I Could Use a Hug But I'm Surrounded By Strangers

More Holiday Check-Ins

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Today’s the second installment of our holiday check-ins. The subject line for today comes from one of the entries about traveling home for Thanksgiving:

“This year, I’m traveling to see my parents and siblings for Thanksgiving … without my wife and our kids. It’s my first time being away from them since our daughter was born. When we discussed the options, this seemed like the best choice, but now that I’m sitting alone eating pizza and blankly staring at airplanes, I’m feeling pretty unsettled about the choice that was made.

I could use a hug, but I’m surrounded by strangers.”

Take note: In the next couple of weeks, if you see someone in an airport or a bus station sitting alone eating pizza and blankly staring at nothing, run up and hug them. What could possibly go wrong?

Alright, let’s get to it.

If you are 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.

Are you ready to collide! Are you ready to look after each other!— AJD

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The Antidote for Discomfort Is Usefulness

by The Small Bow Orchestra

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I was already facing my first holiday season without my stepmom. But now I'm coming to terms with the fear that I'm losing my dad to his grief over her death, too. He's still here, but it's not the same dad I knew a year ago. On top of that, it seems as though my mom is closing herself off from me. We haven't talked for real since before Mother's Day, and my Thanksgiving wishes of love were essentially brushed off. In short order, I’m realizing that my relationships with my parents have all irrevocably changed. It doesn't really make me want to drink, but I am keenly aware of how much easier this would be if I had something to numb, whatever this is I’m feeling. Not pain, exactly, but yearning? Anyway, I am grateful for a good Thanksgiving with my wife and kids. I just wish I could have been more present instead of in my head about all this.

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I have always been a Scrooge. As a very anti-social child, not even the promise of unlimited food (Thanksgiving) and presents (Christmas) could make me enjoy the time of year from November to mid-January. If I could, I would rather work on Christmas day for 24 hours straight in a closet while not speaking to a single person than be around people. Social media throws a wrench into my pity party because now I see the joy that others have for holidays and the abundance that I don’t have: support, stability, and love. Nowadays, I have to be content with breathing a sigh of relief when decorations come down and we move on to the next empty holiday.

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I’m celebrating Thanksgiving at my parents’ house for the first time in over a decade. Working on the holidays years ago gave me an easy way out and the habit stuck. After witnessing my parents’ declining health on a recent visit, though, I decided to come for Thanksgiving.

On Sunday, my mom was hospitalized with pulmonary edema, likely due to heart damage from chronic hypertension. She left AMA after spending only one night there. Over breakfast this morning, my dad told me that she has also had a breast tumor for the last 18 months that has progressed into an open wound. Neither of them has mentioned it before today, and we all know that she will not seek diagnosis or treatment. By noon today, I had lost count of how many times my mom said, with the nonchalance of someone discussing the weather, that she is tired of existing and won’t be here much longer. My dad just rapped his knuckles on the table and changed the subject when she said that living past 70 isn’t worth it. I have many startling early childhood memories of her telling me that if she ever got cancer, she would simply die. I accept that it is her choice, but it’s awful to watch. I don’t know how to attempt a real conversation about death and dying with someone whose attitude towards mortality has always been glib, sometimes cruelly so. This is my second Thanksgiving sober, and it’s a motherfucker. I am reminding myself tonight that drinking, for me and in this moment, can only deepen life’s pain and rob me of its sweetness. Better to experience the highs and lows of sobriety, fully lived, than the middling fog that was my norm. Saying it helps me to believe it.

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This holiday season, I’m spiraling. Work is miserable, and the stress combined with psych med issues means my attention span is so shot that I don't feel safe driving any more than 10 minutes at a time. (Maybe my new Adderall prescription will help with the issues caused by my old Welbutrin prescription.) Because of that, I’m more isolated than I’ve been in a very long time. My self-loathing is white-hot, my pseudo-addictions are flaring up, and pretty much everything is shit. So I’m holding out for work to ease up eventually and for an upcoming audition for something that will help get me out of the house more often. Happy holidays, looters.

