Recovery

When I was in the eighth grade, I made the baseball team at Cleveland Middle School just outside Clayton, NC.  This was a big deal for me because I was in love with baseball and the son of a bitch that coached the team (God rest his soul) cut me my seventh grade year.  The feeling was mutual by the eighth grade, but that coach was a fairly sour dude who never really liked me.  I guess I’ve always rubbed some people the wrong way, even as a kid.  I’m really just starting to figure that out in the second half of my life.

Anyway, one of the reasons I made the team despite his disliking me was because I was willing to do my coach a favor that year.  He had nobody to play catcher, and I volunteered to give it a try.  By the end of the season, I was probably in the top three or four in the voting for team MVP and he gave me an award for teamwork and perseverance called the Ram Award for taking a chance on a new position, working my ass off to do it well, and then actually succeeding at it.

But this story is not about my coach or about my proudest season of playing team sports.  It’s about my dad.  If he could be at a game, basketball, baseball, or otherwise, my dad would never miss one.  No matter the dullness of the cliche, he was my biggest fan.  I mean, my mom was too, but when you’re a young boy, your dad is the one you most want to please because he’s the one that plays catch with you and pitches to you and takes you to buy that new glove you wanted.

Well one day about the middle of that season, I was catching, of course, but I wasn’t having my best game.  I had let a couple of pitches get past me and I let a couple of runners steal bases.  In my defense – and my memory is a little shady on the insignificant events of that day – I recall the pitcher being a guy named Josh who had a lot of movement on his pitches, and catching was a tough job when Josh was pitching.  

My dad was like most parents of athletes at the middle school level.  He was vocal and supportive and he’d call out some advice based on what he was seeing from behind home plate, but mostly he just enjoyed watching his son play.  Well on this particular day, I was having none of this unsolicited advice from the crowd. 

So in the middle of the damn game, between damn pitches, after I was sick of him giving me his damn take on how damn bad I was playing (and I doubt he ever said one negative thing) I turned my snotty little ass around and told him to shut up.  There were somewhere between thirty and seven thousand people in the stands, depending on how much this story still stings me, but I told my dad to shut up in front of all of them.

I was young, but what I remember most about that day was how long and stressful and quiet those next couple of hours were.  I remember my teammates even seemed to ignore me. It was awful. I couldn’t look at my dad, I was terrified to look at my coach, and I just wanted to fall into a damn hole and die.  

The most profound lesson I received that day – even though I didn’t understand the lesson for decades – was not a lesson of embarrassment or thinking before I spoke or tuning out things I didn’t want to hear.  No, it was the earliest lesson I received in recognizing and realizing the profundity and gravity – and quite often the elusiveness – of our own words.  It wasn’t just the words I had spoken – far, far from it, in fact – it was the words I hadn’t YET spoken.  And it was those words that tortured me.

I understood from an early age that what’s done is done.  The past is the past and it’s staying right there.  I knew I couldn’t take back what I had said.  But the words I hadn’t yet said – that treacherous apology – is probably the earliest horrifying memory of my life.

You know what’s crazy about it now, though?  I don’t even remember the apology.  I remember the time during which the words I had already spoken and the words I hadn’t yet spoken attacked my brain like a father who caught the molester before the police did.  Just like that father, I was slowly and meticulously and almost artfully tortured by my own words.  But mostly it was the words I knew I had to say.  So simple are the words, “I’m sorry.”  But don’t tell that to a man’s pride, no matter his age.  You know you MUST say it, but it is absolutely agonizing what happens in your own brain until that happens.

If you sit back and consider some of the most difficult words that can ever pass your lips at any point in your lifetime, some of them can be downright painful to even read, much less actually have to say.  Far beyond that of a thirteen year old kid knowing he has to apologize to his daddy for embarrassing him when he only wanted to watch his son play baseball, there are words we must say at various times in our lives that are WAY more difficult than that stupid kid’s apology.  Here’s a short list I came up with on the fly.  Not all have applied to me, but these are the obvious ones to include here.

• “I want to break up.”
• “I want a divorce.”
• “Will you marry me?”
• “Your (insert family member) is dead.”
• “We lost the baby.”
• “I’m gay.”
• “I plead guilty, your honor.”
• “I’m dying.”
• “Mom, for the next two years, I’m going to war.”
• “Santa Claus isn’t real.”
• “Honey, I have some bad news.  I have AIDS.  And I got it from your mother.”

