Tag: alcoholism

Human

I suppose I am a human being. I mean, that must be the assumption, right? I have always felt like a freak. I was frequently called “weird” and “a freak” growing up. I admit I have always been puzzled by the way people around me behave. They all seem to be in on a secret to which I have never been privy. What to do and when to do it. I have always done my best to act in ways that that meet with approval—whenever I can, anyway. I guess the word people use now is “masking.” I’m glad we finally have a term for people like me: neurodivergent. It doesn’t sound so bad when you say it like that.

Physically I am average in every way. I look normal, I suppose. Somewhat attractive, I am told. I have traced my ancestry and I come from a long line of everyday people. My genetics are English, German, Scot and Irish, in that order. I am a plain old ordinary guy, but somehow I was gifted and cursed at the same time. I’m hyper-sensitive, queer, musically inclined, and with a very high IQ. Oh, and also an alcoholic (with forty years of sobriety). If you are meeting me for the first time and are interested, scroll back and read “From Boom to Bust,” a thread in which I recount my childhood, and you will get a sense of who I am.

I hit a point in my autobiographical storyline where I had to stop and rethink how I wanted to proceed. I have been thinking about it a lot over the last few months and have decided that the theme must be “a man’s search for meaning.” Mine has been a journey of spiritual growth, but I have to take a moment to define what I mean by that term.

I don’t believe in God or gods, or in any of the things that are generally encompassed by the term “spiritual.” But there is no denying the reality of what I call “the human spirit.” Humans are interesting beings: we evolved like all animals, yet we have reached a point where we can reflect on ourselves and assess. If other animals have this capacity it’s hard to know, since they don’t talk to us, at least not in words. They do communicate, and we form bonds with them. How much they are like us I just don’t know. But humans, we talk a lot. Every person has a spirit about them. I mean all the things beyond the merely physical: qualities of character, vibes and energy. What we value shows up in everything we do. Most importantly, I believe in the plasticity of the human spirit. We can, by choice, cultivate in ourselves any qualities we wish, given time and persistence. The Buddha recommended developing compassion, generosity, and wisdom, and any of us can do that if we choose to prioritize those things. What we often forget is how amazing that is!

So, I see humans as animals with a little something extra. We are organic life forms, but something about us can transcend mere nature if we try. Inside of each of us is an image of what we are striving to become. I call that our higher self. When I do 12-step work, that’s the “higher power” I’m working with: the yearning to be more than I was yesterday, and the inherent power to move one inch closer each day, trusting the process.

It has been a long journey, and I have learned a lot. My life story includes many stages including grasping to make some sense of my life when I was in the depths of CPSD and alcoholism with a dissociative identity disorder, recovery with the help of 12-step programs and therapy, a decade as a devout Methodist, then as a “new-age guy,” then Buddhism. Eventually I became a licensed massage therapist so I could go back to college. I completed a double-major undergraduate degree in philosophy and economics and finally felt that life made sense.

Until lately. Now I am living through the descent into darkness, the ripening of negative karma, of my once great nation, with which I happen to share a birthday, July 4. My disappointment in my species, of which I have only ever barely felt a part, is crushing. Humans are more than our animalistic urges, but only barely. People can rationalize any atrocity if sufficiently motivated, and I’m seeing a lot of dark motives playing out in our public life. I am disgusted.

But I also feel a sense of urgency bordering on despair. I have so much I want to say that I feel I could pound away at this keyboard for the rest of my life and barely scratch the surface. Today I wonder if my country will die before I do, and if these “messages in bottles” will be picked up and read by anybody, or if I am just yelling into the wind. Regardless, writing in this blog is a duty I owe to myself and my loved ones, so I will proceed.

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What I knew of Shelly

I need to fill you in on what I knew of Shelly before that fateful night when we got together at a cast party. I mentioned that it came out of nowhere. Nothing in my story up to this point foreshadows it, and absolutely no one at the time would have pictured the two of us together. And yet there was a certain kind of inevitability to it, which became apparent to the two of us only gradually.

