A "hard thinker"'s survival (so far) of alcoholism and suicidality

The power of prayer and imaginary friends

A few months after I almost died in a DUI car accident, I visited my dad in a hospital where he was undergoing cancer treatment. I had earnestly been trying to get sober since my accident—and failing—because I was trying in all the wrong ways. Namely in my way. And in my way, I was explaining to my father, who had been sober for over 20 years, some quibble I had with the AA literature, and he said, “I hope you’re not too smart to get this thing.” At first I thought my dad was sarcastically calling me a dumbass, but as the silence lingered after he said it, I realized his fear was genuine.

In the months that followed, as I continued to attend AA meetings, I heard his fear phrased in several different ways: “You can’t overthink it…” or “Keep it simple stupid” or my personal favorite “If you’re so smart, why’d you end up here?”

Before I was entirely sure this advice was sound, I followed it. I “took suggestions” as we say in the program. I was desperate enough to do exactly as I was told, even if it didn’t make sense to me. Although ultimately I found the advice untrue or at least not timeless/permanently true (more on that to come), it was profoundly wise and probably saved my life. Because in early sobriety I was totally incapable of honest, healthy “hard thinking.” My ability to think hard was polluted by the still-recent touch of alcohol. It could, and did on a few occasions, get twisted by the disease into a “rational” justification to drink again.

The other way the advice was wise is because of a fatal flaw exhibited in many hard thinkers, especially newly minted alcoholic ones: the arrogance of it all. When something like God can’t immediately or even through much deliberation be understood through “hard thinking,” there’s an impulse to assume it must be wrong or stupid. In our inherent pride about hard thinking—and why shouldn’t we be prideful? It has been a strength much of our life—it’s easy to be close-minded. But to fight a disease we’ve never fought before, we need to be the most open-minded we’ve ever been. We need to consider wielding weapons we’ve never considered wielding before, even weapons we arrogantly thought beneath us, like prayer.

Through what I’ll call “open thinking,” which takes more-than-expected time and research, the aforementioned openness, and a bit of luck (to not die from the disease before it’s done), I found God and all of this spirituality stuff can work for hard thinkers. God and spirituality are not separate from or “higher” or “lower” than hard thinking; rather they are perfectly in line with it in some remarkably beautiful ways. In this post, I try to outline some of those ways. For the first time. I’m hoping more hard thinking and softer spiritual thinking will yield more results in time (if my luck maintains and this disease doesn’t find a clever way to kill me first). If that happens, then I’ll write more.

I’m writing this for myself—to revisit in times of crisis—but also for the newly sober or very depressed hard thinkers out there. I know how close I was to giving up on many occasions, partially because so much of what is offered to save a drunk or suicidal hard thinker’s life is foreign or feels “stupid”. I don’t pretend my ideas are new or that there aren’t similar resources out there, but I tried like hell to find them and never could.¹

Lately, with the obsession to drink lifted, I’ve felt it safe to hard think again. And not only safe, but essential. I believe maximizing my chance of survival hinges on all of this making sense to the hard thinking part of me, as well. It’s too big a part of who I am to be told to shut up forever.²

What is hard thinking?

What do I mean by hard thinking? There’s nothing sophisticated or scientific or “good” about it. In general, it just means I have an appetite for mentally poking and prodding things for a long time. It’s almost like dissection. If you present me with an idea or a choice, I’m going to think about how much it weighs, how its internal organs work, where it came from, etc. I’ll flip it over and turn it inside out and try to look at every inch of it. (As an aside, I actually think my writing style shows I’m a hard thinker. A part of why I’m verbose is, with words, I inspect every inch of something, which leads to lots of ANDs and ORs in my writing as I tell you about all these details. It also leads to a lot of digressions—like this one you’re swimming in right now—because how whatever I’m inspecting relates to other things is noteworthy, too. But I’ll spare you and use footnotes for the rest of my digressions in this post.) A symptom of this is that I ask a lot of clarifying questions, which can be quite annoying for people who don’t enjoy hard thinking. On the flip side, it makes me a pretty good analyst in work settings.

Hard thinking is fun, like solving a puzzle, but it’s also foundational to my trust. I have a difficult time believing anything until I’ve thought about it very hard. A negative outcome of this—of all this dissection—is that to dissect something, you must kill it.³ My dad used to tell me to stop “mind fucking” myself because, as a hard thinker himself, he knew that hard thinking could casually murder things that would be better to let live. A good example of this is the way my hard thinking often kills joy I had a chance to experience. Consider the joy of watching a magic trick. Many people can watch a magic trick and be nothing but tickled by it. On the other hand, if I see someone pull a rabbit from a hat, I want to know how the trick is done, where the magician learned the trick, what income—if any—the magician gets for performing the trick, why he chose this rabbit, what other rabbits did he not choose and why, etc. Again, this type of thinking is fun for me in a masturbatory way, but I admit it does sort of sap the joy out of things. Instead of enjoying the mystery, I perform a cold, calculated murder. As a consequence, I don’t enjoy many things in a pure, childlike delight way, and the things I do enjoy in this way, I don’t enjoy very much.

