Whatever You Think About the Most Is Your God

September is an ideal month for the internet's most thoughtful readers to share about the current state of their recovery.

The Small Bow is funded entirely through paying subscribers. We use your money to help pay for all our freelancers and Edith’s illustrations. September is the start of Recovery Month. Before we begin the usual Sunday issue, let’s talk about that.

It’s tough for me to be earnest about something like Recovery Month, but I’m gonna give it a whirl. Because I believe it’s meant to celebrate aliveness. Recovery is not only a willingness for some of us to stay above the dirt but a genuine commitment to be a better version of a human while we’re here.

The list of ways to die from This Disease – which I was reluctant to call it that for most of my life, but I think it’s important to do so now – are innumerable: Heart explosions, liver rot, misadventure (as the Brits call it), hypoxeia, drunk driving, falling off a deck, jumping off a bridge, all sorts of cancers and cavernous sadness. Death is defied, until it’s not – and it’s on the loose out there right now.

So my one request for everyone reading this newsletter this month is to connect with the living and remember the recovering. Say thank you and I love you and I’m so glad you’re still here to anyone who needs it.

If you love The Small Bow, a good way to celebrate is to send someone a TSB Gift Subscription. Or, you can just tell someone who is struggling they mean something to you.

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Good morning. We’re going to start our September Check-In series from very special guest who decided not to be anonymous this month. Julia Wertz, author of “Impossible People” asked if she could submit hers in “sketchy diary comic form.”

Cool? Cool.

We ran an excerpt from “Impossible People” last year and it’s an incredible book—TSB readers worship it. Buy it for yourself if you don’t believe us.

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Now let’s get back to the usual format: All the writers in the below portion 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 magnificent because Edith Zimmerman drew everything. 

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. Let’s get healin’. — AJD

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This Is Where We Find Out What We Are Made Of

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

This summer, I've been newly "sober" from a lot of my regular habits —caffeine, alcohol, sneaky flirtatious DMs to hot guys. I'm eating home-cooked food with lots of vegetables, taking my vitamins, working out, being honest in therapy, and meditating daily. I'm surprised and thankful that it doesn't feel that hard. It actually feels really good, centered, calm, blah blah. Enter suspicion: there's no way it's this easy, right? My real worry is that this sobriety is just a high itself, a FEEL GOOD MANIA that I'll inevitably crash from. Is this what happens when you fix your life up? Is my brain just so happy to be free and unburdened of toxins and neurological trash that it's blasting off like a rocket ship? What do I even do with all this joy? Genuine question: Is this just how people live?

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My sobriety is going great: I don't want to drink. I walked past a bar last night and saw a beautiful, wild-eyed 20-something man-boy writing in a notebook and drinking what I would guess, from the glow of him, was his third beer, and I wanted to go in and tell him to walk away from that place and keep walking until the thirst had left him and he could find it slaked by other things. But I didn't because (a) that would be weird AF and entirely ineffective and (b) because my recovery beyond the dryness is like trudging through molasses: it's sticky, slow and I don't like it. I've downgraded my suicidal ideation from something that needed to be dealt with to something that just flickers in the distance of my downer moments, but the long walk I need to accomplish from feeling like there's no point in any of it to finding some point in some of it — and thinking I won't fail at anything I try at — is, like, entirely too elusive. I can't maintain a regular meditation, yoga or fitness schedule, and the early stages of an amicable and long-overdue separation from my spouse has me feeling wobbly too much of the time. But, hey, one day at a time, right? 

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I spent a good amount of time with new friends this month, and it's been, for lack of a better non-cringy word, healing. I have this deep fear that everyone kinda sorta hates me, even my friends. ESPECIALLY people who I think are cool -- those people probably hate me the most. But I've been trying to pay attention to people's actions and trying not to read body language as much and try to read their minds. I'm the grown-up version of a kid who spent way too much energy trying to read the minds of the adults around her to figure out if they were in a "safe" mood or not. That was time that could have been spent doing shit like sleeping well at night, but whatever. I honed the skill of people-reading, and it has served me well, or so I've thought. It's kept me from making many grown-up friends, and now that I'm getting a divorce, I'm trying to branch out and really make solid adult relationships. Turns out, I'm likable at least to some people. Some people keep responding to my bids for friendship and don't seem to be rolling their eyes at me when I turn my back. They seem to actually want to hang out and get to know me better, and in this time of high stress and crisis for me (I'm getting divorced), I really appreciate the small gestures. 

