Letter to my Father.
Dear Dad,
Today, on your 72nd birthday, I, your only (that we know of) son, would like to wish you the happiest of all birthdays. There is no doubt that I owe much of my current happiness and success to your parentage.
I want to talk a little bit about chess. Chess has always been your game, and because of your love for it, I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn’t know how to play. I started playing chess when I was two, perhaps. Maybe younger. It’s something we do together every time we see each other. I’ve never been as good as you are. I never will be. But the lessons I learned from playing chess with my father have prepared me to be successful in life.
The first lesson you taught me, after how the pieces move, was to get used to losing. I don’t believe you ever let me win a game in my whole life. I didn’t beat you a single time until I was in my teens. I still only win maybe one game out of five. In my current career as a scientist and an engineer, I lose a lot. Papers get rejected, grants go unfunded. Jobs I want don’t land. I had to learn that no matter what I choose to do, someone is better than me. That taught me to fight harder for what I really want, but to accept it gracefully when I don’t get it.
The second lesson you taught me with chess was to appreciate it when I win. You never taunted me when you beat me. You had encouraging words, and every game we played when I was a kid, you analyzed and showed me what I could have done better, how I could improve. When I finally did beat you, I could see that your reaction was not dismay but pride. Pride that I had finally achieved what you’d been teaching me all those years. And I celebrated. But I didn’t taunt. Because you taught me by your example to win generously.
The third lesson you taught me was that my actions have consequences. I make a move on the chess board, and the game unfolds one way, not another. I can’t go back and undo it. Even when I was a little kid, you’d ask me, “Are you SUUURE you want to move there?” Because you always enforced, once I’m no longer touching the piece, I can’t take the move back. No matter how bad it is. It was my decision. Now I have to live with it.
The fourth lesson you taught me was that time spent playing a game doesn’t have to be about the game. Just about wherever we went, you had a little cloth pouch with a roll-up vinyl chessboard and a set of heavy plastic pieces. If I was bored, or cranky, you’d say, “Let’s play chess.” And then, you’d beat me at chess, and by the end of it, I felt better. Because through the game we’d talk, and I’d usually either talk about what was bothering me, or we’d find a topic that entertained me, and my boredom or my discontent would vanish among the forest of warriors on the board.
The fifth lesson you taught me is that time is too precious not to waste it. All that time that homework didn’t get done, and chores went untended. While the world went on with its business, we played a game in the park, or in a coffee shop. Wasting time. Playing chess with my dad. Learning how to live.
I love you, Dad. And thank you.
Drunk Dreams.
I had a drinking dream last night. I no longer remember it. When I woke up from it at 6:15 in the morning, only about 20 minutes before my alarm was due to ring, I thought about trying to write it down, but instead I went back to sleep. I only remember the barest of details. And they are similar to all my other drinking dreams. I suddenly realize I’ve been drinking without meaning to, essentially. I just look down and realize I’m halfway through a drink. Rather than immediately throw it away though, of course I finish it, because it’s too late. I might as well get drunk, as long as I’ve lost all this time.
And then I start to panic and think about my sponsor, and what I’ll tell him. Then I start thinking about my new girlfriend, and what I’d have to tell her. I’d lose the relationship. I start thinking about how I can lie: “I didn’t mean to drink so I don’t have to tell anyone. I can keep my time”; “No one has to know. I’ll just stop again right now. I did it before, I can do it again”. But I know it’s not that easy. I have this sense, in the dream, of impending dread. I’m afraid it’s all going to begin again. The drunkenness. The sloth. The fear. The rage. The sickness.
Waking from these dreams is an incredible relief. I realize I didn’t really drink. I don’t have to give back all my time. I didn’t lose everything I’ve worked for. There was some talk in my Sunday meeting about drunk dreams. I shared then essentially what I’m writing now, except that I hadn’t had a dream recently then. That when I have these dreams my first instinct is to ask how I can lie my way out of it.
