that last one is true sobriety or death. The easy answer is that sobriety and recovery is probably the most difficult challenge we addicts will ever face in our lives, and addiction is quite honestly just easier than sobriety, but the addict will never be fully able to explain how thoroughly his brain was gang raped from the inside out prior to that relapse. And I mean gang raped by several dozen ex-cons with genital warts so large and fleshy that they’ve developed their own central nervous system. Just a thorough and exhaustive gang rape of the brain.
To all those people who say, “Just think happy thoughts” or some such nonsense, most struggling addicts and those people suffering anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses would love to stuff your happy thoughts so far up your happy ass that they catch a whiff of liver bile when they pull their hand out. Those people who never experience a mental gang rape – and I envy the hell out of them – will NEVER understand the negative, destructive power of the human brain. It’s a dangerous f**king place.
4. People are not equal. Some have very few flaws.
There were several ways of saying what I wrote above for number four. I was trying to keep it fairly short because it’s the title of this one, but what it really means is that there are people on this Earth who are markedly better people than most, and I believe it was designed to be that way. Think about it another way. If you believe that nobody on Earth is better than you, and you can’t strive to be better every day to reach the level of people who you admire, my guess is that very few people like you because you are an arrogant asshole.
Some people are just better than me. And I’m glad!! Have you ever met somebody that drove an electric car to their job at the free clinic wearing clothes they made from recycled puppy blankets, and then at lunch they went and visited random blue hairs at the nursing home and took a blind kid for an afternoon walk after buying him a waffle cone, and when they got home that night, they ate nothing but green leaves and taught a virtual class on meditation to inmates at the women’s prison just before falling asleep to the sounds of Yanni beside a spouse that made them feel small because they did even BETTER amazing shit? Me either. That’s a little far-fetched. But you’ve met people you admire so much that you wonder how they function with so much goodness. If you haven’t, you need to surround yourself with better people.
If I thought I had nothing left to improve, I would most definitely be drinking right now because I would have zero idea of what the hell I’m doing here. I don’t know why that means I would be drinking, but I would be bored out of my damn mind feeling like I was just treading water in a baby pool for no damn reason, so what else would I do? I’m not built to do much else. Mentally, I would not be able to handle a world in which I could not improve.
But can I tell you the good in that? Two years ago, when I was as close to rock bottom as I could get without a chisel, I had no interest in improving. Now I do. Sobriety is cool.
5. Asking for help and/or showing vulnerability is actually empowering.
Does it get any more vulnerable than starting a blog about your struggles with addiction? That you freely shared with the entire gamut of people who know you? I thought I was nuts when I first had the idea. I knew I wanted to write about it because I knew the act of writing itself would be empowering and healing, but it took me a LONG time to come to grips with announcing it to the world and inviting them in.
And I have zero regrets. I actually feel more empowered and worthy than I’ve ever felt in my life. When I first talked about it on Facebook, an old high school friend of mine said she once heard a saying that went, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” I don’t have any secrets anymore. And I’m okay with that. Most people couldn’t handle going public with their addiction story. I get that. Most people have absolutely no interest in sharing such an embarrassing, intimate, troubling secret with the world. If that had been me, however, I would never fully be free of it. Now I’m free to be free. And that means I’m free to be the real me. I’m telling you, sobriety is cool.
6. We have a gigantic problem with personal accountability in this country.
I realize the overall theme of this one is a little odd compared to the rest of them, but it actually fits pretty nicely. The title is “10 Unique Things Alcoholism Taught Me About Life,” and accountability is most definitely one of them. Without being able to admit or accept accountability for my addiction for twenty years, I was the guilty party. When I finally did, it was like I started seeing the entire world differently. It has slowly become this thought of “I’m finally holding myself accountable, why the hell can’t everybody else?” And the lack of accountability in this world is just astounding.
It has been like shining a black light in a dark interstate motel room. The accountability stains on this world are blatantly obvious and unbelievably staggering in scope. We have a government that cannot accept responsibility for anything but how well they are blaming the other party. Our president was never actually held accountable for saying he was so famous he could just grab women by the p**sy. And that’s benign compared to everything he should be held accountable for during his presidency that he somehow evades through divisiveness and bullying and the ignorance of the American people.
