I Can See the Edges of Everything

October is here in all its terrifying majesty so let's cHEck-iN.

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Hello!

I don't have anything particularly exciting or illuminating to add here other than I continue to be grateful to all of our contributors who crack themselves open and spill for us each month. There's a connection out there for anyone who wants it.

So, thanks to you and your soft-hearted demons.

For anyone unfamiliar with our Check-In format:

All the Anonymous writers in the below portion are credited collectively as 'The Small Bow Family Orchestra.'

The ***** separates individual entries, as do pull quotes.

And, of course, TSB looks amazing because Edith Zimmerman drew everything. 

And thanks for your continued support of The Small Bow. If you love what we do and believe we have provided some value to you or people you love, please try out a paid subscription and access our complete archive and the Sunday newsletter. Okay, let's light some lanterns. — AJD

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Sometimes I Wish My Head Was a Balloon

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

I've lost 25 pounds, but I don't feel too grateful. 

Things aren't great. I'm spinning my wheels in therapy (my prescriber suggested Lamictal!), my family hates life and themselves, and I'm too terrified to move out of my parent's place while I'm still staring down the barrel of a third layoff in 5 years, dating is miserable, and I'm not sure I'll ever get over the end of my first adult relationship (which happened nearly a year ago and was 100 percent my fault.)

I've lost 25 pounds, but somehow, I don't feel too grateful. 

*****

One of my three kids said they missed the ‘old me laughing.'

I’m 148 weeks into this. Not going back. I’m not. I don’t wanna die. And it's great—the health! I'm doing it for my kids! All the good stuff! But I'm on all these Instas, shits, spaces. Everyone is doing fuckin great! “How did I ever drink!” So I go to the meeting. I read the reading. Therapy on and off. I throw myself at this vague cloud of the bigger man I’m supposed to be. But I'm not going to pretend, I gave something up when I became sober and it wasn't the booze or the drugs. I think I liked myself more then?

Giving a fuck about everything is not endearing. And I know, we all have the same battles, and I there’s all the steps and mantras and tools and apps and shit. Sure. But my consciousness has been sandpapered these past two months. And I know that while booze always got me into another nightmare... sometimes the running was the point…

So what’s got me broken up… one of my three kids told me they missed the ‘old me laughing'. They were too young to know the real fallout of Mr. Saturday night…  but I could use a little of the guy who didn't give a fuck about everything these days. I miss reckless laughter, too. Because I don't know that I've laughed like I used to in three years, and I can't take glad-handing any more MFers at my kid’s school functions who think they're funny.

*****

I'm doing well not drinking after years and years of bingeing 1 or 2x a
week.  I told my counselor I finally felt like I've conquered this
thing.  I feel so much better.  Now, the next thing is my body
dysmorphia.  I've known this for a while, but part of my drinking (the
many reasons why) has been that I don't want to eat and when I drink I
don't eat.  It's stupid because of all of the empty calories alcohol has
in it.  The thing is, I know my body image isn't healthy.  The belief
that being skinny is the only way to feel or be sexy isn't true or
healthy, but I don't want to give it up.  Maybe I work on accepting that
part first?  I signed up for a body love Zoom meeting.  These 2 hour
long things have never created change, but there is always hope and
that's if I actually attend. I've just held this belief since I was 10
and society backs it up.  My daughters get upset with me because
they see my issue.  I'm glad I didn't pass it on to them at least.

*****

Two nights ago, I drove at 930 p.m. to my local gas station store to buy cigarettes. Closed. Dammit, god doing for me what I can't do for myself. I've been AA sober for 15 years, the first 13 without a cigarette (I quit in 2008), and then I took up casually smoking (again) at age 47 last year. Delicious and gross. I played hide-and-seek with the pack for a while—I kept the box of American Spirits locked in my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I counted them daily, checking in on my babies to ensure the postman wasn't stealing. And now it's been a few months since I quit again, and the evil nicotine monster will always be tickling my brain, especially when I feel restless, irritable, and discontent. This week, my sponsor, who has 21 years, also told me that she is doing ketamine treatments for her depression—and I had FEELINGS about that. My partner picked up his 60-day chip this week, too. More feelings. And all I want to do is get in my car, listen to music loudly, and smoke cigarettes alone. And yet still—here I am, not smoking, sitting at my job, Slacking with coworkers as if I am a normie, telling you all about it instead. Go team.

*****

I found myself getting absolutely shitfaced while the people I'm out with have a beer or two.