I’ve written before that honesty is the first casualty of alcoholism. We can’t tell the truth and drink how we want to. If we tell people how we drink, they get concerned, they tell us we’re in trouble, they refer us to doctors or, worse, to AA! Honesty and drinking alcoholically don’t go along together for long. To drink like I drank, you have to lie. And the lies feed the shame, and the shame makes you need to drink.
There is a moment of terrible freedom when we finally decide not to lie about it anymore. When we say: “I am going to level this facade and let it all come apart. This is the truth of all the things I have done in service of my addiction.” It is awful and wonderful and glorious in one obliterating heartbeat.
I’m grateful for these dreams. They remind me of all the lies I don’t need to tell. All the sicknesses I don’t need to suffer. All the isolation I don’t need to endure. And they rededicate me to the steps I take forward.
Setting a New Goal.
The month of August was not a great one for me running. Nor was July. My consolation is that I am unfathomably further ahead of where I was this time last year. For 2012, I set a goal of averaging 2 miles a day, walking plus running. I hit it, almost perfectly: 736.3 miles, 457.1 of it running. Not too shabby. That goal was semi-subordinate to my overall long-term goal which was to run 10 kilometers in under an hour. That requires me to run six consecutive 9:38 miles. And I did it this spring. Twice. My record is 59:08. I am really very, very proud of reaching that goal. I worked very hard for more than a year to get there.
I’ve always been a goal-driven person. I think it’s because I like to collect experiences. I am generally uninterested in collecting things. At least, not things that I don’t use. I’m not especially interested in owning art, for example. I like having a few nice pieces that I enjoy looking at, but owning art for its own sake doesn’t really appeal to me. Seeing art, on the other hand, I’m very interested in. I like to collect the experiences of seeing great pieces, famous pieces; visiting the museums where they’re housed and feeling the awe of the presence of genius. But I’ve never wanted to take the piece home with me.
This year, walking and running, I’m up to 690.6 miles already. My running total is 213.9. I walk a lot in ECC, now that I don’t have a car. And for all that, I still haven’t lost an ounce of weight. When I look at myself in the mirror, I feel like I’ve gained weight. I don’t own a scale. But I don’t think I’ve gained any weight because my clothes all fit exactly the same. Just goes to show how the mind plays tricks.
But I’m operating without a goal. I can’t run that 10K in under an hour anymore. After taking essentially six weeks off, my 5K times are up around 32 minutes again, and I haven’t even tried to do 10K. I could make a goal to get back to that fitness, but here’s the problem with my style of experience collection: I’ve already done it. It feels kind of hollow to say, “I’m going to set a goal to do something I’ve already done.” This is why I often find it difficult to return to places I’ve already traveled to. It doesn’t feel new. Though I am excited to maybe return to some places I’ve been and see them again through the new eyes of my girlfriend, who will be traveling abroad for the first time with me soon.
I should say, I’m not operating entirely without a goal. My first and most important fitness goal remains unchanged: don’t get diabetes. And I’m on track for that still, I’m sure. I haven’t been to a doctor in 18 months, but I did have the basic blood tests for my work physical, and I wasn’t diabetic in April. Considering the exercise I’ve gotten since then, I’m pretty confident I’m still in the clear 4 months later. It’s depressing that I can’t seem to drop below 190ish pounds, but this is where my body seems to want to be, given the amount of effort I can bring to bear.
And it’s always worthwhile to look at where I am versus where I was. Even in sobriety, back in the summer of 2009, I was 225 pounds, smoking a pack a day (I quit August 18th, 2009. Four years!). I was, according to my blood numbers, teetering at the edge of diabetes. But I’ve come back from the ledge, and now I’m in pretty decent shape for a guy who would still be pretty fat if magically transported back 40 years ago.
It would be great to be thinner. But I’ll settle for fitter. And that’s why I’m setting a new goal. An ambitious, but achievable goal. I am 39 years old. Between now and 1 Jan 2015 (that’s 16 months, more or less), I will, at some point, run half a marathon without stopping to walk. 13.1 miles. It doesn’t have to be a race. I don’t have a goal for the time it will take me (though I hope it’s less than 2.5 hours). That’s my new goal. It’ll take some doing. Right now, the longest I’ve run without stopping to walk is 8.2 miles. So, I just have to extend it by 60%. I can do that.
