"Regret," self-portrait sketch of G
I was told recently by a non-alcoholic, non-addict that it’s selfish of people in recovery to put our sobriety before everything else in life—that when we say we need to put our sobriety before our marriages, our kids, everything else, what we’re really saying is that our addictions give us license to do whatever we want for ourselves and in our lives.
I tried to talk about how recovery asks us to serve, to look for God’s will and challenge our selfish and self-seeking behavior, but I seemed to dig myself deeper into a hole because in fact “God” seems to be expanding my life in unexpected ways that look selfish to some people in it—even to myself.
Have you ever had trouble talking about this idea with friends or loved ones—or even thinking about it in relation to them? Has it ever been difficult for you to put your recovery over the people in your life, or your work, your achievements?
Has putting recovery first ever resulted in your making changes in your life that others didn’t expect or like? Has your pursuing sobriety ever hurt anyone else? (one of my biggest fears: hurting someone else unintentionally.)
I really need to hear your experience with this today, so I hope you’ll let it rip.
So today I’ve written about exercise and addiction for The Fix.
I started thinking about whether exercise could help or hinder recovery when a guy who sometimes reads this blog emailed me at 4 a.m. one morning saying he couldn’t stop thinking about how one of the members of his recovery community had killed himself. A “meeting-a-day guy,” he said, and a finisher of “many Ironman triathlons”—a guy who worked it, and who expected it to work for him, because, as we say, “It works if you work it.”
I never say that at the end of meetings. I don’t believe “it works if you work it.” Recovery is not about self improvement (I tried it). It’s about self acceptance. (The hardest lesson for me.)
My experience is, the bad shit doesn’t stop happening just because I get sober. (God, how I wish it did.) Bad shit keeps happening, keeps happening, and because I’m sober I feel it even more deeply. Which can so totally suck. Or it can be beautiful:
I Feel Life.
Feelings Pass.
Exercise can become a compulsive behavior just like any other behavior. Exercise can be another way to get out of feeling the feelings. The push to exceed limits raises adrenaline and dopamine just like cocaine and speed do, producing a chemical rush. Just watching your body improve in the mirror gives you a rush.
G's body after two rounds of P90X, late fall 2011.
Last year I started an intensive exercise regimen. My only goal was to test my strength. I completed two 90-day rounds, and in the other six months I scaled back to three to five days per week. My body changed. In the downtime, I decided I had to exercise not for vanity reasons.
I used to take drugs to be thin, to fit into jeans that were too small for my body, to feel my bones stick out, to feel wraithlike and spidery
G's skinny-ass little body two weeks before going into detox, August 2008.
(this is unhealthy sick but this is the way girls are taught they ought to feel)
I decided I had to exercise for my health. To accept myself. To surrender to what my body would become. Not to sculpt it into what I thought it ought to be.
Exercise is like medicine.
No: exercise IS medicine.
Good food is medicine.
Rest is medicine.
Work in moderation is medicine.
Play is medicine.
Prayer and meditation are medicine.
And an attitude of self-acceptance is medicine.
These exercise gurus I interviewed—they’re all over 40, and they’ve all got at least 15 years sober. Catra Corbett, she’s 47, my age, she’s amazing! She works in a San Francisco Whole Foods selling vitamins and supplements, she’s the one in the store who knows about nutrition and the difference between vegetarianism and veganism and who can tell you what food to buy if you want a healthy body. And when business slows down in the summer (because in the Bay Area everybody’s outside from April through September), Catra takes a month off and just goes solo fast-pack trail-running all over the place. Check out her Facebook page. Check out this photo.
Ultra-marathoner Catra Corbett, looking about 27 at 47
She runs, she says, not to look hot or to look 20 years younger than she is, but to stay clean and sober and sane. She has 19 years off booze and drugs.
