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A few days ago, I was in the bedroom and was going to jump in the shower. So I closed the door, but right before I was going to strip down and get in the shower, I remembered I had to pay a bill online. So I sat down in just shorts on the bed, opened up my laptop and paid the bill.
At the exact second when I closed my laptop, my wife came in the room and got an alarmed look on her face. “What’s going on in here?” she said. She wasn’t mad. Just a little mystified.
So was I. I said, “Uh, I had to do something on the computer.”
Her eyebrows were scrunched up a little bit but I was totally confused. Then it hit me. I had gone in the bedroom, closed the door, took off most of my clothes, then popped open my work laptop on the bed. When she walked in, I closed the computer up and stood up from the bed. You can probably imagine what her assumption was.
That was the end of it, but when I got in the shower, I thought about the whole thing and how nice it was to have the truth be the same thing that you’re saying is the truth. This is still relatively new for me. In active addiction, you couldn’t believe a word I said. If I wasn’t lying to cover my tracks, I was embellishing my work performance, overstating my happiness, leaving out details about why I didn’t show up for something, and so on. It was all one big house of cards to keep that lifestyle going. Even before I really went off the deep end of addiction, I was often completely full of s**t. So it’s a muscle I worked for a long time in my life.
Then I went to rehab, and I realized I had to tell the truth if I expected to stay sober. I had to tell the truth to my wife, my kids, my sponsor, my boss, everybody. And I didn’t always like that, because sometimes the truth sucks. Sometimes I would whiff on a work project, and the urge was to try to blame someone else, or say the power went out at my house, or come up with something else that numbs a little bit of the sting. But luckily I found that it wasn’t sustainable to live my life trying to avoid the sting of the truth. Instead, I started to try to figure out how to feel the sting, then move on from it.
I gotta say, as I stood in that shower the other day, I had a moment of gratitude that the story I tell every day is usually true. I have mentioned before I caught myself a few times in recent years trying to cover my tracks a bit, and it left a yucky feeling that I was proud to have. That meant I have a radar now that detects my bad actions and lets me know about it. In that instance, I had told my wife I would be home at 6 from work once, then I stopped and got gas and a soda and just sat in my car and screwed around on my phone. On the drive home, I hit 60 seconds of traffic on the highway. When I walked in at 6:40 and my wife said, “Hey, what happened? I thought you left at 5:30 and would be home at 6?”
My first reaction was to blurt out, “I hit a bunch of traffic on the highway.”
She nodded her head and accepted that answer. Was that answer true? Uh, sort of. But not really. I left out the part that stings—the part where I have to fess up to screwing around on my phone instead of coming home when I said I would. And that sat with me a little bit for a few days. I didn’t like the feeling of lying, even if it was hidden in some truth.
So looking back on that day with my laptop, it felt pretty good to actually be paying a bill instead of whatever scenario she had in her head!
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:
One drunk says to another: “How many moons do you see tonight?”
And she replies, “In which row?”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2002, Dave S. from Ithaca, New York)
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