Because, why shouldn’t I have that experience? I should be able to say, “Yeah, I’ve run half a marathon. It sucked. I loved it.”
A Fatal Condition.
Yesterday, a friend of a friend was found dead. He was an alcoholic. Same as me. Same as many of you. A father of young children, 9 and 11. I didn’t know him. I never met him. Never spoke to him. I know him only through my friend, an alcoholic like me. She feels survivor guilt today. Because she’s sober. And he’s dead. But that’s the way of things, with this disease. We die. Our friends die. Our lovers die and our children die.
I had a long conversation with my friend last night. She told me that in the beginning, when she was first recovering, I told her the same thing I’ve written here many times: alcoholism is an incurable, progressive, terminal mental illness. She told me last night that when she first heard it, she thought I was being melodramatic. Maybe you, my non-alcoholic reader, think it’s melodramatic.
You know, there’s nothing to forgive in thinking that. Alcoholics tend to be dramatic. I am no exception. But there’s no melodrama in that description. My friend said it seemed melodramatic until she came into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. Until she saw with her own eyes. Recovery is never finished. We are never cured. I know people who have had years and years of sobriety who went to drink. Sometimes, they don’t come back.
I’ve known people with years and years of sobriety who’ve blown their heads off stone cold sober. Alcoholics, at least those of my description, are prone, are seduced, toward living tiny lives of dispirited isolation. Dark rooms. Bathtubs. Basements. Desolate and depressed and numb from useless rage. Our disease never leaves us. And in the long march of time it takes more, and more, and more.
And eventually, it kills us. This friend of my friend died surrounded in filth and vomit. His children, I am told, never wanted to see him anymore. He didn’t do things. Like make them food. So many times I’ve heard the same refrain: “No matter what, I’d never let alcohol come between me and my children.” So many times, I’ve seen that vow broken. When we are alcoholic, anything that we try to put before alcohol, we lose. Which is why in recovery, anything we put before sobriety, we lose.
It’s not melodrama. It is the simple grim calculus of the condition. Alcoholism has no cure. It advances past any barrier we put in front of it. And it ends our lives. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard conversations that begin, “Did you hear how they found him?” We die miserable, silent, lonely deaths.
And every time I hear about another one, I am grateful. Because I’ve known plenty of alcoholics too, who’ve died sober. Peacefully, in a clean bed. Mourned. Celebrated. All of us are bound for eternity, dear reader. I have seen the door that so many people like me, better than me, have slouched vilely through. And because I know that door – that door appeals to me in a way that I think no non-addict can understand – I can step from the road that leads me to it. Guided by those who have recovered, and alike by those who have not.
On Sexual Harassment.
Yesterday, I was meeting with a nurse from the really super cool ultra-high tech surgical unit I’m studying as part of my grant, and also just in general as part of my job. It’s an amazing unit, and something that MECMC does better than anyone else in the world. It’s an honor to be a part of it, and I’m super excited about the project. In part of my role as preparing for the development of a simulation, I interview the people who work in the system and ask them to describe their roles, and take me through their day and the day of one of their patients.
As I sat down for this interview, the nurse told me that she liked how my socks matched my jacket (an accident… I wear brightly colored socks which may match or clash depending on random chance.). I said, “Thank you! I try!” And we got to the interview. There was another nurse in the room, whom I had interviewed a few days previously. About a half-hour into the interview, out of the blue, the nurse I was interviewing asked me, “Are you single?”.
I paused for probably three full seconds as I went through my options. Included were, “I’m not sure how that’s relevant right now.” and “Really none of your business.”. I went with, “I have a girlfriend.” She then sort of slightly rolled her eyes in exasperation and said something close to, “It’s so hard to find a man with a real job.” From there, we talked for a few minutes about the differences between single men and single women in their 30s. Full of stereotypes, to be sure, but there might be general trends to spot.