Hell, we as a damn country should hold some accountability for having two of the least presidential and most crooked candidates that have ever run on the damn ballet at the same time!! And they were our only choices!! That’s like having to pick between being castrated or impaled in the ass with a spear gun, never to shit properly again. I mean, WTF were we thinking?
Let’s go further. We’re basically handing out participation diplomas at this point. Our kids are held accountable for nothing, and that’s probably because half of them come from homes where the expectation is that they live off the government for the rest of their lives just like whoever they live with (and yes, that’s stereotyping, but can you tell I’m not blue OR red?) Let’s keep going. Obesity is the food’s fault, or the medicine’s fault, or genetics fault (some of that IS legit, though.) The blame for failure or irresponsibility is diverted away from the guilty party. When we screw up at work, what do we do? We make excuses and never actually hold ourselves accountable. When our kids screw up at school, what do we do? We make excuses for THEM and never actually hold them accountable. Wouldn’t want to hurt their wittle feelings, now would we?
Just look around and start noticing it. Power companies fight to NOT be held accountable for coal ash spills. Chemical companies fight to not be held accountable for producing cancer-causing pesticides. Athletes – the world’s worst role models – are simply above the law and above reproach and very few of them actually know how to spell accountability anyway (another stereotype; doesn’t really bother me.) All these men getting accused of sexual assault or harassment and only about ten percent of them will actually come out and say, “I did it and I’m sorry.” Dare I say that when a person gets clean and sober, we have become a world where alcoholics and addicts aren’t just normal, they’re far more accountable than our leaders and role models. Damn.
7. Fear has broken more dreams than an absence of talent or skill or effort ever will.
Think back to when you were a kid. Hell, think back to five years ago. Did you have a dream? I sure as hell did. Lots of them, in fact. For the past twenty years, however, mine has been to live a life of sobriety. That was my biggest dream. Yeah, I had dreams of getting married again and having more kids and finding a job I liked (all of which came true prior to sobriety,) but the biggest one, the one that had all the other dreams by the balls with a vise grip, was to get sober. It is an odd fear that keeps an alcoholic from getting sober. The fear of living without addiction is nearly debilitating. It’s insanity. But it’s very, very real.
The other big dream of the past 10-15 years was to become a writer. I wrote a novel that almost got published, but it was the whole lightning in a bottle thing. I couldn’t catch the voice or the storyteller that used my body and mind like a puppet for that span of time that it was being written. And then it was nothing more than the fear of failure that made me quit. I had the talent. A novelist I know and the agent I met with about my book both assured me that the talent and the writing chops were there. I let the fear of failure break that dream for me. And then I drowned it in alcohol.
Take at look at your dreams. I’m betting you wouldn’t have had them if there was no talent or skill available to pursue them. So if you didn’t achieve them, my guess is that you have nothing to blame but fear.
8. You are NOT that f**king important. But everyone is judging you anyway.
I referenced this in my last post, but it definitely belongs here, too. I was talking about the mental aspect of emerging from addiction out into a world where we feel like “a lesser person, an unworthy person, but somehow, a very important person.” For some reason, aside from the tiny, unworthy people we actually are, we somehow think we are so important that everybody is staring at us with judgment and condemnation. I’ve thought a LOT more about that this week. I stand by the fact that we are just NOT that f**king important.
When we die one day, the world will forget us in seconds. And that’s not hyperbole. I literally mean seconds. Yeah, your little inner circle of family and friends will take a little longer, but you are nothing but an obituary to the .000001 percent of the world’s population that will actually see it. And half of them won’t actually read it. We are NOT important. Hell, you give me a week postpartum and I’ll forget about every athlete, singer, and politician in the country, and I love sports, music, and politics. Even the famous people are about as important as a discarded chicken wing. The world really will keep spinning and the people left will keep right on living.