Okay, so it got a little weird there at the end, but you get the idea.  Aside from asking your bride-to-be for her hand in marriage (more on that later,) there are those moments in life when you know you have to open your mouth and say something to another human being that will either crush them or destroy you – maybe both – and you would rather remove your skin with a veggie peeler than to have to say it.  

Our earliest examples of this – for many of us anyway – go back to that first or second or maybe even third really serious boyfriend or girlfriend.  It was that moment that we knew we had to break their heart and tell them we wanted to break up. Sometimes we would negotiate and haggle and barter with ourselves in our own brains for days or maybe even weeks with the anguish that this caused us.  I can still remember some of those feelings.  They were awful.

I mean, it shows I have always had a big heart and a softer side, but I am still the reason I repeat the following phrase almost weekly in my classroom and quite often to my teenage daughter:  “Remember this, ladies.  Teenage boys are horrible creatures.  Just horrible.  Do not trust a single word that comes out of their mouths.  Even the ones who everybody thinks are the good boys.  They’re all terrible, horrible creatures.”

But eventually we said it, right?  We wouldn’t have married somebody ten relationships removed from those first girlfriends or boyfriends if we hadn’t.  But when we said it, it was always accompanied by “It’s not you, it’s me.  I’m the one that’s messed up.”  And even though that was true, it was not true for that particular moment of our lives nor did the person we dump even care that we were messed up.  We said those self-rationalizing things to lessen the blow caused by the gravity of what we put ourselves through preparing to deliver the breakup speech.

And even though it doesn’t really need repeating at this point in this article, it needs repeating just in case there are teenage girls reading this.  Teenage boys are just walking, talking, conniving pieces of shit.  Remember that.

Anyway, we somehow lived through those breakups and we trekked through life dreading that next horrible thing we had to say, and for a lot of guys, that thing is, “Will you marry me?”  Ninety-nine percent of the time, we know she’s going to say yes, but it is still a nightmare to actually say it out loud.  And it’s not the fear of what she might say, it’s the fear of losing that tiniest of slivers of freedom we have left.  When those words exit our lips, it’s over.  Or that’s what we think anyway.

There are probably tons of other unimportant times in a young person’s life prior to that first marital biggie when they must say something about which they will lose weeks worth of sleep and spend their days with stress headaches and maybe even run the thermometer under hot water to convince mommy that they’re sick just so they don’t have to say it today.  And then when they finally say this thing that has tortured their trivial, adolescent brain for weeks, it goes something like this: “Mom, I don’t want to go to the family reunion.  Aunt Gertrude grinds on me when she hugs.”

But the important stuff – the REALLY hard stuff – is reserved for adulthood.  We get to ask for divorces and tell our kids that their parent is dying or tell our spouse we have cancer or – God forbid – tell our spouse we cheated.  We get to suck up our pride and tell our boss we screwed up or announce to the world that we are, in fact, gay.  These are all big boy words.  They’re heavy.  They can REALLY cause some anguish before they finally leave our lips.

But none of them come remotely close to the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say in my life, and I venture to guess that when I look back on my life one day when I’m old and ornery, it will always be the hardest thing I ever had to say.

The hardest thing I’ve ever had to say in my life was, “My name is Denton, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Now this admittance is not coming from a slouch who was never faced with some difficult words.  I was a very sweet but still horrible teenage boy and had to suffer the anguish of breaking up with girls that deserved much better than me.  I have asked two women to marry me.  I have stood in front of a crowd of better than five hundred people with my two year old daughter climbing all over the pews and delivered my first wife’s eulogy.  I’ve had to admit a shitload of lies to my wife.  I’ve had to tell my daughter all about who her dad really is and was.  I’ve had some deep, heavy shit pass these lips.

But none of them compared to the anguish and torment that came with admitting I was an alcoholic.  And you may ask why and say that makes no sense based on all the other heavy shit I’ve had to say.  But here’s the thing about admitting you’re an addict of any kind:  

You can’t ever take it back.  Ever.  And it changes everything.  Literally everything.

