The Other Side of Intimacy – A Guest Infact.
After I wrote my post on intimacy, I received a lot of feedback on twitter. I have been, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, surprised by just how many people in the scientific community have had their lives affected by alcoholism. Below is a Guest Infact from a female scientist, describing her marriage and the impact alcohol has had on it.
I do need to put a trigger warning up front for potentially distressing sexual situations.
I was deeply moved by the post on alcoholism and intimacy that @Dr24hours wrote. As with many of his posts, it offered me the chance to understand the other side of a problem I’ve experienced. I’m so thankful he is sober and able to blog with honesty and openness so other can learn from his experiences. I’m going to attempt to approach this subject with the same openness and honesty as Dr24hours, but I’m not sure I can. My wounds are still fresh, but I’ll see how this goes…
I have to admit that I don’t know that much about alcoholism. I’m not sure what comes first, the alcohol or the alcoholic. So many of the personality traits that Dr24hours describes sound like my husband. The thought patterns, the self-esteem issues, just about everything. But, he was not an alcoholic when we met. He enjoyed alcohol in the causal way that most people do. We’ve gotten drunk a few times, and had fun doing so, but it wasn’t something that happened regularly. The longer we were together, the more he drank. I don’t think it was cause and effect, but a byproduct of our circumstances. We got married right before I started a PhD program, he got a masters degree, and we had a kid. Lots of life happened has happened in the last 10 years. When kiddo was 3, I defended and we moved for my postdoc. He has never been particularly motivated to find jobs and when we moved, he had even less motivation. We used the excuse that he would be a stay at home dad. But, he didn’t want to stay at home. He didn’t really enjoy it and neither him, nor the kiddo, were thriving. I was stressed and felt guilty for moving the family. He started using alcohol as an escape. He finally got a job that he liked, but then it ended after 4 months when funding fell through (yay soft money science!). That sent him to alcohol even more.
He had little motivation to even look for jobs. He would fall into the thought pattern of not wanting to apply because nobody would want him anyway. He would count himself out of the running before even applying. I ended up writing several cover letters for him and helping him apply to a few jobs. He had interviews, but nothing came through. Then he got a few months of work on the soft money research position again, but he his tasks had shifted and he didn’t enjoy what he was doing, or the commute. Every day he would come home and have a beer in his hand before he sat down his work bag. He would pick up a beer and check out. He didn’t drink till he passed out, but he had a beer in his hand from the time he came home to the time he got ready for bed. If I tried to talk to him about it, he became defensive. At one point I had asked him to cut back on the beer and he replied, “it’s the only thing I have to look forward to at the end of the day.” It made me so sad that he felt this way. Even if he wasn’t excited to see me at the end of the day, how could he put beer above our daughter? My dad had said something similar to my mom not long before their divorce. I remember her telling me how much it hurt. I remember going for a walk and calling her to tell her. We both cried.
As Dr24hours describes, our intimacy started to fade as the drinking increased. He drank as a way to emotionally check out. I felt like it was my duty to “be a good wife and give him want he needs” but his low self-esteem meant that I had to initiate any intimate activities. And, well… as Dr24hours describes, alcoholism is associated with sexual dysfunction. This made intimacy harder for both of us, eventually all aspects of intimacy faded away. There was no kissing, no hugging, no handholding. Alcohol combined with his insecurity and inability to connect on an emotional level also led him to make some very bad decisions. I became an object to him and little more. I felt like shit and I feared him. If anyone else had done it to me, I would have called the police, or left immediately and never returned. But I couldn’t, I had to see him the next day. I had to continue to live with him and my shame. He was not someone I wanted to be with and I didn’t give a shit about being “a good wife” any more, I just went into survival mode. I did what I could to keep it from happening, but it didn’t always work.
I was working my ass off trying to do my postdoc and keep us financially afloat, but I didn’t even have my friend, my partner, at home. I couldn’t talk to him about my good or bad days at work because he didn’t want to talk. He had nothing to say so he just watched TV and drank beer. I felt emotionally abandoned. Conversations about alcohol went nowhere. He’d get defensive and walk away. I knew there was no way I could talk to him about our intimacy problems. I knew he was hurting and would be ashamed, if he was even aware of his actions (I have since learned that he was aware of what he was doing, but at the time I didn’t know if he was too drunk to remember). I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone about what was happening. I felt ashamed. I felt like it was my fault.
