“Relationships”

I have to say, it’s a good thing other addicts & alcoholics have as much trouble with relationships as I do. If I was the only one who had these problems, there’s no way I’d be able to handle it. I can still get lost in my crazy brain and lose track of what’s real. I can still fall victim to thinking I handle things worse than I actually do.

Say, for example, I meet a new woman. We have a short date, nothing fancy, and it goes well. It’s a forgone conclusion that I will be spending the next who knows how long constantly thinking about it, analyzing it, going over every little detail. Did I say the right thing? How did I come across? Was I too forward? Did I represent myself honestly? And don’t even get me started on the ‘why hasn’t she called???’ I’ve no doubt that there are people out there who can meet someone new and continue going on about their business as if nothing were different. Bastards.

The diseased part of my brain loves it when things go well for me. It takes it as the perfect opportunity to spin the wheels. I hear people talk about it like a hamster spinning the wheels in its cage. The more I want something to go well, the faster the hamster spins the wheel, until it becomes more like a racing cheetah than a little rodent.

The tools I have do work, though. I can work steps. I can call my sponsor, I can go to meetings and work with others. These are all actions which have proven themselves time and again to be great ways of getting out of my self. Talking with others helps me, too. Sometimes it takes talking it out with another person to see that the stuff going on inside my head is only going on inside my head. When I step outside myself and look at my actions (instead of listening to Uncle Steve's drunk chattering), I can see the progress I have made.

A lot of my friends in Recovery agree that romantic relationships are like the last frontier for folks like us. How many times have we hopped into bed with someone, then tried to build a relationship out of that? I’m guilty of it over here. The idea of getting to know someone first, taking things slow, is very different. Like having just one or two drinks, there are normies out there for whom that makes sense. Getting to know someone slowly, gradually, for some people it’s like ‘well, duh!’ For some of us, it’s not so obvious. And it’s not so easy.

For me, it all comes back to being sober. It’s because I’m sober now that I have the chance to get to know someone first before rushing into things. I have the opportunity to avoid being in bad relationships. If I was still getting loaded, that wouldn’t be possible. It doesn’t mean that every woman I’m attracted to is going to be interested in me. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to find the perfect partner. It does mean that I have a chance now, when I didn’t before.

I can accept now, too, that it is possible for me to put my best self forward, make no mistakes, and still not get the result I want. That is part of life. It doesn’t mean I'm a failure. It means I'm living life on life's terms.

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“The Wonderer”

In meetings, I hear people talk about ‘peeling the onion’. We get sober and we start dealing with all the stuff inside ourselves: the feelings, the memories, the thoughts and the motivations. We get to know ourselves, the different layers that make up who we are. I know I’m not alone in saying that, before I started on this path, I didn’t really know myself. One of my favorite things I ever heard a speaker say was that when you come into the rooms, the person you get introduced to is you.

As I continue in my Recovery, I, too, am peeling the onion and exploring those ever-deeper layers. I confess, I get annoyed by it. Sometimes I wish I was a simpler man. I think life would be easier. But I am me and no one else. So if I may, allow me to peel back another layer here.

A lot of the ... stuff ... of me is a smokescreen. And I don’t always know that that’s what is going on, because I am genuine. I’m a personable guy. I’m one of those people who hears, “you're so easy to talk to” a lot. People tend to be comfortable around me and feel safe opening up to me. When I listen, it's because I want to. I care about what the other person is saying. I want to know them and hear them and understand. But this doesn’t mean I don't have emotional barriers as hard and thick as a stone castle wall.

Intimacy, real intimacy, means I have to open up as well. It’s something that is still very, very hard for me to do. It means I have to lay bare who I am inside. It means I have to find the courage to let out the real me, expose him to the world. I have to show others the me that I keep beneath the layers and behind the walls.

It’s ironic. I was once paid a compliment after a meeting. Someone told me how much they admired the way I really ‘put myself out there’. I don’t remember how I reacted, but I do remember thinking the compliment didn’t make sense to me. I felt there was so much more of myself that I’d kept inside. Maybe we’re like that. Maybe, no matter how much we share, there’s always plenty more that we don’t. Maybe it’s just that I’m like that.

So who is the Zach that’s on the inside? Who is the me--beyond the words, beyond the music, beyond the supportive reassurance--who is the me that’s at that deeper layer? For starters, it’s a man that looks at sentences like the previous one and rolls his eyes. He looks at the words he just wrote and says to himself, “wow, obfuscate much?” Because he sees how the surface layers are talking about opening up and yet taking their sweet time to actually do it. “What, are you stretching it out for dramatic effect? Jeez dude, just say it already…”

I’m a wonderer.

I enjoy thinking. About everything. I wonder why I’m here. I wonder why WE’RE here. I wonder at the beauty of the full moon and at the mystery of a starry sky. I wonder at a gorgeous sunset. I wonder at the insanity of those with wealth and power who go to any lengths to prevent others from taking it. I wonder at a world that lifts up liars and cheats and allows good people to be murdered. I wonder about a God that loves us so much that he gives us free will to decide even if we want to believe in him or not. I wonder why some men who don’t think are admired more than those who do. I wonder how it is that 'do something, even if it’s wrong' can be more valued than taking the time to do something right. I wonder in disgust at a culture that prizes ignorance and lifts up con artists as heroes for no other reason than the fact that they successfully scammed countless others. I wonder, too, at a world that has seen any number of prophets teach different ways, yet still insists on doing things the same.

This is the real me. To an extent, childlike. I ask questions, sometimes without even caring about the answers. I look around me and try and make sense out of a reality that I never possibly could. I am an artist who comments on what it is I see, experience, and learn. And now, as an addict in Recovery, I am learning better how to let go, how to not ask as many questions, and to just accept things that are. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering, or from being a person of wonder.

