Eye of the Beholder

Hi, I’m Pabst Overdrive, and I’m an alcoholic. 

I have been letting the idea of recovery slide in the last few months… I’ve been feeling like I just want a drink. I’ve settled with some good, clean self-loathing. I just want to drink like everyone else—why can’t I drink like everyone else? Why can’t I be like everyone else? Why am I like this? 

Sometimes I have dreams where I relapse and I spend the rest of the dream covering it up so no one finds out, but I still know and I try making excuses in the dream, but no one cares. No one is listening; they just look at me as if to say, “No one put a gun to your head.” In the weird liminal space between dreaming and waking I am racked with guilt because it feels so real. I wake up petrified, feeling like I’ve let so many people down including myself.  

I feel like such a fraud. 

I have felt like a fraud for most of my adult life, like I wasn’t living my own life, but someone else’s. Most of the time I couldn’t even do that right, leaving me anxious that someone was going to find out that I wasn’t who I said I was… that I was nothing at all. Perhaps that was why I needed to wear so many different layers to feel safe, because underneath I was worried there was nothing to see at all.

For a long time, I looked in the mirror and I wondered if there was anything good looking back, anything of value. When I was younger my mom told me I had the same eyes as a family member who has done his own battles with substance abuse. The substances got the better of him for most of my life. She told me when she looked in his eyes, she saw nothing. 

She saw the same in mine. 

This person with nothing in his eyes also happens to be the person that made me who I am today. They are the reason I love the things that I love. This person is still alive, thank God, but you never come out of your fight with addiction quite the same. You can never really leave the battlefield. 

He is one of my heroes. I hate him. I love him. And I miss him. Dearly. The last thing I heard about him is that he’s out of jail and taken up a meditation practice. Not only that, but he’s taking responsibility for his actions and moving forward. This is hope.

It’s a type of hope that I cannot relate to, honestly. I’m sober going on over three years now, but I was never incarcerated, I didn’t lose friends (yes, I did), never been in a halfway house; I never had the chance to hurt my family because I did my drinking far away from them so what gives me the right to write about recovery? Write about sobriety? What gives me the right to write about my stupid journey? What journey?

I was/am a functioning alcoholic. 

There’s no explosive incident where I realized my life was getting too hard to handle; there was no moment where I fell to my knees a la Miles Peterson (Bibleman) and gave my life to God. I don’t have some trite sob story about how I turned my life over to a Higher Power as I understood Him in my darkest hour. My life just isn’t as dramatic as that, so in terms of helping anyone with their own problems who the fuck am I? I’m just some dude who quit drinking because… 

I don’t know—I just couldn’t anymore. When you’re a functioning alcoholic you’re just holding things together well enough to keep drinking. And if you’re good at it, then you can get away with a lot for a long time without anyone noticing there might be an issue. You can keep it up living in your own world, built around drinking. What is clear in hindsight, though, is that I wasn’t keeping my life together through drinking, I was keeping it together despite drinking. 

A lot of days I feel like my recovery is just getting started, like today is the first day of my recovery and everyday leading up to this has been helping me get to a place where I’m ready to start the process. I have no idea what the process looks like, there aren’t prescribed forms of recovery, there’s no check-list that we mark off on our way to a full recovery. Even if there was what the hell does a full recovery look like, anyway? 

No, the truth is I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m just as scared of what recovery looks like or will require of me as I am of relapsing. I can’t relapse, I can’t… I just can’t. I can’t go back to that place. I’m afraid I want to, though. There’s a comfort in misery that recovery doesn’t really allow, because recovery is, by its nature, uncomfortable. As well it should be due to no growth coming out of comfort—the lotus blooms from muddy waters, the roses buds amongst thorns—but still some days I really want to go for a drink. I could really use one.

So, what gives me the right to talk about recovery? What gives me the right to apply any of what I’ve learned to try to help anyone? Why would anyone want my help? But thinking this way—That is fucking rock bottom. 

Rock bottom is like Hades: it’s a nonlocal place, not a destination. It’s not a place where you land and “see the light and error of your ways,” it’s a place we hit and keep digging. We can never hit bottom. Car wrecks, lost friends, estranged families, hotel fights, subway fights, broken doors, bloody mirrors; they’re all curiosities we find digging deeper and deeper. There’s just more down there, you dig so far down into Sheol eventually you forget why you started, barely able to recognize yourself anymore. 

Eventually you see what your mom sees when you look in the mirror. 

