| SOBER TRUTHS | PAGE 1, 2, 3
In the beginning, yes, there was elation -- great surges of strength and hope -- but in its wake, there was fear. I don't remember exactly when that early feeling of euphoria, known in AA circles as a "pink cloud," began to fade -- it must have happened so gradually as to barely be perceptible -- but I do know that for a long time I did a lot of scary things (bought the house, wrote the book, quit the job) and then I did many fewer scary things. I slowed down, backed off from large groups, cultivated a much more solitary style. My first two years, I went to four or five AA meetings a week, befriended a whole gang of sober women, often headed out to dinner with them afterward; my third and fourth years, I stayed home five, six, sometimes seven nights a week. My first two years, I had an almost missionary fervor about confronting complicated feelings -- a feeling of anger or sadness or conflict would come over me and I'd think: OK, come and get me, I'm ready to deal. My third and fourth years, I began to steer clear of complicated feelings, or situations that might generate them, in much the same way I avoided bars and liquor stores. I bailed out of the romance that had felt so healthy and promising in early sobriety; I spent a great deal of time alone with my dog; I watched a phenomenal amount of television. This impulse toward retreat was not particularly conscious or deliberate on my part; nor was the path entirely linear or the motive behind it entirely clear. A certain amount of attrition goes with the sober territory: Old activities and friendships start to feel less comfortable and gradually fall away; large packs of casual friends -- by nature hard to sustain -- devolve into smaller numbers of close ones; as you grow more conscious of your own feelings and likes and dislikes, you become more selective about how and with whom you spend your time. Forty-six potluck suppers down the road, you find yourself looking up and thinking: "Wait a minute! I don't even like three-bean salad!" And so you stop attending them. For me, a certain amount of solitude seems to go with the sober territory, too. I spent much of those third and fourth years very slowly feeling my way across the landscape of desire, trying to figure out what degrees of human contact and intimacy felt right to me, how I really wanted to spend my time, what people and activities gave me comfort and a sense of connection. As it turns out, I'm a bit of a loner at heart, a person who requires a certain amount of solitary protected time in order to feel balanced and sane. This is the side of me I've described as the Merry Recluse: I prefer long quiet walks with the dog to dinner parties of 12, I'd rather have one deep friendship than 10 casual ones, I hate crowds. These are important pieces of information, and at times they've given me the sense that I have, in fact, created a smaller but more intimate life for myself, a life with a handful of trusted friends, and a beloved dog, and a lot of walks in the woods. But I also know that the current carrying me along in years three and four shifted over time, that I drifted out of that early river of triumph and headed into a small ocean of fear. There are so many ways to outrun feelings, so many varieties of numbness. Lock the door, turn on the TV, let the answering machine pick up. People generate very dark and complex feelings -- disappointment, competitiveness, insecurity -- so they keep them at a good safe distance, minimize vulnerability by minimizing contact. Romance is way too scary: Negotiating about needs? Compromising? Contemplating sex without the calming, disinhibiting effects of wine? Forget it; jump ship instead. As for emotion, no problem. Angry? Light a cigarette. Anxious? Go to the gym, swim a mile. Full of existential dread? Lose yourself in work. Above all, stick to activities that are known, predictable, orderly, that don't evoke any unwelcome feelings. No surprises. To some extent, I followed all those rules. I did take on a few scary -- and very gratifying -- things: cultivated a very close friendship with another sober woman, started a new book. But I also craved solitude and the calm it can bring: order, ritual, quiet, distance from others. Night after night, I'd walk the dog, then come home, bundle myself up in a bathrobe and eat cold cereal in front of "Ally McBeal" or "NYPD Blue" or "Law & Order." For two years, I felt a little lonely, a little bored and very, very safe. Which is not an entirely bad thing. I have a particular talent for self-deprecation, and I know it would be very easy for me to pathologize that style. But I also know that I needed all that solitude, that in some respects those first two years of major change and activity -- buying the house, quitting the job, gearing up to separate from the boyfriend -- were a semi-conscious way of building myself a little cave, a quiet and gentle place where I could curl up and lick my wounds for a while. And there were lots of wounds. Both my parents had died in the years before I quit drinking, and I'd never really mourned those losses outside of the fog of drunkenness. Drinking had taken a big personal toll, too, left me unsure of myself, immature in many ways, full of self-hatred and regret: In my last years of drinking, I'd been dishonest, selfish, out of control, horrible not only to myself but also to people who loved me. And then there was early sobriety itself, by nature a profoundly disorienting state. The hardest thing about those first years is that all the stuff that led you to drink in the first place is still there when you put down the alcohol; unchecked and undiluted, it begins to bubble and roil inside, to become more concentrated: Social fears reawaken; so do self-doubts, inhibitions, old sources of rage, feelings of emptiness and longing, whole years of unaddressed Sturm und Drang. Some people react to this by throwing themselves into AA or therapy; some find new ways to self-destruct; some relapse; some choose isolation. Me? The novelty of early sobriety wore off and so did that early victorious thrill and I went underground: an extended adult timeout. This is one of the surprising truths about sobriety: how damn long it takes to get your feet on the ground. Friends and relatives -- at least some of them -- thought my decision to leave the boyfriend, which I did toward the end of my second year, was a particularly bad move, and speculated secretly (sometimes not so secretly) that I was crazy. My response today is: Well, I was crazy. I was far more foggy and fearful than I thought I was, and I stayed that way for far longer than I would have guessed. I suspect that's par for the course. Several years can pass before you realize just how nuts you were when you first put down alcohol, just how monumental the shift from drinking to nondrinking is, just how much internal muck you have to wade through before you become even remotely clear-headed. N E X T+P A G E: No pot of gold at the end of the alcoholic rainbow - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