I knew I was an alcoholic probably by my late twenties.  I admitted it when I was thirty-nine.  I finally said the words out loud that had ravaged my brain for a decade.  That cannot compare to anything else I have ever said in my life.  Any of the other heavy shit I’ve mentioned ravaged my brain for days, weeks, maybe months.  Not a decade.

But once it’s out there, you’re done.  If you admit you are an addict, you cannot go back on those words.  You can’t say, “Well, I mean, I sometimes drink a little too much, but I’m not like those people at AA or those drunks living under the bridge or like Uncle Mel when he shows up at Christmas and steals all the liquor.”  

It doesn’t matter what KIND of alcoholic you are – be it homeless panhandler, fully functioning, or Uncle Mel – an alcoholic is a person who is powerless over alcohol.  They are a person who does NOT get drunk with the fifteenth drink, they are already drunk by the first drink because they will NEVER stop with that first drink.  The drink that makes them blackout is simply inevitable once the first one happens.

If you’re an alcoholic, you already know it.  The question is, when are you going to say it out loud for others to hear?  That’s when you can stop being defined by your addiction.  There’s always a “but,” though, right?  When you admit your alcoholism, you absolutely are on your way to the day when you do not define yourself by your addiction, but you can’t think that clearly when you haven’t admitted it yet.  You’re in the stage of, “Oh my god, I can’t do this.  I can’t do forever.  Just can’t say the word or my wife will be right and my life will be over.   I can’t say I will NEVER drink again.  I shouldn’t have to admit this now. What if I learn to drink in moderation one day?”

It’s nothing more than lengthy internal bullshit, and you know it.  Sometimes it’s a decade of bullshit.

So what happens when you say it?  Well for starters, if you say it and you mean it, as soon as you go back to the bottle, you’ve gone past addict territory and into junkie territory.  That’s what I tell myself, at least. If this shit owns me that thoroughly – if I am not strong enough to say no to something that almost ruined my life – I might as well label myself a junkie and just live out my days drunk and miserable and let my family find happiness without me.  

I’ve heard of a few people who admitted they were alcoholics, stayed sober for months or years, and then decided they could drink in moderation all of a sudden.  They swear they can actually drink one or two beers and just stop.  And maybe they can.  But if I’m being honest, and you can bet your ass that’s why I write about this like I do, I think they’re lying.  I think they drink more than they say, I think they hide alcohol from their spouse, and I think it’s only a matter of time before they go full on addict again.  For most of us, wherever we were when we quit drinking, as soon as we start back up, we will be back to that low, rock bottom place within days or weeks.  

Alcoholics cannot do moderation.  The obsession after one or two drinks is just far too strong.  I do not believe that somebody who was in the depths of hell because of alcohol can ever have a cordial and mutually beneficial relationship with it ever again.  I just don’t think I’m wrong about that.

And it’s for all these reasons that it is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say in my life.  And you know what?  It still isn’t easy to say.  It’s still a little embarrassing.  It’s still – sixteen months later – a difficult thing to wrap my head around, especially that concept of forever.  

I will never regret breaking my anonymity and telling the world about my alcoholism because I truly believe this is my calling.  I’m supposed to talk about it.  Eventually God will put somebody in my path that needs exactly what I have said and it will be a small catalyst in saving their life.  But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.  I still see people occasionally that I really only see on Facebook and think, “I wonder what they think about me when they see me.  Do they see an alcoholic or do they see someone they have come to admire?”

These questions, and these continued insecurities, are exactly the type of questions a practicing alcoholic does not have to consider.  They are choosing the easy way out.  It is MUCH easier staying in addiction than it is facing a world that no longer includes it or allows it.

I truly hope somebody reads this one day who is in that decade long anguish of knowing they are an alcoholic but refusing to admit it.  I hope they have just enough strength left to walk into one – just one – AA meeting and admit they are an addict.  I hope the recovery and the withdrawals and the mind games and learning to live sober from that night forward suck so badly that they think the only way out is back in.  I hope they think I am asking them to ruin their lives by admitting this, and I absolutely am.  I’m asking them to ruin the thing they THINK is life. 

And with that, I hope they understand that they are free to still ruin their own lives outside of addiction, but at least they can do it in a much more responsible way.  And I don’t even necessarily understand what that sentence means, but it makes sense to me.

