It truly is awful to admit, with a straw in my nose, that I need an act of Providence to remove the addiction, the compulsion from my body, my mind, my soul. You see, I was not me – I was my addiction, and my addiction was me. We were inextricably bound in suffering and hedonic seeking. No matter the cost, I could not stop. I could slow, I could abstain temporarily, I could even wean off, but I could not give it up entirely. My grandma used to say about quitting smoking, that she could and had quit before, but it was the “staying quit” that got her.
I got myself to the point (thank god) where I couldn’t tell myself it wasn’t “that bad” or that I could “handle it”. I knew I was in deep, and my only ways out were in a body bag or a program of total abstinence. I’m certain that I have a deeper bottom that I can dig to, but at this point, with the knowledge and recovery that I have today, if I go out, I hope I don’t come back.
It’s funny, sometimes, well most of the time, I don’t think of my sobriety as a weakness, I think it is a strength, an asset, a superpower. What if I had found this gift when I was 16 and first put into treatment? I shudder to think of what my life could have been. But, then I’m happy it played out this way that put me sitting right here across from you. I remember all the times before when I had been the drowning man at sea. Washed over and beaten down by the turbulent waters of my own vices, and the passing ship of a treatment center, an AA meeting, a caring therapist – had thrown me the life preserver of recovery and I looked at it, decided that it would not be sturdy enough to save me, and tried to swim my way out to a shore that didn’t exist.
I like the idea of raising a bottom. It could have taken days, months, or even years for me to reach my bottom or my bitter end. It took what it took to finally get me to give up, not give up on my life, I had done that many times before, but give up on the idea that I was the only one who could cure what I was dying from. I was the doctor, the priest, the pharmacist, the higher power that could find salvation because I thought I knew myself better than anyone. But that was a lie shrouded as an enabling, unconvincing truth.
I don’t remember when or even if during my last run that I thought back to the AA meetings and had regret. I think the regret set in when the powerless and unmanageability could no longer be forgotten, soothed or reasoned away. I’m happy that I got to go out and have another bottom. If I didn’t have my first-step experience dope sick on the floor of a putrid jail cell in the Twin Towers, yanked out of my mania with multiple arrests on my face, I guess I’m glad it came eventually.
That last paragraph is beautiful, “Under the lash of alcoholism… fatal nature of our situation… as willing to listen as the dying can be”. I think that’s the crux of it. And dying can look different for everyone, I was literally on the verge of death, some just had a rough weekend or whatever, but thank god I was milligrams away from death.
