A Capsule Holding Pain
“When I tell myself how things should be, I’m saying that I understand how the world works, when I do not.”
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Today we’re rerunning Sarah Miller’s essay about Al-Anon. Al-Anon, is, as Sarah explains, “for people involved with, friends with, or related to, or just bothered by alcoholics and addicts.” It might also be for you, as Sarah discovers, if you have trouble distinguishing between self and other; if you believe your problems would vanish if only the people in your life would just do the right thing — the right thing, of course, being exactly what you think it is.
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Here’s a wonderful example from last year:
August is a recurring mourning period for my failed transformation. I’ve doubled down on the feeling this year since I’m getting married in mid-September. At the start of my (unexpectedly multi-year) engagement, I was convinced that I would use the engagement as the chance to change. What could be a better motivation to become a shiny, healthy, sane person? Alas, I am weeks out, and still myself — afraid, stubborn, my emotional sobriety in constant peril. My fiancé is a truly good person and deserves better. Grateful he still loves me anyway.
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Even if Your Blood Is Clean
By Sarah Miller
Originally published May 14, 2019
When I was in my 30s, I fell in love with a real piece of work. Fell in love is probably wrong, piece of work is good. I’ve never come up with a good definition for love or even a good question to ask about love that might lead us into some useful conversation. Anyway, there I was in the middle of a life that, with any semblance of sanity, I would have recognized as a never-ending and wholly unnecessary visit to an amusement park. And I chose to get on a ride best described as a “shitty boat operated by drunk captain that went back and forth across the same weedy, mosquito-infested stretch of river.” That was the whole ride. And why? Because I’d had such a great time waiting in line. Once the ride began, I thought it must be my fault that it sucked and that I could make it better, obviously, by making myself better.
I was so in love with this person — who had made it very clear that he did not love me, even though he said he wanted to marry me and was living with me and told me he loved me all the time — that I was terrified I might die trying to get him to actually love me.
As much as he did not love me, he loved alcohol.
The person who told me to go to Al-Anon is one of the sketchiest people I have ever been friends with and an addict himself. He explained that Al-Anon was for people involved with, friends with, or related to, or just bothered by alcoholics and addicts. “Will it get him to stop drinking?” I said.
“The fact that you want to know that is the reason you have to go,” he said.
Jesus, I thought, sketchy people are so weird. Then I thought, If I go to this, maybe he will stop drinking.
It’s so funny now because I really can’t remember what it felt like to believe that. I mean, it makes about as much sense as my saying, “If I go over and wash that pile of dishes in the sink in Nevada City, my friend in Vermont will go wash her dishes right now too.” But I thought that. It’s kind of adorable!
At my first meeting, this woman talked about how her partner had stopped drinking and now they were really happy together. I wanted that. It seemed so doable — she wasn’t even THAT pretty. I thought about how I would talk to that woman at the end of the meeting and ask her about everything she did and then do exactly what she had done, and all my problems would be solved. But then many people told stories about how they went to Al-Anon and their partners still drank. And some of those people were pretty or good-looking. How could you be that hot and not just like MAKE SOMEONE do what you wanted? It just didn’t make ANY SENSE.
For about a week, I went to two meetings a day. I kept the score at every meeting of how many people were happily with partners who weren’t drinking. Those were the only people I wanted to be. I didn’t listen to anyone else.
Al-Anon people said to go to six meetings before you decided Al-Anon wasn’t for you. I was thinking about bailing — why waste my time with something that wasn’t guaranteed to give me exactly what I wanted — when, at meeting number six, on the dot, a woman got up and shared a story about being affected by someone else’s alcoholism in a way that was so fucking bad I couldn’t believe she’d managed to dress and drive from her house to this meeting. I imagined her in a car, a capsule on the freeway, holding pain. How had she driven here, how had she operated a door handle, how could she sit and stand? Yet there she was. She spoke in measured tones without crying. She was not there to be judged as a winner or a loser, or as successful or unsuccessful, or as desirable or undesirable. She was just a person, speaking of the life she had lived and would continue to live.
As I listened, the boundaries between my mind and body and between myself and other people seemed to dissolve. I was devastated, of course; at that moment, I would have removed my skin and wrapped the woman in it if I thought it would help her. But the experience of listening was also making me kind of high, as if I’d been injected with pure dopamine.
