Hiking as Homotopy

I didn’t manage to hike today, but I’m keeping with the posting schedule. I’ll hike tomorrow and it will look something like this. I’m sure it will be beautiful. And I’m sure there will be a few of those, “I’m starring in my own movie,” moments that result when one is all endorphin-y and listening to good music and surrounded by gorgeous surroundings.

Apropos to what I want to write about today, here’s one of the pithiest passages in “The Road Less Traveled:”

[Being about spiritual growth, this book is inevitably about the other side of the same coin: the impediments to spiritual growth. Ultimately there is only the one impediment, and that is laziness. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome...In examining discipline we were considering the laziness of attempting to avoid necessary suffering, or taking the easy way out. In examining love we were also examining the fact that nonlove is the unwillingness to extend one's self. Laziness is love's opposite.]

I wanted to include another section of the writing I’m doing for Neil. In part, because it’s relevant to the blog, and in part because I’m a little behind on it. So it’s an x birds, y stones type of thing. The following stuff took place over something like January 2008 to June 2009.

[My girlfriend of about four years had just broken up with me. Surprisingly, my drinking wasn't one of the cited reasons. But it could have been. It was a growing problem. I spent so much energy protecting my drinking. I worried about her noticing how quickly I was cycling through half-gallons. I worried about her smelling alcohol on my breath when I picked her up from work. I worried about her being upset if I stayed up later than she did; it being obvious that I was doing that so I could drink more. I am someone who has a pretty good idea what an ideal relationship looks like, in terms of emotional honesty and openness and generosity and so forth. And I could see myself falling short. Moreover, I knew that my drinking was the biggest impediment to improving in those areas. But I did nothing about it.

I moved into a smaller apartment which was immediately a bit depressing. Because I was alone in it, and because the building was indistinct. Also because my drinking was starting to scare me and the relationship, which had been holding the drinking slightly in check, was over. It was in this apartment that I started drinking in the morning. Although I felt some shame when I did this, I was in denial about the extent of what it meant. The whiskey eased the morning hangover and I felt a little like Hunter Thompson or some other famously productive weekend dissolute. But things were definitely getting worse, even if I was the only one who noticed. Here are some memories from that time. Sometimes on Saturday mornings I would go play basketball with math friends and I worried about smelling like alcohol as it sweated out of my pores. And there were times I skipped basketball to stay home and drink. When I had my friends over for dinner I hoped they wouldn't notice the half-gallon of whiskey in my freezer. My friend kept his whiskey on top of the fridge for all to see. I couldn't do this because it would be too obvious to visitors how quickly I was drinking it. (Also, I liked it cold.) As a result, I rarely shared my whiskey with him as he did with me. I always had this feeling when people came by this apartment that they might find me out. It takes a great deal of energy to live this way. I worked hard every day to make sure nobody knew how big of a problem my drinking was. On Halloween 2008 I went to the annual grad student Halloween party, got more or less schnockered, and came home to drink more whiskey. I put some soup on the stove to heat up and woke up to the horrible shriek of my industrial strength smoke alarm. I couldn't quiet it in my stupor, so eventually two security guards came in and shut it down. They smiled to each other like they knew they were at the apartment of a drunk. The soup pan was ruined and the apartment smelled awful for a week. I remember feeling terrified after the security guards left the apartment. A feeling I had a few other times that year. Always when the amount I was drinking seemed to get totally away from me. And the fear seemed out of proportion to any possible threat. I just drank myself into terror.

Not long after the Halloween incident I tried to stop drinking for a month or so. I had become worried about my health. I had been imagining liver pain and went to the medical center to get it checked out. My liver was fine but my blood pressure was high and the doctor advised me to cut down on my drinking. I didn't make it more than a few days. Too lazy. Too scared.

The general schedule during this stretch of time was: spend the day at school in a partial fog, head home at the earliest, still-reasonable hour (like 4), drink for a couple hours, make dinner, and drink tell I slept. If there were a social occasion in the evening I would drink less but I would always drink quite a bit after I got home. It was like a daily admission of defeat. I would go home knowing I was going to repeat the pattern, knowing this wasn't the right choice to be making but knowing I was going to do it anyway. And the only thing that would temporarily ease my frustration with myself was more alcohol.

My time in grad school was amazing, the friendships that were made are irreplaceable. I wouldn't trade that time for anything. But for the last year and a half, I was more sad than anything else. Sad and scared.]

My drinking history is rich with both of the examples of laziness Peck mentions above. To the extent that I drank to escape suffering (which certainly was always a part of it), I was lazy in the face of the discipline we need to be emotional healthy. And in terms of laziness as love’s opposite, it was evident in the relationship I wrote about.

In fact, these two lazinesses have been behind every relapse I’ve had. Am I drinking to medicate anxiety? Am I willing to drink even though I know my drinking has been causing people I supposedly love immeasurable agony? Laziness.

It’s easier for me to see this now. There’s a fair bit of suffering one must endure to quit drinking. But not only is it not fair to avoid this by shifting the suffering to my loved ones, it’s also true that acting to avoid the suffering increases the suffering. Peck describes neuroses as patterns of behavior we develop to avoid suffering. Eckhart Tolle writes, “Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego…as long as you resist suffering, it is a slow process because the resistance creates more ego to burn up. When you accept suffering, however, there is an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact that you suffer consciously…the fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.”

I don’t want to dwell too much on the notion of suffering right now. Lately I’m not suffering at all. I haven’t felt this much peace in sobriety before. I’ve been successful at not having huge expectations; just getting done what needs to be done and trying to engage and connect with others. I have plenty of doubt. Sometimes I worry I don’t know myself very well, so how do I know I’m moving in the right direction? Tolle writes, “If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what’s left is who you are–the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined.”

I love that. My job is so simple right now. Don’t drink (it’s lazy). Show up for things I’ve committed to and give my best to them (it’s loving). Be absolutely comfortable not knowing who I am (what a relief!)

Here’s the map of today’s hike. It was hot and a little muggy today, in part because I didn’t hike until 2pm. And it seemed that there were more ups and downs than normal. But I’m excited to get to the three hikes per week frequency which was my intention all along. Assuming I hike and post on Thursday, this will be only the fourth three-hike/post week I’ve had since starting this a year ago March. Shame on me. It will be more difficult for me to find reasons to not stick to this schedule without having relapse to fall back on.