Based on a conversation I had recently with Chicago Joe, we talked about how there seem to be many, many more competent, professional, educated, attractive, and unattached women in their 30s than there are men. The single men in their 30s, unless divorced, tend to be, as the nurse put it (eerily echoing Chicago Joe’s words of perhaps 4 months ago), “playing video games in their mother’s basement.” I don’t know why that’s true. Hell, I don’t know if it’s true. But I know that it’s a sentiment echoed by many men and women alike in the cohort of “30-somethings looking to date”. Women say it’s hard to find a decent man. Men say high-quality women are thick on the ground.
But whatever the epidemiology of the single professional cohort of humans in their 30s is, it’s not really what I wanted to write about. The topic I’m interested in is: Was I harassed?
No. Very simple. She complimented my outfit, and she asked about my relationship status with the strong subtext that she’d be interested in going out. When I told her I had a girlfriend she immediately terminated that line of inquiry. Now, was the question inappropriate? Yes, probably. We were in the middle of working. Is it always inappropriate to ask a coworker out? No. In fact, at my orientation to this job, the preceptor told us she met her husband here at MECMC, and that dating coworkers is explicitly allowed as long as it doesn’t interfere with work.
But the question left me wondering. What is the standard? What’s going on? The skeptical community is currently embroiled in a huge sexual harassment/abuse/rape scandal. People are drawing lines and making accusations. I’m not going to take a position on that here. But of serious import is the question, what constitutes sexual harassment and why? Suppose the genders in my circumstance were reversed? Then what?
When the romantic approach (that’s what I’ll call it) was made to me yesterday, the subtext was essentially just context: she liked how I dress, she appreciated that I have a good job. Now, the subtext goes a tiny bit deeper than that, in that she probably found me at least tolerably physically attractive and/or funny and/or whatever. But for the most part, what she made very clear was that she valued me for the reason I was there. That is, I was a competent professional.
When a man makes a romantic approach to an unknown-to-him woman in the workplace, the subtext is generally not that. Whether he means to communicate it or not, the subtext is usually, “I find you physically attractive.” Often, it’s the outright context, in the form of physical or sexual ‘compliments’. Now, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with finding people physically attractive. But with a few exceptions, being physically attractive isn’t why a woman is at her job. She’s there for the same reason a man is. To do work she has the education, training, and experience to do. So the approach doesn’t say, “I value you for the reason you’re here.”, it says, “I am interested in you despite the reason you’re here.”
And that can be objectifying. Nevermind the fact that you’re a trained professional here to do a difficult job for which you are eminently qualified. I find you sexually appealing. That’s where your value lies.
Now, I’m not saying that men can never ask women out in the workplace. I’ve done it. But never anyone that I worked directly with, and never anyone that I just met. I went out with a post-doc in my last job when I was a new investigator. But she wasn’t my post-doc, and we didn’t work on any of the same projects, and I had no particular influence with her PI. I had known her for years before I asked her out. We dated for a few months, it didn’t work out, we’re still friends.
Now, I can hear some men complaining that there’s a double standard. I’m saying that I wasn’t harassed but that if the genders were reversed it would have been? Well, no, not exactly. I’m still not sure it would be harassment for a man to compliment a woman’s outfit, ask if she is single and then drop it immediately when she says no. But I can decidedly see how it would be much creepier, less welcome, and a bigger deal. I can see it making her very uncomfortable, instead of how I felt (bemused, a little flattered, and mildly put-off at the same time).
So yes. There’s a double standard. Men and women are different. While uniform standards of conduct are reasonable, to put everyone on the same footing (i.e., legally, if it’s not harassment when a woman does it, then it shouldn’t be harassment when a man does it.), it is also appropriate to consider both context and subtext, and how they are different, when the woman does the approaching versus when the man does.
So I wasn’t harassed, no. But guys, don’t do that.
Work-Life Balance.