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I am deeply struggling with creeping resentment as we move deeper into this holiday season. I am reminding myself that boundaries are for keeping myself in good relationships with those around me, not as demands of others and their behavior, and also … maybe I just want to scream very loudly, “and I need this to fucking STOP.” Burnt out at work where boundaries are continually crossed (which, when someone supplies your health insurance and paycheck, feels like a non-negotiable dance).

Coming off another holiday where my brother-in-law, who is very much in his own addiction and mental health storm, has once again done the “I’m in the middle of my addiction and mental health thing and gonna bring whoever I can in it” and left us, the couple setting our boundaries, as tired, sad, and unwilling to do what the rest of our loving family that also doesn’t know what else to do so ends up doing — enabling. Demands on my partner’s and my time seem to just continually add up and up (and I just miss him and miss not always being in the administrative state of running our lives). With all of this, I can feel my resentment creeping in and I don’t want to be resentful. I don’t want to be resentful because it’s like a hot bath — it feels great. It’s righteous and comfortable and lets me let go of all my old stories I’ve worked hard. I know the bath eventually boils you alive. How do people let go of their resentments? To let it roll off their shoulders? I feel as if everything I’ve ever touched is replete with claw marks, and my resentment is no different.

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The post-election hangover ought to make Thanksgiving at my sister’s extra tense this year. The family’s been divided since Trump came on the scene, and our inability to talk about our differences without hostility prompted my 84-year-old mother to declare a no-fly zone around politics. So we talk about the weather, carefully ensuring it doesn’t slide into global warming. Pass the stuffing, please. Is this carpet new?

I’ve been sober 15 years, so the issue is not so much wanting to drink as it is wanting to run. Recovery has taught me that the two urges are part of the same bloodline. Running isn’t practical unless I start a fire in the bathroom wastebasket, but emotionally withdrawing is seductive.

The antidote for discomfort is usefulness. I have learned I must participate in the festivities as if my life depends on it. Look people in the eye, smile, and ask them how they are doing. Listen. Wash dishes. Smile more.

Many years ago, I drank after 11 years of sobriety. I’m an expert on alcoholism’s patience. And the road back to a drink starts with untreated discomfort.

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As a young adult, returning “home” for holidays was always an occasion for secretive binge drinking. I was a jolly drunk in public, and so consuming robust quantities of beer and wine in social gatherings made everyone happy. And I knew where the bottles were, so one or two would come with me into the guest room at bedtime. I would stay up late and lean out the open window to smoke cigarettes and drink from the bottle until the room began to spin, and I would pass out. There was anger in it. These stupid fuckers have no idea, I thought. I’m a bad man.

In sobriety, I was determined to create very standard holiday rituals for my own family: a Thanksgiving feast and an elaborate Christmas extravaganza, which I married into. My two adult children were raised amid those rituals and are attached to them. And they were powerful for me, as they felt like the first true family holidays I had experienced at the time.

It’s two days until Thanksgiving 2024, and here’s the scorecard. I’ve somehow managed to piece together 32+ years of sobriety and a year and change in Al-Anon. My ex and mother of my kids is an untreated active alcoholic, and the man she left me for is in long-term treatment for wet brain. My 25-year-old has been in and out of rehab since 2020. Maybe he has a few months clean today, I’m not sure. My 21-year-old is coming home from college and spending the first half of the break with their mom and the second half with me.

This is me taking care of myself today. I’ve been invited to have Chinese take-out with the ex and both kids on Thanksgiving day. I’ll do it, but only if I can get to the Thanksgiving meeting my Al-Anon home group is having at midday.

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This is my tenth holiday season since starting my Al-Anon program. Before recovery, there were traditions. Every year, I’d go home the same week; start at my dad’s and end up at my mom’s. We’d eat the same things and watch the same movies. But since I started in recovery, each holiday season has been totally different from the previous. While my family hates this break in routine, I like to think it’s a sign that I’m learning to be more honest about what I need. Each year, I feel a different degree of safety around my family based on their alcoholisms and dysfunctions. Each year, I feel a different degree of stability based on my own mental health needs. This year, I’m not going home at all because I have a puppy that I can’t travel with. I feel a sick amount of guilt about not seeing my family. But I’m trying to remember that this year is the same in that it’s different from last year, yet again. And I’m taking responsibility by making sure my puppy has what she needs. She’s very cute and I think dressing her up like a turkey may be the serenity boost that I need.