Feeling confident that my drinking career is over, I’ve thought recently about how my most recent drunk would then be my last. People often talk about their last drink as having been especially memorable; maybe because of a burst of clarity about the wretchedness of their current situation. My last drinking episode was basically a four day blackout. So not very memorable. But it was helpfully terrifying after the fact to realize I’d lost that much time. Someone told me recently that there were people on death row because of crimes they committed in a blackout. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it’s certainly possible. One reason I can never drink again is that the only thing that sounds worse than doing something horrible to someone while drunk is doing it and remembering nothing of it. Another reason is what I said recently about not causing any more pain (of this sort, anyway. I’m sure I’ll still fuck up in other ways.) than I already have to loved ones. Another reason is that 2.5 years opting out of the human contract is enough. There are more reasons.

I’m 55 days into the third and final part of my alcoholic story. Already, I’m surprised at the rewards I seem to be receiving for trusting the process. I have a sober roof over my head with housemates whose eccentricities are, I’m almost certain, outshone by their helpfulness. (Hopefully they can say the same thing of me.) I have a growing sober support network and meetings I love going to. I’m involved every week with the A.R.C. which feels like an important connection to keep. (This Friday night I’m going to the A.R.C. alumni banquet with my mom as my add-one.) I have a math-related part-time job which will come close enough to covering my expenses that I’m not going to supplement it just yet. I’ve spent 55 consecutive days making small but steady improvements to my relationships with loved ones, mostly by virtue of simply participating in the aforementioned human contract. But it’s also true that I’ve been more thoughtful than I have tended to be historically. I don’t remember ever having been this comfortable letting life happen. I know it’s early days. But I’m excited to see what’s next. I’ve ceased fighting. The next few months are going to be characterized by my simply showing up and doing what I need to do. And by my continuing to seek connection as opposed to isolation. And by my gratefully charting the repairs that I trust will be made to damaged relationships. And by my eating too much and staying up too late and watching too much television. Nobody’s perfect.

Here’s the map of today’s hike. I guess I have to embed links to the maps; I can’t seem to get the map image to embed anymore. This is probably not a big deal. One cool thing is the way that almost all of the trails I use when I’m in the park itself are marked on the map. As devoted readers of the blog (read: Mom) know, all of the in-park hiking takes place on either the red, green or blue marked trails. Today was red, then green. Green and red are oppositely oriented, so to keep myself following the correct direction of the trails I had to turn around after completing the west half of the red trail to then complete the west half of the green trail. The official, unofficial hike length was 3.99 miles. It was a beautiful morning and the park was filled with revelers celebrating their mothers and momhood in general. We should celebrate Earth Day and Mother’s Day on the same day since we sometimes say, “Mother Earth.” While I’m making holidays more efficient, we could combine Easter and Halloween. Everybody has to dress up as some sort of zombie bunny and the candy given out has to be Easter candy. Specifically, it should be Peeps, with delicious, sugary, fake blood inside. Surely Passover and Thanksgiving could be combined. My point is that people get way too many days off. (Says the asshole alcoholic working 10 hours a week.) A large number of the sentences in this paragraph are non-sequiturs.

The title of the post refers to one of my favorite AAphorisms. “We don’t think our way to right action; we act our way to right thinking.” This is clearly inspired by James 2:14-26: “faith without works is dead.” And James was inspired by the caveman philosopher Grock, who famously grunted, “No just talk about rock…use rock.” Most people assume he was speaking metaphorically. Anyway, this notion is one I need to remind myself of regularly. I can spend a lot of time wondering about my mind-state when I might better use my energy for the going and doing of something useful. Also, the implication is that by simply doing the next right thing on a regular basis, life gets better. I get better. I don’t have to chart it or analyze it. I can safely assume that things are improving if my actions are in line with God’s will, for lack of a better deity-noun two-word combination. As far as what I mean by God’s will, the truth is I don’t mean anything too specific. I recently finished the M. Scott Peck book I started in treatment last year and I guess, for the time being, I’m adopting his definitions of God, religion and grace, among other things. I’ll write more about my efforts to synthesize and adopt the Peckian worldview in another post some time soon. For now, God’s will might as well mean what it is I’m fairly certain is the right thing to do in a given situation, while trying to be as aware of ego as possible, and minimizing its (my ego, that is) contribution to the whole brainstorming-of-possible-next-actions process. For instance, my awareness of ego is telling me that I made the last few sentences unnecessarily complex so I can feel like someone who has been passed some faint embers from the torch of David Foster Wallace.

In practice, it’s often easy to recognize what the next right thing ought to be. Going to one of the meetings I’ve committed to attend is a no-brainer. Socializing with my friends from these meetings if I’m invited and I’m able is as well. On Saturday my brother and I made dinner for our moms. This was God’s will. And I believe God guided me to find the recipe for golden mashed potato gratin, because God likes me a little chubby. God thinks it brings out my eyes. I’m probably being a little overly cheeky at this point. My apologies. It’s easy for me to be borderline dismissive since my vision of God, inasmuch as I have one, is along the lines of a collective unconscious. If your vision of God is more concrete and you’re offended by my cheek, I apologize.

When things are going well, as they have been lately, I often want all the old wounds I created to heal instantly. This isn’t how things work, though, and I know that. This disappointment is salved, however, when I remember that all I have to do is do the work. If my actions are where they need to be, I can rest assured that the healing is taking place. Maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but it’s taking place. I just need to stay on top of my millipede legs, to hearken back to one of the posts from the Sally. In fact, here’s an excerpt from that very post. This is from hike 16.84, on September 2, 2011.

["Billy Pilgrim says the universe doesn't look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see humans as two-legged beings, either. They see them as great millipedes - 'with babies' legs at one end, and old people's legs at the other,' says Billy Pilgrim."

I love that. It reminds me of "Donnie Darko," when Donnie can see a shimmering cylinder connecting himself to where he'll be going in the future. I will henceforth awkwardly connect this idea to recovery. That gives me a good idea for a future blog, "Awkward connections to recovery." Coming soon, to an interweb that lives inside us all.

Anyway, I'm going to try to imagine that my future is laid out irrevocably. In AA, and in religion more generally, there is the idea of abandoning "my will" and living "God's will." I think that idea can be interpreted in many different ways. I have to think that if I'm an athiest who wants to find meaning in these ideas. And I am. So I'm going to imagine that my millipede legs lead in the direction of God's will. This is the direction I'm intended to go. That's why it's such an effortful struggle, riddled with anxiety, to veer from that path. I imagine that my millipede legs are leading me to a life of meaning, filled with discourse with people like you and rewarding work and a very high ratio of "vegetable experiences" to "cotton candy" experiences, in the words of my former therapist.]

The quote inside the excerpt is from “Slaughterhouse Five.”

Today my millipede legs took me up Mt. Tabor and then out to my dad’s to celebrate with the other side of my family. Sometimes when I see people who have an intimate knowledge of my behavior over the last few years, I imagine I can see in their eyes evidence of a perfectly understandable loving skepticism as far as my continued sobriety is concerned. I can’t fix that in a day. And I’m not in control of when people come around, if ever. But I can take comfort in fifty-three days of remaining in contact with my millipede legs. Things get better when I pay much more attention to actions than thoughts.

Well, I’m having a heck of a time getting my little maps to show up here. Suffice it to say that I really am going on hikes. I did one Sunday and one today and I’m doubling up tonight so that I can get caught up. From now on I want to always post the same night as the hike itself. The procrastination is driving me batty. And I know the connection between the posts and the hikes is important to my readership. (I’m kidding. It’s more of a readercanoe.)

This has been an interesting week. I had an email exchange with a very close friend wherein he told me that he had been somewhat distant lately because it’s hard for him to reconcile what my drinking is doing to me and my friends and family with the person he thought he was friends with. Those are my words but I think I’m getting the overall message right. He also said that he wasn’t interested in ending the friendship right now. But if this pattern kept up, at some point he’d have to cut loose. This, combined with the recent comments of a similar tone, and along with the homework I’m doing, putting on paper all the ways drinking has made my life a mess, have forced me to think long and hard about the damage I’ve done and am doing.

When I was thinking about this stuff tonight, it occurred to me that it’s almost like I’ve been playing around at getting sober. Since I’ve always believed I would get it eventually, what’s a few more relapses? After all, addiction is a beast! None of this was conscious but that’s how it looks to me looking back on it now. How supremely selfish is that? It’s more important that I scratch the insanely high-consequence itch that is the desire to drink than it is I spare my loved ones another month or so of grief, worry and pain. They who will be conscious through it all. Not me, though. I’m spared the pain while I’m doing it. After it’s over I have a maudlin, apologetic phase which is more about my feeling bad for myself than anything else. Then, as I start to heal, feelings of compassion for what I’ve put others through are put aside, probably because they’re really painful for me to think about. It’s cognitive dissonance. I don’t want to think I’m the sort of person who would do that to people. And that’s the lie I’ve been buying into. Since the damage is done when I drink, and when I drink I don’t feel at all like myself, then I’m separated from the deeds somewhat. But that defense would only work if someone had tied me down and poured the vodka down my throat. I made the decision to drink, again, on February 10. Whatever few thoughts I had about how drinking that night would affect me, I had none about how it would affect everyone else. How do I justify that? All of this isn’t to say I’m interested in getting sober to please others. I’m just done putting people through all this pain just to indulge a fable about how helpless I am in the grips of this disease. I do feel helpless once I drink. But I’ve known that for a while. So just don’t drink. Ever. I’ve lost the right. Practically speaking, I’ll still be going about things one day at a time, as it were. But that’s a good way to live for anyone. Being in the moment and so forth. But it’s dangerous for me to buy into the idea that drinking could sneak up on me. I know too much for that to happen anymore.

I know this may sound hollow. Perhaps this histrionic swearing-off is just part of the cycle. But I know I’ve never felt this way. And I know I’m done. From now on, each day will be about healing my life and my relationships with the people I’ve hurt. A friend of mine, forty-one years sober, advised me when we were discussing my relationship with family and close friends, “Just don’t cause them any more pain than you already have.” I’m not going to. I’m shutting the door on the “active addiction” part of this story. There, I justified the title of the post.

On my way over to Fred Meyer’s for some gummy candies (an important part ((along with occasional, semi-constant, ice cream gobbling)) of my harm reduction plan), I was bathed in the full glory of the perigree “super moon.” This extra bright, extra big (seeming) moon is bright enough and big enough that I could finally make out not only the man in the moon, but the ironically self-referential tattoo he has on his bicep. The tattoo is of a full moon, complete with its own man in the moon, this man, too, having a tattoo of a moon, with a man, and so on. This must be some kind of positive omen for me, my life and my blog. I don’t know. I’ll settle for it just being a bad omen for everyone who isn’t me.

[The above hike took place Tuesday, as it happens. And it was the first hike in the series that wasn't done alone. One of the regular contributors to the blog came with me, having won the inaugural "Come Hike With Me" reader-raffle.]

I worked at the tutoring center this morning. It’s out in Beaverton so I spend a substantial amount of time being ferried around by buses and max trains. This gives me lots of time to read, listen to music and podcasts, and think. If anything, there’s too much time to think. Sometimes I think I’ve lit on something helpful. Some new way to frame my struggle, or a new angle of approach in how to combat it. If I were describing this to a long-sober person, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear them say, in a playfully mocking way, “So, you’re trying to fix your thinking with your thinking. Let me know how that works out for you.” And there’s good reason to be skeptical about this sort of thing. It’s like trying to lift oneself off the ground. But my thoughts can be helpful. It’s just critical that I’m aware that they’re only thoughts. They need not dictate action. In fact, taking action is a great way for me to get out of my head, at a time when my thoughts are more malign. This action might simply be going to a meeting, or going somewhere with sober friends after a meeting, or visiting with housemates as opposed to isolating in my room. Lately it seems that I’m achieving a critical mass of such action; as a result, staying sober feels less effortful than in recent memory. It feels less effortful only because I’m making an effort, I guess. But back to today. Today my thoughts were tending towards less beneficial self-examination. Even though the last six weeks have been going very well, I sometimes imagine other people looking at my life from the outside and wondering why I’m not doing more. Most of my time is spent attending meetings; hanging out (or “fellowshipping” in the verniggity-nack) with other meeting-goers; traveling to work, working, and traveling back from work; eating sugar in a desperate attempt to stay sober; watching/playing/reading about sports; general reading (this deserves more than two words. I’d give up gummy candies before I’d give up books); watching high quality movies and television; hike-blogging and blog-hiking. Truthfully, I’m pretty content with my life right now, stripped down though it may be. I’m especially pleased that it doesn’t involve drinking, or even, for that matter, much drinking-related perseveration. It’s always easy, however, for me to slip into shapeless worry about how my life appears to those around me; as if you all have nothing better to do but sit around and think about how I might spend my time more productively/efficiently/meaningfully. When I find myself mired in a thought like this one, I try not to chase it out of my head, but to deflect it obliquely away; acknowledging it with a smile, I get busy doing something tangible.

Like making up stuff about recursive moon-men that I can share with 80 of my closest friends. By the way, if you’re thinking of judging me you should know I courageously strode past the ice cream aisle today. The power of the moon. Speaking of the moon, here’s an excerpt from the Mighty Boosh. The man on the left is Howard Moon.

And here’s the actual moon.

Lately I’ve been working on a writing project suggested by a member of an anonymous organization. In an effort to retrain my brain to associate my drinking with the damage I’ve wreaked in, around and under the influence, I’m cataloguing some examples of alcohol-enabled dysfunction. Maybe it’s difficult to understand why this would take any work at all. Why wouldn’t I immediately think, when a using thought arrives, about all of the misery my drinking has visited on my life and the lives of those closest to me? I wish I had a good answer to that. The reality, though, is that it seems to take a conscious effort. And it also seems to require that I don’t allow myself to get too far out of whack. As far as I can tell, remaining “in whack” is contingent upon meeting attendance at meetings where I know and like people, not lying (much), and reading books about spirituality. This is the minimum, anyway. My working definition of spirituality is the transcendence of ego, as described by Eckhart Tolle. So when I read M. Scott Peck define love as the will to extend oneself for the spiritual growth of another, I have the above definition of spirituality in mind. He may have had a different definition in mind but I bet they aren’t that far apart. I include the definition because I’ve seen others get frustrated with how hard it is to pin down what people mean when they use it. Anyway, reading Peck and Tolle and others is an important part of the whackening process. For what it’s worth, the past forty days have been remarkably in of whack. I’ve had drinking thoughts, but nothing even close to what I would describe as a drinking urge. This is news. After seven months in treatment I had several powerful drinking urges, and eventually acted on one. I think it’s probably a matter of life balance and keeping my focus on recovery. When this focus slips, denial is reactivated. I was using the fact that I was working a lot to justify slackening the above whackening (couldn’t resist.) I should have done just the opposite. Since work is stressful, I should have been working extra hard to stay in balance. Right now, it’s clear to me that I will stay sober if I continue doing what I’ve been doing. I feel safe in my sobriety for the first time in a long time.

Here’s an excerpt from some of the homework I’ve done.

“When I started grad school, I wasn’t yet a daily drinker. I also didn’t know anyone initially; on weekend nights I would often get six tall beers to take back home to the room I rented in a house near campus. I would justify to myself that this level of drinking wasn’t interfering with my studies, but that wasn’t entirely true. On a night that I knew I was going to drink I was more likely to wrap up my studies early. Even if I hadn’t been drinking during this time I would probably have had work ethic problems, but the drinking exacerbated these. Also, I felt shameful about the antisocial nature of my drinking. I would secret the beers into my room inside my backpack so my housemates didn’t realize I was drinking six tall beers by myself in my tiny room.

Soon, I made friends in the math program and developed a healthier social life. This often involved drinking too, but with other people in a social setting, making the whole enterprise a little less alcoholic-seeming. But this social drinking never replaced my anti-social drinking, it simply provided cover for it. Around this time, for instance, it occurred to me for the first time to buy whiskey to drink at home. But it was never in my nature to just occasionally have a bit to sip on. I spent many weekend nights getting really drunk and watching pornography. Drinking was occupying a bigger share of my time, and of my mental landscape. I spent more time planning to do it; more time doing it; more time recovering from it. And since I was drinking more alcoholically, I felt more shame about it. While this was going on, many of my classmates would have been pulling late-night homework sessions. I felt like I was letting myself down by not working as hard as I could have been; more so, because of exactly how I was not studying. I didn’t feel comfortable telling any of my friends that this was how I spending an evening, so on these nights I was incommunicado. From this point on, I always kept the frequency and intensity of my home-drinking secret from my friends and family.

Soon thereafter I started dating the woman I would date for about four years. I remember coming home after kissing her for the first time. It was exciting, but I remember wanting to feel the excitement more deeply. It occurred to me that I could only access the depth of emotion I was looking for if I started drinking. Of course it didn’t work. I was looking for the alcohol to profoundly intensify my emotional experience and it wasn’t capable of that. I wanted it to help me access an emotional profundity that I thought the moment was worthy of. I remember realizing that it wasn’t doing for me at all what I wanted it to do.”

In fact, the regularity with which I was drinking eventually functions as an emotional anesthetic. Maybe alcohol does more emotion heightening in one’s early drinking days and more deadening in one’s later drinking days. This would explain the way many of us alcoholics describe our late-stage alcoholic drinking as the chasing of some bliss earlier reached, so we think, with alcohol’s help.

But that ship has sailed. I want access to the entirety of the emotional spectrum. And I believe I’m on the way. If I do ever turn this project into a manuscript, this would be the beginning of the boring part about the person putting their life back together.

For some reason, I can’t get the little map of my hike yesterday to embed in the post properly. I suspect no one pays a great deal of attention to those maps, however, so it’s no great loss. It’s just a continuity issue. But for continuity’s sake, I guess taking two months off from posting does greater damage than a missing map. For what it’s worth, my hike was 4.24 miles from beginning to end (although more like 5.34 from the Oxford house I’m living in ((which is the same Oxford house I was living in when I started this project a year ago)) ). It was totally blissful to be up there again. I believe the past month has been the most important month of sobriety I’ve experienced, and I’ll explain why I think that, but it has nothing to do with being happy all the time. I’ve been anxious more than happy, or content. But these hikes make me happy. I say this month is important because it’s the last first month of sobriety that I’ll ever need to have. Practically speaking, the two longish periods of sobriety I’ve had (four months and eight months) were both spent almost entirely in some sort of voluntary confinement (living at home and breathalyzing twice a day and then living in the A.R.C.). Only the last month of each of those sober periods were spent outside of that confinement (living at home but not breathalyzing and then in the Oxford house I moved into after graduating the A.R.C.). But during both of those situations I had gotten right back into teaching, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, but can be if I look to it for ego validation and some sense of “it was all just a bad dream. You’re still a successful mathematician.” It’s true that the Oxford house still serves as a disincentive to drinking, but I promise you that it’s much easier for me to stay sober in treatment or living at home under threat of breathalyzer than it is where I am now. So the last month has been especially important because I need to prove to myself that I can stay sober in the real world. This current situation provides the right balance of structure, safety and freedom for me to do that. I’m not working so I don’t get the false sense of emotional health that work sometimes provides me. I have one focus. Treatment was actually more about proving to myself that I could be uncomfortable for seven months without bailing than it was about staying sober. The two things are certainly related since walking through discomfort is something sober people have to do often. But I think I’m learning more about staying sober now than I did then. Or maybe I’m just learning by doing now, and then I was learning by learning. There comes a point when you need to learn by doing. Today is my 29th day. (I titled the post the way I did because I set out to write it last night and I’ll leave it that way since there aren’t any horror movies entitled “29 days later”). And it’s the best, in terms of its importance, 29 days I’ve ever had.

As far as why I relapsed, I’m not sure. I had been strongly tempted the two prior weekends and I managed to talk myself out of it. But the Friday (Feb. 10th) that I drank, once the idea arrived, I didn’t question it. It’s hard to explain. But I believe what I wrote earlier about work providing a misleading ego boost if I let it. Also, I wasn’t being honest with Neil about how many recovery meetings I was going to. I could tell the guilt was building up, but I didn’t come clean. Had I come clean, I suspect I wouldn’t have relapsed. Don’t get me wrong. Teaching doesn’t make me drink; math doesn’t make me drink; my childhood doesn’t make me drink; Santorum doesn’t make me drink; even lying doesn’t make me drink. It’s what I do in response to these things. Or what I don’t do. If I’m making a daily effort to check in with myself and others so I don’t get too far out of sorts, I’ll stay sober. If I try to stay sober by being busy and closing my eyes and gritting my teeth through temptations, then I’m likely to wake up sleeping on a cement floor or behind my parents’ garage in the snow with blood running down my face.

The details of the relapse are probably not very important. But I’m working on how training my brain to associate with my drinking all the painful feelings that it brings about. Euphoric recall is a bitch. It’s easy for me look back fondly at miserable shit. Changing this will take work. So I’ll write briefly about the experience, in an attempt to at least convey the misery.

Istarteddrinkingfridayfeb.10th.
Iintendedtojustgetapintofvodkabutlefttheliquorstorewithapintandafifth.
IrememberdrinkingmostofthepintbutthenextthingIrememberiswakinguponmybedwiththefifthoverturned,
havinglostmostofitscontentsonmybed.
Theroomreekedofvodka.
ThenextdayIgothighalcoholbeerat7amandvodkaat11am.
Thenextdaymaybebeerandwine.
Monday,Ididn’tteachbutmyfriendcoveredmyclasses.
Lefttomyowndevices,Iwouldhavejustnotshownup.
ItoldmyfriendIwouldstopdrinkingifshecoveredmyTuesdayclassaswellbutbythatpointIknewIwaslyingaboutthat.
TuesdaymorningIwaskickedoutofthesoberhouse.
Istayedonedayatamoteluntilmymoneyranout.
Thenitwasmyintentiontospendtwonightsinmycar,drinking,untilIgotmoremoneyandcouldgetanothermotel.
But,onthefirstnightinthecar,Iwassoanxiousaboutbeingfoundinthecar,thatIkeptmovingit,
whichinvolveddrivingdrunkagreatdeal.
EventuallyIgotoutofthecartorelievemyselfandlockedmyselfoutofit.
AtthattimeIcalledmyparents,whotookmehome.
I detoxed at my parents’ house and other family members took the car away so I couldn’t kill myself or somebody else with it. This made me furious for a while but I eventually relented. After detoxing I moved in with grad school friends (under the condition that I wouldn’t drink) and, having salvaged one of three jobs (the tutoring company), I went back to work. Nine days later I drank again.
Idrankforabout60hoursattheirhousebeforetheycalledthepolicewhocouldn’tarrestmebuttheysuggestedIleave,
whichIfinallydid.
IhadnomoneyforamotelsoIwenttomyparents’houseandsnuckintotheir
garageanddranktwohighalcoholbeersI’dbought.
Atthattime,Ibrokeopenacabinettheykeptsomealcoholinandstoleamostlyfullhalfgallonoftequila,
whichIstashedbehindthegarageincasetheyfoundmeandtookawaymybeer.
TheydidfindmeattheycalledthepolicewhenItookoff.
Thepolicetookmetothedrunktank.Hence,thewakinguponthecementfloor.
WhenIgotoutIwentbacktomyparents’housetogetthetequila.
IthadstartedsnowingandIhadnowheretogo.
Thegarageitselfwaslocked.
Istartedoutbehindmyparents’houseandthentriedafriend’srecentlyvacatedhousebutitwaslockeduptoo.
Iwasscaredtobreakin.
IwasalsoscaredtosleepundertheoverpassbywhatusedtobeHollywoodLanes.
AlthoughIconsideredit.
EventuallyIsleptbehindmyparents’garage.
AtsomepointImusthaveslippedandhitmyhead.
SointhemorningwhenmybrotherfoundmeIwassoakingwetandbleedingfromanot-very-deepheadwound.
I was taken to the ER and detoxed a little there. From there, I got into the Providence detox and stabilization unit. They keep you for two weeks and help you arrange a plan for what you’ll do when you leave. I had arranged to move into a different Oxford house and start going to outpatient treatment in Milwaukie and look for some kind of temporary work. Since, by this point, I had fucked off the tutoring company as well. But the day after I left Providence I sneaked a fifth into my parents’ house.
Idrankthatnight(thisisMarch16th)andleftthenextmorning(ostensiblytogotoameeting).
Ihadalotofmoney,allofasudden,fromgettingpaidbythejobsIhadrecentlybailedon.
SoIgotamotel,intending,Isuppose,todrinkforaslongasthemoneyheldout.
Afterafewdaysofthismyparentstransferredmuchofthemoneyoutofmyaccount
andIleftthelastmotelI’dbeeninwithseveralbeersinmybackpackandnoplanwhatsoever.
Afterwalkingaroundabit,
theweightofthebeersinthebackpackcombinedwithmydrunkennesscausedmetofalldownseveraltimes.
Eventually,somepassersbycalledanambulance.
Again I was taken to the ER. The next day I got into Hooper Detox and stayed there for a week. My plan was to try to get into a program called Blanchet House, where you serve homeless people food in exchange for a room. But there’s a waiting list and it was going to require trying to stay at the Mission downtown for a while. I called my friend at the Oxford house I lived at last year and he let me crash for a couple of days. But it turned out there was a vacancy as of April 1 so I was able to move in here properly.

So that’s what happened. It was all one relapse, in the sense that I didn’t back to close to feeling secure in not drinking until I got into this house. I typeset it that way because it’s a pretty decent symbolic representation of how I think, feel and act when I’m drinking. I don’t blame you if you don’t read it. It’s more important that I write it than you read it. The shame I feel coming out of those drinking bouts is the most unpleasant feeling I’ve experienced. And it’s that shame that I need to remember every time I think about drinking. Also, the third of those three drinking periods lasted from the evening of Friday, March 16th to the morning of Wednesday, March 21st. I have about two total memories from Saturday through Tuesday. That’s fucking horrifying.

I had a day, while at Hooper Detox, while I was reading Eckhart Tolle write about ego transcendence, where it became clear to me that I could really be done with this. It was more a feeling than a thought. I don’t remember feeling that way, deep down, at any point prior to that. It was moving. I cried a lot that day and then for the next few days, when I thought about it. Even in the emotional turmoil of detoxing I hadn’t had an experience like that before. I don’t know how meaningful that particular experience is but I do believe that it’s done. Not the work, just the failure. It is in my control to stay close enough to level ground that I don’t slip. Next time I’ll write more about what’s going on now. I’ll try to include detail about what’s not going well so as not to repeat previous everything’s-fine-until-it’s-seriously-not type stuff.

Thanks for reading. And caring. And wearing that t-shirt. Just kidding, I can’t see you.

I clearly have much yet to learn about gratification delay. I’m writing tonight about last Sunday’s hike, the memories of which by now have all but passed through the sieve which at some point was given the unfortunate job of gathering in recollections. I think I should try to write the post within 36 hours of finishing the hike. Even if the connection between the hikes I take and the posts I write is tenuous, I do want to preserve what’s left of the illusion. And in fact, I do think blog-related thoughts as I’m on the walks. But I don’t remember what I was thinking about on Sunday. I know that Saturday night was a bit of a challenge for me, though. So, for lack of a better idea, I’ll write about that.

Since I’m teaching statistics, I keep wanting to describe things to people using histograms, pie charts, scatterplots and what have you. So when I was reflecting on my temptation to drink Saturday, and how I fairly quickly realized it was born of the same bullshit responsibility avoidance that I have used as an excuse to relapse a few times before, it occurred to me that I might compile some data on the reasons, as best as I can figure, for my relapses of the last two years.

I’m not claiming this has therapeutic value. But maybe it does. I’m not glorifying anything, you’ll soon observe. So it seems it can’t hurt. And if I have a main point in mind, it’s something about the sadness of life built around avoiding pain and discomfort. So it got me wondering how often that’s been at the root of my decision to drink.

The standard impetuses (I think the plural should be impeti) have been:

1. It’s been a very short time since my last drink and my abstinence is very shaky still. Enough time has passed that I no longer feel sick but not enough time for me to feel much real wellness. This is, of course, the reason many treatment programs go on for a minimum of thirty days, on up to three months, and in the case of highly a few highly intransigent scoundrels, a full seven months.

2. More time has passed than in situation (1) so that I do feel well. Things have been going so well, in fact, that I start to feel overconfident. The tiny asshole has made some convincing pitches in this environment, especially prior to my having identified him as the source of the ideas.

3a. Work/responsibility/relationship anxiety is diminishing my contentment to the point that I want to drink simply to not feel the stress. Same reason a lot of people drink, I suppose, but with disastrous consequences.

3b. Like (3a) except that I’m experiencing the stress subconsciously. I only realize after the fact that some (3b) type shit must have been going on for me to get as twisted up as I got.

4. I am around people drinking (or I’m just thinking a lot about it because of something I’m watching on TV or reading) and I feel I’m missing out and it isn’t fair and so on.

5. I feel I deserve a reward for accomplishing something that lots of people do all the time. “I worked a twelve hour day!! Where’s my fucking parade?” When (5) happens I think there’s always some (3) left in it. Like the stress doesn’t fully dissipate for a while so the celebration is, to some extent, just good old avoidance of lingering stress in a fancy dress.

-When I drank just two weeks after returning from California that was clearly (1).

-A month later when I tried again I think it was a combination of (1) and (2).

-During the next couple of months I didn’t spend much time sober, but the next big collapse coincided with a pile of ungraded final exams, so let’s call it (3a).

-After nine weeks sober I drank the night before flying to California to spend time with friends, one of whom I had been dating for a few months long-distance. I think this was 3b (I have felt a lot of relationship stress in the past because of my fear of commitment. I’m very confident this will be less of an issue in my sobriety. Not just because I’ll be sober, but because I’m excited to work against it.) combined with 4.

-After grading finals in spring 2010, it was (5) all day. “I graded finals without getting drunk! Where’s my fucking parade? I deserve a drink as a reward for not drinking. Don’t you see?”

-Halfway through a promising summer term, with employment at Linfield a distinct possibility it was (3b) without question. This particular experience was the most like my two strong-ish temptations to drink since I’ve left treatment. I feel ill at ease somewhat all of a sudden, and because I don’t immediately recognize the boringly predictable forces at work, I’m more threatened by the feeling than I should be. The quicker the recognition, which seems to be happening more quickly every time, the less threatening the event.

-Then, after a short period of covert drinking, came another collapse associated with the Linfield job I apparently wasn’t going to be taking. So this is (3b).

-After almost four months sober I relapsed on Christmas Eve. I think this was (3b) for the upcoming term and, to a lesser extent, (2).

-My last relapse was definitely not a (3b). I was only tutoring and didn’t feel much in the way of responsibility. But I guess it was (4) and (2) and what I believe will be my last attempt to prove that I can conquer alcoholism by, wait for it, drinking alcoholically!

The only two times I’ve felt a powerful urge since leaving treatment were definitely (3b) events. What’s different? I really did learn a fair bit in treatment about alcoholism. This makes it more difficult for me to completely bullshit myself. Also I believe that if I were to drink it would simply be a matter of time until I was back at the Adult Rehabilitation Center. This thought/fact makes me cringe and acts as an effective disincentive. People drink in spite of much more powerful disincentives than this all the time but it’s easier to heed a disincentive having been sober a while.

So here’s a graph of the results. I’ll make a dotplot of sorts. Two dots will represent one occurrence of an event so that one dot can represent a half-occurrence. Like in the very last relapse described above I would put a dot in the (4) row and a dot in the (2) row.

The first row will count occurrences of excuse (1) and so on, with (3a) and (3b) combined into a single row for the purposes of manipulating data interpretation.

Here goes.

I’m not going to have my statistics students look at this for a dizzying multitude of reasons.

…
…
……..
..
..

As you can see, this proves absolutely nothing. But I think it’s helpful to me to emphasize how often the idea to drink comes simply from the desire to flee from under an uncomfortable feeling. But these uncomfortable feelings are fleeting. And, as I wrote about recently, not giving in to these impulses seems to encourage incremental spiritual growth in my spirit chamber. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Let’s see what DFW had to say about pain avoidance. And perhaps he lost the battle with pain avoidance but I don’t think that makes him less of an authority on it.

In this section of “The Pale King,” a character is describing the lengths he has gone to to deal with severe anxiety attacks he’s been having at school and in other public situations which manifest in an unholy amount of sweating.

“In February his mother made a breezy, half-joking comment about his love life and if there were any girls he especially liked this year, and he almost had to leave the room, he almost burst into tears. The idea now of ever asking a girl out, of taking a girl out and having her looking at him from right there close up, expecting him to be thinking about her instead of how primed he was and whether he was going to start sweating — this filled him with dread, but at the same time it made him sad. He was bright enough to know there was something sad about it. Even as he gladly quit Scouts just four badges short of Eagle, and turned down a shy, kind of socially anonymous girl from College Algebra and Trigonometry’s invitation to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and faked being sick at Easter so he could stay home by himself reading ahead in ‘Dorian Gray’ and trying to jump-start an attack in the mirror of his parents’ bathroom instead of driving down with them to Easter dinner at his grandparents’, he felt a bit sad about it, as well as relieved, plus guilty about the various lies of the excuses he gave, and also lonely and a bit tragic, like someone in the rain outside a window looking in, but also creepy and disgusting, as though his secret inner self was creepy and the attacks were just a symptom, his true self trying to literally leak out — though none of all this was visible to him in the bathroom’s glass, whose reflection seemed oblivious to all that he felt as he searched it.”

I have felt this tragic relief from giving in to irresponsibility and isolation, and certainly this ‘on the outside looking in’ sensation as well. And I’d very much like to be done with it. Lots of great thinkers, Vince Lombardi and Hank Robb among them, have posited that any substantive achievement comes at a price. Sometimes that price is having to wade through a certain amount of discomfort. Hell, sometimes that price is getting your legs blown off. All I ask of myself, having been fortunate enough so far to avoid significant physical sacrifice, is that I grow strong enough to endure emotional discomfort, especially when it’s in the service of things that are of value to me. I think if I keep doing this, these (3b) potential pitfalls will eventually morph into regular opportunities for me to remind myself of my commitment to the conscious pursuit of valued living. These (3b) events have typically functioned as breaking points for me. But Hemingway (“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”) has led me to believe that I can hope to eventually be stronger in these broken places.

Today, while giving a calculus exam, I noticed a student succumbing to the visual temptation presented by the hip-swishing sultry strut of his classmate’s unguarded exam. I have enough distaste for confrontation that I have been slow in the past to punish this behavior. I always try to make eye contact with the student first, hoping that once they realize I’m watching they’ll decide it’s too risky. But this never actually seems to work. Once they’ve added “scouting classmates’ tests for inspiration” as a stratagem, they seem to be reluctant to let it go. So then I either do nothing, which I sometimes justify by making note of the lack of inspiration available on adjacent desks (it’s kind of funny that a fairly large percentage of people who do this seem to sit close to their friend who is also struggling in the class and end up cheating off of the very person they fail to figure out homework with.), or I go over to the student and quietly insist that they keep their eyes on their own paper. Today I just stayed sitting where I was and stage-whispered to the offending student this same advice. I didn’t drag out the process as long as I have in the past. Also, when I first noticed it happening, I stopped myself from engaging in bullshit like “How dare they disrespect me like this!” I thought about how, despite my usual good intentions, I still feel the need to cut corners sometimes. When I do this, it isn’t out of spite or disrespect of anyone in power. It’s just laziness or indulging an old habit. This person with the wandering eye is most likely a good person making a bad decision. I’ve freaking been there. But when we do this, on some level, we want people to enforce the rules that are in place. That’s not to say that we want to get caught. Maybe sometimes that’s true. But I think we’re disappointed if we realize that the rules-enforcer knows what we’re doing and lets us get away with it. We’re forced to lose respect for them when this happens, which is a drag. And I think we know that rule enforcing, when done right, involves (M. Scott) Peckian love. This is why there are so many more people who wish their parents had been more strict (short of anything abusive, of course) than less so, once they’re actually grown up. I guess I’m just asserting that this is the case but I think it is.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Road Less Traveled.” Peck is making the argument that love, as he defines it, and psychotherapy go hand in hand.

“Similarly, there is nothing at all inappropriate in the feelings of love that a therapist develops for his or her patient when the patient submits to the discipline of psychotherapy, cooperates in the treatment, is willing to learn from the therapist, and successfully begins to grow through the relationship. Intensive psychotherapy in many ways is a process of reparenting. It is no more inappropriate for a psychotherapist to have feelings of love for a patient than it is for a good parent to have feelings of love for a child. To the contrary, it is essential for the therapist to love a patient for the therapy to be successful, and if the therapy does become successful, then the therapeutic relationship will become a mutually loving one. It is inevitable that the therapist will experience loving feelings coincidental with the genuine love he or she has demonstrated toward the patient.”

The process of teaching 15-40 college students is somewhat different than practicing psychotherapy on one patient, but I still find the message helpful. I can still attempt to practice genuine love with my students by holding them accountable, asking a lot of them, and being willing to do those same things myself.

Sometimes Peckian ideas bring to mind Hankian ideas, where Hank is still the psychologist I saw for a year or so recently. He once said that since it’s so difficult to do something perfectly we should decide ahead of time on which side we want to err. It’s difficult to be perfectly on time to appointments, so I can either tend to be a little early or tend to be a little late. One of these options is clearly more loving than the other. When I was writing the exams I gave this week, which is something that ties me up in procrastinating little knots sometimes, I was struggling to figure out the appropriate exam length. It occurred to me, with the help of some good advice by a colleague, that it’s better to err on the side of too short of an exam than too long. It’s hard to know how to assess the results of an exam that’s too long, since it forces students to do some sort of strategic short-cutting, which some of them are better at than others. But this isn’t really what I want to be grading them on.

I find this idea really helpful when I get stuck in perfectionistic idling of some sort. It forces me to choose a direction or an angle of approach. It keeps me moving forward. I did this tonight when I decided to write a post even though I felt too tired. I have to remind myself that it’s better that I write something short (mission not accomplished) and mediocre than I write nothing at all. Considering that I am trying to hold myself accountable to a schedule of sorts. So I’m trying to submit to the discipline required for me to show genuine love to myself. This is what I’m trying to do in all areas of my life right now. And it’s impossible to be perfect at it. But I’m making a good go of it. And I feel justified in asking my students to submit to the discipline required to grow as calculus students. When they fall short, I’ll be demanding of more. I’ll do this, hopefully, without losing contact with the fact that I’m motivated by love; I want to help them grow, as students and people, to whatever degree I can.

I mean, look. It’s also true that it’s a job. And sometimes I’ll suck at it. And sometimes I’ll mail it in. But if I’m staying sober and showing up, literally and figuratively, and if I’m motivated and energized by the above ideas, then it will almost certainly be a good process for them and for me.

As I wrote last week, I’m reading the posthumously published David Foster Wallace novel, which is often described as being about, among other things, the nature of boredom. Here’s an excerpt:

“To me…the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.”

This makes me think of laying in bed when I was 10 or 11 or so, trying to chase from my completely undistracted brain the thought of how excruciatingly desolate an eternity of nothingness must be. I don’t remember ever having believed in heaven or hell. They always seemed too much like stuff humans would think up to be comforted or threatened by. It was never soothing to me that the nothingness, by virtue of its being nothingness, couldn’t be excruciating. Death, merely by representing an end to my consciousness, was horrifying. I’m all I have. (You know what I mean. In some sense, I’m all I have. I’m the only person my consciousness lives inside of. You can hardly blame it for thinking this way.) And I’m going to be over forever. I don’t know how common this is. I have one friend who has had these same feelings. And I have friends who also don’t believe in an afterlife but seem to accept death pretty stoically, if not cheerfully. But it’s always freaked me the fuck out. Thinking about death, not abstractly, but actually thinking about what death would feel like, as stupid as that sounds, is something I’ve always associated with psychic pain. I remember the sensation of having to almost shake these morbid thoughts back down into my subconscious.

It seems that most of us have dreams that serve as go-to anxiety dreams, often standing in symbolically for some other anxiety not yet converted into dreamvision. I would think, then, that this might be true when we’re awake too. If so, fear of death is my regular stand-in for all sorts of other fears that haven’t fully materialized yet. I wonder if that ten-year-old might have actually been feeling afraid of the uncertainty posed by his parents’ recent divorce and recoupling. But the endless nothingness (endless nothingness makes me think of this song by The Mighty Boosh. Consider it a palate cleanser.) represented by the end of me came forward as the resident bogeyman. This makes some sense to me, as the divorce-related uncertainty was a more immediate concern and I suspect the brain knows how prioritize immediate concerns. It’s just not that good at letting us know specifically which thing we should be freaking out about. I think I had suppressed some perfectly reasonable fear of the unknown in an effort to be the kid who, with precocious reasonableness, accepts divorce as being better for everyone involved. But periodically, when I didn’t have enough stimulation to distract me from it, it bubbled up dressed as my big bad fear of death.

But back to dullness. Why should it be so awful, if it doesn’t represent an opening for these low-frequency fears? When I have fewer external stimuli I go inward. I start listening more to my own thoughts. And I don’t see why this should be bad. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who’s never bored. And it’s true that I can often find something useful to ponder over if nothing else is going on. But sometimes that lack of distraction is scary. And maybe it’s scary because the psychic pain caused by suppressed fears can no longer be ignored. Alcohol became a terrific solution to this problem while I was in grad school. I drank alone, not only because I didn’t want people to see how much I drank, but also because it was when I was alone that it served its greatest purpose.

Lately, and predictably, it’s when I come into contact with this psychic pain that the temptation to drink appears. But I’ve had several experiences recently where I’ve ridden this temptation out and, after a bit, the fear has been replaced by a sensation as if I’ve stared into a dark part of my subconscious and, once my eyes adjusted, saw that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of there. I feel like much of what I’m trying to do here is an attempt to map my consciousness. When I’m sober and willing to look inward, I get some decent exploring done. But if I’m drinking, even back before it was so obviously a doomed enterprise for me, I don’t venture out of the “safe” parts, learning nothing about myself.

I like thinking of a sober life as an opportunity for expansion. Expansion from facing the unknown. Expansion from facing challenges from without, and often more dangerously, from within. This growth is achieved, in tiny bits, every time I make a decision to look scary stuff in the eye-like structures.