I was walking with someone new to recovery this week. My mother gave me a pink canister of pepper spray for Easter, so I feel safer early morning Grand Rapids. We start out at dawn and some of the back streets are dark.
Bitter Pill to Suck On…
There is a look people have when they first get sober. Contemplative, as if they are harkening back to the “good ole drinking days.” Or thinking long and hard about a life without the one thing that has fully occupied them for so long. In my case it was top-of-mind, an affectation like a walking stick or a smoking jacket that I wore for twenty years.
When you think about it, that’s a bitter pill to suck on. I actually had people ask me what I’d “be like” when I said I was going to quit drinking. As if my biting wit was going to go down the drain with the last of the booze in the cupboard. As if wine was a part of my personality. And when I started writing this blog a couple of years ago, I couldn’t find a single photo of me without my usual prop – a wine glass spilling chard over the edge – and a hazy smile…
Empathy thy name is Mare…
If I were being honest, I’d have to say I have forgotten a lot of the edginess and unpredictability of early recovery. I am reminded daily, as I work at an Addiction Treatment Center, but I haven’t felt the desire to get drunk for a while. Nor have I had the punch-in-the-gut triggers I used to get at the weirdest times. A snippet of a song, an airport, a photo of the azure Bahamas, passing a familiar restaurant and reading the word “BAR” on the marque, a squirrel running into the road in front of my car. Bam! Drink! I can TASTE it! Who would know?
Kindness and a bit of superstition
As many times as I hear it and understand the positive spin, I do not buy the statement “you are not your addiction.” So much of what I am now is because of my addiction. In spite of my alcoholism. I am a totally different person now – a better person. And as much as I crow about my paucity of emotional triggers, I am a bit superstitious of those out-of-the-blue cravings I used to get… I kind of am my addiction – in a good way, if that makes sense…
So, to answer my own question, feeling “with” someone does not require active sensation. It does not demand that I crave alcohol. It only requires kindness and the ability to remember enough about how it felt to be new to sobriety, to understand its unique demands.
