It's Not Easy
The time is here again: Our wonderful readers write in about the current state of their recovery.
Good morning, here’s a new thing—comments will not be paywalled on this post.
I want to encourage everyone (even the lurkers) to comment, especially on these Check-In posts, which tend to be very heavy—part confessionals, part exorcisms. It would be incredibly generous of you to show your support and appreciation, especially if someone else's story sounds like one you've lived through. Are you ready to look out for each other? Let’s be great.
Usual formatting rules apply: All the writers shall and will remain Anonymous but are credited collectively as "The Small Bow Family Orchestra."
The ***** separates individual entries, as do pull quotes.
And, of course, TSB looks incredible because Edith Zimmerman drew everything.
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Making Things Hard Is Easy to Do
by The Small Bow Family Orchestra
I believe most people say that relapse is part of it. I don’t want it. I want us to be the exception.
After years of cycling through a pattern of addiction and abstinence, my partner finally experienced a powerful reckoning and shift and began attending AA and got a sponsor. He's been sober for 90 days and has attended 90 meetings in 90 days. It's been jaw-dropping to see how much he's changed in just these few months. It's like this invisible fortress he had around himself has been coming down in huge waves: He can access and express his feelings, and I can connect with him. He's now allowing himself to cut back on the demand of daily attendance. I'm keeping my anxiety about it to myself, wanting only to cheer him on and tell him how proud I am of him and how much I love and, value and cherish these changes. But I'm so anxious about losing everything and of things returning to how they were. I don't want that for our lives. But I believe most people say that relapse is part of it. I don't want it. I want us to be the exception. Is that silly and even stupid sounding to say? I just want this feeling, this state of being, this relief to last.
*****
I have to trust that this version of me is a better mama, even though I feel like a disgusting, quivering, controlling stress ball most days.
Tomorrow, I finally pick up my daughter, my 6-year-old, whom my ex has withheld from me for the past 14 months. Custody has been legally established, and she will be living with me for the following year. The judge was nothing if not fair. I have spent the last year fighting SO HARD to maintain my relationship with her and retain access to her. The threat of losing her and the pain of this long physical separation fucking turned me inside out. And yet, in this last year without her, I racked up some serious personal growth. I got fully sober, but more importantly, I started dealing with the personality-altering CPTSD that I somehow had been completely unaware of having. I’m scared at the thought of jumping back into full-time motherhood tomorrow. Sobriety and therapy have allowed me to see how twisted up I am, and I’m getting better, but it’s slow. Same sentiment as always, I guess. I sure preferred the delusional optimism and positive self-regard that substances, denial, and disassociation allowed. I have to trust that this version of me is a better mama, even though I feel like a disgusting, quivering, controlling stress ball most days. I will report back on the developments next month.
*****
I knew change would be uncomfortable, but the loneliness feels particularly unbearable.
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder three years ago and am in the very early stages of recovery from alcoholism and serial monogamy. Sometimes, I feel on top of the world, and then suddenly, it’s like it’s rolled over me. There are days when I exercise, finish a big project at work, and have a productive therapy session. Then, the next day, I don’t get out of bed, skip my medication, and avoid eating.
I knew change would be uncomfortable, but the loneliness is particularly unbearable. I’ve had to distance myself from people who are bad for my recovery. I still love them dearly, though, which makes it even more difficult.
But I feel hopeful for the future for the first time in a while. I’d been so focused on surviving each day that I didn’t have time to dream. Or maybe dreaming felt useless since I couldn’t picture a future where I wasn’t struggling or dead.
I want to get better. I really do. I feel like I’m on a good path. Is it rocky at times? Yes. But I’m making different choices, and that’s what matters.
*****
I can barely find a few minute's relief from the self-loathing.
It's been a tough few months. I'm staring down the barrel of layoffs (AGAIN) at work, I'm spinning my wheels in therapy, and I can barely find a few minute's relief from the self-loathing on a loop in my head whenever I'm not working or distracting myself. I recently made the connection that the last time I was on psych meds, it freed up enough space in my head to think about the wants and needs of someone else and act on them in a way that, to this day, feels so healthy that it's out of character for me. I miss that. My appointment with a prescriber is at the end of the month.
*****
Can't finish a book, food sounds revolting, TV and podcasts and social media are just noise.
I'm depressed. Every morning, I can't believe I have to do this again. Life doesn't need to fall apart to disintegrate. It doesn't even need to look weak (or at least weaker). It just needs to stall out and slowly dissolve in the rut of inertia and ennui. To step back and see my life as it is today—socially and professionally alienated, a romantic partnership choking on fumes, financially scraping by—is to desire less and less of myself in the world. And thus I envision even less and less of myself in the world. Less impact, less value, less interest. I exist, but for how long? That's not suicidal ideation, but rather the sense that people whom no one needs disappear a little more every day. I am too tired to resist my fade or its inevitability, let alone stop it or reverse it. What do I do in the meantime? Can't finish a book, food sounds revolting, TV and podcasts and social media are just noise. It's an unsolicited world. Beyond depression is... what, exactly? I feel like I'm about to find out.