Another feature of my hard thinking is that it doesn’t have an on/off switch. It’s always on. In sobriety, I’ve learned how to politely ask it to shut the fuck up, but I can’t prevent it from starting. It’s in my nature. My default setting. Maybe I will learn to reduce the frequency of its arrival in time. I think one thing I enjoyed about alcohol wasn’t just the euphoria itself, but also the way it turned my hard thinking off. Only through alcohol could I truly and fully enjoy magic tricks, per my example above. People often cite how booze reduces inhibitions and makes it easier to meet and talk to people or approach scary tasks with less fear, but that’s never made sense to me. I’ve always been able to talk to people, and I’m brave in the face of most challenges. Instead, I loved how it stopped the hard thinking and just let me go with the flow and lead with my heart and feeling instead of my mind. This very much meant for me that not drinking didn’t just mean losing booze; it meant losing the only reliable way I knew how to enjoy anything. The euphoria of alcohol makes our hedonic set point too high, so in early sobriety most addicts struggle with accessing joy. It takes time before the brain notices and feels (gets dopamine from) simpler things in life, like hobbies, relationships with others, etc. But for me, it was more complicated than that because the truth was I always had trouble accessing joy, even before I started drinking. My incessant hard thinking ruined most potential joys in life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a room full of people when something happens that causes everyone to laugh—a ridiculous dance move, a comedic movie on TV, a magic trick—and I find myself standing there not laughing, not feeling anything. Sometimes people will notice this and ask me if I didn’t laugh because I disliked whatever occurred, and it’s not that. I just didn’t feel anything, one way or another. Probably because my brain has literal dopamine release issues, but also because I was too busy “mind fucking” whatever occurred to let myself simply feel it. This feature is not unique to me, but I learned it’s also not every alcoholic’s experience. Once I realized this, I found sober people who also struggled with accessing joy, partly due to hard thinking, so I could lament this feature of myself with people who understand. In other words, most people who get sober have to learn how to enjoy things again, but sobriety for me means learning how to enjoy things for the first time in my life. As of writing this, I’ve made almost no progress on this front, but I’m hopeful I’ll figure it out one day.⁴ In early sobriety, I feared not being able to access joy writ large was why I’d return to drinking. But my sobriety is more solid now. Even if it turns out drinking is the only way I can access joy, I’ll just choose not to feel joy. Using is a foggy, clumsy, often-forgotten way to experience joy, and it’s painfully apparent it’s not sustainable. I have to find another way or just miss out.

The nature of my disease

Before I get to how hard thinking aligns just fine with softer spiritual stuff,⁵ I think it’s important that I describe the nature of my disease. I don’t think anything about my disease is unique,⁶ but understanding how mine works will make everything I say later make more sense.

Up front, I’ll say that I’m struggling with addiction and suicidality. The whole suicide thing I sarcastically call “a gift of sobriety.” I’m sure I had passing thoughts of killing myself before I ever drank, but I didn’t really want to. I don’t even remember wanting to when I drank (although I did get sent to a psych ward once for saying apparently suicidal things at the tail end of a fantastic bender). But lately, I think about doing it all the time. And I mean it—like I really want to. In fact, I’d say as my desire to drink has lessened, my desire to kill myself has increased. What the fuck, right?

About a year after I first tried to get sober, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This was a big revelation for me. That first year, over and over again, I’d get around two months of sobriety, and then I’d relapse. Once I learned about the rhythm of highs and lows in BPD, I realized every relapse had come during a period of mania. It had felt like clockwork because it was, and treating my BPD was why I was finally able to put together more than two months of sobriety.

My experience with mental health medication for about two years was that it successfully halted the mania, but nothing was stopping the lows. Again, like clockwork, I’d have two very terrible weeks about every two months. For whatever reason, lows didn’t make me want to drink like the mania had—probably because in lows I didn’t want to do anything but sleep—but they filled me with terrible dread. No one warns you about the physical symptoms of depression. During those weeks, I would be in head to toe pain. It sort of felt like having a bad flu that would never end. Last year, I spent three straight months like this, and the pain made me want to die. I was simultaneously dealing with restless leg syndrome,⁷ so I couldn’t even find refuge in sleep. I didn’t think I was going to kill myself, but I feared it might actually kill me—like my body would just give up one day. Fortunately, I was prescribed a medicine for nerve pain (what?) and some new antidepressants, and for about six months now, the chronic pain has been resolved and my lows don’t feel nearly as low. They still happen, but they aren’t debilitating like they were.