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Last month I upended my whole life and moved across the country to live with a recovering alcoholic I’m in love with, who also loves me. Last week I started a 16-month grad school program (I’m the second oldest person in my cohort; I know this because a lunatic woman had us line up in age order as an icebreaker activity at orientation). I’ve been going to a lot of meetings, AA and Al-Anon, though I haven’t gotten local sponsors yet (can you tell I’m beating myself up for that even though I’ve been here all of four weeks?). I’ve been doing an Al-Anon Zoom almost every morning as part of an attempt at a 90 in 90. I think the Al-Anon is helping. I have so many insecurities and brutal ways I think about myself and it seems like a time to address that. But also, the grad students do happy hours and talk about the sour beers they ordered while I suck on a Diet Coke and the local Al-Anons order margaritas at fellowship and isn’t it kind of crazy that when I’m living with someone in recovery is when I suddenly really remember how good a fucking margarita can taste? What a sicko. Also is Diet Coke an old lady drink?

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His plan was to get out of the debt through the thing that caused the debt.

I've been in crisis mode related to finances and stability/safety since my partner revealed that he had been purchasing basketball cards and racked up almost $20,000 in credit card debt over the last six months. His honesty came with defensiveness and a plan to move money around and pay off the debt with a “1 of 1” rare Wemby basketball card sale (get out of the debt through the thing that caused the debt). I’ve been struggling with the broken trust and felt overwhelmed, sad, and angry. I identify as someone who has a compulsive shopping problem (I qualify for the money program), and I have had periods of secretly shopping and getting into debt, which mirror my partner's recent spending and impact our trust. While I’ve tried to maintain compassion and connection these past few months, learning about our debt activated some deep historical wounds from my childhood (financial and social fall from grace for my family of origin after a lawsuit and jail time for one of my qualifiers). The stress, fear and trauma have caused some new anxiety symptoms - migraines and all day anxiety episodes.  I’m focusing on rebuilding trust one day at a time through open communication and self-care as a priority (but not overdoing it).

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I hate saying ‘no’ when people ask me to be their sponsor, but there’s only so much of me to go around.  

Why do I get asked so often? Perhaps my co-dependency sends out subtle bat-squeak signals that only addicts can hear. I wish I could flatter myself that it's because of the length or quality of my sobriety, but unfortunately, I know better. I have friends with many more years on the clock. They are keen to sponsor, but no one ever asks.

My own sponsor is a distant figure in my life these days. Christie took me through the steps twenty-five years ago. She is on her own spiritual journey now - in recovery, but not part of any twelve-step fellowships.  We are barely in touch and live on different continents and I don’t know if she even thinks of me as her sponsee. I tried with a few other sponsors, but it didn’t click. I will always think of Christie as my sponsor, because she’s the one who heard my Step Five and told me that half those things weren’t even my fault.

Long-time sober friends often confide the same dilemma. Their sponsor moved away, got old, went back out there, or found a different path. Being an unsponsored old-timer seems to be a shameful status shared only in whispers between close friends. 

What can we do? We look around the group. That person has a great quality of sobriety - but if she sponsored me? Yeah, I used to think that when I was fifteen years sober. You’ll learn.

What about those others, our near-contemporaries? We’re old mates. Sure, we can share a step 10 and talk it through, but it would be weird to create a hierarchy after all these years. And anyway, as I always say about myself, “Length of sobriety is no guarantee of sanity.”

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Today, recovery feels like every morning I have dropped the secret to function somewhere, like dropping the car keys between the seat and the console. I muscle through. I move the seat, try a different angle, and push them farther away. Every effort brings fear, frustration, and loneliness. I muscle through. I write in a journal, I meditate, I open the web browser, and I wonder where, in the folds of my brain, the secret to functioning is hidden. Recovery tells me it’s there and to keep looking.