There is a difference between the wonder of being amazed, and the wonder of asking why. When I wonder, it's in the first sense of the word. Being in Recovery has given me plenty of opportunities for it, too: the wonder that a group of dope fiends can help someone turn their life around; the wonder that a group of drunks can do the same.

I believed in God before I got into Recovery, but it was only after I came into the rooms that I truly began to see miracles.

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“Be . . . Not Afraid”

Fear. If I were to simplify everything about the disease, distill it all down to one single, simple aspect, it would be fear. So much of the chaos and the drama of our lives stems at least in part from our fears.

We are afraid of what others will think of us, and so we try to control it. We make ourselves out to be someone different than who we really are in order to shape others’ views of us. We are afraid of not being good enough, so we inflate ourselves. We boast and we brag, hoping other people will be fooled and think highly of us. Some of us are so used to other people having low opinions of us that we recreate that pattern. We meet someone new and don't know how to handle someone liking us or having a good opinion about us, so we act like assholes and treat others with disrespect to make sure that they don't like us.

We are afraid of feelings. Waking up after our long slumber of being loaded, we find that we don't have much experience in dealing with emotions. We remember that our inability to handle them is one of the reasons we started getting loaded in the first place. We remember family from our childhood with inappropriate emotions. Anger. Sexuality. And, of course, fear itself.

My family is big on fear, and we each react to it in our own way. My mother is the most outward. She handles fear by worrying constantly--and out loud--about everything, to the point of making up things to worry about if she runs out. My dad and my sister do things a little differently. I, of course, spent many years high as a kite. The one thing I probably worried about more than any other was what other people thought of me. It wasn't until I got into Recovery that I learned this simple phrase:

Someone else's opinion of you is none of your business.

Working the program of Recovery helps us to learn how to deal with fear. We learn to recognize it and walk through it instead of letting it control us and run our lives. We learn to accept our fears, and (in time) how to let go of them.

These days, my fear shows up most when it comes to relationships. Especially when I meet someone new. All the old feelings come up: the worry that I’ll do something wrong, the fear that I won't be ‘perfect’, the idea that I have to pretend to be someone else to get her to like me. I did a little meditating on this very subject today and received a fantastic piece of wisdom: be . . . not afraid. Not just ‘be not afraid’ but something else: be the exact opposite of afraid.

I’m not a bible thumper by any stretch of the imagination, but I know this passage and there’s something profound about it. The message is very simple: we don’t have to be afraid, God has it all under control. In Recovery, we learn to ‘let go and let God’. We learn to live by faith, to trust our higher power to take care of us and give us what we need even if it’s not what we want.

I lot of people come into the rooms hating God. They feel God has turned against them, betrayed them. A lot of people who have been in the rooms for awhile look back on those feelings and say that they now realize they were the ones who had turned against God.

Ultimately, my fears about relationships are about my fear of being alone and unloved. Through working the program, I continue to find a deeper truth in that old saying that ‘God is always with me’. I am never alone. I am always far more loved than I could ever comprehend. Maybe I don’t have a romantic partner right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m unloved. I have friends in my life. There are many, many, many people who know me and love me. And even if I didn’t have that, I would still have the incomprehensible, infinite love of my higher power.

There really is no reason to be afraid--ever. Be . . . not afraid.

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“An Obsession of the Mind”

We talk about the disease of alcoholism/addiction as being three-fold: a disease of the mind, body and spirit. It’s a spiritual malady, an allergy of the body, and an obsession of the mind. I was reading a good website the other day that broke these down into layers. They talked about the allergy of the body as the top layer, the obsession of the mind beneath that, and the spiritual disease beneath that.

I’m not sure how closely I agree with this way of looking at it, but it does make a lot of sense. Those of us with this disease can’t drink and use like normal people. We can’t have just one drink, take just one hit, and then put it back down. We continue to get loaded again and again, even when we don’t want to.

The site talked about the spiritual malady a lot. It listed out many quotes from the AA big book to describe it: feeling restless, irritable, and discontented, the trouble with personal relationships, not being able to control our emotional natures, and on and on. The list was pretty long, actually. It went on to include depression, being full of fear, and one of my personal ‘favorites’--self-will run riot.

I can recognize those traits in myself. I can remember their presence in my life from before I ever first picked up, but that’s not what I’m getting at here. Before, I’d thought of them as the ‘obsession of the mind’ part of the disease. Now, I’m thinking that my thinking might need to be changed.

My mind has almost entirely stopped its obsession over substances, but it still obsesses from time to time. The most common obsession is wondering or worrying about others’ opinion about me. Why hasn’t my friend called? What does that woman I’m attracted to think of me? These are, obviously, prime evidence of my disease. Sometimes, I’m able to be extremely spiritually fit and look at these thoughts from a distance. I can even laugh at myself and find some gratitude in knowing that I am still not cured. Other times, I get angry. I even have a special prayer for when I’m really pissed off at my chattering brain: ‘Dear God, help me to chill the fuck out!’

I don’t like it when my brain obsesses. It distracts me from what’s real. It pulls me out of the serenity I have worked so hard to achieve. It prevents me from being who I really am, prevents me from being honest with myself and with others. Thank God I’ve got tools, now, to deal with it. I can pray. I can go to meetings. I can work steps. I can work with others. Whatever it takes to get me out of myself, that’s what I try to do. It passes.

Recovery is a process, not an event. It’s possible that I will never totally get rid of my obsessive mind, but what I do get, instead, is a way to handle it. I can look back and see how much better things are than they used to be. I don’t obsess nearly as much as I once did. There has been a lot of improvement. If I keep working the program, there will be more.