Recently, I’ve been feeling like she was right. Maybe there really is nothing good in me. Maybe I can’t help anyone. Maybe no one should listen to me since I’m the one who needs a drink. Maybe I haven’t learned a thing this whole time. So, why the fuck don’t I just relapse? If I didn’t have a real problem, why the fuck won’t I just go down to the bar and order a drink and make it a double?

Well, because that’s an addict talking… That’s why I’m not going to drink. Because that’s the fucking addict talking, and I don’t know how to get him to leave me alone. I’ve wanted to put a fucking bullet in him to get some peace and quiet. I’ve wanted to drive him off a cliff. I’ve wanted him to disappear completely. Hell, I’ve wanted to disappear completely. 

But there’s nowhere I can go that he isn’t right there with me.

And he isn’t going anywhere. 

The horrible truth is that he’s me. I can’t… I mean, I can, and I have… But I just can’t keep running from myself. I cannot give the addict what he wants because it won’t satisfy him. He always just wants more—it’s exhausting. It’s, ironically enough, the same exhaustion that led me to put down the bottle; God, I don’t want to be like this anymore. 

I met a Zen Buddhist, recently, who is involved in Recovery Dharma, which is a program applying Buddhist practices and teachings (Dharma) to help people recover from addiction. They explained to me that addicts make remarkable students of contemplative practices. The nature of meditation, prayer, and other contemplative practices being a profound supplement to sobriety. They continued saying that sobriety and recovery are significantly deep and weighty contemplative practices unto themselves. This makes sense considering the Twelve Steps are fundamentally spiritual—the Steps are the most holistically extensive approach to a physical and mental irregularity I’ve ever encountered.  

If we engage with our recovery from a purely material sense, then we get nowhere and just the same from a strictly cognitive approach. They must be synthesized. If we might be so bold as to read the implicit rules of the Twelve Steps, then we might gather there is no direct line of healing. The first step of the twelve is certainly not “quit drinking.” Furthermore, the first and second step are incredibly Christian if we understand Christianity as a theology predicated on liberation (and it is), where we find the first step is letting go of our control, admitting our powerlessness over alcohol. We are, intentionally, putting our faith in something outside ourselves. This is not faith in God alone, but faith in a system, “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17). Sobriety and recovery are choices made on the principle that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The practices assure us of their value, but we must practice them to see the reality of their value ourselves, otherwise we’re taking someone else’s word for it—which is hardly a virtue.

What is a virtue is admitting when we’re wrong; acknowledging we’ve been going the wrong way for a long time driven by “our refusal to accept the way things are [leading] to wanting, or craving, which is the cause of suffering. We don’t suffer because of the way things are, but because we want—or think we ‘need’—those things to be different” (Recovery Dharma 14). Μετάνοια (metanoia) in Christianity suggests the change from this mode of thinking, the term describes a fundamental change in behavior that blooms from an initial repudiation of wanting or craving that lead to suffering.

This is where the practice becomes tantamount to continued transformation: this initiatory μετάνοια, a fruit of humility, is when the real fight begins. When we put down the bottle or whatever we’re trying to kick the habit of then there is nothing to run away from—everything that we are becomes clearer and clearer. The awareness stemming from a sober perspective is how we build the practice of νῆψις (nepsis). This Orthodox concept is a part of the cathartic stages of purification on the road of θέωσις (Theosis) and comes from compunction. The piercing of our hearts by the love of God, our own sobering awakening to our separation from Him and from others. The νῆψις that comes as a result of this catharsis is an ongoing practice of watchfulness, because unwelcome states of consciousness have their own addictive qualities. The more we navigate kicking the habit of being with those states the more we unveil deeper and deeper connections within ourselves of how they form, where they come from, what instigates them, etc. 

And from my experience it’s fucking hard to look at. But we must look at it.     

The more we burn away the dross and scour the waste within our mind; the more we shepherd our lost sheep back into the folds, the more we discover just how much separation there is between us and God. And God is never far from us, as a reminder, but we, without practicing νῆψις habitually wander away from His love. Wandering aimlessly in the dark. So, we must turn on the lights as a habit, seeking through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.  

We must retreat to our souls, the inner closet and seek a conscious contact with God. And His will. We pray for nothing but the knowledge of and power to carry out His will which is Wisdom. Also known as seeing things for how they actually are, because as we purify our thoughts so do our actions.

Wisdom is actionable intelligence. 

This will be the subject of the next couple of posts on recovery, the Dharma, and my own bullshit.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus

Source: “Recovery Dharma.” 2019. https://recoverydharmanyc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Recovery_Dharma-v1.0.pdf