While all this was going on, we also hit the wall financially. We couldn’t make ends meet on my salary alone, but he couldn’t find a job (in his field) and he didn’t really want to work. I had a few interviews for TT positions, but it wasn’t looking like anything would come through. I had another year of funding, but started looking at other postdocs to see if there was one that paid better or was in a location where he might be happier.
I ended up getting a postdoc that did pay better. I really hoped that moving would get him out of his rut. The next place had a smaller kitchen and no garage, so there was no place for the “beer fridge.” He liked the our location and was much happier. But he still drank and his actions continued. He was having fun staying at home. He went for bike rides, he hiked, he cataloged his record collection. The kiddo had entered school and was gone 6 hours a day. He had plenty of time to do his own thing and really enjoyed himself. I was glad that he was happy again, but it also showed me that his depression and our previous location wasn’t the root of our problem. I was paid more, but it still wasn’t enough to make ends meet. Once again, the credit card was piling up. He deferred his student loans (without discussing it with me). I was stressed about applying for TT jobs, learning new things at work, and working till 1 or 2 am every day. I was frustrated with my work and frustrated with home. I would tell him that I was very worried about my ability to support us. He didn’t think he should apply to jobs till after I got a permanent position. I told him I was worried that it wouldn’t happen for a while, if at all (like many people I’m seriously worried about the current state of scientific funding). I felt crushed by the responsibility of being the breadwinner and having all the financial pressure fall on me. I also felt so emotionally abandoned. I was alone. I was trapped. I hit the wall. I was crying every morning and every night. He would see me crying and say nothing. There are so many different kinds of intimacy, and I had none of them. I can’t say it was all because of alcohol, but alcohol played a role.
I have since entered counseling. My getting help has led to marriage counseling, and now individual counseling for him as well. He is no longer drinking, but our marriage is over. We have not had intimacy for nearly two years. It is hard to imagine it ever coming back. For now, we are working on moving forward and parents and friends.
Developments at MECMC (and Elsewhere!).
Today I meet with my boss and her co-director, their boss, and her boss (the CMO). I am giving a short presentation on the state of simulation efforts at MECMC , and then we’re all going to discuss how to move forward. Yesterday in prep I was talking to my boss’s co-director (who I will often also just refer to as “my boss”), and he told me that he wanted to see MECMC really invest in my work, develop a department for long-range efforts, build a bridge between research and quality improvement and have me direct the whole thing.
Um. How did I get here? Now, that’s still just a guy spitballing with me in his office. But the CMO seems to have a similarly ambitious vision for my ideas and industry. I’ll tell you more when I know more. But it is decidedly exciting that people with authority at one of America’s finest medical institutions are interested in developing my skills and putting me in leadership positions. That they want to explore a new direction, take risks, and invest in me. And it’s terrifying.
My path from lazy drunk to valuable asset has been blindingly fast, dazzlingly blurred. And unremarkable. In the sense that I have seen it happen so many times, for so many drunks who get sober. We rise fast through professional ranks, as a rule, because we are have a sense of urgency about our work. Employment becomes a source of serious gratitude. Having a job and being able to be self-sufficient and contribute feels like an incredible privilege after years in sloth and uselessness.
Of course, not everything I do works out. And I don’t always do a great job. I just got a brutal review from PLoS One on my recent manuscript. They complain that my simulated cohort is unclear and that they therefore can’t evaluate the appropriateness of my methods. And that’s probably true. I rushed the paper because I wanted to finish it before leaving my last position and really it needs to cite another paper that’s still under review itself. I shouldn’t have submitted it until the other one was accepted and could be cited. It’ll clarify everything. But I’ll still need to rewrite the second.
And the R03eq that was funded looks like – after months of drama – it can be accepted. I had the conflict of interest discussion with my bosses, and they agree that as long as I don’t use MECMC time and resources, it’s fine for me to work on the grant. Which is an exciting prospect, and will be a very cool project. And it’ll involve me having an excuse to buy a piece of software that I really want. And my colleague is the kind of guy who can build amazingly interesting papers out of small projects, so I’m excited to finally be able to collaborate with him.
So, time to go prepare for my presentation. While I’ve been writing this, a new colleague, in her third week with MECMC, has been complaining to another colleague that we’re not doing things “the right way”, by which she means the way she thinks people should do things. She’s nice and competent and might be right that in this case, her way is better. But I am unbelievably grateful that I no longer have to think that my perspective is the only perspective. I no longer have to think that people need to do things my way or the wrong way. I’m so grateful I don’t need to have people adhere to my vision in order to feel useful.