But in all things we trek through in this life, the view forward is like taking a panoramic picture with the lens cap on.  As soon as we turn around and look back, the pictures – and their are millions of them in rapid fire succession – are all crystal clear and come with extremely detailed captions.  When an alcoholic is faced with saying these words they can NEVER take back, the future they see is not only as black as that panoramic, it is also filled with a promise of depression and anxiety and poor self-esteem and an unwillingness to escape the reclusion.  And yes, sixteen months later, I still see all of those pictures.  They’re ugly as hell, but I’m keeping them forever.  I need to remember how much this sucked.

Attempting to look at a future without addiction was the most challenging encumbrance of my life.  By a LONG shot. I heard those eight words every day – multiple times a day – for ten years. Ten YEARS.  Imagine trying to talk yourself into saying something twenty to thirty THOUSAND times. It sure makes that saying about insanity seem pretty accurate.  You know the one: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  I was probably borderline insane by the time I actually said it.  In many ways, I still am.

If you’re an alcoholic or other addict, saying those words will ruin the life you are choosing to live, but it is most definitely not ruining your life.  An addict cannot and will not see it that way, but they will also probably agree with me, because their dream – since the moment they admitted it to themselves – has always been to live in sobriety.  But addiction is such a f**ked up existence that they prefer to maintain their status quo, even when they are one hundred percent confident that life outside of addiction is better.  Now THAT’S insanity.  It’s such a tragic way to live.

Remember all those “tough as hell” things at the front of this article that we are sometimes forced to have to say?  Those things that are so difficult to say that they cause personal anguish?  Consider a few that an alcoholic might be forced to say one day:

• “Honey, we’re broke.  I’m sorry.”
• “I’ll take the manslaughter plea deal.”
• “Yes, mom and dad, I stole from you in order to maintain my addiction.”
• “I have irreversible liver disease and have only months to live.”
• “Yes, I was drunk at work.  Will you please let me resign?”
• “What should I write in my suicide note?”

You think some of those are exaggerations?  Nope.  Research the name Chandler Michael Kania.  Or Amy Winehouse.  Or David Foster Wallace.  Or Hank Williams.  

Or don’t research them.  The stories suck and they will depress you.  Instead, think about how freaking easy it is to just say those eight little words.  My name is Denton, and I’m an alcoholic. It was the hardest eight words I’ve ever spoken, and they caused some pretty excruciating mental agony before AND after they were spoken, but I don’t have to really consider ever having to say the things in that last list ever again.  That’s pretty cool.  Happiness and hope eventually render the “forever” aspect of that admittance nothing more than a little bit of daily personal maintenance.

And when that happens, look at all the things that you might get to say:

• “You mean you trust me enough to make me a daddy?”
• “Of course, I’ll take the promotion.”
• “We can actually afford to go on a vacation.”
• “I’m going back to school.”
• “The doctor says I’m as healthy as a man twenty years younger.”
• “Saw a shooting star tonight.  I wished for a dream, not a beer.”

Just say it.  It’s going to absolutely suck for a little while, but dammit, it’s better to have life suck for a little while than to have life suck until there’s none left.  Addiction does not enhance or sustain life.  It takes it away, it drains it, it makes it shorter and less enjoyable.

If you’re an alcoholic, you already know it.  Just say it.  If you need to practice on somebody, even if you don’t plan on doing anything about it for a while, say it to me.  I won’t judge.  I mean, how could I?  You’re just like me.  Send me a message and I’ll send you my phone number so you can try it out on somebody.

If you have read the majority of my website, I have said several times that I will never try to talk a person into admitting their addiction if they don’t want to quit.  I don’t enjoy wasting my time or my energy on pointless efforts.  I sincerely hope you enjoy your addiction.  It would be better than suffering addiction and hating every minute of it, right?  Why would I wish that on somebody?  If you choose alcoholism, I choose to wish happiness upon you even if your choice is not one I would make any longer myself.  I believe in big boys and girls wearing big boy and girl pants.  Besides, you’ll need all the pants you can get when you break into your ex-wife’s house to see if she kept your box of winter clothes because sleeping in a tent behind Walmart starts getting cold in late Fall.

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.