I get the irony of this, that it’s selfish on some level, but the truth is it just felt so good to care about someone other than myself. I mean, if you asked me before that day, “Sarah, are there other people in the world?” I’d have been like, “LOL, yes, hello, obviously.” But in that moment, I realized that I didn’t actually really know that. I was like, Okay, there’s me, and then there are these other things that are sort of like me, they have heads and arms and legs, but I was so preoccupied with how these objects might hurt me or help me that I’d lost track of the idea that they had lives of their own.
I got a sponsor. She was an older woman, in her late 40s, like I am now. I thought she was ancient. We didn’t have a lot in common. I called her once a day. I did my reading and steps and answered questions at the ends of the chapters in Paths to Recovery. I remember how all the questions about controlling other people struck me as absurd. Of course you had to control other people. How else were you supposed to get what you wanted? I remembered justifying those feelings to my sponsor and her just saying calmly, “Okay, well, let’s just keep going with the questions and see what we find out.” I found out that I have an addiction to people and the feelings people give me. It’s not something you can test my blood for, but it is there, and it has as much potential to be dangerous as anything else.
At some point, I stopped keeping track of who had stuck with their partner, whose partner had gotten sober, who was single and who was not. A few months later, I stopped feeling so stupid that I used to think that stuff was important. My sponsor told me I would not have to do anything about the boyfriend, that the relationship would just resolve itself. There’s nothing about Al-Anon that says you have to trust your sponsor, but she told me to keep going to meetings and doing my steps, and I wouldn’t have to worry about him, and I didn’t have any better ideas.
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Because life sometimes does what it does, that guy and I did in fact stay together for another year after she told me that. But day by day, I was less upset that he was drunk or that he wasn’t nice to me or that he didn’t call me when he was away, and then, finally, we just weren’t together. He just meant less and less to me every day until he meant nothing, and I didn’t even hate him.
A year later, I found out he was marrying someone, and honestly, you could have told me I was out of washer fluid or, on the other hand, that someone had just given me a year’s supply of it. And all I had done was answer a bunch of questions about how I wanted people to change and how mad it made me when people did things I didn’t like, and listen to a bunch of other people discuss the same.
I went to Al-Anon almost every day for several years, and then once or twice a week for a while. I’m not going to say I should go more now because “should” is a word I learned not to use with myself or others with any degree of regularity. I mean, it’s a pretty common fucking word, kind of hard to avoid altogether, but a good word to notice. When I tell myself how things should be, I’m saying that I understand how the world works, when I do not.
I go back to Al-Anon now and then (once for a whole year when I thought I SHOULD have more money) whenever I start thinking that the world would be so much better if only people would do what I wanted them to, or pay attention to me in exactly the way that I think would make me happy. I go back when I find myself thinking that if I somehow made myself perfect, and did everything right, then the big problem that I have (which is my fault) would go away. I go back when I find myself behaving in ways that suggest that I believe that love, attention, praise and appreciation are guaranteed to me if I am good enough, reliable enough, loving enough, quiet enough, loud enough, responsible enough, smart enough, dumb enough, mean enough, nice enough.
After some time in Al-Anon, it became clear that while it was founded for people who had issues with alcoholics, it could be of great use to anyone habitually disappointed and/or enraged that people do not behave as they would wish them to. As I “got healthier” about the reason I had come to Al-Anon, this category came to re-include me in a brand new way, in that I became annoyed by friends of mine complaining at great length about some situation or person in their life (especially when their complaints were not punctuated with amusing anecdotes or jokes) when those same friends would not take me up on the suggestion that they attend at least one Al-Anon meeting.
I see almost all culture and pop culture through the lens of Al-Anon. I do not consider it proper to diagnose real people, but in place of that, hear this: Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are classic Al Anons, as is Michael Corleone. The movie Love, Actually should be called Go To Al-Anon Now, Actually. The other day, I listened to a podcast about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I love her, and I think he’s an asshole. But I found myself shouting at my portable speakers, “You had no business being that in love with someone. No one stuck your head in that oven but you, honey.” Now, of course, this response evades sexism, unpaid labor, and abuse issues.
Al-Anon does not make everything clear for me and does not explain every problem in the world. But it does give me a point of view beyond “Look what you all did to me, a wonderful and innocent lamb.”
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Sarah Miller is a writer. Her Substack is here. Her Twitter is here. Her most popular story is probably here. My favorite story of hers is here.
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
We never know how high we are (1176)
by Emily Dickinson
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—
The Heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King—
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