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“Being Wrong”

I remember being new to the program and hearing someone share about how good it felt to be wrong. It was bizarre. It made no sense at all. ‘Why would anyone want to be wrong?’ was my thought at the time. Little did I know that, one day, I would feel exactly the same way.

Perfectionism is something a lot of us with the disease can relate to. It’s a control thing. If we can make something perfect—whether it’s ourselves, another person, some project, etc.--then we are in control and have proved that we can manipulate the world. We have demonstrated our power. Maybe we even garnered respect from others because of the demonstration. We have bent reality to our will. We are mighty. We even feel God-like at times.

Step One: We admitted we were powerless...

Some of us showed our perfectionism through knowledge. We were know-it-alls. God knows I was. Any subject I opened my mouth on, I was the expert. I knew everything about it and anything anyone else tried to tell me was flat-out wrong. Some people call this being hard-headed. I call it being an arrogant asshole.

There are all kinds of reasons behind the need to be perfect. A lot of us come from backgrounds where, if we aren’t perfect, we aren’t loved. We had to live up to someone else’s idea of what we were supposed to be like. Often times, it was an impossible task; we were set up for failure. And the love we needed was held over our heads, always just out of reach. We got the message that if we had just tried a little bit harder, then we would have gotten there. Many of us visited this evil on ourselves as we tried to quit. We tried over and over and over again, always unable to, and always feeling like it was our fault because we couldn’t achieve the impossible. We are addicts; we can’t ‘just quit’.

Being a know-it-all comes from a severely damaged self-esteem. For myself, I felt that emptiness inside, the pain and the loneliness. I didn’t know that I didn’t have to be anything other that me in order to be loved. I thought that the more I knew, the more impressed others would be by me, and that they’d respect and admire me for my greatness. There was no way I could have understood that it was my raging ego that turned people off. Even if I was talking on a subject I did know a lot about, my attitude was still a problem.

Working the program of Recovery gives us many opportunities to learn acceptance about the times we are wrong. It starts with surrender, with admitting that we do have a problem after insisting for so long that we didn’t. We make this admission to ourselves, to our sponsors. Every time we open our mouths to share in group, we admit it again. The process continues as we work a fourth step and see our part in the ways others had wronged us. We start taking responsibility. In Steps eight and nine, we learn how to admit to others just how wrong we were and become willing to do something about it.

Being wrong is part of being human. We have failings. We’re not perfect. Recovery teaches us that it’s okay, and that we don’t have to pretend anymore. We are going to make mistakes. It’s one of the ways we learn. There’s a common recovery slogan my sponsor uses a lot: make different mistakes. It’s one of my favorites, too. Making mistakes, being wrong, are opportunities to learn. If we think we know everything, then we aren’t teachable. We aren’t practicing the spiritual principle of Humility.

Today, I’m glad that I can be wrong. I’m grateful that I can see when I am wrong, and grateful that I can admit it to myself and to others. It means I’m a little bit closer to being right-sized.

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"Outer Child"

Sometimes I feel like my inner self is a two-year-old. That inner child thing people are always talking about? Yep, I've got one, too. He's angry, hurt, lonely, self-centered, and always seems to be on the verge of either crying or throwing a tantrum--or both. He's in some serious need of love and attention today, so I'm doing my best to put him up on my shoulders, swing him around, and see if I can't bring a smile to his face.

It's no coincidence that my inner child and inner addict are so similar. I write sometimes about the addict side of myself as a character named Uncle Steve. Maybe I should give the inner child a name, too. How about lil' Joshua? Ah, now I'm naming the members of the committee in my head. Still insane over here :) but none of this means that I don't take these parts of myself seriously. Giving these voices recognition, calling them by name, is a mental trick I've found useful. It's my way of accepting these parts of myself, while at the same time knowing that they are not me. An addict may be what I am, but it is not who I am. Each of us has an inner child that, again, is not who are on a day-to-day basis.

Uncle Steve is the addict side of me at its worst. Lil’ Joshua is the frightened child who never got the nurturing all children need. And just as Uncle Steve can grab the wheel of my life and start running things, so can this little guy. When he does that, the resulting chaos and wreckage in my life are just as disastrous. Relationships get ruined. People I love get hurt. My self becomes the outer child and I react to my life, the people and events of it, as a hurt, angry child would.

Many of us stopped growing emotionally when we began using and/or drinking. Instead of developing and maturing, instead of feeding our spiritual selves, we retreated and our growth stagnated. We masked who we really were and our altered selves became the way we dealt with life. Many of us experienced abuse as children. This trauma can also be a pivot point that prevents us from growing. We learned to escape and our use became a way to escape from the pain we felt inside. Being loaded was our only way to cope. We didn't know how to deal with or process our emotions, we didn't know anything about acceptance, had no experience practicing it.

Dealing with abuse is a lifelong process. Recovery from addiction and alcoholism is, too. But if we do the work, we can be successful. If we surround ourselves with trustworthy people, put ourselves in places where we are nurtured instead of belittled, we can move forward. We don't have to let our inner child and our addict selves run our lives. We can choose to do the work and improve. We can stem the pain and learn to heal. It takes time, but it can be done.

Longtime followers of this blog know that I don't have any childhood experiences of abuse that I can recall, but that I do have indicators that trouble me. To this day, I still have insomnia. It's really frustrating to be tired, falling asleep, then go to bed only to wake up again. I wonder from time to time why this is. It may be the sign of some repressed memory. It may just mean that I need a new mattress. I don't remember much from my childhood at home. Again, it may be that I've deliberately forgotten something, or it might just mean that my childhood was extremely uneventful and boring.