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Every holiday seems to be getting more and more complicated and messy for me. All year long, I unintentionally neglect to acknowledge the hurt in my life related to family dynamics … but it’s impossible to do that once holiday planning begins.

Travel is strategic, not light and fun.

Trip durations must be considered/minimized, escape plans are discussed, slippery topics must be avoided, family members opt-in/out, and the sting of unfulfilled expectations throbs for the next couple of months while we awkwardly untangle the knots that were made.

We could skip the travel entirely … but we do that the rest of the year. Why do I forget how messed up things are until October punches me in the face?

This year, I’m traveling to see my parents and siblings for Thanksgiving … without my wife and our kids. It’s my first time being away from them since our daughter was born. When we discussed the options, this seemed like the best choice, but now that I’m sitting alone eating pizza and blankly staring at airplanes, I’m feeling pretty unsettled about the choice that was made.

I could use a hug, but I’m surrounded by strangers.

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Thanksgiving is a cruel holiday for me, even though no one will ever really know. It all goes back to the year my daughter died and, on top of everything else, I had to place my mother in a nursing facility reluctantly, and my favorite aunt died, too. Thanksgiving that year was spent at my in-laws, in my room, crying. The brutality of it all. The unfairness. The god-damn (f'n) unimaginable tragedy. I was lost, but I managed to pull up my trousers and put on a sweater and with an unwashed red face, take the stairs to the dining room as dinner was being served. I was not in my right mind, obviously, and the laughter and candlelight and food made me spin. I mouthed a few bites, smiling at my boys, trying to be in the moment. I think the only thing I ate was Pat’s chocolate cake. Thanksgiving morning is always the same. I wake up and relive this memory, and then I go through the day, not really grateful, but at least I'm trying.

This year I am adding a different kind of spinning. All my recent cognitive and brain MRIs had somewhat normal results. However, just as an x-ray should, it identified concerning areas that showed up in my lungs. Next thing I know it’s off to the races with a CT scan, a PET scan, a visit to the oncologist (really bad sign), and now a biopsy of ONE of the concerning areas that lit up. Could this be the dreaded metastases? I’ll get the results right before Christmas — not exactly news I want to share around the holiday table. So I’ll probably do a lot of crying in my room, figure out some way to cope without substances (which look awfully tempting right now), and pull out my years-of-practice holiday face.

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This is the first Christmas without my brother. He died of liver failure in January; that kind of thing happens after self-medicating with alcohol for the better part of twenty years. He didn’t make it to Christmas last year; he was hiding the fact that his abdomen was filling up with fluid, that his legs were swelling, that his skin and eyes were yellowing, and that he was dying. So, I guess, this is the second Christmas without him. This year is already feeling empty: who am I going to text when the SWAT officer gets hurt by the rose bush in Die Hard? Who is going to poke fun at me during our large and loud family dinner and then tell me to “lighten up and live a little?” Who is going to make sure that no one feels left out? That no one is isolated? That everyone feels loved and appreciated? There has to be a way to fill the hole in my soul with something else other than cannabis. Maybe shortbread is the answer. (Shortbread is sometimes the answer, but not in this case.) What’s not the answer is what I’ll ultimately do: watch the laundry room door at my parents’ place, expecting him to bust through it like a chaotic Kool-Aid man — like he always did.

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Today, I’m 11 days into my sobriety for the umpteenth time and looking ahead to next week of both my parents’ birthdays, plus Thanksgiving, then going to visit my mom’s family in Maine. Where, among other things, my cousin (who is wonderful but on the spectrum and gets obsessed with certain things) will be repeatedly asking me, “Did you hear Donald Trump won the election??”

So I’m already plotting the opportunities for me to sneak away and drink — they certainly exist! — and like many alcoholics I’m nothing if not opportunistic. But it’s weird to be also plotting against my own plots at the same time. And feeling like the anti-plots will actually win out this time.