I’m separately still dealing with bouts of anxiety (sometimes obviously due to work-related stress, but sometimes for no apparent reason), which can be a pretty gross mess of puking and not sleeping, but it honestly feels like cupcakes and rainbows compared to where I was six months ago. The last time I drank—10 months ago, when I had 14 months of sobriety at the time—was because of an anxiety attack. I so desperately needed it to stop, in a moment of weakness, I turned to my old solution. For whatever reason, drinking didn’t make me feel better, and I’m so grateful it didn’t. I was back in meetings the next day and restarted my sobriety counter. I think that relapse was good for me. It really put to bed the last little voice in my head that said drinking could help—because it didn’t, not even temporarily.

So, if you’re doing the math, I’ve only drank one day in the last two years. Not bad, eh? And for the last six months, in general, I’ve been pain free and debilitating-depression free. So that’s what makes what I tell you next sound insane.

Despite feeling for the most part better the last six months, lately the voice in my head that suggests I kill myself has spoken up more often and, at times, more loudly. A few weeks ago, it reached a new level of scary. Usually the voice in my head says You know you’re going to kill yourself one day, but for some reason, this night it said You’re going to kill yourself. Right now. Tonight. I was so caught off guard by this sudden change in message that for the first time, I was truly afraid of the voice. And it felt stickier, too. Like the idea had more gravity. More control. The last little piece of me that didn’t want to die that was present knew that it would be bad to be alone. I don’t know what would have happened if I was alone—probably nothing—but in that moment, I didn’t want to find out. So when I put Mac to bed, I stayed with him for a long time. I leaned into all of his little kid bullshit of one-more-book, one-more-song. I didn’t want our time together to end because then I may find myself alone. By the time I did put him to sleep, much too late, Mallary was wrapping up putting Heider to bed, so I avoided ever being alone and finding out what that would have meant.

Last week, I had an even scarier experience. This particular Sunday, I fully lived “it’s a program of action” ethos. I prayed when I woke up. I chaired the 9 AM meeting, with a fantastic lead and shares. I called my sponsor. I made amends to an old boss, and I did more than apologize; I offered all my power and resources to make it right. I checked in on sober friends. I meditated mid-afternoon. I spent time outside. I had one-on-one time with each child. I took care of my house plants. I prayed some more, after reading some of the literature. And late afternoon/evening, I felt low. Low, low. Much lower than when I woke up.⁸ The suicidal part of me suddenly felt in control again, and I headed to my office to research how to do it. It honestly felt like I was watching myself walk to my computer. And a little part of me that didn’t have control knew it was bad; “planning” is a whole other tier of trouble that I had avoided until then. Fortunately, when I sat down to do it, the power went out. A weird wind storm had come through. Oh, the God people just ate this story up. With my newfound openness, I won’t say it wasn’t God, but I won’t say it was God, either.⁹

What about getting sober has made me want to die? First, it's important to point out that it may actually have nothing to do with getting sober.¹⁰ This could be its own mental health issue that manifested on its own. Or it could be a consequence of the medicines I'm on. But I have ideas about how it could relate to getting sober, partly conceived on my own, partly conceived in discussion with my wife and therapists and sober friends.

Something that really pissed me off when I first got sober—and others in recovery talk about this, too—is the sudden lack of autonomy. Giving up drinking and agreeing to be in recovery means more than not drinking. It means you won’t go certain places at certain times. It means you’ll give up any other vices that have even a 1% chance of leading to a drink. It means doing all sorts of stuff you never had to do, like routinely visiting medical professionals, getting adequate sleep, eating right, etc. So maybe some part of my brain is throwing some kind of temper tantrum? Oh, no one will let you do what you want to do? We’ll show them something we can do. As a hard thinker, I like the way this rational thought sounds, but I don’t honestly feel like that’s what’s going on.

It could be a last desperate plea for escape. At this point, the alcoholic part of me has had to accept I’m serious about this whole not-drinking thing, so maybe it’s grasping for straws? But escape from what? Like I said, I was in chronic fatigue and pain six months ago, and I thought about suicide less then than I do now. A large part of me does want to escape from the boredom—the endless anhedonia of my life—but, again, I don’t honestly feel like that’s the root of my suicidality either.

It’s hard to type this as a proud hard thinker, but the time I stayed up late with my son and that time the power went out, when I was most it danger, it was a deep feeling in my chest. I felt a heaviness, almost like my chest was going to collapse in on itself like a dying star. Oddly, my mind was about as quiet as it can get both times that feeling came—certainly the quietest it’s been in sobriety—and actually the thinking, rational part of me was just a tiny little voice in the corner begging me not to be alone or not to Google such things. In other words, I think some part of me wants to die just because it wants to die. I don't know why, and actually hard thinking about it hasn't revealed why. It's just given me a bunch of rational theories like those above that I know in my heart miss the mark. It's a little bit those things, but it's not just those things. It's not that simple.

When I told my therapist about those two ultra-scary situations, she naturally wanted to work on our crisis plan. But I told her what was most scary about those situations was the feeling that I had lost control. Honestly, it reminded me of the times in early sobriety when every ounce of my conscious being didn’t want to drink and then I would sort of “come to” and find a drink in my hand.¹¹ There’s a primal, deep part of me that can take the wheel when it wants to apparently, and twice recently it has with suicidal intent. So, we can crisis plan all we want, but if this part of me wants it and takes control, I think it’s going to find the loophole in the plan.