What I do remember from my childhood is crying all the time. It was my response to nearly any hardship. I remember not having any friends. I remember being picked on by the bullies. I remember feeling helpless and hoping desperately for rescue. And I remember, too, acting happy and spending a lot of time in my imagination. I remember an uninvolved father and an enmeshed mother. The best analysis these days is that I simply never developed a sense of self. Accomplishments which might have built up self-esteem were few and far between, and far outweighed by the torment and hurts I did experience. What I went through isn't nearly as bad as what many others had to endure, but it shaped who I became. I don’t like talking about it, because it feels like whining, but maybe there are others out there who will read this and relate. Maybe the sharing of my experience will be helpful to others.

My inner child is never going to get the love and support he needed. Asserting himself, now that I am an adult, will only undermine what he hopes to achieve. So, at the times when he's feeling lonely and afraid, I put my arms around him and tell him its okay. He cries and says no one understands. I tell him I do.

It's important for us to be in touch with ourselves. It's important to be conscious of our emotional needs. It doesn't mean we're weak, it means we're human. When we take care of ourselves, we become able to be of service to others. It is when we are able to give ourselves true unconditional love that we become able to pass it on to others.

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"Family Of Choice"

These days, I am in a place with my Recovery where I rarely complain. It's too easy for me to recognize that everyone has difficulties. I am well-practiced in being grateful for what I do have, and in remembering how there are so many others who have so much less. But this, too, has its dangerous side; if I ignore what I'm feeling, then I am practicing denial and taking the path back to active addiction. So the challenge becomes to recognize what I'm going through, to feel my feelings fully, and then to keep them in proper perspective. This can be a real challenge when dealing with my family of origin.

For those who don't know the term, it refers to the family we were raised in. Usually it's our birth relatives, the people in the same house as us when we were growing up, but not always. More often than not, it's the source of a lot of anger and resentment that we carry as adults. Often times, the things we experienced by growing up in that environment have played a significant part in why we first picked up. I tend to think of the phrase as a polite way to say, 'those insane people I share blood with'.

No one in my birth family is a practicing addict or alcoholic, but their thinking and behavior is often similar to what those of us with this disease experience. I’ve heard drug & alcohol counselors describe those with severe codependency as nothing less than people who have our disease, but without the addiction.

My sister got married a few months back. When I was visiting my mom this morning, I saw that one of the pictures had been framed and was on display. The picture was of my sister, her new husband, our folks, and myself. It looked nice and I said so to my mom. She agreed, then went on to say that she wished they'd gotten a picture of just the four of them. I made a slightly snarky comment to her and she realized pretty quick what she had said.

I'm going to take a brief minute here to cover my ass: as someone with this disease, I am notoriously self-centered. So when my mom, when talking about a family picture, says she wishes she had one that I wasn't in, that's how I hear it--regardless of how the comment was actually phrased. But, going back to my point, it never occurred to her that she had said she wished she had a picture that I wasn't in. Little comments like this, little side jabs and lack of thought about others, has built up years of difficulty in communicating with my family. The way they tell it, though, is they have to walk on eggshells around me.

Some time in recovery and some work done on developing my own boundaries has helped me to learn that I don't make them walk on eggshells. I am not responsible for how the behave, the way they think, or things they say or do. They are responsible for themselves. I am responsible for myself, for standing up for my thoughts and my feelings. Today, that meant pointing out to my mom that she had said she wished for a picture without me. I know that wasn't her intent, and maybe I didn't have to say anything. I choose my battles with my family, sometimes wisely, but not always so much. This comment today might seem like a little thing, but I think most people can relate to how loaded our interactions with our families are (pun unintentional).

This example with my mom is a really minor one, of course, but it’s good for my larger point: my family isn't really safe for me to open up to. Every difficulty is a problem they have to solve. Many things I share about my thoughts or my feelings are 'wrong' to them, and they've corrected me many times, told me what I should be thinking, should be feeling. I'm not really allowed to just think what I think or feel how I feel around them. Such are their issues, that they think less of themselves if they don't fix my problems or 'correct' me.

My friends in the program aren't like that. This is why I am so grateful to the program and for having people in my life now who can and do provide the love and support a family of origin is supposed to. They respect and love me for who I am, just as I am. They help me when I need help, when I ask for it. They listen to me without passing judgment or imposing their perspective. With them, I’m allowed to just be who I really am.

Like others in the program who share my experience, I call these friends my Family of Choice. They’ve been where I’ve been; they’ve felt how I feel. I don’t have to explain myself to them, they understand. It’s not a coincidence that so many people in the NA rooms start their shares with, “Hello, family…” We give each other the love and support that our blood family was supposed to give us, but didn’t.

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“Sometimes Quickly, Sometimes Slowly”

There’s a comment I’ve heard many times in the rooms and it goes something sounds like this: ‘I don’t know how it works, I just know that it does.” There are lots of opinions out there, though, about exactly how it does work.

The OA folks have a line in their prayer that I like a lot: ‘together, we can do what we could never do alone’. That is undoubtedly a big part of it. We depend on the help of others who have gone before us, who have the experience living a different way of life. Instead of reaching for that outside fix, we talk to others and they carry us through. They help us to heal the damaged self inside.

Those with a very deep faith in their higher power might argue that it’s that strength which gets them through, and I’d have a hard time arguing with them. As I heard someone in an AA meeting say once, the first time he got 24 hours was a spiritual experience all unto itself and the only answer for how that was possible was because of God. That any of us are successful in pivoting, making the change, putting down the stuff and picking up a different way of life, really is a miracle.

The literature tells us that Recovery is a process, not an event. It isn’t something that happens immediately, all at once. It takes take, and a lot of effort, but it does happen. And, as it also says in the literature, it happens at different speeds for different people. Some come into the program and make tons of progress right away. For others, it can take years. Some have difficulty putting together clean time. Others can stay sober, but are reluctant to make the other changes the program asks us to make in our thinking and in the way we live.