I'm not in recovery yet, though I suspect I will need to be at some point. I've been cutting way back though, until last week when, "because it was a long week," I found myself pulling out one of my signature moves: getting absolutely shitfaced while the people I'm out with have a beer or two. When you do this after a few weeks of hardly drinking, though, the result is a migraine that lasts until Monday afternoon and forces you to cancel the fun plans you made with your friends. I noticed myself, even after that happened, feeling unable to fully turn down drinks—there were beers in my fridge. I drank them this week (one at a time, but I picked them up after telling myself I didn't feel like having them). I went to a show on Sunday night with friends, and instead of asking for cash to repay me for the ticket I'd purchased for one of them, said, "You can buy me a beer instead," and sat there drinking the beer while saying to myself, "I don't even want this." 

Yesterday, we were watching TV and chatting about a family vacation we wanted to plan, and my son, who is a teen, asked, "Could we go to Europe next year so I'll be old enough to drink?" He was joking, but he's said things before about being curious to try drinking. I'm the high-functioning alcoholic of the bunch, but my side of the family is filled with dangerous drinkers, especially the men. I feel my heart breaking over it, but I can't bring myself yet to say, "You shouldn't drink because every one of your relations is a drunk, including me." 

I don't know what's holding me back anymore. Just myself? I'm hoping October will be a time for some good introspection and some movement on getting to the heart of the issue. 

*****

I want to get back to Adult Children of Alcoholics. I’ve come to learn I may need to attend AA too. I want to trust in a power greater than the hyper-vigilant constructs I still find myself living in. With two children aged 3 and under and working full time, I’m stretched to every max I’ve known. I was having a hard time getting through their bedtime routine without having a drink so I decided to stop drinking in February. It was on the anniversary of my Mom’s death. She died from alcoholism and all the unprocessed grief that caused it in the first place. I returned from maternity leave and all it took was a work event. Someone insisted I have a drink. My husband was baffled just as much as I was that a complete stranger somehow convinced me it was a good idea. It bugs me that I didn’t have the willpower to just set the drink aside that he insisted I have. How did this all happen? I’m still unpacking it.

What’s different after eight years of psychotherapy, I guess, is I didn’t wallow and spiral in self-blame like I used to. I’m having a drink or two in the evenings with my husband again though. It all feels weird now. My gut tells me I can try again. I will quit again. I don’t want to be dependent on the very substance that had me living in foster homes as a kid. It’s all too painful to think about repeating. I want a different life for my kids. I want a different outcome for me. I’m going to break the cycle. I’m confident I will. It’s just going to take some time. Thanks for listening. 

*****

Last month, I moved out of the house I shared with my soon-to-be ex-husband.  I have been trying to exit this relationship for years: by drinking myself into oblivion, by forcing him to leave me with my weaponized resentments, by suicide.  But I have discovered that thanks to a sponsor, working the steps, and a relationship with a ride-or-die HP, I can see options never visible before.  Like telling the truth: “I am not in love with you; I want a divorce.”  I have a little home now, a home where I’ve never blacked out (yet), a home where I work my program today, where I pick up the damn phone and call people and ask them how they are doing, if I can help, how I can help.  “I am grateful to be here,” we say in the rooms.  And I am, truly, so grateful to be here.  

***** 

I (finally) managed to get off weed! 

Daily use has been my main crutch since quitting booze five years ago (harm reduction, right? It's not physically addictive, right?) Lately, with the help of some mindfulness practice, I've been seriously asking myself: "What am I getting out of this? Why do I need to smoke to watch a movie? To walk the dog? Does it even make me feel good?" I've realized that I smoked (and drank), not to feel better, but just to feel different. To escape whatever momentary discomfort was going on.

The first week sucked. Night sweats, poor sleep, and (near murderous) aggravation with coworkers, but here on day 23, I feel really good. I've caught myself smiling for no reason, awed by sunsets... all that cringey shit. I think I smoked to take the edge off bad feelings, but it was muting the good ones, too. 

I had to quit drinking to survive. Weed wasn't going to kill me, but I'm pretty sure it was keeping me from living my whole life.  

*****

I'm monitoring all these messes in progress like a train dispatcher, routing cars and keeping them from colliding.

So, I'm no stranger to paradoxes, but how my life has been falling apart and coming together has been mind-boggling. I wish I could end the day with a stupid glass of red wine like "everyone else" to soften my awareness, but instead, I'm polishing off my green tea and taking a long walk at dawn and looking forward to another green tea and long walk at the following dusk. There's a beauty in this routine I've established, but when I'm not feeling empowered by my sense of discipline, I'm desperate for something, anything to break up the monotony. Thinking about my sobriety, about my practices, and thinking about how distracting the thinking mind can be, then being. And being. And more being.

I am grieving so much right now. I appreciate that grief is non-linear, I guess I just didn't recognize my capacity for grieving more than one thing at a time, and having all these messes play out simultaneously. Everything is kind of terrible, yet wonderful simultaneously, and I'm spending so much time alternating between monitoring all these messes in progress like a train dispatcher, routing cars and keeping them from colliding.