I have such a wonderful life, today. Because of my sobriety, I am open to so many things. And free from so many things. I am alive.
Intimacy.
One of the least discussed and most personal aspects of recovery is intimacy. There are many different kinds of intimacy and I’m talking about them all. For recovering addicts, there will be challenges with respect to nearly every type of relationship. Intellectual, emotional, romantic, and sexual. Alcoholism pervades our whole beings, saturates all of our relations when we drink. And like everything else we do, it poisons the way we interact intimately.
I drank for about 12 years. And I came to intimacy late in life. I was already a drinker when I started having intimate relationships. As my drinking progressed, it overwhelmed all my attempts to establish deeply intimate relationships. My ex-wife used to tell me that I was choosing alcohol over her. It made me furious. Because it was true. But I didn’t understand why she couldn’t let me have both. I didn’t understand that she was a real person with real needs and desires and that having a drunk, petulant husband wasn’t on either list.
When we finally enter recovery, and start doing the 12 steps, one of the things we address in the fourth step is a sex-conduct list. We lay out who we’ve wronged sexually and what we’ve done, so as to establish what amends we need to make, and what resentments we need to process. I’ll venture to say that most alcoholics have been less than sterling examples of healthy sexual conduct in their drinking careers. And that process is crucial to our recovery. But it doesn’t prepare us for what comes next.
Intimate relationships can be incredibly painful for me, in the midst of all of their wonder. Feeling deeply connected to someone and sharing with them brings with it a deep pain. A pain that reflects, I think, all of the times when I longed for – needed! – intimate support when I was young and didn’t get it. Sometimes, the most painful words a person can ever say to me, the words that cut closest to the bone and provoke the greatest hurt, are “I love you.” Learning how to be loved is an astonishingly difficult process for most of the alcoholics I know. We are deeply ashamed of ourselves, and do not believe we have the right to happiness or joy or love or intimacy.
Sex brings with it a whole host of other problems. When you spend a number of years only having sex drunk, it can be difficult to have sex sober. Some alcoholics suffer from erectile dysfunction, or premature ejaculation (I’m sure the list of female sexual dysfunction in sobriety is long, but I know little about it.). Shame can compound these problems. I was very fortunate. My ex-wife and I stayed together for about two years, and managed to have a pretty healthy sex life during that time. So I learned to have sober sex while I was with a partner who was devoted to getting it right.
But now that I’m divorced, new sexual relationships are often nerve-wracking. Frightening. And that’s compounded by the pain and shame and hurt that I feel when someone actually cares about me. But the excitement of new relationships is the same, I think, for us recovering alcoholics as it is for others. It can take time to get intimacy right. It can take time to shed the baggage of past relationships, past sexual traumas, past betrayed intimacies. And I think it’s important to talk about how sex changes. One of my first confidants in sobriety was a 70 year old man with 30 years, and he told me: “Sex is going to be different.” He was right.
But you know what? I am capable of flights of intimacy now that I never was before. Because I’ve learned how to be vulnerable, open, honest. I’ve learned how to recognize that trust takes time, and that missteps are surmountable. And now, when I am intimate with someone, it’s better than it ever was before. Because I know how to be me, within an intimate relationship. And by being comfortable with me, I am more open to the discovery of another person. By being sober, and healthy, I can share in new ways. Better ways than I ever knew before.
Why is Alcoholism Different from Cancer?
Yesterday on twitter I had a brief conversation with @Dirk57 and @drugmonkeyblog about treatment of alcoholism. It started with @Dirk57 (who is also in recovery) tweeting a question about why we don’t do more to treat addiction with compassion rather than condemnation. I responded that it is not cruel to say: “I can not participate in your illness.” I then went on to say that I believe in “Compassion with boundaries, and honest appraisal. Pussyfooting around doesn’t help.” And @Dirk57 agreed that otherwise, compassion can simply be enabling.
At this point, that agent provocateur (and highly regarded addiction researcher) @drugmonkeyblog chimed in: “Do that for cancer, depression and you are an ass – why different?”
It’s a really good question. Now, I’m not going to address the depression aspect (and I said that in the twitter conversation too). I’ve been diagnosed with Major Depression more than once in my life. I have found that treating my alcoholism has treated my depression for the most part. When I have gotten situationally depressed in sobriety, I have sought medical attention from a psychiatrist, and have taken short runs of SSRI-based antidepressants. My depression has resolved completely and quickly. Now, I treat it with exercise. It works for me. I do not claim to have any insight on the treatment of depression.