It’s different for different people, and that, too, is a blessing. It helps us to remember (or perhaps learn for the first time) that everyone is different. Everyone is going to respond to the program in their own way. Everyone is going to work it in their own way. Accepting that can be a challenge, too. It has been for me. One of my issues is with members who refrain from using but still live their old lives exactly as they had when they were ‘out there’. Being judgmental is one of my character defects that I continue to work on, but the challenge of remembering that not everyone has to work the program the way I do or the way I think they should is a good one for me. My higher power doesn’t give me what I want, but what I need.

One of the coolest things, though, is seeing that miraculous moment when someone gets turned on to the program. Maybe they’ve been coming for a few months, maybe many years, and all of a sudden there is a shift inside them. I’ve seen people start working the steps for the first time after years of being clean and sober. I’ve seen people who can't seem to stop relapsing hit a bottom and start claiming time. It’s beautiful thing.

It’s not my place to judge timing; that’s all up to God. There have been many people in my life whom I have hoped would ‘get it’. Some do, others don’t. My job is to refrain from judgment and Know that each of us ‘gets it’ when we’re ready to. Each of us makes progress at our own pace. Recovery happens in God's time, not ours. We get to put on foot in front of the other, take the baby steps, and live by the faith that progress will be made as long as we keep moving forward.

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“Going Gray”

I seem to be going gray. No, I’m not talking about the hair on my head, or in my beard, or any other place of furry covering on my body. I'm actually not talking about hair at all, just working on a metaphor here.

Earlier this evening, I’d gotten to a meeting early and, after talking to some folks and taking a seat, I found myself thinking about what’s going on in my life. Skipping the long, drawn-out details, my thoughts settled on two things: 1) that I’m not always right; and 2) that I’m not always wrong. In fact, it might be better to phrase it by saying that never am I always right, and never am I always wrong, though I do my best to steer clear of the ‘N’ word.

Something that’s been really good for me in Recovery is that I keep on learning about myself and getting to know myself better. What I learned today is that either end of the right/wrong spectrum can be a bad place for me. This isn’t exactly new knowledge, but it became clearer to me today.

If I’m thinking I’m always right, then my ego is in charge; self-will is running things. I start to think that I know everything. I start to let my thinking and my will run my life. This is, of course, a disaster in the making.

If I’m thinking I’m never right, then my ego is still in charge, simply in the opposite way. I feel like shit, like I’m worthless, that no one could ever love such a lowly example of a human being. But, it’s still my ego, still me being self-centered, which means that it’s still self-will running my life. The same disaster looms.

The literature talks about how we are aren’t all bad, or all good. We aren’t the greatest on earth, and we aren’t the worst. It’s about balance, about remembering that I am just another human being dealing with this disease, learning as I go, and doing the best I can. Still not perfect, over here.

Thank God.

If I’m all one thing, whether it’s all good or all bad, that is black and white thinking. If I focus on being all good versus being all bad, being always right or always wrong, I’m not looking at my life realistically. It’s a form of denial: a failure to accept reality for what it is. If I look at myself in black and white, if I see myself in terms of absolutes, then I’m not living life on life’s terms. My job is to accept what is. I don’t have to fall into this track of all-good or all-bad anymore. I don’t have to let my ego run the show anymore. The reality is that I am not black or white, but a shade of gray.

My disease wants me to look at myself, look at life, in absolutes. If I do that, the my ego gets to run the show. Self-will gets to run my life and my disease gets fed instead of my spirit. When I accept life, my life, for what it really is--that I’m simply human, not perfect, neither all bad nor all good--then I’m living a spiritually fit existence. I am aligned with God’s power. My disease isn’t being fed, my spirit is.

There are some nice side benefits, too. I don’t have to kick myself for being the most horrible human being on earth, because I’m not. I don’t have to think of myself as less-than because I’m not perfect. In fact, I can be proud of and happy for myself for the exact same reason--that I’m not perfect--because now I get to accept and embrace myself for who I am as I am. It’s a blessed change, one that I owe to being in the program.

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“Cross-Addiction”

Okay, this is one of those entries that gets started with a disclaimer: Not everyone agrees with me on what I’m about to say. I write about what I have learned, what my experience in Recovery has taught me, and what I have learned from those who’ve gone before me.

Take what you like and leave the rest.

I attend multiple fellowships. I came into the rooms through one particular fellowship, but have found it helpful to attend several different ones on a regular basis. I hear different things in different rooms. Even in different rooms for the same fellowship, you can hear wildly different stories of experience, strength, and hope. To me, one of the biggest crimes against Recovery is to tell someone they “don’t belong” in a particular meeting.

Regardless of which room I’m in, I identify as what that meeting is for. I announce myself as an alcoholic in AA meetings, an addict in NA meetings, etc. I don’t have a problem doing so and it doesn’t feel dishonest to me. Some experts in the field of addiction medicine describe all addictions as the disease of alcoholism. Most NA meetings are very clear that alcohol is a drug, and needs to be avoided by those who are addicts every bit as much as their drug of choice. I, myself, believe that sober means sober and my program of Recovery is that I don’t drink or use no matter what.

The NA rooms have a bit of a leg up on the AA rooms, in the sense that they seem to understand better the need for being clean and sober from all mind- and mood-altering substances. On the other hand, those in AA seem to better understand the concept of a ‘dry-drunk’, someone who has merely given up using/drinking but has done nothing to address the behavior and thinking that is part & parcel of our disease.

I know of number of people who are in Recovery only for one particular substance and feel that it is perfectly okay to drink alcohol. I know those who are in Recovery who don’t see anything wrong with using other substances, as long as they don't drink (the so-called ‘marijuana maintenance’ program, for example). The suggestion I give to those who want me to sponsor them is to give it all up, because only with a completely clear head can we begin to address the issues we address in Recovery. I don’t ever have to come down on anyone about it, either. If they want to continue to use or drink, they usually drift away all of their own accord.