This recent revelation that I don’t have consistent control of my suicidal thinking and actions is terrifying. Yes, the rational, "clear-headed," hard thinking part of me would like to die. Having a mostly joyless existence punctuated by random weeks of intense pain will do that to you. But though I want to kill myself, I have agreed that I will not. I'd like to, but it would be a terribly fucked up thing to do to my wife and children, so I will not. And because I have agreed that I will not—and because I never do anything in my life half-assed—I will do everything in my power to prevent it from happening. I don't really want to play this game called "keeping myself alive" because it's very hard and takes a lot of my free time (therapy, AA meetings, reading, etc.) and is boring (because I don't enjoy much), but I have agreed to play it, and so I will play it to win. That's how I play every game in my life. I may ultimately lose because my competitors (alcohol and suicide) are more clever or stronger than me, but I will not lose because of a lack of effort on my part. This mostly means that when some kind of professional or wise sober person tells me something I can do to reduce the probability that I'll kill myself, then I do it, no matter how much I'd rather not do it.

But though I have agreed to play the game the best I can, I don't want to lose focus on a much bigger goal than winning the game: cultivating a life that I do not wish to end. What I want most is to not want to die. The people advising me on the game—and even my loved ones—just want me to not kill myself. But I want to not want to. I want to be happy to be here, or at least at peace with being here. For everyone concerned with the game itself, I can confidently say that not wanting to die would really help me win the game. Right? What if instead of all this medicine and crisis planning and spiritual salvation, I just didn't want to die anymore? Then all of that stuff would be nice—good for my health—but less essential. I think it's fair to say that the probability that I'd kill myself would be much lower if I just didn't want to do it. Getting to that point is not a topic of this post because I still haven't figured out how to. Mostly here I'm talking about winning the game—how, as a hard thinker, I've come to understand and appreciate the spiritual tools presented to me because they will help me win the game.¹² But this larger goal of actually wanting to be here suddenly feels very important. Because like I said, if the suicidal part of me takes control, it might not matter how much rational Alex wants to win the game, and it might not matter how much preparation I’ve done to win the game if it decides to find the loopholes in my preparation. I feel more than ever that I have to learn to really want to be here because that’s what might stop these scary loss-of-control moments from coming. And their sudden appearance, twice in a pretty short time span, makes me feel like I’m running out of time.¹³

Hard thinking about softer spiritual stuff

We’re finally to what I promised up front. I “only” cover my current hard thinking on prayer and having a relationship with a Higher Power.¹⁴ I bold the important bits.

Prayer

When people in the program asked me to pray, the hard thinker in me got fired up: Who am I praying to? What am I supposed to pray about? Do I have to be on my knees for it to “work”?¹⁵ Do I do it out loud or in my head? Etc.

Interestingly, the answer to almost all of those questions was “It doesn’t matter.” People would suggest prayers that they liked, but it was clear there were no rules. This turned out to make the hard thinker in me quite uncomfortable. How could something so unstructured and so intentionally pointless be of any value?

I did it anyway. I didn’t have a sense of who or what I was talking to. Sometimes I was just quiet. And one benefit of prayer became immediately apparent to me when I started regularly doing it: For the one to two minutes I’m praying, I’m not drinking. That won’t sound like much to someone who hasn’t been in recovery, but it will to everyone who has. We have a lot of sayings about how it’s a “day at a time” program, but in early recovery, the truth is that it’s a minute to minute program. When a craving to drink comes upon you, it’s terrifying because of that potential loss of autonomy I mentioned before. The worst risk of losing control is in the first 30 days,¹⁶ when you’re still physically addicted, but it doesn’t truly get “easy” for most people until about 18 months. Through relapses, I learned that when I got a craving, it was important that I do nothing. If I stood up, and definitely if I walked outside, I was probably doomed. But doing literally nothing was miserable. I’d rock back in forth in the fetal position in bed, crying or yelling. Eventually, prayer became my go-to move in these times. It’s such a subtle and small action, but it did make the craving feel more survivable. It felt like I was using the panicked energy in a useful way, channeling it out of my body and into the universe. Meditation was similarly useful. Consistent prayer and meditation is why I finally achieved sustained sobriety. Most cravings only last 15 minutes, often less. Prayer is the bridge to a calmer moment. Prayer is how I survived the fear of losing control.