I first met Shelly when I was in eighth grade when we were in a speech and drama class together. She was in ninth grade, as was the majority of students in that elective. A part of me loved the course because it was so interactive. We did improvisational exercises, script reading, speeches, and so forth. I was painfully shy at that point, although I would have thrived on it in elementary school. Truth is, the abuse from my stepfather had really taken a toll on me socially. My social blossoming in the band room had yet to take place, and I felt a bit intimidated by the older kids in the class. But it was fun. Shelly and I got along just fine. She was very extraverted, joking and laughing all the time. She loved being the center of attention, and she was hilarious. She was five foot four with long blond hair, thick and straight. Her face was pretty enough but her ample Macedonian nose made her brown eyes look smaller. None of that mattered when she talked, because her voice and facial expressions were animated and fascinating. She could easily capture the attention of a room full of people.

One day in class a group of the ninth-grade boys began making jokes about her breasts, which of course everyone knew were the largest in the whole school. It was her claim to fame, and she didn’t seem shy about it. Although she was laughing it off and coming up with snarky retorts, I sensed she was beginning to get uncomfortable. I suddenly found myself telling the guys in a stern voice to knock it the hell off and leave her alone. They were shocked at my sudden intrusion, but they sheepishly complied. She acted like it was no big deal and she had the whole situation under control, but after the guys turned away she threw me a glance. There was a lot of information in that glance: surprise, gratitude, and curiosity all mixed together. One of my older sisters was an early developer (fifth grade) and back in those days men made all sorts of ignorant assumptions on that basis. I remember my sister crying at the way she was treated by boys and men of all ages, including sexual assault. That must be where my sudden courage originated. I felt empathy and indignation.

After that we conversed sometimes in class, and had fun doing improv together. I loved it when she laughed at my jokes. But that was our entire relationship: one semester of middle school getting to know each other a tiny little bit. In high school we would see each other around, but we never talked. She was very wrapped up in choir, drama, and musical theater. She had an amazing singing voice and was the strongest soprano in our high school. She often accompanied the choir on the piano. The two of us had been involved in two musical theater productions prior to that spring, where she now played the part of Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! while I played the piano in the orchestra pit. It was over the course of the many rehearsals where I was providing the musical accompaniment that we began to feel each other’s presence more and more.

Everyone in our school knew who both of us were, since she stood out in voice and stage work, I in music. But she being the extravert and me being the nerd, no one would have imagined us dating, including me. Especially with her being a year-and-a-half older. And when I say she was an extravert, I mean she was a true drama queen: president of the Thespians club, organizer of cast parties, godmother to the cast, locus of attention, and the life of every party. If you wanted to know any gossip, just ask her. If you were wondering where the next party was going to be, ask her. She cared about how everyone was doing, and they went to her for advice. She was also a straight-A student and was ambitious about her future: really a remarkable person, frankly. This is all I knew of her prior to that fateful night, except for one other detail.

I said she was the center of attention and the life of the party. Well she definitely did like to party. By that I mean drink. And make out with boys. Actually, she had a reputation. Maybe it started with the anatomical features that evoked assumptions about her proclivities, especially when she made the most of opportunities for humor with her Mae West impressions and bawdy jokes. She didn’t seem to mind that everyone considered her “the biggest slut at our high school.” She took it in stride, seemed to enjoy the notoriety. Perhaps that was why I wasn’t entirely surprised to find myself making out with her that night. My number had come up, I assumed. It was just my turn, perhaps.

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Radical Acceptance

Tomorrow I will resume work on the thread I have been doing about “From Boom to Bust,” but on this day I feel I should take a moment to offer a few reflections on sobriety. No one asked me to give a speech, but it’s my blog and I have the prerogative to say a few words here if I want to.