I’ve heard people list off the lengths of time they’ve been sober from various things. X number of days from alcohol, Y number of days from pot, Z number of days from crank, and on and on for however long their list is. My comment on that? Sounds just a little bit unmanageable to my ears. For myself, I have only one sobriety date, and it is the date I was first clean and sober from everything.

After I had been doing this Recovery thing awhile, I had several conversations with various people who were trying to understand why I wasn’t drinking, even though in their eyes I never had a problem with alcohol. My response to them was that they’re right, I didn’t have a problem with alcohol—I had a problem with me. When it comes right down to it, my problem wasn’t with my drug of choice, either. My problem was with me, with life. I didn’t know how to live and I didn’t know how to deal with reality, especially the real me.

Every once in a great while, I will identify like this: “My name is Zach, and I still suffer from the disease of addiction.” Because this, to me, is the rigorously honest truth. I still have an obsession of the mind. I know that I can fix (or attempt to fix) on just about anything. Food. Sex. Coffee. Donuts. It doesn’t matter! If I’m not working the program, then I’m not spiritually fit, and the old patterns of behavior and thinking come out and start to take over my life again. People I love get hurt. If I let things go too far, I could undoubtedly end up back in the psych ward or even dead from a successful suicide attempt. That’s not what I want, so I maintain a close vigil on myself, doing the best I can to watch for the signs that things inside Zach aren’t going so well. And if they aren’t, I try to take action as quickly as possible.

A “real” alcoholic might not consider me one. That’s fine. I know that when I drank, I drank alcoholically. I drank to get drunk. The idea of just having a couple of drinks still doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. To an addict who was strung out on heroin and homeless, they might not consider me a “real” addict because I had a low bottom and my drug of choice wasn’t as “bad” as theirs. I never lost a job, so how could I possibly be a real addict? My two failed marriages and three suicide attempts don’t mean anything to them, I guess.

Pardon my sarcasm, but my intent here really is to help those who are new. A lot of people have made the mistake of thinking that they only had a problem with one thing. Focusing on that has led a great number of people in the rooms right back out the door. If we want our lives to improve, we have to treat our disease. A recovering addict or alcoholic is not someone who merely refrains from getting loaded, it is someone who actively works the program. They work the steps with a sponsor. They go to meetings and share about themselves and their lives. They work with others to try and pass on the message that there is a better way.

This disease has many shapes and takes many forms. It has been my experience, the experience of many addicts & alcoholics who have come before me, and the experience of doctors in the field, that our use and our drinking is a symptom of the disease and NOT the disease itself. Recovery doesn’t treat our use, it treats our disease. Every single twelve-step fellowship out there follows almost EXACTLY the same twelve steps. There is a reason for that.

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“Laid-off”

I was browsing through some of my previous blog entries when I realized that I had never really written about being laid-off. I had mentioned it, but done no entry on the subject. A little odd, eh? A life-changing experience, something that definitely ranks up there on the list of ‘bad stuff that really sucks to have to deal with’. I’m a little surprised about not having written an entry, and at the same time very much not surprised.

“Zach, how do you feel about not having to go in five days a week to that job that you hated?”

The question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it? In truth, I’m trying to walk a line of sorts. Sure, I’m not thrilled about being unemployed, but the job I was working was so very much not me. It was a job I’d taken when I was still active in my addiction, another job in a list of employment occupations that I’d taken specifically because I didn’t have to think too hard or work too much. Though I do feel the need to insert in here that when I started, I was one of three or four people and by the time they’d let me go I was the last man standing. But all of that is a little snippy, and I’m trying to live more spiritually here.

Am I happy to not be working there anymore? I suppose. Mostly, what I’m happy about is having the chance to do what I love doing most, which is my music and my writing. This current album project I’m working on feels like the best music I’ve ever written and my skills in mixing it are helping it to shine even more. I’m grateful for the chance to do more writing, another one of my loves. I’ve been reading my words at open mic nights and poetry events. I’m getting better connected with the artist scene here in town.

Some people feel very strongly that life is about work. That’s fine. They are allowed to have that perspective. My sister, as just one example, has taken that path in her life. She works, goes to school, and has pushed herself really hard and reaped the rewards of it. She’s paid well and is well-schooled in her field. I’ve never been one who thought that work was the be-all end-all of why we are here.

It just might be that, these days, I have a healthy sense of letting go. I am unemployed. But do I sit around bemoaning this fact? No. I wasn’t fired. I wasn’t let go because I was a sub-standard employee. When I was there, I did my job. How well depends on your definition of what constitutes doing a good job. Was I someone who was constantly working? Nope. Because that’s not the kind of employee I am. I don’t push papers around, slack off, stretch things out so it always looks like I’m busy. I get the job done. As in, yesterday. Give me a problem, it’s solved. If a manager prefers to have his employees look busy than actually get things done, then sure I probably am not the greatest employee to them.

But I have never had a great need for lots of money. Even before I entered Recovery, I was well aware of that old adage that Things are to be Used and People are to be Loved, not the other way around. I don't have much use for things. One of my most favorite compliments came from a friend who told me, "you don't have a materialistic bone in your body, do you?" To which I replied, "not really, no." It is one of the truths about who I am.

The time that I have now is a blessing. Sure, I would much prefer that I not have a day job because my music was going so well or I was getting paid to write a book. That would be fantastic! But I do have time these days to spend doing the things that I am truly good at. I’ve made music for as long as I can remember. Of all the gifts God has given me, that is the one he has blessed me with more than any other. I have done my part, of course. I’ve studied, I’ve practiced, and I continue to chart a course for improvement, and I reap the rewards of that.