These days, I do pray to a Higher Power. But I only have a vague sense of what that Higher Power is. The only vivid experience I’ve ever had that I say was “spiritual” came the morning I woke up in the psych ward. I was very hung over and a bit scraped up and bruised from falling while drinking, but for some reason I felt very alive. I remember feeling very in tune with my breath, my heart beat, the slight flexing of my muscles, and my heavy blinking, and I just started shaking my head in wonder. Every ounce of me controlled by thought and even spirit wanted so much to be dead, and yet here I was, very much alive. I was suddenly struck by the persistence of life. Many alcoholics talk about wanting to die and being devastated day after day when they wake up, but in this moment, rather than devastated, I was filled with awe. I couldn’t conjure gratitude for it, but I had a deep sense of respect for it. People with more traditional God figures will say of moments like this that “It wasn’t your time” or “God wasn’t done with you yet”. That’s a bridge too far for a hard thinker like me, but for the first time, I simply acknowledged how powerful life is. My Higher Power is somewhere in that moment. I wouldn’t and couldn’t say some deity figure empowered life to be as incredibly persistent as it is; it’s more like my Higher Power is the persistence itself.

The following spring and summer—where I finally got beyond my two-month, bipolar-related hurdle I had hit over and over again—I planted a tomato seed every time I wanted to drink.¹⁷ I did this to have a healthy distraction, as something in addition to prayer or meditation to pass the time of a craving. But I chose this specifically as a way to tip my hat to that morning in the psych ward. I’ve grown tomatoes most of my life. Everything about tomatoes delights me. But growing them—or any plant—from seed always fills me with wonder. I’ve read in biology books how a seed grows, but the majesty and mystery of the why of it inspires awe. Seeing little seeds do their thing, often in spite of shit circumstances, kind of helps me shrug off my existential dread and say Why not? Life does life things—with incredible persistence and strength—just because. Maybe instead of fighting against it, I could go with that living flow: survive and thrive and maybe eventually grow some kind of tomato of my own.

With this context in mind, I’ll say that my favorite thing to pray for now is the strength to do what I know is right. With alcohol no longer in my system, I’m back to being a person who, generally speaking, has good values. I believe in being kind. I believe in helping others, especially those less fortunate than me. I believe in being a good listener and attentive for my wife and children and friends. But I often don’t feel like I have the strength to do those things. It’s not that I’ll do ill instead; it’s that I just might not get out of bed. I pray to whoever—or whatever—is behind those seeds sprouting and ask to have similar strength. Obviously, as a hard thinker, I don’t think anyone or anything infuses me with some great strength in an “answer to my prayers”. But I have found that the thought exercise and the routine of this asking, especially on days I feel my weakest, does give me strength. The prayer is literally nothing more than a simple reminder to myself that I have within me the same incredible persistence and strength as those seeds and that I can access that life in me as needed. Reminding myself through prayer that I’m like those seeds is perfectly true in hard thinking terms, but also deeply spiritual. It’s such a small thing, hardly holy or magical or miracle, but it has changed everything for me.

Having a relationship with a Higher Power (God)

A lot of people who enter the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, myself included, struggle with a major question about God: Is He (it) real? I had thought about this a lot before I joined AA, too, inspecting every inch of the idea. Ultimately, though fun to ponder, the truth is that no one can prove one way or another if God is real. That doesn’t mean the question is “pointless”; much good can come from discussion and hard thinking about this question. But I recently realized it’s the wrong—or at least not the best—question.

Whether God is real or not, everyone can agree that the idea of God is real. The idea of God is all around us, mostly in the form of the central figure of many religions. Even a non-religious person like myself “knows about” God. My first sponsor thought the idea of God was inside of all men, women, and children, and he felt that was some kind of proof that God was real. I still don't know how I feel about that. I'm not sure that if I was born alone on a desert island and lived my whole life alone that I ever would have had a thought about God. I'm not sure I would have come up with that idea. But it doesn't matter where I got the idea, only that I did. I was born into a world where the idea was presented to me regularly, if not always clearly.

So, instead of wondering if God is real or not, I started to ask myself: Is the idea of God useful? Having had experienced the truth that prayer was useful to me, even though I thought most traditional views of prayer’s purpose were nonsense, I started to wonder if God could be surprisingly useful in the same way. After much hard thinking, my answer is: Yes. Let me give you a metaphor.

Sometimes my five-year-old daughter has trouble falling asleep. She’ll get up, frustrated and sad, and when I beg her to try to go back to sleep, she asks that I tuck her in again. Sometimes this will happen several times before she finally falls asleep. One night, after she had been pretend playing with her imaginary friend, I got a fun idea: When I tucked my daughter in, I told her I had tucked in her imaginary friend, too. After this, my child finally fell asleep. I was unsure my playing along with the imaginary friend was the cause, so I tried it in subsequent nights, and it worked every time. What I realized from this experience is that it doesn’t matter if the imaginary friend is real or not; all that matters is the sleep. I could have been critical of her having an imaginary friend. I could have told her such things were stupid because they weren’t “real”. Beyond it being lame to be so ruthlessly literal with a child, it also wouldn’t have been some wise revelation. She already knew her friend wasn’t real. But she somehow recognized, in a way I hadn’t yet, that “realness” wasn’t a precondition for usefulness. And anyway, in the poignant and exhausting desperation common among all parents that want their children to go to sleep, I didn’t give a shit if it wasn’t real either. The sleep it produced was real. Suddenly, I found myself thinking differently about God.