The other guys are amazing too—Todd Crandell, Shane Niemeyer, Dan Cronin. And the guy who emailed me is equally amazing, if not in some ways more amazing, but I promised I’d keep him anonymous. (No idea why my editor named him “Brian.” Editors do funny things sometimes.) Each of them demonstrates self-acceptance, as well as a desire to maintain their fitness in order to help others.
What do you do to stay fit and sane and sober?
Bikram?
Biking?
Ultramarathoning?
Dog-walking? (I’m thinking about getting a dog.)
Tell me.
At my noon meeting today someone told a story: a friend of theirs was related to a drug-addict and alcoholic who had gotten herself involved with violent men. The person telling the story said the woman had died “a violent death.” The person had looked up her story in the newspaper and found out just how she’d died.
“I can’t stop thinking about it—I don’t know why,” the person said. “Except I think to myself, That could have been me. What she was doing wasn’t very far from where I was when I finally got sober.”
I was sitting on the floor (we had so many people today, there wasn’t room enough for chairs for everyone) thinking about Virginia. A woman who used to live in this house.
When we moved in here in 1993, I was out back double-digging the garden one day when I introduced myself to the old lady who lived next door. “My husband and I have just bought this house. We’re happy to be your neighbors,” I said. She fixed me with a steely stare.
“My daughter died in that house,” she said, her head shaking in an almost palsied way.
“Oh my God,” I said. What else to say? “I’m so sorry . . .”
“You should find out things like this before you buy a place.”
So I checked it out. I went to the office of the recorder of deeds (this was in the days before electronic recordkeeping) and found out that our house had been bought in 1969 by our next-door-neighbors, who in 1972 sold it to their elder daughter, Virginia, and her husband Raymond, I guess so they could have her living nearby. Virginia moved in with Ray and their three-year-old daughter. Then in 1974 Raymond sold the house, which, the deed said, he owned in full after his wife’s death in 1973.
Her death?
So I called the coroner. (These are the things that, as a reporter, you learn are possible to do: you can go to the deeds office, you can call the coroner, you can say you’re investigating a death and get the public information.)
I told the assistant I was investigating a death that had occurred in June 1973. He whistled at the early date and said he’d do some checking. An hour later he called back and said he’d found her name.
“Right,” he said, “cause of death was pentobarbital poisoning, location”—and he named the address of our house—“30-year-old white female, date of death six-three-seventy-three, manner—”
“Wait a minute!” I said, scribbling furiously.
“—manner of death undetermined,” he finished. “But there was an autopsy done, and the cause of death was determined to be pentobarbital and Tylenol poisoning.”
Suicide, I thought. Or an accident. Or, less likely, murder.
“So there’s no way we can know how she died?” I asked.
“What you mean? She died of a drug overdose,” he said.
//
Nembutal caps, otherwise known as Yellowjackets.
The Physician’s Desk Reference says pentobarbital is more commonly called Nembutal. It has a very high bioavailability, meaning not much of the drug passes through the system unmetabolized—your body gets most of the dose. It’s processed by the liver and discharged by the kidneys. Wikipedia says it has been used in Oregon for physician-assisted suicide and “in various U.S. states” for use in executions. It is said to be the drug that killed, for example, Marilyn Monroe. It was one of the drugs used by the waste-case Hollywood characters in Valley of the Dolls. In the U.S. it’s classified as Schedule II, the same as all the drugs I was on in the last four years or so of my addiction. It’s majorly habit-forming; it’s one of those drugs that’s very effective if you want to not-feel.
//
Even before I admitted I was an addict, I thought it was pretty ironic that I was living in a house where a previous owner had OD’d. Virginia’s story was one of the many stories that helped me get sober. I didn’t want to die in my bedroom, as she did.
Did she in fact die in our bedroom? Did she die in the bathroom? Did she die in the adjoining room I use as my study? Did she die in the night, in the day, as she was falling asleep, before she could wake up? Was her little girl in my study or across the hall, in my son’s room?
I can’t know any of this, but I do know that it could have been me, and it wasn’t.