There’s an old line that artists like myself hear a lot. “When are you going to get a real job?” Yeah, that crops up in conversations sometimes, and I do my best not to give in to that quick, rude, retort that’s always on the tip of my tongue. It usually sounds something like, “Shit, I’ve been making music for 25 years. What have you been up to?”

Most likely, at some point, I will be working a day job again. Maybe not. Maybe this increased time and effort I’m putting into my artistic endeavors will lead directly to my being able to continue doing them without having to worry about finding a day job. I don’t know, but I do know that it is worth exploring and that if I hadn’t taken this opportunity to work on the things I love, I’d be kicking myself.

Making the decision to spend more time on my art was a no-brainer. I’m not even sure I had much conscious thought about it. It felt so natural, like the Next Right Thing. Only time will tell if it truly is the next right thing, but that’s what it feels like right now. A lot of people, here in the US particularly, don’t understand this inborn need to create. They don’t get why someone would spend so much time and energy on something that isn't guaranteed to bring in the big bucks. That’s okay, they don’t have to understand.

What I understand is this: I have never been happier. So if you’re wondering how I feel about losing my job? Meh. Wasn’t anything I did or could have done. How am I spending my time? Oh, let’s just say I’m doing my best to do what I was born to do.

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“Others”

It’s been an interesting week for Recovery over here. I’ve started to plug into the massive online community and it’s been both heartwarming and overwhelming to be reminded just how many of us there are out there. I go to a meeting of dozens or more, and it helps me to remember that I’m not alone. Going to these online forums, where there are thousands of us, it’s flat-out amazing.

One topic under discussion was the issue of dealing with those in meetings who are disruptive. To me, this tied in nicely with a Just For Today about gossip. Hey, I’m an addict, it’s how my brain works. We’ve all been at meetings where the discussion was commandeered, or been around people outside the meeting talking in not the greatest light about others. One is a form of self-centeredness, a failure to think of others. The other is using others’ failings as a way to cover up our own lack of self-esteem. These are both real issues that we deal with in Recovery and outside the rooms as well.

What you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.

Not everyone respects this. I’ve heard old-timers talk about how anonymity isn’t the same as it used to be, almost as if we’ve all become therapists and the meetings are our group sessions, and when it’s over we gab about what has gone down. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it at some point, too. If someone is being disruptive, that can lead to denigrating comments, to looking at someone else as less-than, and far too often it’s a newcomer, someone who needs help.

Recovery teaches us how to live sober--the operative words there being ‘how to live’. We learn a better way of dealing with life, of dealing with others, and of dealing with ourselves. Gossip and exclusion, two very human failings, are things we try to avoid as best we can.

If someone is being disruptive, they can be taken aside after the meeting. Groups can hold discussion at their business meetings and come to a group conscience on what is best to ensure the survival of the group. Gossips, also, can be talked to. If word is going around about you personally, find a moment to talk to the person you think is responsible. There’s no need to be angry, to throw a fit or make a scene in front of the group. Remember always, that if someone has a problem with you, it’s their problem.

Remember, too, where we all come from. I can look at someone new to Recovery and think about how that used to be me. Any time I start to think anything along the lines of, “I was NEVER that bad,” then I’m forgetting where I’ve come from and what it was like. I’m thinking of myself as better than someone else and have lost my humility. I’m not better than anyone else, either because I have sponsees, am of service, or have time. There is no difference between myself and someone with 24 hours. The disease affects us both.

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"I Am My Own Higher Power"

Something has been on my mind, and I'm not sure how to write about it without being judgmental. But it keeps circling around. Experience has taught me that's when it's time to share it.

I was at a meeting where we discussed the second step. For my share, I took my usual care to say 'Higher Power' because I have a deep belief that others are allowed to find and believe in the god of their own understanding. Each of the shares were about people's feelings towards their own higher power. Some talked about the group as their higher power. A lot of folks talked about the difficulty of finding something that worked for them. One member talked about how they weren't sure about God, didn't really believe in anything except themselves. So they proclaimed that they were their own higher power.

The sound you've just heard is the collective 'smack' of thousands of recovering addicts & alcoholics smacking their own foreheads in a Homer Simpson-styled "D'oh!"

Now, in all fairness, this person was brand new to the program and had not even worked the first step yet. They are undoubtedly still in the grips of their disease, with no Recovery yet to speak of. Probably the coolest thing about it all was that no one jumped down the sharer's throat. They were allowed to speak, to state their perspective and talk about what they were going through. They were respected and welcomed.

We go to meetings to learn. When I was new, I had to learn that I was an addict. I knew I used all day long, but couldn't see anything wrong with it. I knew I wanted to quit, but couldn't. It was by going to meetings, hearing the shares of other people, that the veil of denial finally lifted and I became willing to admit that I am an addict. It was by listening to others with this disease that I began to learn about it and to learn the full extent of how it had affected my life. I had to learn that addiction/alcoholism isn't about just drugs & booze, that our use is a symptom, not the cause.

I hope that member keeps coming back. Maybe they will find that holding themselves as their higher power doesn't work so well. Maybe not. But listening to them talk helped me, helped my Recovery. I need to remember where I've been.

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“Growing Up From Chaos”

How do I feel about chaos? The same way I do about using and drinking: I’m grateful I don’t have to do that anymore. It wasn’t always so. File this all under ‘how it was’.

I remember thriving on chaos. I used to be so proud of myself that, no matter how insane a situation got, I could roll with it. Or if I couldn’t, I could at least pretend like I was handling things just fine. I look back on it now and wonder just who I was fooling besides myself. In terms of my thinking, though, the more chaos the better. I was so proud of myself because I was so malleable.