Yesterday I participated in the last 45 minutes or so of the discussion of the challenges facing scientist moms, over at Pub-Style Science. By the time I got there, I think they’d solved most of the major issues and all that was left for me to do was cheer them on and admit that I had nothing to add to the discussion. Because I’m barely a scientist, not a woman, not a parent, and not on the traditional academic track, around which the discussion focused. My contribution was limited to suggesting that people without kids also value their free time, and making a fool of myself by challenging an assertion about which I actually know nothing at all.
So, let me stipulate right up front that I freely admit that women face greater challenges in science than men, for the most part. And that parents face greater challenges than non-parents. And that single mothers face the greatest of all. Finding a way to succeed in science as a single mother has got to be astonishingly difficult, requiring reserves of energy I cannot fathom, much less muster. And I know people currently doing it, or who have done it, and who are succeeding or have succeeded. Their stories are inspiring and instructive.
I was raised by a single mother, for several years. From the time I was six until I was ten, and then again while I was in high school, my mother was a single mom who worked very hard at her own practice (she was a pediatric psychologist and yes that does explain at least a tiny bit of why I’m so messed up.). While she was a practitioner and not an academic, she worked easily as hard as any academic does. Most weeks she put in at least sixty hours, often eighty. She would travel to lectures a great deal. She served as an expert witness in trials. There were times she took me to court with her because I was sick, couldn’t go to school, and she had no other options. I remember plenty of days lying down, admonished to be silent, on courtroom benches while my mom testified. She worked like hell and had very little life of her own during those years. But she was very successful.
And she did all that while in constant physical pain from a bad hip-replacement. And her toil has made my life easier. Her efforts (and those of her father) allowed me to be one of the most privileged human beings on planet earth. Not only did I complete college and graduate school without debt, but I was able to drink myself near to oblivion, go to a fancy rehab, and get into recovery. The two years I was unemployed did not leave me destitute, or unemployable, or ruin my credit. As a result – and I don’t mean to minimize my own contributions, I’ve worked hard too – I landed squarely on my feet after confronting an addiction which has slain better persons than me.
I have seen alcoholics and drug addicts from much less privileged backgrounds go on to higher pinnacles than I have. But they are the exceptions, of course. Any alcoholic who recovers is already an exception. And there is absolutely no denying that my privilege and the incredible efforts of previous generations of my family have made my road far, far easier.
So, where is my work-life balance? Well, as I said in the video, I’m not crazy about the whole concept. I don’t think of my “life” as what I do when I’m not at “work”. I don’t think of my “work” as what I do while I’m not “living”. My career is part of my life. A part that I could be far more dedicated to than I am. I work about 40 hours a week. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. I take vacations and I enjoy them. I work hard enough to finish the things that are expected of me. I don’t do all of my work at work. I find myself thinking through things and puzzling out problems at other times. Sometimes I enjoy that. Sometimes I do it because my head won’t stop.
But my non-working time matters to me. It is just as important to me as anyone’s time with their children is to them. The idea that childless scientists should have to work harder to make up for missed time by those with children, as is the case in some labs, is absurd. But I have no personal experiences like that, so I can’t really comment. I only know this: I will never expect the childless to work harder than those with children. One day, maybe, I’ll have an R01, and I’ll hire a few post-docs. And if I do, they’ll be expected to work about 40 hours a week, but not necessarily on a fixed schedule. And they’ll get vacations. And it won’t matter whether they have kids or not. The rules will be the same for everyone.
Because life happens, and work is part of life, and kids are part of life. Working means you have to spend a lot of time away from your kids. Humans have been doing that for about as long as we’ve had specialization of labor. But having life other than work also means you have to spend time away from work. Sometimes during working hours. And that’s ok. We should expect reasonable things from people, and we should remunerate them according to the expectations and how well they fulfill them.
But, as I said, I really don’t have anything to contribute. I’m a single, childless, white man, who employs, currently, two undergraduate interns for a total of 10 weeks. They are paid well for what they are expected to accomplish. And that’s the sum of my experience. It’s essentially nonexistent. As such, my opinions should be accordingly valueless.