I do claim to have some insight on the treatment of alcoholism. It’s opinion, of course, but it’s opinion based on more than five continuous years of diligently working a program of abstinence and emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual maintenance. I have seen treatment succeed, and I have seen treatment fail. I read a lot of the current literature in the epidemiology of addiction and the various predictors of success. I have deep concerns that the medical community at large remains incapable of understanding how addiction is treated successfully. In part because the way that science measures success remains largely irrelevant to successful recovery.
However, strides are being made. And the fact that addiction researchers like @drugmonkeyblog are interested in engaging with us, the hoi polloi of the recovery community, in order to understand our philosophy of recovery is very encouraging. Unlike some recovered alcoholics, I do not dismiss the efforts of science to improve our odds at better lives, free from addiction. But I think that there may need to be wholesale changes in the reductionistic means of examining addiction in order to do so. The fact that preeminent scientists are willing to engage is very encouraging to me.
So how do I answer @drugmonkeyblog’s question? First, I said that refusal to enable is part of an addict’s treatment. Getting a job, paying our own bills, making our own food, these are things that help us recover. When people relieve us of these requirements, they give us what our addiction wants: lack of responsibility, more shame, more isolation. When we break down the false ego of feeling like we’re above work, and above responsibility, we can start to build the real ego-structure of useful adults. We talk a lot in recovery about breaking down the ego. But really, what we mean is basing our ego on real things, rather than inflated senses of entitlement.
To this, he responded that cancer patients make horrible treatment decisions too, and that there’s room to judge there. And that may be true. I’m fortunate enough never to have been involved in the treatment profile of a cancer patient. Especially not one making decisions that I think are against their best interests. So I responded: “We all have the right to say, ‘I will not help you make yourself sicker.’” And @drugmonkeyblog agreed.
For me, alcoholism and cancer share many basic aspects: serious diseases that often kill, that need to be understood and treated aggressively, and from which sustained remission is often a perfectly reasonable goal and outcome. But alcoholism has a behavioral element that makes the way people legitimately respond to the sufferer a factor. We don’t yet know what makes an alcoholic choose to attempt to recover. But we do know that those who enable alcoholics do themselves and their alcoholic loved ones no favors. We alcoholics in recovery say that we turned to recover when the pain from our addiction became to great to bear.
No one I’ve heard of says: “Look, I just want a little bit of cancer now and then. I can handle it.” And then refuses treatment because they like the way cancer makes them feel. But addicts do that all the time, and our loved ones help us. We all have the right not to help people make themselves sicker. And for the recovery of the addict, I personally believe it is imperative.
Restorative Exertion.
I was always a lazy person. I come from a long line of lazy people. My grandfather used to say, “Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, and when you lie down, go to sleep.” He probably didn’t make that up. I have never been a person who truly enjoys exertion, either physical or mental. I hate puzzles. I seriously hate puzzles. What’s the point of doing all that mental energy and then at the end, all you’ve done is solve a meaningless problem? Why not do something useful if you’re going to do all that work? That’s why, if you may recall from my old blog, I once blogged an algorithm which solves all Sudoku puzzles*. Because, fuck Sudoku. It’s not interesting.
As a result of having a lazy, addictive personality, I ended up, at 33, a fat addict. My journey from there to here is well documented in the preceding pages. Today, I just wanted to comment about how glorious it is, how wonderful I feel, to be in the position where I am today. I haven’t just changed what I do. By being consistent and diligent about what I do, I’ve changed how I feel.
When I solve a problem with my simulation, or I observe a new process in my hospital, or I work out a better way of engineering a system, I’m excited. I’ve done something difficult and useful. I’ve earned something. It’s good. But I need to recover from that. I need vacations, or down time. Rest. Mental efforts are efforts, and even though they can have rewards when whatever I was working on comes to fruiting, I am still exhausted by the work.
Physically, though, I am turning a corner. I haven’t lost any weight in a year. I’m stuck around 190, which isn’t fat but also isn’t going to get me any underwear-modeling gigs. But I’ve been working steadily. Running. Lifting. I’ve started doing the planks. It sounds easy: hold a push-up position and don’t do any push-ups. But it gets difficult fast. I’ve held a plank for 213 seconds, and I can routinely do about two and a half minutes.