Who I was changed from situation to situation, depending on who I was dealing with. There was a different me for practically every person in my life. Who I was when I was with friends was different than who I was with my family, and all that was different than who I was with women. I used to think of conversation as a game. This person says this, then I say that, then they’ll say this, and so on and so on. It was like a guessing game for me: see if I could guess the right thing to say in the right moment. If I played well enough, I might win the prize. My fellow addict/alcoholics out there know that I’m not being metaphorical here.

Being something of a people-pleaser, I loved it when others were in crisis. I could be there for them, listen to what they had to say, and let loose a barrage of solutions to all their problems. Being more than a little codependent, I loved having my own crises so that others could rescue me, take care of me, and solve all my problems for me, too. It was how I was raised; the way I learned to survive in my environment; it was what I learned life was about and how to live it.

There’s a fine line between helping others because it brings you joy, and helping them because you have no self-worth. I was one of the latter. That’s not service. The help that I gave was to people who didn’t necessarily need help. I rescued. I saved. The help I gave wasn’t about others, it was about me and my need to be a rescuer, a savior. It was about feeding my gigantic ego and covering up for that hole inside. My relationships with women were like this, too, except to the Nth degree. I look back on that behavior now and call it for what it is: I used other people to make myself feel good.

It isn’t something that changed overnight. It’s taken a lot of work on (big surprise here) myself. I’ve done work outside just working the program, too. I’ve done a whole lot of work on boundaries--learning what they are, how to make them, how to keep them strong. It’s a skill I continue to develop. But it is such a relief now, today, to know that I don’t have to participate in other people’s chaos. I don’t have to jump on the rescue cycle with them. I can let them take care of their own problems if they want to. It’s one of the coolest parts of sponsorship, to me, that I don’t solve my sponsees’ problems, I help them to take care of themselves and solve their own problems.

Sometimes my actions can seem harsh to those who don’t understand where I’m coming from. Someone will invite me to a party and they get upset that I don’t come. They don’t understand the boundary I have when it comes to not being around people who are getting loaded and/or drunk. If someone just has personal issues and spreads a lot of chaos in their life, they might get upset that I don’t want to be their friend. How about that? I don’t have to talk down to them about the way they live their life. I don’t have to tell them to change or to try and make them live differently. It’s not my place to lecture.

I’m not responsible for anyone besides myself. So I do what I can, I change what I can change, which is me. I don’t go to the places I don’t want to go. I don’t spend time with people who are unhealthy. I have learned the hard way that when I hang around with people who are insane, I go right back to being insane myself. And that is a place I don’t want to be anymore. So I am grateful, content in the knowledge that I don’t have to do that anymore, either. Ever.

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"God Is Love"

There are a LOT of different ideas out there about what God is--and I include in that statement the idea that God isn't. Many people come into the program very hung up on 'the God stuff'. Some meetings are strong on the proselytizing. The majority of the meetings I go to are not like that. We don't tell people what to believe or how.

Personally, I enjoy talking about God, but I rarely start those conversations. Once in them, I have a few standard things I tend to say. I use the word 'him', for example. This does not mean that I think God is a man. I don't. I don't think God is a woman, either. The best way to describe my opinion on that subject would be for me to say I think God neither male nor female and yet also both. Also, I do use the word 'God'. I do this not because I think that's his name or because I subscribe any particular religion's dogma of what he's like, but because it is a word I can understand that I know others know. It's like a shorthand for something incomprehensible and, to a large extent, indescribable.

It's important to me to not tell others what to believe. No one told me to believe in God. What I know is what I have learned over the course of my life. My faith does not come from dogma, but from my own experiences. I don't know God through hearsay; I know him because he has made himself known to me. I know him because I have sought him and sought deeper understanding of him.

My faith is not dependent on convincing others that God is real. When someone tries to draw me into an argument, I just try to be respectful of their perspective and know that they are allowed to believe as they choose. It's called freedom, and it's not the kind of freedom they talk about on tv or sell you in stores. It's not freedom of choice like what am I having for lunch today or which Presidential candidate will I vote for in the next election. It's the freedom of choosing how we interact with reality.

Some believe that there is no God and that free will is an illusion. I disagree on both counts. God has touched my life, touched me personally, in so many ways that it's never even occurred to me to keep track of the frequency. I am grateful to have that force in my life and know that I am fortunate to have it. But I tend to think there is nothing particularly special about this, and that anyone can have such a force working in their lives if they allow it to.

I disagree with the idea that there's no free will, because if there isn't, there's no responsibility. If someone is molested as a child, and grows up to be a child molester, they are freed of any culpability. But of course, there are many children who are abused who don't grow up to be abusers. What is the difference? Some of us repeat the behaviors and mistakes visited upon us; some of us make conscious decisions to do things differently. To me, that's free will in action right there.

I believe that God has given us this gift, this blessing of choice. The love God has for us is so strong that we are allowed to chose whether we want to live in the real or not. We get to decide whether we want to be close to God or not. We can allow God to work directly in our lives... or not. My higher power, the God I believe in, is not in need of praise. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that God loves each of us unconditionally no matter what we do. We are all loved more fully and more deeply than we could ever understand.

Instead of spending my time in praise, I try to live a life that honors God. If I do my best to treat the people I cross paths with in a spirit of love, then I am succeeding. When I find myself unable to do so, I find it helpful to pray. Sometimes I ask God to change my heart. Sometimes, I just rat myself out and admit the truth in prayer. I figure I'm the one who has had a hard time accepting my humanity, my imperfections. God has always known and accepted me as I am. I've been behind the times on this for a while. I still am, really. I hope to one day get to a place inside where I truly love and accept myself unconditionally. Even if I get there, though, I know the love I will have for myself will never be as great as the love God has for me.

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