Politically, I am radically moderate. Theologically, I favor letting a thousand flowers bloom, even if every single one of them is plastic. As a leader, I always lean toward the compromise that leaves all parties wishing they’d gotten more but thankful they got something. In short, I don’t play well with absolutism. The perfect is the enemy of not just the good, it also opposes the acceptable.
Living in a variety of gray areas, I fail almost every purity test.
Almost.
In one major part of my life, I didn’t always take such a moderate view. Since May 21, 2007, thanks to a program of recovery that remains central to my life, I have not found it necessary to drink or use any mind-altering substance. Over these 6,058 days, I’ve worked hard to become the kind of man my mother dreamed I’d someday be. I have, without boasting, made, and continue to make, progress on that goal. That is how I define my recovery.
When I first entered recovery, all my effort was devoted to not drinking. Since I was 13, I’d relied on drugs and alcohol to make life worth living. At the age of 48, I needed to focus on how to get through a day without the promise of alcohol’s sweet, sweet comfort. Although I was not a praying man—some things never change—my mentor in recovery, I’ll call him Jeff, advised me to “get down on your knees and ask a power greater than yourself to remove your obsession to drink.”
“But I don’t believe in God,” I said.
“I don’t care what you believe,” Jeff said. “I didn’t suggest you believe in anything. I told you to get down on your knees and ask a power greater than yourself to remove your obsession to drink.”
“But I’ll feel stupid,” I complained.
“So? You’ve done a lot of stupid things and didn’t feel anything. Feeling stupid is something you don’t have enough experience with.”
Cruel but true.
I was two or three weeks sober, living in a shelter for formerly homeless vets and estranged from almost everyone I knew. If feeling stupid would help me stay sober, it might well be worth the risk.
I knelt privately beside my bed and prayed one of the most half-assed prayers imaginable:
“I don’t really believe in you, God, but Jeff told me to do this. If you are there, please take away my obsession to drink.”
Then, a miracle occurred. I got up from my unfamiliar position and felt the obsession lifted, as if it were a ghost slipping out of me. From that day forward, I have not experienced that overwhelming goddamnit-I-need-a-drink pull I thought would accompany me to my dying day.
Have I thought about drinking? Sure. Have I wished for the ease and comfort so readily available with just three or four drinks? You betcha. When I got my cancer diagnosis did I miss the possibility of crawling into a bottle and letting nature take its course? Yes. But since that day more than 16 years ago, I have not felt an obsession to drink.
I mentioned drugs above. As a teenager I didn’t really care for drinking, at least not compared to the overwhelming appetite I had for getting high. Beginning with weed, I moved through acid, pharmaceutical pills (often grabbed by the handful from neighbors’ medicine chests), black beauties, hash, opium, crystal meth and, finally, the brass ring of drug use, heroin.
In early recovery, I was a complete and total absolutist—I would not, under any circumstances, take a drink or use any other mind-altering substances. While I tried, unsuccessfully I fear, not to judge others’ behavior, I wouldn’t use cough syrup because it contained alcohol and DXM. I abandoned my favorite dessert, bread pudding, because it’s insipid without a brandy or bourbon sauce. I even got used to drinking Virgin rather than Bloody Marys, asking the server to double the amount of horseradish. Lips that touched liquor would never touch mine.
In the intervening years, my recovery has become as moderate as the rest of my being. I don’t drink alcohol or use drugs, and don’t suspect I ever will, but the newly sober Keith would be shocked at my libertine ways. Last night I prepared a beef stew for dinner guests. After browning the meat, I deglazed the pan with cabernet sauvignon and, even more shocking, added more to the stew itself an hour or so before serving it. That would have been seen as a relapse to newly-sober Keith. Maybe I wouldn’t need to confess my sin in public, but it would have been a long conversation with my mentor.
After our guest had left, my wife, Elena, decided to have a glass of wine. She does not now nor has she ever had a problem with alcohol. Although it took her a while to feel comfortable having a drink in front of me, she has gotten over that, and once or twice a month relaxes with some wine. Old habits die hard, though, and she genuinely seems to fear that the sight of alcohol will Hulkify me into drinking.
To prevent my transformation, she used a blue tin coffee cup, the kind I use throughout the day to drink lukewarm leftover coffee (don’t judge me). Last night, she placed the cup on the counter beside our coffee maker. I hadn’t been watching her, so when I walked into the kitchen and saw the cup, I picked it up to have a sip of coffee. As soon as it hit my tongue, I spat it into the sink, making an ack-ack-ack sound as if I’d been poisoned. Elena, who is much kinder, wiser and attractive than I, ran to my side, filled with remorse and, I expect, a belief I’d soon jump in the car in search of more booze. I didn’t. It was just one of those things, one of those things that would have led newly-sober Keith to reset his sobriety date and wear ashes and sackcloth while chanting, “Unclean! I am unclean!”
In a recent piece, I talked about my hospitalization to have part of my lung removed. I mentioned a brief out-of-my-freaking mind experience where I believed a nurse was trying to kill me. My explanation for this madness was a combination of severe pain and prescribed use of painkillers, Oxys in this case.
Newly-sober Keith would have fought like hell to avoid opioids, even if prescribed by a doctor in a hospital setting. I’m not going to judge that version of me, or anyone else who fears for my recovery. What was right for him, and may be right for you, is not the path I chose, and here’s why.
I’ve been open and honest about my recovery with every one of my medical providers for the past 16 years. I avoid mind-altering substances—unless medically necessary. Having a robot inserted into me, having part of my lung and some lymph nodes removed, having a garden hose attached to a wound in my side—these things were necessary, but they travel with pain. Serious pain. Spiritually, mentally and emotionally stunning pain. Pain can make people into monsters. I have a hard enough time becoming the man my mother wanted me to be without introducing my beast nature into the equation.
For the Keith of today, an improved and more insightful version, the choice was easy. I asked the doctors and nurses to use normal protocols to medicate my pain for the first two days. After that, I asked they seek my permission before giving opioids. On day three, I was released with fistfuls of over-the-counter pain medication, nothing else. In the intervening three weeks, I haven’t found it necessary to use any mind-or mood-altering substances.
Except for a sip of what should have been coffee last night.
Tiny White Box--Thoughts on Life, Death, Recovery, and Other Mundane Topics 