A few words on many years ago

Nothing to do with politics, for once -- today I'm celebrating a little (big) something.

I remember sitting in coffee-stained chairs in the same damn meeting I had attended for years, sometimes drunk, sometimes not, sometimes detoxing, sometimes just out of rehab with brighter eyes and that old hope that this time, this time it will work.

It never did, though. They'd tell me to "keep coming back" and I'd smile and tilt my head and nod in understanding and gratitude at the poor old-timers with 5 or 10 or 30 years sober -- the idiots actually think I can stay here. But I'd get in my car and light a cigarette and there I would be. Nothing worked like alcohol worked. Nothing changed my inside, the only place it matters. Nothing in the world washed life in brilliant light, connection, understanding.

Carl Jung said once that alcoholics are seeking God. We can define that however we want but to me that means connection, meaning, a sense of the divine, a reason for being. Oneness with something that matters.

I found that in the bottle and nowhere else.

The idea that I could one day find that power in you, earth, my children, myself, anything on this planet — well, it was a very pleasant one, but my experience taught me it was a reality for others (or an outright lie).

I used to watch people living their lives and finding what appeared to be deep satisfaction in those tasks and roles. They like going out with friends, eating good food, having sex, getting married, “achieving.” I guess I liked those things too, but none of it gave me what one single sip of alcohol gave me. Shit, even the PROMISE of the sip coming my way turned me into a new Janelle. One that saw things, understood the world, wasn’t afraid. I loved deeply then. I knew how to talk to you. I was, in a word, at peace.

But then you know it turns on you one day, and you can drink all there is to drink and not one moment of that old friend comes back. Not one second of peace. You think you got a bad bottle. You try again the next day. You chase the memory of what you used to have. Sometimes you’re gifted a few moments of oblivion, but it never lasts.

But I had formed my whole life around this friend! The one who never left me, never failed me. I had given it all up for this God, this light that poured down my throat into my blood and through my now-broken body, and now that God had left me?

In those rooms they’d say “Once alcohol stops working, it never works again.” I wrote in my little notebook, “THAT BETTER NOT BE TRUE.” It could not be true. I had no other way of doing life. I put it out of my head, for I was not there yet.

I went to a meeting once after a few drinks and a couple of pills and I slammed my fist on the table and screamed at them how their shit doesn’t work. I had been to mental institutions and treatment centers and I had talked to them and sat with them for years and there I was still, dying of a disease I could not accept I had, didn’t understand in the least though I could recite all of the causes, conditions, medical processes, treatments — for a long time now we had been openly using words like “addict” and “alcoholic.” I wasn’t hiding it anymore. I knew what I was on paper. I knew it made no difference to what alcohol gave me.

A man came outside after a meeting once when I had really spilled my heart out in a rare moment of hopefulness, one of these old dudes who used to sleep in a refrigerator box on skid row, the man who helped my husband get sober, in fact, and this man lit a cigarette and walked up to me, looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You, Janelle, are entirely full of shit.”

I have no recollection of how I responded, if I responded at all. But I remember his face like it was yesterday, his piercing blue eyes behind his glasses, the lines on his face drawn through god knows what, and the awe and rage I felt at the audacity. The cruelty! I imagined I wandered off in a broken, self-pitying fury.

Three days later I was on day 2 of drinking Ancient Age whiskey alone, as usual. Had slept a bit, woken up mid-morning, sat up in bed and took a drink from the pint. There were other people in that house but not near me, and as I took the drink on hour 48 of another run that would last 3 or 4 days before I’d sober up, get back to my mom’s house, ask my husband if I could see the kids, or avoid them, whatever worked best for me, surely — as I took that drink on day 2 of a rhythm I had been living for fourteen years, another day, another drink, another shaking hand and desperate head — his voice came in just one thought.

Just one fucking thought. “Maybe I am full of shit.”

It sounds trite when I write it now, as if it were a fleeting thing that nudged me into a new way of thinking. No, no, do not misunderstand, those words were a sledgehammer to my brain, to everything I knew, everything I had so carefully constructed to avoid that exact idea — a whole life built brick by brick, every day, for years - I GOT THIS. I DO NOT NEED YOU.

Unless it turns out I am full of shit. Oh I sound so good in rehabs. I learn so fast what they want me to say. All the counselors feel so confident when I leave, and I do too, because isn’t talk the same as change? Isn’t thought the same as truth?

Sure, unless you’re full of shit.

And if you are, if everything you’ve drawn, if your absolute best effort at life to think, create, conclude, act, if it is really bullshit — what then? What then. What then.

Then I need you.

Then I hear you. Then I get just small enough to watch you walk into your life, once an alcoholic just like me, and I watch you walk freely as a mother, child, employee, friend. And I’ll let you teach me a thing or two.

Those were the last drinks I’ve had, sixteen years ago yesterday.

Sixteen years ago today was the first day of my sober life, the one I had no idea was waiting for me, could not possibly believe could be waiting for me. Twenty-nine years old, two children, a husband, mom, dad, brother, this whole world - and a god found in life and nowhere else.

I was 24 with my beautiful daughter, who is now almost that age.