Moving Ahead.
OK. Things are proceeding apace. Even though the academic aspects of my new job are sort of minimal, I take them seriously because I enjoy them and they matter to me. It’s strange how I never cared about getting papers out when I was in grand school, and neither did my advisor. But now, I really love it even though I’ve had barely middling success at it. It’s one of the ways my ambition comes out.
And my academic productivity has been pretty good here of late. Well, sort of. Two old papers have been resubmitted. One to a little European journal that I’m hoping will publish this paper out of pity. One to a major glamour publication that would, if I were in a professory-type position, be a potential career-maker. Considering the history of these papers, I’m looking at two rejections.
Two new papers have been submitted too. One is a research paper based on the first simulation that I did here at my new work for MECMC. It’s a good paper with a strong result, I think. We submitted it to a very high second-tier journal (i.e., a leading specialty journal). The kind that is considered “high impact”. It made it past the editor’s desk and is currently under review. The other is a strange little piece, that I discussed here. We submitted it to a well-regarded specialty journal in quality.
For this piece, I decided to make myself last author and put one of my co-workers as first. He’s got strong ideas about how to perform the kind of work we do, and so I sat down with him and we hammered out the paper after I wrote a short first draft. He wants to go on in administration, and this piece may help him do that. I want to have something out there that shows I know how to integrate myself into a QI department in case I ever have to change hospitals. And this does that too.
My other motive was to put my manager’s names on the paper. They have been supportive but unenthusiastic about my academic ambitions. I had them edit and comment on the manuscript, and participate in content organization, so that I could legitimately include them as authors. I strongly suspect that once they see their own names as authors on a published paper, they’ll be more excited about letting me pursue academic work a little more aggressively. Similarly, once they see how nice it is to have a little more money in the budget, they ought to appreciate my grant-writing.
So, of the two papers I’ve written since joining MECMC, I’m hopeful that they will both make it into journals on first submissions. I don’t know. It’s been a while since that happened for me. But it’d be nice. I have 4 papers out there under review. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll actually hit a couple of these this time. I don’t know. But I’m moving ahead.
Guest Infact: Growing up in an Alcoholic Home.
I am no longer surprised by the number of people in the scientific community who have lives touched by alcoholism. Not when, over and over, I’ve seen it, heard it, and been privileged to talk to those who either drink too much, or love those who do. This community, the online science world, has become my virtual home. And it’s a beautiful home to have. Which is why I offer to give a home to these stories, here.
There’s a line in this piece about not knowing how to not be alone. This is how. Share your story. We’re all taking one step at a time. Take the next one with me. We are the light in the dark.
Growing up in a home with violence and alcoholism/polysubstance abuse is often something one just survives, in the best case scenario. When I was younger, they told me there was a typical set of different roles that children of alcoholic families tend to exhibit in school, in the family, in society. I may have shifted across that list myself at various points, trying to find something that brought a bit more sense to my life. It was like trying to endure all the normal difficulties of growing up, with the added complication being that while my peers were sailing on fairly smooth waters, I was attempting (failing) to hide the fact that my life was a hurricane. I never got to just be a kid.
I won’t beat you about the head by recounting the succession of terrible moments that bring me to my current position in life. I’d prefer not to think about it myself, much less write any of those things down. So when I say it was awful, that there were felonies and frequent 911 calls and courtrooms and guardian ad litems and shelter homes, I’m sure you can imagine enough without the need for a trigger warning label. I’m fortunate to be alive, and it took some drastic actions on my part to ensure even that. Contrary to what people typically seem to think on the rare occasion that I openly discuss the issue, though, the biggest impacts were not the physical ones. Far from it. Injured bodies can heal- most of the way, most of the time. That last injury may have socked it to me for half my life, but I’m working on it. No. The betrayals, the failures, the constant dread, the life without trust and without emotion- these were the things that will stay with me forever and still actively make it hard for me to live a semi-normal life on a regular basis.
