This is the job.
Photograph ©2011 David Bivins
Up until the second-to-last time, whenever I tried to quit drinking I did it in my spare time. I took the task seriously, but it wasn’t as important as maintaining the rest of my life–deadlines at work, soccer games on the weekend, helping to manage a community garden, making dinner, you know, life. Because the drinking “problem” was a hidden thing, and if I could work it out on my own, the rest of my life could just keep moving as usual and no one would be the wiser.
That second-to-last time, I sobered up for six weeks thanks to a combination of affirmation emails from Holly Whitaker’s Hip Sobriety and reading Annie Grace’s book on my Kindle several times. I made accommodations: I found the longest possible transit rides between a park in Brooklyn where I had to drop my kid off for a day camp and home. Two-hour bus rides were a “legit” way to have uninterrupted reading time.
It gave me six weeks of sobriety, then the monster crawled back out from under the bed.
The next time I treated it like a job. I joined Tempest, an online recovery group that grew out of Hip Sobriety, and I did all the things. I drank hot lemon water in the morning. I covered my desk area with affirmations written neatly on Post-Its. I meditated. I blocked out hours in my work calendar for “work meetings” that were actually recovery meetings. It didn’t work.
I signed up for another eight-week course. This time it worked a little better, but it was still squeezing out around the edges and rearing its head after ten days. I volunteered to be a community supporter for a third course and it came together right as I started.
I didn’t do much different within those first sixteen weeks, or even in the last eight. Every day I got up, drank the lemon water while I read the day’s affirmation, went to meetings (about five a week), brushed my teeth, flossed, etc. I just did it. I didn’t do every single thing. I never made much progress on a recovery map. And by the end of the second course, I stopped the hot lemon water. But I did everything else.
I hadn’t hit a “rock bottom” when I did my final push to get sober. I was tired of feeling like shit all the time. I was terrified that I would die and not be there for my family. Finding joy in anything had become so difficult that I had stopped reading and making music. I still found joy in my family, but it was fleeting. I saw people who lived with addiction who lived on the street around where I live and would say to myself “there but for the grace of god go I” (really, I said that to myself). I knew I could lose everything, that I had too many plates spinning, and it was actually amazing that they hadn’t all clattered to the ground yet and shattered into thousands of pieces.
I had it together just enough to treat getting sober like a job.
I realized that nothing else would matter anymore if I didn’t stop drinking. I would lose my job (which I actually did–after I got sober). My partner would leave me and I would lose my family. I’d have to sell off my music and photography gear. I imagined I would live a tiny basement apartment and work minimum-wage jobs to pay the rent. I thought it through, and I didn’t like it.
I have that thing where I think I can fix almost anything on my own. I’ve fixed my cars since I was a teenager. Replaced locks, plumbing, electrical. I’ve grown seedlings from seed and built raised beds in the garden. I learned to bake great bread (before the pandemic, if you’ll indulge a little brag).
Being in meetings with others in recovery neatly snapped that concept in two: I could still be highly capable, but I couldn’t fix people, and I couldn’t fix myself alone. This wasn’t a task that I could google my way through (though I tried). I couldn’t get it by watching YouTube videos or checking a Chilton’s manual out of the library. I had to let go. Let go of who I thought I was. Let go of my illusory power to make things better. Stop thinking I could transfer money out of another account to cover a bad check. I had to cry a lot.
I had to let a lot of plates fall and shatter and not worry about cleaning them up right away. I had to neglect other parts of my life and focus all of my energy on me. That might have been the hardest part–putting my recovery first. I went into it thinking that would be too selfish, but what was the alternative?
So it became my job. It’s still my job. Just like you can’t buy a house or a car and think they’ll be just fine without maintenance. Just like the puppy in one of my favorite first-season MadTV sketches, I have to feed the damn thing every day.
Being sober exposes the difficulties of everyday life. The maintenance on everything is more raw. I can’t escape from myself anymore, but I can face the things that I used to brush aside with a night of drinking. Scratch that–years of drinking. Decades. I’m still exposing nerves and pain that I plastered over (badly), and I know I’ll need help with a lot of that, too. But I can do it. It’s a good job. And I get to do it with you.
I love you,
David
