It’s risky to write my story and it’s risky to read it.

Eliot Engel describes Shakespeare’s tragedies as beginning in the same way: we’re shown the characters’ fatal flaws from the outset. We know they’re going to get it, just not when or how bad it’s going to be.

I have a cautious go-ahead from mentors and counselors to write my story. They’re concerned that the effort to write – to dig deeply for the truth and to express it as artfully and clearly as I can – might exhaust, overwhelm and weaken me, and that thoughtless or even mean-spirited feedback* might undermine my morale, particularly since my subject of choice is the stigma-laden “A-words”: addiction and alcoholism. I will be forever vulnerable to relapse, but year two is a particularly dangerous one. [Read more…]

The trouble with abstinence is the abstinence.

When I remember how I felt when I began to drink an increasing amount of wine every night at 5:00 PM, I float far from shore in the warm green waters of the Gulf of Mexico off the beach at Pass-a-Grille. The salt water lets me drift upright and eye-deep. My skin is touched, my neck and arms and legs are supported and surrounded. Ahead of me I see soft, wavy water and a blue sky horizon, and to either side is warm, warm green. I am small and safe in largeness. All is well. I just am.

I got to feel that sense of well-being, of womb-like safety and oneness, every single night when I was drinking. Nothing in sobriety feels like that. If I never drink again, if I am forever abstinent from alcohol, that feeling is gone forever. [Read more…]

“Know thyself.”
– inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

Who am I now?

This question has plagued me since I first entered recovery from addiction to alcohol 16 months ago. For half a century prior, I taught and shared and lived and loved my belief in the value of the self: self-awareness, autonomy, insights, enlightenment. I thought the self was the center of power by which choices could be made, from the extremes of using Coleridge’s “the best words in the best order” to select a word for a poem, to opting to die so another might live.

No matter what anyone said or did, I had my self for good company. I felt safe with my self and could trust my self. [Read more…]

How do I feel about sharing publicly that I became addicted to alcohol? Relaxed. Ahhh… No more hiding. What peace has come from telling the truth.

I will attend a yearly event soon at which, in the past, I drank heavily. [Read more…]

Today marks sixteen months that I have not had a drink of alcohol.

On December 27, 2012, I became an automaton. Dissociated from feeling and thought, I got in my car and drove myself to a recovery meeting. I drove back home and drank all the wine left in the house, about three-fourths of a bottle. On December 28, 2012, I drove myself back to the recovery meeting. On that day, I didn’t have one glass, many glasses, or a bottle of wine. I had none. I have had none since.

An occasional social drinker, I became a daily drinker of a glass or two of wine in 2007. By December of 2012, I was drinking a bottle of white wine every night. [Read more…]