*****
Now that we had a baby, we could no longer ignore our unwieldy foundations.
I fell into sewing when I got pregnant with our first daughter. After a decade-long marathon of late nights and partying, I joked with my husband, “Well, it’s time to get domesticated,” and unboxed the sewing machine his mother placed under our tree the previous Christmas.
As someone who has always loved puzzles, I enjoyed seeing fabric fragments become something bigger. I once tried knitting, but the time required to see any progress was painstaking. This was fun. I easily made baby blankets and burp cloths and thought of my little baby girl, whom I didn’t know but deeply loved.
Then, shortly after our daughter Gwen was born, as I understand it goes, my marriage was revealed for what it was. I had a lifelong (and unmanaged) mental health issue, and my husband had an addiction (also unmanaged) to alcohol. Now that we had a baby, we could no longer ignore our unwieldy foundations.
After our daughter went to bed, I sewed for hours into the night. As the needle pierced the fabric repeatedly with a meditative rhythm, I turned my mind toward self-help audiobooks and podcasts. I was making quilts but also searching to solve the grand-scale problems I couldn’t yet see in their entirety. Problems I only understood in pieces:
A moment when he lied about drinking, as I held the found liquor bottle in one hand and our days-old daughter in another. (Was his drinking a problem?)
Another time, when a benign disagreement flooded me with so much anger and adrenaline, I found myself screaming and literally running out the door on him. (Was my response normal?)
I would sit behind this machine and try to stitch together the broken bits of my life, just as I would the fabric. The machine hummed, and my brain whirled. It felt spiritual—a wing and a prayer to understand who we both were.
*****
I have been hard on myself and think (believe) that I'm not doing enough to earn my sponsor's time.
I started Wellbutrin in April, and I was super scared I was going to feel numb, flat, or worse than my current anxiety level. I'm amazed that I've found more ease, balance, and tolerance with my small dose. I haven't had an anxiety attack, and I'm feeling more even and regulated than before, even with ongoing and new stress concerning my marriage, self-worth, work, money, my qualifier's not-great health, my friends, and the state of the world. I'm so grateful I took this leap, and it's working for me. My recovery feels primarily positive, too—lots of good service work and outreach in my homegroup, chairing meetings and getting lots of hope. I have been hard on myself and think (believe) that I'm not doing enough to earn my sponsor's time since I've avoided doing step work for months. I bought a new workbook to revive my energy for my 4th step but avoided it (and my sponsor). I have been distracting and procrastinating in other ways (at work, online shopping, doom scrolling), and it's a signal that I can support myself more. I can try to love myself as much as I am being critical of myself since those thoughts are constant and loud.
*****
There are a million ways I could fuck things up. Why do I want to?
I'm working on the 6th step with my sponsor, so I'm thinking about my character defects. I'm thinking about the death drive and my impulse towards self-sabotage. The last month has been good. I picked up commitments like you're supposed to: secretary at my home group and driving an elderly woman to Sunday night meetings. Work is fine, and my friends and family seem happy with me, so the hurricane in my brain starts churning up a maelstrom of horrible ideas. The bars are colorful and shiny at night. That guy I hooked up with showed me the train station where you can cop. There are a million ways I could fuck things up. Why do I want to? I'm hoping to figure out why I keep making this mess over and over.
I'm approaching 90 days, and my brain feels cleaner than it's been in a while. I'll keep making my lists, calling my sponsor, working the steps, and doing the things. It's okay to just be content. I can tip my scale away from the darkness if I keep trying. I can scrape it out from under my skin.
*****
I lost myself in a solipsistic, unhealed, selfish false reality again.
Two weeks ago, the love of my life broke up with me. I sat and wrote furiously about how we had been torn apart by a traumatic event that was neither of our fault—the Shakespearean tragedy of us abandoning each other. This week, after more hours of therapy than I’ve attended in two years and an abundant amount of truly stomach-turning introspection, I am facing a much more accurate evaluation: I failed myself again. I lost myself in a solipsistic, unhealed, selfish, false reality again. No matter what happened, I failed to do the work I desperately need to NEVER STOP DOING to be a good, self-aware, deliberate person. Again. One would think I’d feel hopeless, but I’ve laughed more in a week than I have in the recent months that I thought were very happy — I feel like a game show contestant who’s just seen the soundstage around them after the fake walls drop. I can leave a labyrinth, I can see, right?
*****
Where is the ecstatic clarity and energy I keep reading about from the newly sober?
150 days sober for the first time in more than a decade. First, despite some significant life challenges, I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. And yet, so much is unchanged. All my black-and-white thinking, my extremism, and my inability to follow a middle path are still there now, just expressed through less destructive mediums. So, I guess that is progress. But where is the ecstatic clarity and energy I keep reading about from the newly sober? My psyche seems to have skipped that part and moved straight to the reckoning. I live with much less guilt, but daily life still feels like slogging through mud.