But I have to amend part of my belief with that. If you make ANY impact on people, you will be living with the knowledge that even though you aren’t that f**king important, you are most definitely being judged anyway. Think about it. Take your mind to the grocery store for a minute. You walk through minding your own business, and you might see a dozen people of whom you actually take notice. It might be a little old lady that smiles at everybody with this look of “please be my friend” stuck haphazardly in her smile, or a frazzled mom with three kids who are destroying the cereal aisle and you wonder where the discipline is, or the man you think may be a pedophile because he’s childless and staring at diaper boxes.
Yep, we judge every damn person that makes ANY kind of impression on us, even if it’s the most innocuous of judgments and even if it’s passing them in the damn grocery store. So take solace in that, addicts. You’re in the same boat as the bad moms and suspected pedophiles of the world. Hey, there’s worse company.
9. True wisdom thrives in negativity.
What I mean is that true wisdom includes a LOT of not’s, no’s, can’ts, won’ts, and shouldn’ts. “I can’t put myself in that position.” “I won’t talk bad about them.” “I shouldn’t try a back flip off the diving board just to impress the other overweight dads.” Addicts lack wisdom. That’s why we pray for wisdom at the beginning of every AA meeting. We know how important it is. We know wisdom helps addicts know what NOT to do. Furthermore, Confusius once said, “To know what you know, and to know what you DON’T know, that is true wisdom.” See? He threw a negative in there. But it makes sense, right?
To me, gaining true wisdom is preposterous, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be sought after. But in that search, we learn that wisdom is based not around knowledge but around making the right decisions with that knowledge. Almost always, those decisions involve coming to a conclusion that you SHOULD NOT or CANNOT do something. Let’s consider a scenario that exists in the everyday life of a recovering addict and how his newfound wisdom, especially the negative aspect of it, can help him survive and thrive. Let’s start simple. The neighbors down the street are having a Super Bowl party and invite you. You know you should NOT go because there will be lots of beer there. Simple enough. You decide to just sit at home and watch the game with a bag of M&M’s. You just displayed wisdom.
But how about this scenario: You check your daughter’s phone on a whim and discover she has a boyfriend. He says inappropriate things on her texts and Instagram. Far too inappropriate for their age (and no, this hasn’t happened yet; I’m just preparing.) He talks about touching her places. He talks about drinking and vaping. The little bastard wants her to plan a sleepover at her friend’s house (who is also his neighbor) so that he can see her on the weekend when his parents may or may not be home. He’s thirteen years old and you want to fill his skull with roofing nails.
But this is where you step back and allow wisdom to take over. You must use your knowledge of thirteen year old boys, your knowledge of tactfulness in speaking with all involved parents before said possible weekend sleepover, your knowledge of night vision, tactical gear, and lock-picking to hide out in that boy’s closet, and your knowledge of how to hire people to rough up thirteen year olds.
Yeah, I’m not ready for wisdom yet. Screw that. Next.
10. Time is NOT the most important thing you can give your loved ones. Undivided attention is.
This is how sickening it is to be an addict. You can literally be in the middle of sex and can’t keep your mind off of your next drink, dip, drug, cookie, *insert addiction here.* I’m not saying it happened every time, but it happened an embarrassing percentage of the time.
Can you even begin to fathom the TIME I took away from my family getting drunk for twenty years? Or thinking about drinking or dipping? Or preparing for each night because EVERY night of drinking was the most important thing in my life. That depresses me pretty severely. It’s tens of thousands of hours. It’s just sickening. And that makes what I’m about to suggest turn into one of those “do as I say, not as I do” type of things because this is something I need to work on BADLY. So do you. All of you. Badly. So I, pot, have something to say to you, kettle.
Put your damn phone down, turn off the f**king television, and give your family your undivided attention. Play a game. Go for a walk. Just sit and talk. The amount of time does NOT matter. Whenever we actually do those things, it feels AMAZING. Not only that, it looks like THEY feel amazing. It’s how you make them FEEL for even the slightest moment in time, not the calculable amount of time. It’s about making them feel like they are the most important person in your life in that moment. Because inside AND outside of that moment, they are.
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