Today happens to be Saint Patrick’s Day. It is also the thirty-ninth anniversary of the day I decided to try sobriety one last time. This morning began as all mornings do, fixing a cup of coffee for myself to have during my first chess session of the day. My wife, Sarah, gave me a little squeeze of appreciation as she congratulated me for making it through another year sober. I smiled. A few moments later my phone buzzed with a text message from my ex-wife, Laura, also offering a celebratory sentiment. This year we will have been divorced for thirteen years, having been married for twenty-two years before that. She is the mother of my biological children. I thought to myself that it’s nice that we still wish each other well. My mother sent me a “birthday” card every year for as long as she was able. Reflecting on all this made me think, “Wow, what does it say when there is a general consensus that the world is a better place just because I don’t drink anymore?” I guess my drinking must have been pretty bad.

I came-to that morning of March 17, 1985, which also happened to be a Sunday, after a crazy binge that began Thursday after work. There will be future posts with more details about how I had hardly drawn a sober breath for the previous eight months, but suffice it to say for now that what made this Sunday morning different from the previous ones was not the fact that I was contemplating quitting drinking. What made it different was that for some reason I realized that it was a loop: I had been having these thoughts every Sunday for weeks now. I would resolve to take a break, if only to clear my head and get a little perspective. But by Monday I would forget, and find myself drinking again as if my resolution had never happened. This had been going on for weeks, and only on this occasion did I have the mental clarity to realize I was stuck. Eight months earlier I had come to a point of radical acceptance of my fate. I was moving out of the apartment I shared with my then girlfriend because my new love interest wouldn’t have sex with me as long as I was living with someone else. Why? In her words, “because I’m decent.” That left me no choice but to get my own place. As I was leaving, my girlfriend tearfully asked me why I was being so cruel. I looked at her intensely and said, “I’m doing this to protect you. I’m dying, and there’s not a damn thing you or I can do about it. I’m getting out of your life to spare you.” In that moment I had every intention of dying drunk, and I knew it wouldn’t be more than a year before it happened.

My parents had also reached a point of radical acceptance. They hadn’t heard from me in months, but they had a sense of what was going on. Divorced for years, both of them were attending Al-Anon meetings in their respective towns. My dad had twenty-one years of sobriety at that point, but his biggest challenge had become what to do when your child is dying of the same disease. They prayed for me and had their friends praying for me also. Both braced themselves for the seemingly inevitable bad news that could arrive at any time, probably from a third party, that I had met my end. It was a dark time.

But that morning was different, somehow. The miracle arrived in the form of a question: what if I am wrong? I had acquiesced in the knowledge that it was my fate to die drunk. I had stopped fighting it. I was embracing it. I had burned all my bridges and was just trying to go for all the gusto I could on my way out. People I didn’t even know were stopping me and offering warnings and advice, it was so clear from my behavior that I was going to flame out. It must have been sad to know me then. But that morning, for some reason, it occurred to me that maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn’t meant to die drunk. What if I was supposed to recover? That was a terrifying thought, because every aspect of my life was a complete shambles. To try to turn things around now was going to be incredibly difficult. Even just my financial situation was astonishingly hopeless. I had just lost my latest girlfriend, I was about to lose my job, and it seemed like no one at all was buying my horseshit anymore. I had run out of cash and had only enough in my pocket to buy a pack of cigarettes or a six-pack, but not both. When I realized that I had been vainly trying to stop for several weeks and forgetting each time, I realized that this might be my very last chance.

As I sat there contemplating the question of which fate I might be destined for, another question hit me. What if it’s a lie? What if the one thing that has been making my life a little bit bearable, the one thing that gave me a moment or two of relief from the hatred I felt for life and for myself was actually causing all the problems? What if instead of being my one true friend, alcohol was actually what was killing me? If that were true, I owed it to myself to at least try to get sober one last time. Ugh. But if it were true, and I were to pick up that next drink and begin the slippery slide to oblivion knowing what I knew, it would be very embarrassing, to say the least. What a fool I would have been! So, that’s how it started. All these years later, I have still not picked up that next drink. It turns out that it was not my destiny to die drunk after all.

I brought my phone to my wife to show her the text from my ex-wife, and made a wry comment about how bad my drinking must have been for everyone to celebrate the fact of my sobriety. But neither my current wife nor my ex-wife has ever seen me drink! Sarah said, “Well, it’s always been clear that your sobriety is very important to you, so I’m happy for you.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Of course it’s very important to me. It is the foundation of every good thing in my life, everything valuable thing about me as a person. Yes, it’s very important to me. Sometimes I mention to someone that I have been sober for a long time and they respond with, “You must be very proud of yourself!” No. I went back to college in my fifties, thirty years after I dropped out, and busted my butt over the next three years to graduate with a double major, summa cum laude. I am very proud of myself for that! But sobriety? I only feel gratitude for it. Grateful that I escaped the whirlpool and I don’t have to do that shit anymore. And I am grateful every single day that none of my kids has ever seen me drink. Very grateful, indeed.

I wrote a post a few years back called The Wisdom Prayer in which I talk about how pointless it is to accept anything that is not an actual fact. For example, for thirty years I accepted the “fact” that I had missed my chance, that it was too late to go back to college! People in recovery sometimes seem to elevate the idea of Acceptance into some kind of general principle, as if it is the key to everything. But like trying to use a screwdriver when what you need is a wrench, practicing “acceptance” in the wrong situation can keep you stuck in a victim mentality. In such situations what is needed is Courage, and to know that, you need Wisdom. But I want to share something, a fact which I have accepted as such all the way to the core of my being. When I think about all the things that could possibly happen to me — illness, bankruptcy, tragedy, horror — I am unable to imagine a situation that I couldn’t make worse by taking a drink. Honestly. That particular form of radical acceptance keeps me sober.

This is the first year I can remember where I haven’t had a single drinking dream. You know, the nightmare in which I am at some sort of social gathering walking around talking to people with a half-finished drink in my hand. I suddenly realize that I am drinking and wonder, how long have I been doing this? And in the dream I think back and realize that it has been happening for a while now, and that somehow I have lost my sobriety without even noticing. I take these dreams as a warning. In my youth (I was twenty-three when I took my last drink), whenever I would resume drinking after a few weeks or months it would happen without fanfare. No drama. I would just “forget” somehow that I wasn’t drinking. I have no doubt that if I were ever to start drinking again it would happen like that. Terrifying! But I haven’t had any of those dreams this year, thankfully, not even during the Annual Dreary Rehash. The past year has had it’s share of challenges — a couple of colonoscopies, people around me having mental and physical health challenges, financial stress, a sense of impending doom for Western Civilization — but I have a good life. I believe that as long as I am grateful every day for the gift of release from the horrors of alcoholic drinking, I will be fine.

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Grandpa Norris Had Two Last Names

According to my research into my ancestry my grandfather appears with different last names on the 1920 and 1930 census. In one case he uses his mother’s maiden name. I suspect he alternated between them as necessary. He and his brother appear in the 1910 census together listed in an orphanage in Bangor, Maine. I’m not even sure if they had the same father. Rumor has it that their mother was an alcoholic who placed her boys in the orphanage when she couldn’t take care of them herself. I have the impression that her marriage was also on and off again. Norris was handsome, slight of build, with a swarthy complexion. It is possible there was some Portuguese in his ancestry, but not officially. I guess I am implying that my great grandmother was a “woman of ill repute.” It would fit. My apologies: I could also be completely wrong about this. However you cut it, life was difficult for young Norris.

I am told that he was charismatic and charming, good with the ladies, and addicted to gambling. He also had a volatile temper, especially when drinking. As I described in an earlier post, my grandmother never forgave him for his abandonment of her and their baby son. Throughout her life she showed many signs of severe trauma. She received shock treatments in the 1950s for her depression. Given the way both my dad and I took after him, not just in appearance, but in personality as well, she seemed leery of both of us at times. She seemed much more comfortable with her second son, my father’s half-brother. When she remarried, her husband adopted my father and we all have his last name. My biological grandfather, my father, and I all seem to have been cut from the same cloth, including the reaction to alcohol and the temper, but also the charm. One story about Norris that stuck with me is how one time when he was hungover he threw his entire breakfast, plate and all, against the wall. I know that my temper was a problem for my family when I was growing up, and I am sure my dad was no different.

The last thing I will say about Norris is how he came to play a direct role in my recovery. In the final two years of my drinking I lived in San Francisco. As I got closer and closer to the edge my life began to fall apart. Eventually I stopped communicating with my parents entirely. My world was getting darker. Shame and guilt grappled with rage and confusion as I thrashed about pursuing momentary urges, continuing my deliberate slide towards death. I had decided during my first year there that I would not overtly commit suicide, but I was convinced that I would die drunk before I was twenty-five and I didn’t mind the thought. I found out later that both my father and my mother, long divorced, had each lifted me up in prayer: she in her church prayer circle, he in his Al-Anon group. He had started attending Al-Anon because of me. They both came to accept that they were going to lose me to the disease. But just a few weeks before my recovery began, unbeknownst to me of course, in a state of desperation he began to pray to the spirit of Norris, the father he never had the chance to meet. He said something like, “Hey, we both have suffered from the affliction of alcoholism. You died young, but I was lucky enough to recover. Now my son is fighting the same battle and it looks like he’s not going to make it. Wherever you are now, is there any way you could maybe put in a good word, pull some strings, help him?” He persisted in this prayer daily for several weeks until, out of the blue, I called him one evening, reaching out for help. Now, is any of this real? Ancestor worship is one of the oldest human expressions of religion. Who knows? What I do know is that during those final weeks of my drinking there was a series of weird coincidences, spooky experiences, and seemingly miraculous encounters the accumulated effect of which led directly to the breakthrough that reversed the course of my life. I guess I choose to believe that grandpa was indeed able to pull a few strings and call in a few favors. Why not?

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My Lineage

Content Warning: frank discussion of alcoholism and recovery, with family details

I am third in a direct father-to-son line of alcoholics. Not people who “drank too much,” but alcoholics of the “hopeless variety” –those whom alcohol affected in a crazy way, who never took a “normal” drink in their lives. My father hit bottom when he was thirty-two, soon after the birth of his fifth child when I was two years old. I have no memories of his drinking, but I suppose my older siblings might. I do have many vivid memories of attending AA meetings with him from an early age. My dad never met his own father.

Grandpa Norris died when my father was ten days old. At that time they lived in East Los Angeles. While my grandmother was still recovering from childbirth my grandfather was partying in the little town of Mojave. This was 1932, before Las Vegas was a thing. I am told that in those days Mojave, about one hundred miles north of LA, was the place to go to play cards. Norris got lucky and won big. He was drunk when his car crashed, killing him and his passenger, who happened to be his brother’s wife. This is what I recall being told growing up. My father believed that his tires had been slit in revenge for winning at cards, but however you slice it, the circumstances of his death are compromising. My grandmother never forgave him.

My dad was a “periodic drunk,” which means he was mostly sober, but occasionally, perhaps every ninety days or so, he would go on a binge. During these binges he would lose all control, black out, and come-to after about three days. He told me the last time it happened he came out of a blackout while on the road to Susanville, where he and my mother lived some years before, many miles from the town of Woodland where we lived at the time. He had no idea what day it was or why on earth he would be making that drive. He pulled over, found a pay phone and called my mother. The last thing he remembered was partying on Friday night. It was now Monday, and the local high school had been calling the house to find out why he had not shown up to teach his classes. It was a very sobering situation. He sought out the local fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and began his recovery. He had thirty-five years of sobriety when he passed away of lung cancer at the age of sixty-six.

Despite having grown up surrounded by sober alcoholics and receiving education and warnings about the danger of inheriting the malady, I developed a drinking problem of my own. It was apparent even at fourteen that I didn’t process alcohol in a normal way. I partied a lot in high school, and by the time I was nineteen I went to AA myself to get sober. I will be writing a lot about my experiences in future posts, but for now let’s just say that I was given an ultimatum by my then girlfriend and future ex-wife that I had to choose her or the “cult” of AA. I chose her and drank for another four years. Eventually I hit bottom at twenty-three and have been sober ever since.

Posted on by Kirk