This weekend I engaged in a lot of very restorative exertion. It’s amazing to me how much my body has recovered from the grey depths of addicted dereliction it once fathomed. Where once I was sallow, flabby and feeble, I have become vigorous and hale. And I like it. That’s what’s become amazing to me. Yes, running is work. Core work can be agonizing. And some part of my body is usually sore these days. Right now, my abs and chest feel a bit like they were run over by a truck. But I feel fantastic. Centered, alive, upbeat.
I guess, I wish I could tell all of the addicts out there, squatting in misery and shame, that there is so much worth having in the real world. That beyond the veil of compulsive addiction and misery there is life and health and love and excitement and thrilling, illimitable joy. That’s what I’ve found, where I am today. Stupidly happy and feeling as healthy and engaged with life as I ever have. There’s just so much here to love.
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*Here is an mathematical program which will solve all Sudoku puzzles, using the Simplex Method. Quit wasting your time with them:
Define r(i,j), s(i,j), … , z(i,j), such that
r(i,j) = 1 if location (i,j) is equal to 1, 0 else.
s(i,j) = 1 ” ” ” ” ” ” 2, 0 else.
.
.
.
z(i,j) = 1 if location (i,j) is equal to 9, 0 else.
R(k) represent each 9 square 3×3 ‘Region’ from 1..9.
Objective:
Max SUM(i,j) {r(i,j)+s(i,j)+…+z(i,j)}
Subject To:
SUM(i) {r(i,j)} = 1 For All j
.
.
.
SUM(i) {z(i,j)} = 1 For All j
SUM(j) {r(i,j)} = 1 For All i
.
.
.
SUM(j) {z(i,j)} = 1 For All i
SUM(i,j) {r(i,j)} = 9
.
.
.
SUM(i,j) {z(i,j)} = 9
SUM(R(k)) {r(i,j)} = 1 For All k
.
.
.
SUM(R(k)) {z(i,j)} = 1 For All k
Initial Condition Constraints:
For each known initial condition, take the value and location of that condition and add (for example):
v(4,7)=1
There. That’s it. Sudoku is over.
Healthcare Engineering Fieldwork.
Most of my work is sitting at a computer typing out code or processing data from one giant array to another, trying to formulate it in a way readable by the second-rate code I write. Building simulations of systems. But everyone once in a while, I get to go out, into the field, and do some cool observations. Science fieldwork is the sexy side of science. It’s the gorillas-in-the-mist, pigs-in-space side of science. Going out into the world and examining things as they really are. Seeing how nature and the elements interact. I know people who do truly exciting fieldwork, stomping through African jungles and savannahs, diving in Fiji. I even know people who are applying to astronaut programs to do science in space. It’s really cool.
By comparison, my fieldwork is pretty dull. Instead of typing at my computer in the hospital basement, I go up to the surgical tower and strap on a bunny suit, so that I can observe surgeries. Sometimes, I go into clinics and emergency departments. The last couple of years I was doing that in New England at ECU’s affiliated hospital. But I didn’t do much of that fieldwork myself. I had research assistants who took the data and monitored the processes. Most of my work on that project was typing at the computer.
But today I got to spend about three and a half hours in real-world, honest-to-Pete observational science-mode in the field in MECMC’s operating rooms. I’ve visited before for a minute or two, taking a look around. It’s exciting, and can be a little intimidating. Since I’m not a regular OR worker, I don’t own scrubs. This means I need to put on a disposable “bunny suit” so that I don’t contaminate the clean areas. My goal for this project is to understand how OR turnaround is accomplished.
OR turnaround is the process of cleaning the room after one patient, and preparing it for another. Our goal is to accomplish this task as quickly as possible, because the operating rooms are one of the main financial drivers of any hospital. It costs thousands of dollars an hour to keep an OR in service. OR idle time is phenomenally expensive, both in direct costs and in opportunity costs for patients who could be being seen. But of course, it isn’t just money that drives it (and I don’t even know the real numbers, nor will I include them in my simulations). Believe it or not, hospitals and health care professionals really do care about providing the best care to the most patients. It’s not entirely cash-driven. Most surgeons like to operate because they like fixing people, not just because they collect airplanes.
OR idle time means fewer surgeries performed, which means a longer wait for surgeries that are performed, which means that people suffer while waiting for surgery. The whole field of medicine exists to claim ground in the battle against death and suffering. Every minute an OR is ready for a patient that isn’t in it, is time and treasure wasted in that battle. So my job is to help figure out where we can eliminate waste and duplication in the effort of turning over an OR. Everybody wins. When we can do more surgeries, we relieve more suffering. We generate more revenue. And we can reduce the cost of individual procedures through economies of scale.
