Happy Easter: on 30 days in AA

This will be short because I have more pressing matters to tend to
(like our messy kitchen and lesson plans for tomorrow’s classes),
but I wanted to post that I woke up this morning (in itself a small miracle)
30 days clean from booze (bigger miracle).
30 days isn’t,
in and of itself,
a big deal for me.
There were many months
when I never drank booze at all.

Problem was, every time I met a bottle it was pretty much like this for me. Every time. Without fail.

I could go for long spells of not drinking,
and I used this as a way to reassure (lie to)
myself that I wasn’t like “other alcoholics” I knew.
I wasn’t a “real alcoholic” because I didn’t drink ALL THE TIME.
I didn’t drink at work or in the mornings or afternoons
and I didn’t have any kind of physical addiction
to the substance that I once had to, say, cigarettes
so therefore I was NOT an alcoholic.

We all have our delusions. I still have them. My biggest and most troubling delusion was that I was NOT an alcoholic. Wrong. I AM an alcoholic.

I would conveniently ignore my inability
to stop drinking once I started (there is NO such thing as “one drink”
in my world; if I’m drinking, I’m getting drunk).
I would conveniently ignore my inability to completely
extract alcohol from the landscape of my life despite
my precarious health
(my health issues — current and former — were NOT,
to the best of my knowledge,
alcohol related, but alcohol
certainly did not HELP me get “well”
from cancer
or Chrohn’s
or anxiety
or depression or damn-near-paralyzing
medical PTSD).

When you’re an Active Alcoholic
there’s a lot of mental gymnastics at play
because the alcoholism,
like a parasite,
wants to be fed.

My drinking stopped feeling “fun” in my early thirties. But alcoholism was always hanging out like this.

This is the way I am understanding my own alcoholism
at this particular juncture. This makes sense to me about
my experience as an alcoholic.
(Which is really pretty much the same story as every alcoholic
— even the ones who, UNLIKE me,
went to jail or lost their kids or their jobs
because of the disease.
We are all the same: I was just lucky
that my “worst material consequence” was
a permanent forehead scar
and a busted retina.)

Today, Easter, is an important day for many
of my Christian loved ones (my wife, among them).
So I will round out this entry with 5 things I am GRATEFUL for today,
in honor of my Christian friends and family
who feel grateful today for religious reasons (and also
selfishly
this is a good practice for my crazy, alcoholic ass):

As of this moment, I am 30 days a grateful recovering alcoholic. I intend to stay this way. I found a program — in AA — that works for me to help me stay off the sauce. “The Sauce” being one of my personal, greatest, existential threats.

1. Sarah and I live in Tucson. It’s already getting hot (by my wimpy, north-eastern European genetic composition/standards).
   I love The Spaceship (our house).
   I love that we live near eye surgeons with degrees from Yale
   and have regular access to competent healthcare and
   Trader Joe’s and Sarah’s parents who have helped us so much this year.
   We are blessed by community of family and friends, near and far.
2. Friends.
   I may not have been blessed, in this life, with much paper money,
   but I have been blessed with something far better:
   amazing friends.
   Artists and nerds and weirdos and activists
   and borderline-misanthropes and unsung geniuses;
   old people and young people; Black people and brown people
   and Navajo people and white people; gay people and straight people
   and trans people and lesbians and people
   who don’t even know who or what they are
   and they’re okay with that;
   paper money rich people
   and paper money poor people,
   and no matter where they’re from,
   they’re good to me in whatever way they can be good to me,
   and I get to be good to them in whatever way I am able to be good
   to my friends.
3. Plants.
   I have an abundance of plants in my home office
   thanks to my mother and my young friends
   here in Tucson and my sweet friends at FALA
   who sent me a beautiful set of succulents
   after my eyeball surgery.
   To say nothing of the herbs I grow in a raised garden bed
   in our massive Tucson yard here in Sugar Hill.
   Plants make me happy, and I live in a place
   where you can grow shit — outside — year round
   if you know what you’re doing
   (which I don’t exactly yet,
   but I’m a quick study).
4. My body.
   I have never been “thankful” to my body
   because all my life (I mean dating back to infancy)
   my body has caused me problems: colic, Scarlet Fever
   (who in the late 20th Century America got Scarlet Fever? yours truly.), really bad eyesight (what’s up first girl in your class to get glasses!
   key to social success for ANY shy, socially awkward second grade girl
   in the wealthy, white suburbs of the 80s!),
   toxic shock syndrome from a botched surgery
   in the 80s (the 80s were a bad time for me, medically),
   then we get to the cancer and Crohn’s years . . .
   But my point is not to enumerate the ways this body has “failed”
   or “frightened” me, instead to celebrate how it HAS worked:
   I am alive, against even the worst odds, so thank you, body,
   for working so hard to keep me alive even through unlikely, unfortunate medical shit that has happened to you, and though I did terrible things to you on purpose (what’s up, atrocious amounts of booze! and until about 2011, cigarettes!). So I am thankful, today, for my little body
   for hanging in there and for trying to work with me
   as I try to sustain my little life.

Enjoy your Sunday, readers!