Found a tape of my father’s voice today. Had to track down an old Walkman device, in a bottom corner of my study shelves, in order to listen to it. As I plugged my earphones into the jack, my heart was beating hard. It’s been nearly five years since I heard Dad’s voice.
The first thing I noticed on the tape: he sounded drunk. Lazy enunciation, slightly slurred, things you don’t notice unless you haven’t seen the person in, say, five years.
The second thing I noticed: he sounded sick. The recording was made in June 2006, eight months before he died. But we didn’t know then that he had cirrhosis and massive GI cancer.
I listened to him talk, then after about five minutes I had to shut the tape recorder off because I could feel a ripping sensation coming up from my gut through the center of my chest, and as I pressed the “off” button I bent over into a soft moan.
Grief is a strange thing. It comes in waves. For me it’s activated by some physical experience—a bodily sensation. The act of hearing my father’s voice. I shut the machine off just as he was laughing. For such a big man, Dad’s laughs weren’t loud. But they shook his entire body. He usually sat with his legs crossed at the knee, and one arm folded over his huge beer-gut. His broad shoulders were always hunched over, permanently rounding out his wide back, and his laugh would make his shoulders bounce up and down.
And his blue-gray eyes would hold a pleasant squint as he regarded you happily.
It’s always the memory of his laugh that makes my son cry. He was crying about it again just the other night. Both his grandfathers died around this time of year—his paternal grandfather died the second week of January last year; and Dad died the first of February 2007. “I miss Grandpa,” my son said, and I said, “Yes, it’s been just about a year, hasn’t it?”
“But what about Grandpa Greenie?” he said. We always called my dad Greenie. (A long story.)
“Yeah,” I said, “Greenie’s been gone for almost five years.” Five. Years.
“He was so nice,” my son said.
“He loved you very much,” I said. I always say.
//
A lot of people think the drinker in the family is the mean one, but in my family the drinker was kind and gentle, and the “sober” parent was the schoolmistress, the general, the warden. The critic.
I was talking yesterday to another child of a wildly alcoholic family, the writer Kaylie Jones, author of the memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me. I asked her what it is about growing up in an alcoholic family that makes us so pathologically afraid of life. “I think,” she said,
I don’t know—but I think in my case, I was derided and laughed at always, so any feeling I had was worthy of a joke. When your feelings are belittled like that, you have a natural aversion to the possibility of failing or being laughed at.
“So you learned to hide,” I said.
“Yes. And I learned to quit,” she said.
This blog has helped me by forcing me to come out of hiding. By forcing me not to quit. You help me by reading it.
In order to run a blog, I have to write the blog. This week I joined a site called 750words.com, which has given me another way of forcing myself not to quit. I have a lot of big ideas that want to come out onto the page, I can feel them, I’ve felt this way before, they’re dammed up inside there and the reservoir is sloshing close to the edge. But my mother’s voice
(you think you’re so goddam special, what makes you think you’re so goddam special? what makes you think you can do what you want? what makes you think you can just book a flight to chicago and ask those people to pull paintings out of storage for you to study? who the hell do you think you are? who the hell)
is telling me to scale it back, to go into hiding, not to trust people, never to ask for help. To quit.
G's son critiquing awesome and quite famous paintings by Sargent and Homer at a private curated study session of 60-some watercolors, Metropolitan Museum, 2006. Photo by G's friend Nan.
So this morning I booked a slot at the Art Institute of Chicago to look at some of my favorite paintings. In reading about these works on the Art Institute’s site, I found out that one of these artists learned how to improve his style by (duh) studying other artists’ works at another museum. Did he waste a lot of time wondering whether he was good enough or “special enough” to study these works?—I doubt it. He just did it.
So this is how it happens, how I get sober and counteract my alcoholic childhood: I follow the intuitive thought
(maybe i could use my free ticket to go to chicago; maybe the chicago museum does the same thing as the met did six or seven years ago, and pulls paintings for people to study, maybe i could do this more often than once every six or seven years)
and life becomes alive.