I recognized that the desperation I feel for surviving as a recovering alcoholic is much more poignant and exhausting than the desperation I feel as a parent trying to get my child to sleep, so I began to wonder if I could make a similar concession on “realness” to get use out of the idea of God. So you’re thinking, “But we’re adults; we can’t have imaginary friends.” And why not? I carry around an imaginary friend in my head who’s always telling me a drink would be a good idea. And he’s not real, and his ideas are known to be lousy, but for a long time I let them govern my behavior. I still let a voice in my head—which isn’t exactly me, so much as an arrogant, fearful imaginary friend—affect how I see the world (negatively) and my behavior (cynical). Wouldn’t finding God be a bit like inviting another bigger, badder imaginary friend into the equation? One that works for me—the real me—against all of the other lousy imaginary friends I have. I’ll relate this to a specific problem I’m having that the idea of God is useful against.

I recently had a big Aha! in how to describe a major mental health problem to the people helping my recovery/general care. It was this: It turns out there are two component parts to the way a depressive/self-loathing/suicidal thought wears on me: 1) It’s the initial pain of its arrival and 2) It’s all the vile content and details (the nasty things the voice says in my head or the unwelcome feelings). As far as I can tell, therapy, the program, and even medicine have targeted and really helped me get part 2 under control. I’m proud of the way I’ve learned to hear the evil thought, accept it, then say “but no thank you,” and it (usually) stops. No more rumination. But the problem is that nothing seems to treat part 1, the pain of the evil thought’s arrival and the frequency at which those evil thoughts arrive. Untreated part 1 is exhausting me. And since I’m exhausted, my ability to handle part 2 is threatened. So I asked my therapist, “At what point does the frequency slow down?” We discussed how (I think, I’m not sure) the program promises that as recovery/sobriety lengthens, the frequency of the evil thoughts will lessen. I told her that it worked with the evil thought about drinking. Eventually the “obsession was lifted” as we say in the rooms. But lately the evil “kill yourself” thought just won’t stop knocking on my door. Nothing I do seems to slow the pace. I told her I know I must be patient, but I also need relief now. Then she said, “So, if the thought ‘You should kill your self’ knocking on the door so much is exhausting, what if next time it showed up, you just invited it in to stay. Tuck it away on a chair in your mental living room, kind of always there mumbling madly, but at least not knocking hard on the door anymore?”

I immediately liked this idea because I realized, in essence, that is what I had done with the evil “you should drink” thought. Sometimes I’ll hear someone share in a meeting that “drinking isn’t an option anymore”. Not only does this annoy the hard thinker in me—because it’s literally untrue—but it also seems dangerous. I think it’s important that I’m always aware that the option of a drink is right there. I feel like if I floated through life convinced it wasn’t an option anymore, at some point it suddenly would very much be an option—just slap me in the face—and I’d be so caught off guard by the surprise attack, I’d drink. For me, it’s like the old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Fully living Step 1 each day requires an unwavering awareness of my powerlessness. Saying it isn’t an option sounds a little too much like I think I have the power in the relationship, and I don’t. In other words, I felt like I finally “got” Step 1 when I stopped telling the “you should drink” guy to go away when he knocked on the door and I instead invited him to just come on in and sit on my couch. I’m an alcoholic. That means you live here, with me, in my head house, buddy. I’m going to stop pretending I can keep you out. And your chattering away on the couch is less scary and loud than all the knocking was. So why couldn’t I view the “you should kill yourself” guy the same way? In other words, Step 1 my powerlessness over my suicidality and say, “Just come on in and sit on the couch next to that other asshole.” I told my sponsor that I was going to try this, and his response surprised me:

“As you know, my focus with you is to pass on the practices of the Steps. In my experience, the Steps are focused on two things when it comes to working with our "thought-life". 1. We always turn to God first (God is The Solution) 2. We shift our attention to others (service). My experience is this, in time, creates a major shift in my overall thinking. Turning to God provides a sense of safety, love, care and protection. I don't feel alone. I feel less scared. Shifting my thoughts towards helping another person provides a sense of me being useful. Result: when I feel safe, loved, protected and useful, I have valid reasons for living. So in your practice scenario of inviting in the unwanted "party pooper" knocking at the door...also invite God in, too. If the party pooper gets rowdy, ask God to quiet him down. It's an extension of what you're doing, but now you're bringing the Higher Power in as the bodyguard. Make sense?”

So, that’s what I’ve been trying the last couple weeks, with mixed success so far. I don’t know or care if God is real or not. He’s certainly no less real than the stupid voices in my head that want me to drink or kill myself. And I have to fight very real battles with those voices even though they aren’t real, so why shouldn’t I recruit a bodyguard of unknowable-realness into the fray? A bodyguard that I’m told loves me and has infinite, omnipotent strength. Is he real? I don’t care. Just like my daughter’s sleep is real, so is my sense that I’m never going to lose a fight with those guys on the couch again. The comfort is real. The peace and serenity I feel because I have a God bodyguard is real.