*****
I realize that I don't actually give a shit about buying the good vegetables from the farmer's market.
This is a weird time of year for me; six years ago, while half-assing my sobriety, my marriage fell apart, and someone very close to me died by suicide. My life was upended, and there were days when I doubted my existence. Now, I seem to be in the place of sobriety that I recall hearing about as a deeply skeptical beginner: accepting life on life's terms. My money situation is bleak, but I am getting by asking for help. I realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in my consumption patterns. Now that I can't afford to live that way, I realize that I don't actually give a shit about buying the good vegetables from the farmer's market. When I feel that I am being mistreated and want to lash out, I take a minute or more to do nothing before doing something that I will almost certainly regret and have to make amends for later. I feel despair at the grotesque suffering in the world, and I look at my teenage kid and feel grateful that we are both upright and alive.
*****
I tried to fight the judgment but sometimes I think the judgment is the only reason I go.
I’m feeling incredibly reflective right now with my six-year sober day coming in July. About two or three times a year, I’m invited to something with my old group of friends, who I don’t see regularly because I’m sober and their only interest in life continues to be drinking. Last week was one of those times. I found myself mostly just sitting and observing, not engaging too much in conversation because what was there to talk about? I tried to fight the judgment, but sometimes, I think the judgment is the only reason I go.
Everyone told the same stories they told the last time we hung out a few months ago because nothing new had happened, and no one was doing anything new. And no one remembers that they’ve told the exact same story in the exact same way because they’re always drunk when they’re telling it. I just sat there, smiling politely at these people I used to be.
It hit me on the drive home that everyone is exactly where I left them almost six years ago. And it does feel like I left them, like they’re all jogging in circles while I’m off scaling mountains and breathing in air that didn’t go through a cigarette first, growing and expanding and, and, and…
And all of it is wasted on them, so I just sit quietly until it’s time to say, “It was so great to see you,” and go back to my life and thank god that I was right about my fear that everything would change if I quit.
*****
I'm choosing grief today in the hope of happiness somewhere down the line.
After years of back and forth, I made a decision last month and told my partner I wanted a divorce. I don't know what I expected, but it was not this: Massive, heavy sadness. Lots of tears every time I try to speak about it. I feel bad for my husband because every time we discuss it, I'm sniffling and choked up and sometimes can't even talk because I'm trying to swallow my sobs. He stands there, about a broom's distance away, quietly waiting for me to collect myself. I'M THE ONE WHO WANTED THIS. What the actual fuck is going on? Sometimes, I think these feelings may be a sign that I'm making a mistake. So I go back through the mental list of ways our puzzle pieces have grown so they no longer fit comfortably together. I rationally know this is not fixable. Neither of us is willing to shave off parts of ourselves to fit back together again. And so. I'm choosing grief today in the hope of happiness somewhere down the line. As a recovering addict, this seems like a ridiculous thing to choose. I want happiness now, pain later. But, I wasn't getting happiness now. And even scarier is that there's no guarantee that taking the pain now means happiness later. So I just have to have a little faith that everything will be OK at some point, try to feel the feelings, and not numb out with food or TikTok.
*****
fin
OTHER RECENT CHECK-INS:
The Sadder the Tale, the Dearer the Joy
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*****
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
Lit
by Andrea Cohen
************************
Everyone can’t
be a lamplighter.
Someone must
be the lamp,
and someone
must, in bereaved
rooms sit,
unfathoming what
it is to be lit.
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
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I quit cigarettes a few years ago, for good, and that makes me feel as if I have some understanding of addiction. Maybe it does, at least as far as smoking. It took me years to quit properly, and it was not easy. It gives me hope that I at least conquered something. Maybe because of that experience, this place I am in now with alcohol feels familiar, albeit embryonic. I am in the stage (probably an unofficial one) where I *want to want to* quit, but don't yet actually *want to*. But time's a'wastin', and I want to live my life better than this.
At least, I do until about 8 PM every evening. I don't know what it's going to take for me to get there.
Reading your stories every week humbles me and makes me feel not so alone. I see that I am lucky to function as well as I do, and that I am my own train wreck waiting to happen.
Mostly, though, I deeply envy each of you who are in recovery, who have reached the point at which you have had enough and have struggled over one of the largest barriers: your *want to*, your *ready*, has arrived, and you have taken it with you to the other side. You're DOING it. You're living better than you thought you could when you were in the thick fog of addiction. I want you all to see that this is true, even if you're lonely, broke, lost, in pain, or flailing today. You're on your way, day by day, to being even better--whatever that means to you, however small your steps.
Thank you for lighting the way. <3
“thank god that I was right about my fear that everything would change if I quit.” Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. Keep writing and sharing please.