Eventually things reached a point where I just knew I had to leave. I found myself alone in a wide world that I was completely unprepared to confront. This lack of preparation was in part due to the lack of care and guidance that I received- because all the attention was on the alcoholic, all the time. It was in part because I was still just a kid. But most of it was because I had never learned how to trust anyone. I had a very small number of very close friends, but I had distanced myself from all but one or two of them even as the worst events of my tumultuous young life bore down upon me. The world is an ugly, intimidating place when you’re alone and unable to figure out how to NOT be alone. I somehow stumbled through that phase of my life on wits, independence (I had never learned to rely on anyone else anyway), and a couple friends’ and coworkers’ couches when they brought me to their homes- though there was much suffering and many second chances I should not have received. I had to come to grips with the concept of living life for the future, since I had lived my early years as if there were no more birthdays after 17 or so. And once I made it a ways into my “new” life, those earlier experiences ended up making me pretty ferocious in my pursuits. Most people don’t have the life experience I had by age 18 or even 21 or 22, so my general demeanor and approach to the world terrified some of my peers in the higher education game. It was probably better that way anyway, honestly. But it was terribly lonely.
Let me say that for all the pain I’ve lived, I haven’t failed to inflict pain on others- people who love me regardless of my feelings for them, people who I love back, random strangers I’ve encountered. The alcoholic-codependent relationship I witnessed growing up was a pretty poor model of how adult people treat each other. There was the typical pattern of escalating drama followed by peace, waiting in fear for the other shoe to drop. I thought life was one extreme or the other, and hadn’t learned to operate anywhere in the middle ground. So even after finding someone who was patient enough to teach me (and wait for me to learn) how to interact like a functioning adult, the complexities of interpersonal relationships are still mostly beyond me. This most trusted person in my life has learned to live with the feeling that I hold him at arm’s length, though that is not how I intend to approach our relationship. I’m sharp and unavailable to most people who don’t know me very well. The people who I am available to, I can either be far too needy, too critical, or too you-name-it. I learned this at some point and started overcompensating, so that makes things even more screwed up because I always compensate incorrectly. I am terrified of rejection or abandonment, of failure and disappointing those who believe in me. I’m a mess inside but I try to hide that, to varying degrees of success.
You might think that at least forgiveness is a part of my social skillset. You would be wrong. And I am okay with that- how the parties I left behind feel is really not my concern. I have decided to focus forward and lead an interesting life since I have a life to lead. I’ve been a part of many different groups (workplaces, schools, internet) along the path to where I am today, and I’ve met many good people along the way. Whether they knew my history or not, I’ve taken a lot of good away from healthy interactions and healthy friendships. I like to say that I haven’t let the alcoholic in my past win- instead, I’m a high-functioning dysfunctional person who has managed to scratch out a halfway decent existence and find some level of personal and professional fulfillment. Even if my experience of the world is permanently colored by someone else’s alcoholism, it’s my world now.
Round Numbers.
I like round numbers. They’re satisfying in an inexplicable way. The “odometer effect” matters to me. I didn’t do anything special for the year 2000 changeover. Just hung out with my friend Jimmy Legs, if I recall. I got drunk and went to bed. I did that a lot. I was 25.
I can’t explain why the odometer effect matters. It’s only a function of having 10 fingers. If we had eight fingers, piano harmonies would be slightly less complex, and round numbers would come around significantly more often. The year 2000 in an eight-fingered world would’ve happened in AD 1024 as we reckon it. All kinds of other things would be easier to calculate, because we wouldn’t have an odd prime as a factor of our decimal base.
And today, if I had 8 fingers, I’d be celebrating day 3,720. Which has less of a ring to it. But it’d mean the same thing. But, in our good old ten-fingered world, today is a nice round number. Smooth and beautiful.
And that’s a lot of days. Two thousand times in a row I’ve gone to bed sober, and then woken up and not had a drink that day. Today seems like a good day to keep that up that streak.
A streak of little miracles, strung one after another. Some days were wonderful. Some were agonizing. But one by one they’ve stretched out into this peculiar state I’ve come to call my sobriety. And slowly but surely, the mean quality of my days has improved.
It’s a strange paradox: each day the road seems tilted more in my favor. When I was a drunk, I felt like I was climbing up a cliff everyday just to descend further into a nightmare. Now, I feel like I’m walking a smooth easy road, a slight downhill, a little assist to make my travels lighter. And yet I climb higher and higher into a marvelous future.
Alcohol and Sugar.
A very cool post by Scicurious over at Scientific American analyzes a paper linking the preference for sweet things with a preference for alcohol. The study is about finding a correlation between how much people are “rewarded” for sugar intake, and how much they’re “rewarded” for alcohol intake. And Scicurious does a good job explaining the positive correlation they found, interpreting the results, and tempering the author’s conclusions. It’s a really interesting piece. Go read it. I’ll wait.
Back? OK. I’m going to use that to launch into a phenomenon which may or may not be related, which is that when alcoholics stop drinking most of us develop a sweet tooth, even if we didn’t have one before. Before I quit drinking, I almost never ate sweets of any kind. I hated chocolate. I would frequently describe things that other people really liked as “too sweet”, even if they fell into the “savory” category of foods. I hated (and still do, thank god) sugared sodas.
But I developed, almost immediately, a serious liking for sweets. Ice cream, chocolate, hard candies, all kinds of things. Sweets became a part of my daily life and still are. At first, I rationalized this as simply: “Better this that alcohol.” I was, when I quit drinking, in execrable condition. Fat, pack-a-day smoker. And suddenly, I needed to eat sugar too. I craved it (though, not the same way I craved alcohol, exactly.). I would eat huge sundaes. I was truly terrified of being diabetic, but I couldn’t stop and my rationalization was extremely effective.
This went on for about a year and a half, until I quit smoking and started to try to get into better shape in general. Maybe even longer than that. It wasn’t until I’d been sober for almost three years that I started to work out and watch my diet in any significant way. Eventually, I started to try to reduce my sugar intake again. I still eat far too much sugar. I eat something sweet every day. But I do try to eat less sugar than I did and I exercise a lot more to burn it off.
And you know what? I’m ok with my sugar intake profile in the days and even years post-sobriety. Would it have been better to immediately kick drinking, kick smoking, not eat sugar and start running? Absolutely. From a strictly metabolic point of view, that’s a far better plan. But for me, and for most drunks, it’s also utterly unsustainable. When people come in lit on fire and they make all those changes at once, my experience is that they almost always crash and return to drinking. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that approach lead to sustained sobriety.
For most alcoholics, my opinion is that addressing the alcohol is the only thing we can do in the beginning. Attempting to take on even one more significant lifestyle change is too much. I tried, briefly, to quit smoking at the same time as I quit drinking. It didn’t even begin to work. And I didn’t want it to. Quitting alcohol is an incredible, daunting, confusing and overwhelming challenge. But it is possible. Obviously. Millions succeed. But trying to make myriad huge changes all at once can (and in my experience, does) derail that fragile early sobriety.
Many oldtimers in AA will also “prescribe” hard candies for alcohol cravings for newcomers. And it works! Sort of. A little bit of sugar really took the edge of of my early-sobriety alcohol cravings. Maybe that’s just the placebo effect. I have no idea. But I know that anything which aids in diminishing a craving is a good thing. Because they are utterly intolerable, but must be tolerated if sobriety is to be maintained. But they pass.
So, new out there? Trying to quit drinking but struggling with cravings? Try a hard candy. And don’t try to do everything at once. You have time. Cut yourself some slack on the family front. The cigarette front. The job front. The exercise front. These things may come in time, or may not. But what we really need is to be able to focus on the major task at hand. Quitting alcohol. Which is not done by fighting. It’s done by surrendering. Let go of expectations about what you should do, or should feel. Find people – there are lots of us in AA – who have walked the path, and follow the lead you find there. It works.
Infactorium 