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When I wanted to go to rehab, I had to meet with an in-take counselor first to gauge my drug and alcohol use, and she’d determine the level of care she thought I needed. I had never been to rehab before, and hadn’t ever gone to a 12-step meeting, either. I was a total rookie at recovery.
I was also completely broken at that point, and decided to tell her the truth. Everything. The lying, the scamming, the bad parenting, the constant overdoses and projectile vomiting. Everything.
For 60 minutes, I answered all of her questions truthfully. I had never said any of these things out loud to anybody, so it was a painful—but spiritual—experience. I sobbed throughout in a way I didn’t expect. It hurt to admit to it all, to fully endorse the idea I had a drug and alcohol problem. But it also felt like a little bit of air had been let out of a balloon that was eventually going to burst. It was my first experience with the concept of “We’re only as sick as our secrets.”
Of course, that’s the polished-up Hollywood version of my story. The whole truth is that I was at my bottom and my sober journey began that day… but I lied to my wife about the time of my appointment and hit a walk-in clinic on the way to rehab, bawled my eyes out to the check-in coordinator at rehab, then got high as s**t on the drive home. Let me summarize that in case you missed it: Yes, I got obliterated right after begging for help from active drug and alcohol addiction.
What can I say? Active addiction is pretty damn ugly.
And even in early recovery, I still wasn’t completely on board with opening up. At rehab one night, when I had maybe 60 days clean and sober, I off-handedly mentioned that a contractor who’d done work on my house disappeared without a trace while he owed us some more work. All I had for the business was an address in a big office building in New York City. One day I went there and found this small business was actually just a cubicle or two in the middle of 100 or so desks, all small businesses renting the space to set up shop.
I went in after hours and found the cubicle for this construction business, rifled through the desk drawers and took paperwork that had the guy’s name and home address listed. Then I tracked him down and pushed him to finish the job, which he did.
In that rehab session, I casually mentioned this like it was a football score. My counselor’s jaw was on the floor, and I had some other hardcore addicts in the room shaking their heads. For me, I was pretty shocked—what was the big deal? The guy was trying to stiff me!
The counselor said, “You did like five illegal things! You can’t do that in sobriety.” She gently encouraged me to connect with my sober network and see what they thought. And they thought… that I had done like five illegal things and that I can’t do stuff like that if I wanted to be sober. More than one person told me I needed to rethink my decision-making process and start speaking to recovery people before I did things such as, you know, sneaking into buildings and stealing paperwork.
That was a critical lesson for me—that I can’t trust my own judgment. I’d been my own higher power for 10-plus years, and that had to stop. After all, I really didn’t get what the big deal with trespassing in a New York City office building during off-hours until it was explained to me. It reminded me of that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza has sex with a cleaning person in his office, his boss asks him about it, and George says, “Was that wrong?” He had no idea. No radar for appropriate behavior. Same with me.
One really interesting thing I stumbled upon later is that I needed to expand the definition of the word “secret” because the longer I got sober, the less I did breaking and entering or other illegal things that I wanted to keep on the down low. No, my secrets now are stuff like being disheartened by a work decision, or sad about some struggle that one of my kid’s might be having. I think I can figure those things out myself, and on some level, I feel a little embarrassed to have to share something that I am insecure about because it’ll make me feel less than if I had to say it out loud to somebody.
So in some ways, those small things can be more dangerous than the big stuff. I always think about a time in college when I told a friend of mine that I had to get back to my apartment to clean out my fridge, and I mentioned that I had a gross open package of bologna in there that was from the previous semester.
“Why would you throw that out? Bologna doesn’t go bad!” he said.
Well… it turns out, bologna does go bad. By the time I threw it out a few weeks later, I think it was a dark shade of green and had grown arms and legs and had accumulated 12 credits as a college freshman.
The point of that anecdote: I can’t leave secrets in the back of my spiritual refrigerator and expect it to not grow mold and spoil.
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKES OF THE WEEK
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke.
Back in the old wild west, a man encountered a drunk lying in the road. The guy had an empty whiskey bottle beside him and his ear to the ground.
“What is it?” asked the traveler.
“15 wagons, 60 horses, 17 women, 24 men, 5 dogs, and a donkey,” replied the drunk.
“That’s incredible!” exclaimed the rancher. “You know all that just by listening to the ground?”
“No,” replied the drunk. “They ran over me about an hour ago.”
(Credit: AAGrapevine.org, November 2002, Ron L. from El Cajon, California.)
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