I love being sober. I resent being sober. I love being here. I resent being here. The sun rises on a beautiful morning, the sun sets on a terrible day. I love being on track, I'm desperate to go off the rails.

*****

If things are going well, what is waiting around the corner when I least expect it?

I feel like I have been lazy with my sobriety lately. Like I haven’t done anything to support it at all. I haven’t had any issues staying sober and honestly it’s been weirdly out of mind. I started going back to my morning meetings this week after I realized how long it had been. It was great to be back.

I go because it is a room full of people who deeply understand one another, even if we’re total strangers. We all know why we’re there and we all know we’ve probably done some shit, but we’re trying to be better and trying to live as honestly as we can.

Now that I am back at it, I am having one of those disgustingly positive and ridiculously grateful periods. I know that is a good thing, but it still freaks me out a bit. If things are going well and things feel good, what is waiting around the corner when I least expect it?

I used to wonder if the desire to drink would ever go away (it’s 99% gone at this moment). Now I wonder if I’ll ever stop feeling a sense of dread when things are going too smoothly. There’s another shoe about to drop somewhere, right?

*****

My name is Tim, and I was very lucky to have gotten into recovery when I was  28. At that time, my addiction to cocaine and alcohol denuded me of a marriage, custody of my daughter, and almost every red cent I had. Worst of all, I had lost my dignity and self-respect. I was frequently suicidal and my health was precarious.

I had complex PTSD from various childhood traumas (thanks Dad!). 

This year I celebrated 40 years and I am deeply grateful to have a loving wife and family and some financial security.

I love that there's a pretty good chance to be a decent dude each day. I say this not to thump my chest but as an encouragement to anybody out there struggling with addictions or in early recovery. My first year was a fucking rock fight, but it got better.

Stick with it. It will get better!

*****

I'm nearly five years sober.  My sobriety anniversary is this week. I am not the fabulous, enlightened, finally happy version of myself I had envisioned at five years sober. I am, as it turns out, six months into a separation from my partner of 23 years, doing some significant grief processing (aka, crying a lot), and not doing much aa right now. My disillusionment with AA mostly comes from the guilt I feel that I'm continuously 'doing it wrong' and the confirmation of that when my sponsor let me go because I was 'working my own program'. These words haunt me, mainly because I have used them on other recovering people (insert deep pit of stomach shame for shaming others here). 

I've been finding hope in another 12-step program, Codependents Anonymous. It's helping me see how I contributed to the demise of my relationship and how I can learn to take care of myself in my new reality of singledom. 

I often read TSB when I'm eating meals solo and find comfort in other folks' check-ins. When I hear from other people who think they're "bad people," I usually think, "They're not bad people; they're just people." We all struggle in our own ways. I appreciate a community where I can feel connected to other recovering people, just being people.  

*****

I went to a TSB meeting last week (my first ever meeting) and on Saturday I hit 14 months sober from alcohol. My depression has been waxing and waning like the moon since last year, but truly and more accurately for my whole life. This is my first time coming out of a depression completely sober. It felt impossible at times. But I practice my kung fu every single day and keep learning how to relax harder. Sometimes I can’t believe who I am becoming. Me? Trauma healing and raw dogging reality? I look in the mirror and see myself as the person I’ve always wanted to be. But I’ve also gone through so much change so fast I don’t recognize myself sometimes. It freaks me out. I am so proud of myself but I still miss the pink cloud and then I feel like an addict. I’d like to stop feeling guilty about that. 

*****

People keep asking me for tips on sobriety. I say: You have to feel your feelings, REALLY feel your feelings, ride that wave through the moment that makes you want to drink or use and practice moving through it. And it's awful, I say, really, really awful, but it's the most important thing, at least it was to me. And it gets better.

For the first year, I felt so exposed and raw that it was as if I'd lost a layer of skin. And I went through a lot that first year: ending a marriage, starting a new relationship, buying a house, and navigating a new job. And there was lots of crying, LOTS of crying. Lots of hiding under the blankets as the spiders of emotion crawled over my raw, aching skin.

But. It got better.

What I learned through that first year and subsequent years is that the only way out is through, and a drink or a drug is like a clogged drain that keeps all of that dirty bathwater stagnant in your brain.

So now, seven years and four months later, I feel more equipped to process the feelings that come through me, and I've had some challenging feelings to contend with over the past few months. My second marriage is falling apart. I have to sell the home of my dreams where I thought I'd live the rest of my days. I am facing some severe uncertainty about where I will live in the future.

Turns out there are no guarantees. Turns out that you can stay sober even when the person who encouraged you to get sober doesn't want to be married to you anymore. Turns out it's much easier to cope with the rollercoaster of life when you know how to feel your feelings. 