I’ll leave you with one last insane image. Everyone alive has voices of negativity in their head: worries and self-loathing that won’t let them sleep at night. But back to the idea of accessing joy, a feature of my voices is they always show up when I’m on the precipice of feeling some joy. They are a major roadblock on a joy road that is already very hard for me to traverse. The other night I was playing Uno with my kid, and those voices on the couch started heckling me. The first said, “You know that’s a stupid game. I have an idea of something we could do that’s really fun.” The second rolled his eyes and said, “Don’t listen to him. Let’s just go find traffic to drive head first into and be done with this.” And I stood up at the table and looked over at the couch (my child was very confused by this), and in my head I asked them both if they wanted to play. No? Then shut the fuck up. Because I’m going to play Uno. I don’t know why. Just like I don’t know why those seeds sprout. And if you all can’t quietly keep to yourselves, I’ll get Him to keep you quiet. And I glanced over my shoulder at God who wasn’t literally there, but useful in the battle nonetheless, and I sat back down and played a Wild card and laughed and laughed and laughed.

1. The reasons for writing this blog post, outlined in that paragraph, sound nice. But they aren’t really why I sat down to write this. The truth is I don’t have a reason, and writing is the only blessed part of my life I do simply for the joy of it. An idea overcomes me, and I suddenly feel like it must get out of my head. And unlike everything else in my life I mind fuck the joy out of (you’ll read more on that soon), I just got with it. I slip into a flow state and let it happen. It feels “good” for me in a way that nothing else does. So who knows why. Fuck why. I put those reasons why up front because my wife asked me why I was writing this, and I realized that that’s something people like to know when they start reading something. My wife also told me my writing can feel a little “mansplainy” sometimes, and rather than be offended, I wondered about that. At first it seemed absurd because everything I write is dripping with “maybes” and “what the fuck do I know?”. But I communicate with a certain type of conviction. It’s not that I have confidence in what I want to say is true or right, but I am very confident that what I want to say is worth saying and that, by the time I chose to sit down to write it, I know exactly how to say it. The result is an overly-verbose but crystal clear portrait of whatever it is I’ve decided to say, and I think that clarity itself makes some people uncomfortable. It’s almost like we’ve all politely agreed that saying what we think or feel is hard, so when you say something emotionally vulnerable, it better be a little clunky or raw. My careful diction and intensity, thus, comes across as inauthentic or mansplainy. I get it. I even think it’s fair. But I’m not going to stop doing it. Again, writing (in a context like this, not at work) is the one thing in my life that I sort of just let happen.

2. Before you ask, yes, I’ve considered that this is the disease talking. Maybe the part of me that still wants to drink is hoping that if I go back to hard thinking on the regular, I’ll do things my way again and ultimately drink. I admit I’m not sure.

3. Shout out to one of my all time favorite poems, “The Tables Turned” by William Wordsworth: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45557/the-tables-turned

4. I asked my psychiatrist if antidepressants are supposed to do this—like lubricate the joy cogs and wheels in my brain so they’ll actually work. Apparently not. Antidepressants are really just intended to prevent lows (anti depressant, duh). I’ve read some people have success with accessing joy after electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), but it seems like a mixed bag at best. Ain’t nothing seems to work as well as ol’ ethyl alcohol.

5. I warned you about the verbosity and digressions.

6. Another really wise bit of advice I got when I was new was don’t “compare out.” This happens when someone new to recovery thinks they don’t have a problem because the alcoholics they meet have had way uglier lows. They think, Well, I haven’t driven drunk. I haven’t lost a job from drinking. I haven’t lost a spouse, a house, whatever. So they drink again. They do “more research” as people in AA joke. If such people truly are alcoholics, that terrible list of things they haven’t done is usually just a “not yet,” and they’ll do those terrible things if they keep drinking. Comparing out wasn’t a problem for me. I knew I had a drinking problem for a long time before I went to AA. The bit of advice I needed to hear was about a similar danger, but it works in the opposite direction; I had to be warned to not be a victim of “terminal uniqueness”. Not only are you not better than anyone else (compare out), you’re also not worse than anyone else. From the beginning, I knew AA worked. I had seen it work for my parents, and I believed people in meetings when they said it worked for them. But the first year or so I tried to get sober, I doubted AA would work for someone as sick as me. What I mentioned before about life-long issues accessing joy and my concurrent mental health issues made me believe AA, including God, wasn’t magical enough to fix me. On my bad days, I still have a voice in my head telling me that. But fortunately, when I was new, I was advised to listen for how my situation is like my fellows. In early sobriety, I found myself attracted to the biggest weirdos—the absolutely crazy people—because if they said the program worked for them, then maybe it could work for me, too.