(WHAT THE HELL MAKES YOU SO SPECIAL?)
Mum: shut up for a while, OK? I love you, but just sit down.
When I figure out what I need and go after it, life becomes exciting. The excitement, as long as I can tolerate the anxiety of it, makes me want to stay sober. When I’m in that attitude of finding things out, making life interesting, meeting new people, and enjoying myself, I’m moving further away from a drink or a drug.
The star at the top of our tree.
The phone rang this afternoon when I was between two pieces of work. It was a sponsee calling me to congratulate me on two years sober today.
Part of me feels like it’s weird for me to take credit for being sober. (Ego alert: I can’t take credit!! omg, I am so fucked up that how can I possibly take credit for anything?? and I can’t give up being fucked-up; being super-fucked-up is proof of how special I am.) If it’s not a matter of my doing it on my own, if it’s “another” power doing it, then how can I take credit?
But that’s bullshit, too. I made a decision (many decisions) to be sober, and as I told my sponsee today, there have been times I’ve just gritted my teeth and not-used and not-drunk so I could stay sober. For example, after finding top-shelf drugs in my space this summer.
I do a lot of “footwork” so I can live free. I “bust my ass,” as my mother would say. So I guess I can accept some credit.
This sponsee is an artist who just moved back to town after graduating from an art program in NYC. She left high school in 2006. She got sober a year ago, at 21. I’m way old enough to be her mom, and it’s cool that we can have this relationship. Sometimes she’ll call and I’ll ask “What are you doing today?” and she’ll say “I’m drawing,” and for me it’s motivating to hear someone say they’re spending part of the day making art. I like her drawings a lot. And they say your sponsees put you on your game; I’ve been listening to this one talk for a couple of months about how she’s making drawings, she’s working on a book of art, and today I finally got back into the studio.
I talked with this sponsee about creativity and recovery, about how “rigorous honesty” is helpful in creative life, about how anxiety during the creative process can be productive, and about how our dishonesty isn’t about lies, per se—we don’t tell bald-faced whoppers—it’s more about believing delusions about ourselves:
- I’m fucked up
- I’m ugly
- I’m worthless
- I’m a loser
- I’m going nowhere
- I never work hard enough
- I suck
- I’ve fucked up too much in life to change things now
Well, what the hell—I suppose after all these might be considered bald-faced whoppers. But we don’t tell these lies with a purpose to deceive or hurt other people. We tell them because they feel like God’s own truth. These are the kinds of messages I’ve heard a lot of recovering women say they tell themselves. Their very authentic feel makes it difficult to work against them.
I relapsed because of delusions like these. At the time (Jan. 2, 2010), I was comparing myself to a handful of women, mothers of friends of my son’s, who I thought were richer, hotter, better moms, more fortunate, more “successful,” and as a result happier than I was. I mean if they’re richer, hotter and more “successful,” they must be happier than I am, right? So, like, while dwelling on the lives of these Amazing Babes (none of my business), and psychically speaking falling into a pit of spikes with blood at the bottom (favorite image of my imaginative kid), I took drugs.
Great solution.
One rule of thumb I’ve been using the last two years when it comes to delusion is a guideline I heard pretty soon after I first got sober in 2008. They said:
You’re either moving toward a drink or a drug
Or you’re moving away from a drink or a drug
So any thought that makes me want to drink or use—I look for the delusion in that thought. The lie.
One of my new year’s resolutions is to understand thoughts as choices, and to choose what I want to think. For example, instead of choosing to tell myself I’m fucked up, I choose to tell myself I’m doing just fine. Based on the data, the facts, I am.
As I was finishing this post, another sponsee called to congratulate me on two years sober. This person has eight years. I sponsor her in Al-Anon. “If I don’t keep myself sober,” I said, “how am I supposed to take credit?”
“You can be grateful,” she said.
I am that, too.