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I’m back on my bullshit of not smoking weed. I’m getting to the age where other women I know are getting blood clots and having mini-strokes. I smoke too much too regularly not to pretend this isn’t something to be concerned with health-wise. Plus I want to stop speeding through my kids’ bedtimes to get high, and to know that when I think, I'm using my whole brain. The withdrawal is real, though, and my family has been getting the brunt of it. I’m sure they think I’m just a bitch/going through perimenopause (all things are true.) I guess a good thing is that compared to the last time I quit, I’m on a better dose of antidepressants, so I’m not constantly yelling at myself for putting myself in this position. I don’t have firm goals for approaching this (like what will I do the next time I’m socializing and people are passing a joint around?). Does that make me a dilettante who hasn’t gotten real about her addiction and possible use of weed to self-medicate her never-diagnosed ADHD? Maybe. But I saved over $100 at the dispensary this week, so I’ll take that, I guess. 

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I need to focus on what I've gained, not what I've lost.

It feels like my life has been on pause for more than a year now.  Before that I had a thriving business in a field I'm passionate about.  But I left because I needed to put my sobriety first.  I still wonder if that was a mistake.  Since then, I have been to treatment, had a 'recovery job,' relapsed, and then went back to treatment ... and now I am back where I was, seemingly with no direction and my savings running low. But what I have been learning in AA and my other support groups is to be grateful and to focus on what I've gained, not what I've lost.  My marriage is back on solid footing.  I've been meditating and praying, and having a spiritual foundation in my life feels good.  I have friends in AA and have rebuilt some of the relationships that were lost in my drinking years.  I know that if I don't take a drink or pop a pill today, it will be a good day, yet I can't stop worrying about tomorrow.

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This month I passed 5 years sober. I don’t know if I was expecting some recognition or applause but I got neither. My wife probably doesn’t even know it’s been 5 years. My family doesn’t know or is embarrassed to talk about it. I went to my annual family reunion party at my uncle’s. The booze was constantly on offer but I’m not really tempted anymore. I’m more scared than anything. I’m as terrified of the person I was as I am bored with the person I’ve become. I play basketball weekly with a small group of people I don’t know really well. I’m really afraid to be myself. Last week, I snapped at one of the guys for (what I thought was) a questionable foul call. One of the other players said “come on now, let’s just have fun.” It’s the one event I look forward to every week and I’m also worried one week they’ll tell me not to come back if too much of the “old me” comes out. No one else has ever done anything similar to what I did. I’m not like them, I’m hiding something. I don’t know how to have fun.

I’m thinking back to the times I can remember actually having fun. Most of them involve drugs or alcohol to some degree. Drinking was ALWAYS one thing to do. I quit drinking and doing drugs but I don’t know if I’m “recovering”. I just shoved half of myself into the trash and what’s left is sitting on the lid.

Drinking was fun until it wasn’t. It seems like life is trending the same way. Maybe I should try pickleball …

*****

I’ve been sober for two months leading up to my neuropsychological testing and after an MRI to take a closer look at what is happening inside my brain. The MRI showed some concern that I think is related to intense episodes of vertigo after my chemo treatment ended. I completed the first phase of neuropsychological testing yesterday. For weeks and weeks leading up to the testing, I made a plan to drive to my local cannabis dispensary after the testing, buy some pre-rolls, and go home and smoke them. The plan was perfectly reasonable, actionable, and totally fine. I decided that I could also go out with friends for cocktails to have my long-awaited martini or a negroni or something else. My better angel was talking to me constantly: “You feel terrible after one drink.” “Smoking pot puts you in a brain fog for days, and then you beat yourself up for not being productive.” “You’ve accomplished so much in the last two months. Why go back?” “What the fuck is wrong with you?” After the four-hour test, I got in the car, ate lunch, and drove home. I'm grateful I did pretty well on the test, which mostly involved recall. I called my husband to say everything went well. I was in a good headspace and heartspace. I’ve been in a good place. I never even noticed that I missed the exit to the dispensary.