7. I am fairly certain that the RLS was actually caused by my mental health medications. I can’t tell you how many times I desperately searched for a cure for RLS at 2 or 3 AM because I was dying to go to sleep. I never read this anywhere, but what finally fixed it for me was taking my mental health medications in the morning instead of at night.

8. It’s beyond frustrating when I do everything “right” and then somehow feel worse. I know I have to be patient with this process, and spiritual action isn’t some kind of silver bullet. But Step 2 makes one thing clear: For all of this to work, you have to believe it might. You can do all the stuff, but if you’re just going through the motions or doubt it will help, it won’t. And I have come to believe. I’m far from certain, but I think all this stuff might just save my life. Maybe. But when I felt like I did that night, it’s hard not to be afraid that it might not. It’s hard to not to feel like that I may just be a little too sick. I can’t feel terminally unique! I have to believe, even if only a 1% chance! But as I fell asleep depressed at 7 pm that night, I didn’t believe. It was better the next day, but I’m embarrassed I can’t consistently believe.

9. I’m not sure if this is good enough. I wonder if I have to believe it was God for the program and this whole God thing to work. I think (I hope) just being open to the idea that it could have been God is enough. Because if I have to feel like I know it was God, I’m fucked. I could never convince myself of such a thing.

10. Although I was warned at rehab that more alcoholics commit suicide after they stop drinking than do alcoholics actively drinking.

11. This feature of addiction is the one non-addicts understand the least, and I believe it’s one of those things you could never understand unless you experience it. Addiction targets the oldest part of the brain, the part deep down inside of us that operates well before our identity and sense of morals. It’s a pollution of the flight or fight response. You know how you instinctually scream if someone startles you? An addict instinctually uses when he or she is “startled” by almost any stimuli. Flight or fight is replaced by drink, in something like a prolonged scream. You don’t want to do it, but it doesn’t matter what you want because this operation occurs in a part of your brain that’s more important than the part of your brain where “you” are. I believe addiction gets labeled as a moral disease because non-addicts have never had this explained to them or, if they have, they chose not to believe it. It’s scary for members of a prideful species to accept the idea that under certain circumstances they could lose control. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have believed it until it happened to me.

12. I toyed with framing this post as “the opposite of a suicide note” because it’s about all the reasons I’m not committing suicide, rather than the reasons I am committing suicide that would come in a traditional suicide note. But what is the opposite of a suicide note? I guess it would be some kind of declaration of living? I don’t think I’m ready to write one of those because I’m not entirely sure why I’m living. But I do want to write about why I’m not committing suicide even though I really want to sometimes. Maybe those are the same thing. I’m not sure. I’m not sure about any of this.

13. Rather than truly “wanting to be here,” there’s a lot of people who vouch for a strategy of persistent distraction. I can at times get so caught up in a new video game or book or sport that for awhile I just kind of forget that I don’t want to be here. But I’d rather not just bounce from one distraction to another the rest of my life. First of all, this just sounds like some other form of escape; albeit safer than escaping with alcohol, it still doesn’t feel like the true contentment or peace I’d expect to come from sobriety. I think the AA program presents another solution to this problem in the way we are supposed to decide to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. If that is truly done, it’s not that I won’t want to die anymore, it’s that what I want won’t matter anymore. Only what God wants for me will matter. I acknowledge this is a clever and even wise way to escape the threat of suicidality, but I’d love to find a way to turn my will and life over to God and also personally want to be here. Maybe as I get more practiced at turning my will and life over, I will find a side effect of that is wanting to be here. Maybe doing God’s will will fill me with a sense of purpose and joy.

14. It “only” took two plus years of painstaking openness and willingness and soul searching to reach these ideas. It “only” took nearly dying from a physical disease and a spiritual malady to become desperate enough to put aside my ego and try.

15. When my wife first saw me regularly praying, she asked if prayer had to be done on knees. I said, “I don’t think so. But I need to be on my knees.” I knew something about the humility of the position was good for my type of crazy.

16. This is why rehab stays are traditionally 28 days. For most substance addictions, it takes about a month for the physical aspects of the addiction to fade. Then you’re left with the arguably harder and lifelong battle with the mental aspects of the addiction, but those battles can be won with support of loved ones or a fellowship and “spiritual tools”. Nothing can really stop the autonomy-stealing nature of the physical addiction, which is why people have to go some place with zero alcohol until that part fades. The reason people in recovery are so afraid of “the first drink” is because you can wake that physical addiction back up in just one drink, and then you’re off to the races, totally out of control again. One of the counselors at my rehab used to say, “The first drink is a choice. The next 100 are mandatory.” In most cases, if you have one, you’re as sick and addicted as you were the day you stopped. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been sober for 30 years. That’s just how this thing works.

17. I had about 800 tomato seedlings as a result. I grew my biggest tomato patch ever on my mom’s farm, and I gave many of the seedlings away, but the vast majority got composted into my spare soil. It felt bad to not honor the little seedlings that had probably saved my life, but there’s only so many tomatoes one man can grow.