So I made observations today. Which is one of the first steps of doing science. I’m not even taking data yet. Just observing the process so that I can understand who is doing what, what the jobs are, and what has to be done in what order to prepare the OR for the next patient. One thing was fairly obvious from the get-go. Sometimes, surgeons (or anesthesiologists) will run two ORs at the same time, so that one patient can be prepped while the other is still in surgery. This maximizes the surgeon’s productivity by ensuring that a patient is waiting for the knife at all times.
However, it also means that ORs sit idle while waiting for surgeons (or anesthesiologists) to become available. There was a time when a surgeon’s time was probably more valuable than the ORs. But that’s no longer the case, by a couple of orders of magnitude. It would be far less expensive to hire a few more surgeons, and pay them to wait, and keep those ORs clicking. Of course, if you’ve ever met a surgeon who will tolerate waiting in a professional context, you should write in to Ripley’s.
So, there’s today’s little primer on Healthcare Engineering Fieldwork. This is just a tiny corner of the world of it, of course. MECMC has partner hospitals all over the country and the world. It would be exciting to be able to go and study them, deploying simulation to the far reaches of the globe. For now, my fieldwork is in a local field. But that’s no less exciting. I get to watch the real world of medicine unfold in front of me. And I get to play a role in making it better. It’s exciting and humbling to be able to do that here. I love this job. This place. This life.
Privileges and Pains.
One of the things I’m most grateful for in sobriety is the opportunity to help people who are suffering from alcoholism. It’s an amazing privilege to be able to step out into the world as a sober person and be the float on a line that helps haul a new drunk from the swallowing sea and into the rafts of the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. There’s very little that gives me as much pleasure and satisfaction as seeing a newly sober drunk struggle to their feet and start living again. My former sponsee, whom I transferred to a friend when I left St. Louis, is one of those people. He’s coming up on nine months sober now. Working. Contributing. And he has even started a hobby. He’s building furniture at home. Compare that to drinking himself to death and playing video games. Boy to man, nine months. And of course, I hope you read the recent guest post from my friend with a year.
A person who is as close to me as any ever has been is now taking her first steps into the program. She had about 6 weeks sober and then a small relapse. Just the equivalent of about two cocktails. Now she’s got about a week again. She’s working very hard. She got some bullshit static in the rooms too, about “relapse means you weren’t working the steps hard enough!” That’s a crock of shit. In early sobriety, those first six weeks, many people working incredibly hard relapse. And AA is supposed to be a judgement-free place. We all know that any of us could have relapsed in the early days. Now, with five years behind me, yes, my sobriety is more contingent upon working my program well and not neglecting it. In the beginning, sometimes there’s just too much. Relapse happens. Dust off. Come back. Which is what she’s doing. And I’m so proud.
Recently, I’ve had a different privilege. I’ve been talking to a person whose spouse is the alcoholic. Divorce is imminent. The drinker keeps drinking. My friend is suffering. I’ve been trying to support my friend, someone I admire greatly, while they come to grips with the idea that the person they married is gone. And cannot come back. There’s grief to endure.
And I think that that’s what happened in my own marriage. My ex loved me once. And I loved her. And I will always love the things that I loved about her. But as my alcoholism progressed, the person that I was, that she loved, vanished. And when I got sober, he didn’t come back. A new person – for me, a better person – emerged instead. I am neither the person I was before I drank, nor the person I was while I drank. I am a new thing, still marbled with traces of all the persons I’ve ever been. Talking to my friend has helped me see this process from the other side. And I am unimaginably grateful.
And I am deeply affected by my friend’s suffering. Because I see how I was in the reflection in my friend’s eyes. I see the alcoholism of my friend’s spouse and I can see the things I used to do, the lies I used to tell, the selfishness and bitterness that I used to harbor. I cannot imagine a greater lesson about my need to embrace my program, dedicate myself ever more fervently to my recovery. There is so much in my past I need to never return to. But I cannot simply dismiss it, deny it. I own it.
It’s painful. Painful to see the anguish that this disease causes in both those who suffer from it, and those who suffer at the hands of the people who suffer from it. It’s painful to be reminded of the things I’ve done. But it is an unimaginable privilege to stand where I stand now. Ready to help. To intercede. To shoulder burdens for those who cannot carry the weight of theirs anymore. Because that is how I stay centered, how I stay in the middle of this garden, blooming in sober soil, helping to guide others from darkness to light. And so I thank them all, for saving my life.