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This year I’ll be spending the holidays with my partner and his family. Since I got sober I’ve spent the holidays in all different ways: in the slow fog of the first year I was with my dad and his girlfriend and her kids (no longer in our lives; I hear from my dad irregularly and see him rarely), but after that I either had delightful days to myself, doing turkey trots and volunteering and going to meetings, or I joined friends who became a much more comfortable chosen family. My partner’s family is important to him and I am feeling like a feral animal stuffed into the body of a sweet little pet. I want to bolt, I’m scared of being found out, I’m preemptively exhausted. I find myself wanting to tell my partner his family isn’t better than mine, that they’re fucked up too. And they are — and they are. It’s not hard to be “better” than a collection of people who can’t be in the same room and almost never are. I don’t think I realized how sad I am until I started writing this. The holidays always sneak up on me. I don’t care about them at all so why do I get so sad if I actually stop to think about them?

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On Thanksgiving my dad got into a drunken argument over his support of Trump. This coming Saturday is the big family Christmas party, where he will get into a drunken argument over his support of Trump. And then we will spend Christmas at his house, where he will attempt to get into a drunken argument over his support of Trump, but none of his children will oblige him. So that’s my holiday season — avoiding the landmines my dad will be planting in front of all of us for his own edification and child-like need to justify his thinking around this fraught and frankly disappointing decision he made (and relentlessly pressured my mom to make). I feel pretty strong in my recovery right now, and have recently turned the page in a marriage that has tormented me for the past couple of years. It does make me sad though, that instead of looking forward to hanging out with my dad, I see him as a gauntlet to be run again and again and again. This is how it always is, it’s just worse this year.

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This year marked my second sober Thanksgiving since I quit drinking January 30, 2023. I quit while in an unhealthy relationship where drinking — heavy drinking — was normalized. Drinking a handle of vodka was normal. Drinking till passing out was normal. Drinking in the car on my way home from work to deal with the relationship was normal.

Looking back at that Monday in January, I remember thinking “I’m not gonna drink tonight,” and I didn’t. I didn’t drink that night or the next or the next or the next. That mantra brought me to the present.

I ended the relationship on February 21, 2024, and I'm now going through the first sober breakup of my life. I was not looking forward to the holidays and I felt I needed to reimagine them so I strategized ways to deal .... Do the turkey trot? Take the dogs for a hike? Take a long drive on empty roads?

Bitter cold weather intervened and I ended up home alone. Instead of lamenting, I embraced it. I slept in. I slowed down. I cooked a delicious meal and checked in with my tribe. It was a day of “being” rather than “doing,” and it was just what I needed. And I was thankful, so thankful, for my sobriety, for clarity, for strength, and for awareness. It gave me confidence — I’ve got this. I am not dreading Christmas.

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I’m laying in bed on a family vacation to a disgustingly resorted Caribbean island, totally sympathetically activated, frozen, angry, and unable to get up. It’s raining nonstop and smells vaguely of septic from a nearby hotel. The beach is flooded with tourists, and my body won’t relax. Flashbacks and nightmares have been the icing on top. All I want is comfort but no one feels safe and I’m prickly and reactive and everyone keeps backing away. It’s all the poor-me shit. Emotional sobriety? Never met her.

Every holiday season feels like being ripped in half: sit with it or do something about it; stay mindfully aware or speak the fuck up; nurture it or numb out; chosen family or assigned. Am I supposed to enjoy this, endure this, leave?

Gonna go sit in the sand. At least there’s a horizon and I’m waterproof.

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I wrote a letter to my 2014 self, the gist of which was “YOU LIVED, BITCH.” There’s a lot of what I’m terming “medical bullshit” to deal with these days, from cremation plans for my beloved dog to figuring out what to do with my dad’s headstone (long story). There are bills. There’s the planet and the country. But I lived, bitches!

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HERE’S THE FIRST ROUND OF HOLIDAY 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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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

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Trust

by Thomas R. Smith

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It’s like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.

The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers—
all show up at their intended destinations.

The theft that could have happened doesn’t.
Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.

— “via Poetry Town'“

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN