After a couple of years of struggling with the idea—and the actual physical aspects of the idea itself, I finally put up a couple of web pages. I included a short sketch of my life, a couple of long essays and a couple of short ones, an example of fiction, and a list of places on the web that were useful to me. I was proud of myself—I am proud of myself for doing it.
A friend, Edd, wrote me and asked how come I hadn't said anything about sobriety, since it was such a powerful change and force in my life. Ooops, I replied. That is a good question.
I've been clean and sober 12 years now. After that length of time, something is pretty well entrenched, almost to the point of not being, what, visible? Its just a part of me—like grey hair or my heigth. It's a fact of my existence. A well-accepted part of my existence. Unfortunately, that kind of acceptance can lead to complacency, at least in my life. I like to think I'm a reflective person—but maybe I spelled it wrong: maybe I'm just reflexive.
I didn't get sober and stop using drugs until I was fifty years old. No matter how I try to cut that, it still works out to (probably) more than half my life. That's a long time. I'll never get it back, nope. I'd been an enthusiastic drinker and pothead (and sometime acid-head) for more than thirty years. I was dedicated, I'll give myself that.
When I stopped drinking and using, though, that dedication-energy helped me along. Someone once said I have an evangelical streak in me. Once I got sober, that's what kept me going through a lot of hard times. Were those sober times harder than the drinking and smoking times? Yeah. I didn't have any easy escapes, no handy anesthetics. I'd gone through some difficult stuff before, sure, but there was always the quick whack-out of weed or booze. I'd been in therapy several times, too, some of it with good therapists; the problem was that when I'd be lead into painful self-examination, I could take easy detours and never really had to confront my own behaviors, never had to see the enormity of them. I'd never been forced to sit still with myself as I was and had been.
My childhood was rough. Sure. Too rough to really examine without wanting to run and running. I came out of a family of addicts, of drunks, of crazy people. It was a combat zone, with plenty of land-mines and snipers. And I spent years recreating those scenes, because I was comfortable with them. I perpetuated it. I knew how to deal with those situations—well, how to cope rather than deal with them. But every drunk, every addict, has finely polished reasons for drinking and using. I wasn't any different.
I was able to move away from the area I'd lived in for fifteen years and get away from the surroundings. Somtimes that's really important. I was able to be reconcilled to the remains of my birth family. I felt loved (as much as I could feel much of anything in those early years—sometimes it was nothing, sometimes it was too much).
I stayed extremely active in 12-step programs for a long time. I made friends who were clean and sober; I ended up in a city with a large population of clean and sober people. I went back into therapy—this time there wasn't any place to run and hide from the insights and feelings. But there were friends who supported me when I went through so much of this stuff. It seems like what I needed was there when I needed it. I gained a lot of confidence from that, you bet. And along that road, I met people who took me into their lives and families. I found out more about my own family, where they came from—what they had run from. I was able to go back to those places and see there wasn't anything really to run away from—other than frontier race hatred and violence. Underneath there some strong things I'm now able to celebrate and honor.
I don't go often to meetings anymore. To support people just trying to live a clean life, that's about the only reason. I don't think much about drinking, I don't feel tempted. I don't go to drinking places (when I was drinking and doing drugs, I never used to like being around sober people). I still carry the message of walking a sober road.
It seems like there's a lot of flak directed at 12-step recovery, these days. Some of it is deserved—I mean the "higher power" is too often translated as the good ol' God of the Methodists, male, punishing, and rigid. AA is run by men for men, essentially. There are some whacked-out people in the meetings; sometimes there are some real sharks swimming those waters. AA and NA have their problems—like there's somewhere that doesn't? It is a cult, in a lot of ways, sure. But it worked for me. It got me here today. In the long run, that's all that really matters: it worked for me. The programs saved my life.