*****

I'm feeling a lot of gratitude currently. After many years of exhaustive efforts to mask my depression—a grin-and-bear-it approach or numbing it with alcohol—I've started describing what's been going on in my head out loud. It feels like a gift, like a weight lifted. I can feel myself emerging from the murkiness of this recent depressive episode. Why do the episodes love to appear in Summer? So many beautiful days were spent in negative thoughts, with a sense of dread and self-hatred. I've been trying to focus on and take inventory of all the gifts I am afforded - my loving partner and kids, my home, my work, having a creative outlet and space to explore it, and now the community that is the small bow, and much more. The fall always feels like a new beginning to me, like a New Year’s Day approaching, but without the fanfare or resolutions. Today, and hopefully all season, I am hopeful about my journey towards sobriety. Addressing my drinking feels like shaky ground, but I’m here for it. Anyway, yeah, gratitude. 

*****

Day 9 of my 90 (AA meetings) in 90 (days). Still tough for me to swallow its smacks of organized religion, but if I can suspend my skepticism and disbelief to mainline a Bravo series, I can do the same for my own health and survival. I drove with my young daughter in the car when I shouldn't have—a couple times. I had not one drop of alcohol during my pregnancy with her, so I know I can do it again. And I will.

*****

I quit drinking two and a half years ago. It felt decisively over; the desire just evaporated like a fever dream. I had the hubris to think I might be one of the lucky ones sneaking through without needing a program. I figured the hours of therapy and listening to recovery podcasts had just worked some magic. Then, six months ago, I had a lovely dinner with a friend who suggested a martini, and I thought, "Why not? Maybe my relationship with alcohol has healed." That felt true for about a month, and then the sneaky solo drinking started again. It turns out I am not a unicorn and I do need help. Last week, I started up some meetings (Recovery Dharma). Now, I feel such a profound sense of peace and relief. Finally. 

******

I blink awake every day with a tug towards my phone, hoping someone, somewhere, has articulated care in the gap that sleep provides. A smaller voice reminds me I’m happier when I meditate. The tug wins instead, and I go to my phone. There are never any messages of love. Sometimes, people need things from me instead. I wonder: is this the promise a sober life provides? Cogent enough to be someone people extract things from forever?

*****

The guy that I relapsed with six months ago overdosed and died. I found out at work, when I was helping my new boss set up his computer. As soon as I read the text, I knew I would have to push every feeling I might possibly have about this down, really down deep into some other place that I guess I’ll get to later. I’m trying to look good for the new boss this week.

Earlier in the month, my sister was in town, and I laughed harder than I have in a really long time when we tried to do The Sunday Times crossword together. I think she’s starting to see me as a person again instead of just a liability. 

The guy who died — I had to Narcan him twice the week he lived at my apartment. I had plans for when he finally cleaned up for good, we would go to meetings and take hikes and stuff normal couples do. But I saw how strong his death drive was.

*****

My daughter is getting married in a week and I won’t be having champagne. 

When I first got sober 15 years ago, my children were both teenagers. In fact I often blamed their teenage mentality for causing my troubled relationship with alcohol to crash and burn. It was precisely in raising two teenagers that I realized my unfinished adolescent business was alive and raging just under the surface of my well-perfected adulthood.  

I still remember telling my 13 year daughter that I had decided to get sober.  The first thing she said was, “You’ll still have champagne at my wedding though, right?” I hesitated a moment, trying to find the words to make this terrible bummer acceptable. She recognized this and answered for me - “It’s OK mom it doesn’t matter.” 

As her wedding approaches next week, I hope it will still not matter.   

*****

My 4-year-old niece got her ears pierced. I was so excited for her that I took an old pair of hoops and rammed them through my closed ear piercings. It hurt. There was blood. Then I thought, what the fuck am I doing? Am I competing with a toddler? Why am I such a jackass? The earrings look ridiculous on me. They are too shiny. I feel like an idiot. How long do I have to leave them in to punish myself? At least another week, I think. 

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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.

If you want to support our podcast, you can donate here.

Here is the latest one about workaholism:

And, hey, if you think someone else will enjoy The Small Bow, you can give them a subscription.

Thanks for keeping us alive.

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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:

First Lesson

by Phillip Booth

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Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN