I awoke facing the wall. My mouth like cotton, I sensed something amiss and an old familiar feeling. When you wake up from a wild night where memories are sparse, or non-existent, a moment of panic can grip you due to the uncertainty of place and time. The drab detox dorm room had two beds in it, with waterproof mattresses. I rolled over to sunlight blasting through a window and the first thing I saw outside was a Coors Light billboard near a highway. The irony was striking. I had been drinking that watered-down slop the day before, along with whatever else I could funnel into my face.
An old familiar panic gripped my forearms and shoulders, and stirred in my gut. I had noticed this many years before, even during my first mornings after drinking. If humans had souls, or a root essence, I thought, you could experience it via its absence in shaky morning-afters when the five senses lay crippled by the hangover. As the saying goes, “Faith will tell me God is present when my human senses fail.” Except it was kind of opposite of that, because with my failed human senses, I felt the horrific emptiness because I had wholly rejected faith.
The notion filled me with dread that some part was missing, or had departed, or was still downtown at the bar, and I needed that essence to return to me. I needed that part to put the rest of the senses and self together again. Whenever I had awoke in a house full of responsible people, my typical response to this lost feeling was to show artificial health and vigor, to get up and appear normal and recovered, despite wanting to sleep, or disappear, or die. I’ve noticed the same in others, often at business conferences, when a drinker clearly had a rough night or did something foolish, but they rise and pretend that all is well. The lengths a hungover person goes to in pretending stuns me, from my own experiences and from watching others.
To my horror, a clock on the wall showed 4 o’clock…in the afternoon. Having slept all day and not yet called home, this clock signified my betrayal of my wife and children. The mistake I had made this time could not be ignored or charmed over. This error in judgment and prudence leapt past the usual cause of grievances in our household. Worst of all I had been drunk driving while I had a responsibility for my children and should have woke up at home, not in detox. I knew immediately that this would be a scar upon all of my relationships. All of them. Everyone important in my life suffered because of my choice the night before.
Over the coming hours I cycled through the process of denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Then came the shame and the guilt. I had learned about the difference between shame and guilt in a prior attempt to stop drinking. Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, whereas shame is feeling bad about who you are and that you don’t deserve love. Since I like to hold pity parties for myself, I tended to choose a la carte from both of those classifications.
Several years before the arrest, I had tried earnestly, voluntarily, to quit drinking, doing a 28-day outpatient program, to fix myself and address the question of “What is wrong with me?” The propensity to drink and make a mess of life ate at me enough that I had decided to get help. In this circle of misfits, I nearly walked out on the first day when I read the 12 steps on the wall. The second step required capitulation to a “…Power greater than myself.” That verbiage really, really bothered me.
But I stayed. I stayed in that program and did the 28 days, learning a great deal about addiction and how my “lizard brain” works. Indeed, I still know to this day that it is my lizard brain that wants Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 3 AM.
At the urging of counselors, I attended AA meetings, and even tried to believe in a Higher Power. At the time I was atheist or agnostic, depending on the hour, and I leaned left politically, mostly only to lean away from the religious right. My position was not for specific issue, but merely against all things religious, which I felt poisoned the world. At that point in my life I subscribed to the sermons of Hitchens and Dawkins. The deconstruction of my belief in the Christian faith is a long story. More on that later.
Of the many, many things I learned in that 28-day recovery group was that rich or poor, left or right, educated or uneducated - alcohol and drugs do not discriminate. These substances will overpower the strongest will and beguile the most cunning mind. They will feed a person’s vanity and shape an ego into whatever form desired. They will lift you up or bring you down, whichever you want or think you prefer. For me, drinking was the “tree of knowledge.” I suppose that makes Captain Morgan the serpent. Replace the symbolism in Genesis with whatever your vice and I suspect that the same story can be told. Whatever entices and mesmerizes and steals goodness away from you, and replaces love in your heart with negativity is probably your own apple on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Unfortunately for me, even if I avoid one tree, sometimes I find a second tree, or a third.
Detox is a primarily a waiting area, where you dry out until you can be taken to jail. Hence, each drunkard is allotted ample time to think and commiserate with others in the same state of limbo. What frustrated me most was that a month before the arrest I thought I had made the life changes I needed. I had quit tobacco and started exercising, and I was learning to drink socially, controllably. For a month I had done well.
So what happened?
The same thing that always happened.
In hindsight, the spur to action a month earlier had been from drinking too much on a work trip and regretting the outcome. Thus, like every cycle before this cataclysm, I trod the same path: drinking lightly for a time, then back to drinking heavily, onto regret and shame, followed by abstaining and declaring a life change, and lastly looping back to the beginning.
The same cycle repeated for twenty years.
A drinker will always forgive himself in order to drink again. The only difference this time was legal consequences, which apparently is what it took (after all, the system is called the “Department of Corrections”). I needed a correction. Until the arrest I wasn’t unscrambling the obvious message to wake up.
An AA group visited to the detox facility to hold a meeting. I joined their meeting, almost eager to share that I needed to join AA and get on track, as the disturbance in my family and home life was quaking in me.
I had tried AA before, for a while. But rather than 12-stepping I did 9 steps and then dumped my sponsor. He had urged me to unhitch from the past and latch onto AA, full-time, but the group felt cultish and separated from the world that I had to live in. Too much God, I thought. I wanted something more scientific, like SMART Recovery or psychological explanations or pharmaceutical solutions. I had read the Big Book and other AA materials and found them fascinating at first, but it didn’t stick. Reading and re-reading the Big Book struck me as pseudo-scriptural and the writing didn’t feel profound enough to merit such continual attention. The chapter titled “We Agnostics” made me realize what an unoriginal thinker I was, as I was like the chapter’s archetype: “…so touchy that even a casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism.”
It always stings when I find out how predictable and regular I am.
My tendencies, I felt, did not need the full treatment of AA, as “some of us are sicker than others.” Truly, some people have a much worse struggle with alcohol than I did, and I listened in pity to those people. Surely those people needed the whole program. But I had issues with parts of the Big Book and felt that AA took an anti-intellectual turn in saying that problem drinkers tend to “…read wordy books and indulge in windy arguments, thinking this universe needs no God to explain it.” To me those were fightin’ words, since books and knowledge sustained me. I saw science and progress as the ultimate good, and spiritualism and religion as backward-facing fanaticism and wizardry.
In my half-hearted AA attempt, I reached the “Pink Cloud” stage where everything was wonderful, where quitting drinking was easy, and life was grand. Call it my Pollyanna phase. Then, as the AA members and alcohol counselors warned me, the Pink Cloud passed me by and regular cold fronts came around with blustering sleet and negative windchill. I lasted about a year sober, got my one-year chip as evidence, but never fully bought into the program. I said the prayers and joined hands and even (kinda, sorta) liked saying the Our Father with the others. I almost always left an AA meeting feeling lifted up (although my sponsor warned me that feeling good wasn’t the point of meetings, but it was a nice side effect).
I can only praise AA, despite not attending any more. So many people slam it for not being the answer, that there is “too much God” in it. But it gave me a toolkit for dealing with life that was far better than the portrayal of AA in TV and movies. TV’s portrayal of the organization is absurd and disconnected from reality. The numerous proverbs I learned in those rooms still help me in the grind of days. At a meeting, people drop these one-liners into conversation that seem backwards at first, but then become profound upon inspection. I would marvel at the phrases after hearing them the first time. Sometimes they don’t make sense until a day or week later. “Surrender to win.” “Wear the world like a loose shirt.” “Don’t trust your feelings.” “There’s nothing so bad happening in your life that a drink can’t make worse.” “Principles over personalities.” “One day at a time.” “Progress, not perfection.” “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” “Do the next right action.” “Thy will, not mine, be done.” “Perfection kills.” “An expectation is a planned resentment.”
Hundreds of these sayings exist and I mutter them still today, and probably always will. I could write much about each of those sayings and how each has helped me interpret my predicaments. They also summon a memory of a person or a face from a meeting. But above and beyond all of those sayings, in usefulness and practical application to life, is the one prayer that is said at every meeting. The Serenity Prayer. Yes, the corny Serenity Prayer.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Trite or not…this sentence acted as a gateway for me to even consider, to even deign or lower my high and mighty self, to accept that there might be a Higher Power or God over me. It also taught me that whenever I use the words “trite” or “corny” or “cliche” in a sentence, I expose my cynicism toward anything wholesome or time-tested. Those words are like my tell in a poker game. I liked to apply those labels to anything old-fashioned or traditional. Those trite and cliche things were tired and expired, and I was so modern and smart. It’s funny now, with hindsight, my way of life was what had become tired and expired, and certainly cliche.
In the beginning, I would not say the first word - “God” - because I wanted to secularize the prayer, and I felt that the prayer still worked without the first word. However, without the first word, the rest still implies that you are speaking to some Higher Power, some “thing” that can grant the serenity. Otherwise, to what are you asking for Serenity if not the spirit of the universe, or Gaia, or Zeus, or…God?
So much of life can be cut to the chase with this little prayer, yet it is so simple. The Serenity Prayer in its plainness is like a razor that can cut through hard problems like butter. If I were to successfully apply the principles of that prayer alone to my daily decisions, with no other rules or aphorisms or moral guidance, I could quickly separate the meaningful from the useless. You take the problem, thought, or decision and ask yourself: “Can I change this?” If not, then you drop the subject because it’s beyond your power. If you can change it, then you decide if you are willing to take up the challenge to change it, and if you are willing, you do the work. If you are not willing, then you don’t, and again you drop it. Surely the wisdom part is the tricky thing, especially for someone who is all too human, like myself. The prayer provides a little Venn diagram for your problems, where you can place life’s issues into one of two circles: Accept or Change. Wisdom is knowing into which circle to push each problem.
By the time I had attended the AA meeting in detox, I had met many of the other people in residence with me, and found jailhouse lawyer types, hard alcoholics in denial, and drug addicts who had somehow even found a way to get drugs into detox, which baffled me. Like a field trip, detox feels like a tour, or a museum of people that are captured from their natural habitat and paused for a time of reflection.
After 36 hours of sobering up, after some tears and anxiety, the arresting police officer returned and picked me up for my next stop, the county jail. Cuffed again and back in the police car, I discussed what would happen next with the police officer, who told me I was one of his favorite arrests due to the interesting conversations that we had during booking, none of which I remembered, other than a snapshot or two captured in my mind during the blackout.
An awareness of my powerlessness had set in through the hours of detox, and the handcuffs were the physical reminder of my lack of control while I rode in the car. No choices could be made. No media, no snacks, no smart phone. Possibly, for the first time, I understood what freedom actually meant, since in taking these things away, I only then realized what unbridled freedom my entire life had been as an American in the late 20th century and early 21st century. I had been born in the most “free” time in history, with the least personal struggles - no war, no disease, no death - and yet I had invented my own struggles and even felt depressed most of the time. In fact, I had even been taking depression medication for years, all during the easiest and least challenging period in history. I kept thinking about the AA saying that drinkers suffer from a “spiritual malady” and suffer from their own will. This sense of powerlessness did a ride-along as the police car entered the county jail intake door.