*****

I had a moment last week where I slipped into self-pity and drove around manically telling my girlfriend that I think God either hates me or doesn't exist.  The trigger was getting a commission check from a past client which reminded me how badly I fucked up to have lost my past career and how much their new manager is making because I fucked up my career. With all my financial insecurity, you think I'd have been happy to get paid. Nearly everything in my life is perfect these days - great sober girlfriend, new perspectives, better relationships, a house with a backyard, etc. But I'm still unemployed, and I'm still making my career a higher power. Before joining AA, on paper my career was flourishing but my personal life was a never ending source of chaos which included unhealthy relationships, stacking up enemies,  and being miserable and ungrateful nearly all the time. My life is the inverse now, and that should make me happy but I just wish God would give me back the chaos of the past. 

*****

I'm a teacher. I have been for a long time. I am also seven years sober. It's hard for me to fathom how I felt every day back when I was a teacher and not sober. I worked in a Chicago Public School. I had a pretty solid routine at the end of every day. I would leave work at the bell, go home, and park my car. Walk to the corner bodega (they probably think I'm dead because they never saw me again when I got sober) and buy a pint of whiskey. Go home and do shot after shot until it was gone. Pass out. I would wake up three hours later, clean up, and act like it didn’t happen when my husband came home from work. Then I’d drink with him until bedtime. 

Doesn't that sound exhausting? I'm exhausted just writing about it. 

I don't know how I did that. Every. Single. Day. 

When I first got sober, I imagined at five years in, I would be "living my best life." I didn't think I would still be thinking and talking so much about my sobriety. Seven years in, it is still something I regularly talk about. Things are so different now. My husband died (he didn't get sober with me), and he left me and our 4-year-old son (now 6) behind. 

I wish I had some profound thing to say at the end of this. But since this is just a check-in, this is how I'm doing: doing this one day at a time, like I started doing seven years ago. Living moment to moment some days. And just trying to breathe and keep moving. 

I should also probably let Jamie at the bodega know I'm ok. 

*****

fin

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OTHER RECENT CHECK-INS:

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This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.

You can also get a Sunday issue for $8 a month or $60 per year. The Sunday issue is a recovery bonanza full of gratitude lists, a study guide to my daily recovery routines, a poem I like, the TSB Spotify playlist, and more exclusive essays.

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Thanks for helping us grow.

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ZOOM MEETING SCHEDULE

Monday: 5:30 p.m. PT/ 8:30 p.m ET

Wednesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Thursday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET (Women and non-binary meeting.)

Friday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Saturday: Mental Health Focus (Peer support for bipolar/anxiety/depression.) 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET

Sunday: (Mental Health and Sobriety Support Group.) 1:00 p.m PT/4 p.m. ET

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If you don't feel comfortable calling yourself an "alcoholic," that's fine. If you have issues with sex, food, drugs, DEBT, codependency, love, loneliness, depression, come on in. Newcomers are especially welcome.

FORMAT: CROSSTALK, TOPIC MEETING

We're there for an hour, sometimes more. We'd love to have you.

Meeting ID: 874 2568 6609

PASSWORD TO ZOOM: nickfoles

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Zoloft

by Maggie Dietz

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Two weeks into the bottle of pills, I'd remember
exiting the one-hour lens grinder at Copley Square—
the same store that years later would be blown
back and blood-spattered by a backpack
bomb at the marathon. But this was back when
terror happened elsewhere. I walked out
wearing the standard Boston graduate student
wire-rims, my first-ever glasses, and saw little people
in office tower windows working late under fluorescent
lights. File cabinets with drawer seams blossomed
wire bins, and little hands answered little black
telephones, rested receivers on bloused shoulders—
real as the tiny flushing toilets, the paneled wainscotting
and armed candelabras I gasped at as a child in
the miniature room at the Art Institute in Chicago.

It was October and I could see the edges
of everything—where the branches had been a blur
of fire, now there were scalloped oak leaves, leathery
maple five-points plain as on the Canadian flag.
When the wind lifted the leaves the trees went pale,
then dark again, in waves. Exhaling manholes,
convenience store tiled with boxed cigarettes
and gum, the BPL's forbidding fixtures lit
to their razor tips and Trinity's windows holding
individual panes of glass between bent metal like
hosts in a monstrance. It was wonderful. It made me
horribly sad.

It was the same
years later with the pills. As I walked across
the field, the usual field, to the same river, I felt
a little burst of joy when the sun cleared a cloud.
It was fricking Christmas, and I was five years old!
I laughed out loud, picked up my pace: the sun
was shining on me, on the trees, on the whole
damn world. It was exhilarating. And sad,
that sham. Nothing had changed. Or
I had. But who wants to be that kind of happy?
The lenses, the doses. Nothing should be that easy.

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN