This article focuses on my experience and perspective as an alcoholic ten years sober. To learn about my initial struggles with alcoholism, read Experiences of a Young Alcoholic: Reflections on Five Years of Sobriety .
As long as I can remember, I’ve never been able to remember my dreams with any regularity. I recall maybe one or two a year and very few of those make an impression lasting more than a few days. You might think this a curse but I think my mind is really trying to protect me. I believe this because every so often I wake up terrified, sometimes screaming and my wife has to calm me down and reassure me that it’s going to be OK. I take one lesson away from these terrors: within me is a mixture of fear and anxiety that is unleashed when certain restraints of my consciousness are removed. It’s then that I remember why I stopped drinking ten years ago. It’s then that I remember that I’m not better and that I will never be cured.
Insecurity and anger are part of me. They can no more be removed than flour and yeast can be drawn out of a baked loaf of bread. My peace of mind comes from accepting this and focusing on the real task of working within these traits as parameters of my mental landscape. At times they can be advantages. A fragile ego makes me competitive. Anger and dissatisfaction drive me to change what I can about my world. Other times they are obstacles and I am forced to filter overreaction, self-pity and self-deceit out of my thoughts, words and actions. I’m not always successful and I frequently lapse into morose isolation. Other times I can be preachy and shrill. I am also unalterably convinced that the manias, hysterics and rages that attended my benders in the past are kept in check only by the act of not consuming alcohol.
So how am I different from five or ten years ago? Well, I’m 32 now, married and self-employed. My wife and I travelled a fair portion of the world, indulging our curiosity and wanderlust in a way that few are able to do. We came out the other side and picked a new place to call home and to start building our future together. My wife is in school and finishing her degree. Five years ago I was financially dependent on family to get me from one paycheck to another. Today, I am able to meet my commitments with an industriousness and ingenuity I once doubted I would ever possess. Further, I am able to pick up some of the slack for my wife so that she can focus on her studies. Five years ago I had amorphous notions of writing for a living. Today I am a travel and technical writer with a respectable portfolio. I have been able to give as Christmas presents books in which my work was published. As freelance teacher and tutor I have moved beyond delivering Kaplan’s courses to create curricula of my own. My classes attract dozens of students and every few weeks another excited former client of mine calls up to tell me that he got a 700 on the GMAT or got into the graduate school of his choice. Finally, in the simplest measure of wellbeing that I know, it feels good to be me.
I maintain my sobriety as the gatekeeper for all good things in my life. I don’t go to meetings much, however. I don’t have a good excuse. I’ve simply been caught in the inertia of living in a new place and have been too lazy to look up local meetings. I don’t think that I’m in immediate danger of drinking but at the same time there have definitely been moments when the smell of good whiskey has wafted under my nostrils and I felt the old itch. Where I give myself credit is that I’m honest enough to admit single malt scotch still smells good. I think that is as it should be. One of the great dangers of striving to find maturity, peace of mind, will power or courage is to view the powers of others as somehow superhuman. Red-blooded human beings don’t grow up and suddenly become Puritans. Thus, whiskey still smells good to me. A cigarette would really hit the spot every now and then. The 18 year old college girls I see cavorting around town have not ceased being sexy to my thirty-something-and-married eyes.
The point is that keeping my life moving in the direction I want it to is a matter of honestly setting my priorities, making small acts of conscious will when I get a chance to and cutting myself a little slack for being human. It’s my ordinariness that makes the achievement of ten years sobriety an achievement. I have learned to recognize such subtly admirable acts of conscious will in others as well. I remember ten years ago when my wife was a terrible student, who missed classes, turned in assignments late and usually chose partying over studying. Today she’s on the Dean’s list. All that’s changed is that she actually shows up, works hard and by following this deceptively simply formula to repeated successes, she now believes in herself. I am incredibly proud of her not because she called up some hidden wellspring of talent but because she is fundamentally the same human being and prone to the same temptations as before. She simply chooses to excel one good decision at a time.
I have stayed sober by reducing the task to a series of good decisions. I stopped smoking one decision at a time. I’ve gotten my body back into reasonably good shape by recognizing each occasion that I don’t want to go the gym as another opportunity to do the right thing for myself. Sometimes when my attitude sucks and my hamstrings burn more than usual, I decide to love myself my kicking my feet up and watching some Arrested Development . As long as the decision is conscious, I can live with it.
I’ve also learned to appreciate the value of surrounding myself with people who have similar goals. My wife and her sister are also my roommates; both are hardworking honor students. My friends ask after my writing, my exercise regimen and every year on December 7 th they acknowledge that I have managed to keep alcohol out my life. In turn I do my best to inquire after their efforts.
Life is built on simple ingredients. The ability to write anything I can imagine rests on the potential of 26 letters that I learned as a toddler. Ten years after I stopped trying to destroy my own life I’ve learned how to build a better one through nothing more than rational goals and persistence. The most important advice I can give is this; always remember to do the right things and then just do them. Thus, I’m grateful for my love handles because they remind me why I struggle three times a week to push heavily freighted barbells up against the forces of gravity and my own laziness. In the same way I’m grateful for my nightmares because they remind me that I haven’t changed. I’m still here, still an alcoholic and still not drinking as a conscious act of will each and every day.