Recovery

Getting Better, One Day at a Time

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A friend told me about eating out with her “sarcastic” friend—we all have one—when they saw a toddler, bundled up in winter layers, bounce off a closed glass door and fall because the child had not perceived the door.

The sarcastic friend said, sotto voce, “Get used to that, kid.”

Life is a clear, freshly cleaned, plate glass door that no one notices is a door, even with a shiny metal door handle at every-door-you’ve-ever-seen’s-door-handle-height on it, because we are too busy thinking about life until someone bonks into it. Loudly.

When are we too young to learn that? or too old to be reminded?

I bonked into my own life, repeatedly. Another friend has an analogy: Whenever he lived like he thought he was the “captain of his own ship,” he would run it aground, back it up, direct it in what he thought was a new direction, fire up the engines and re-launch full speed ahead, only to find that it was not a new direction at all and he had re-grounded it in the same spot, but deeper in the muck.

Ten years ago, my SMA symptoms were probably beginning to manifest themselves but I was still walking everywhere, and even if I did notice any changes I was not someone who was going to say anything out loud about them to another human being. I had terrible leg cramps. My right leg would spasm out from under me if I stood still for long, but it had done that for years; my reflexes would catch me and pop me back into place. That happens to everyone, right? I fell in my own apartment, a single-level, one bedroom, hard-to-fall-down-in apartment and twisted that ankle sometime in 2004. SMA? or something else?

It is possible it was my leg misfiring, a neuromuscular something-or-other, as well as something else. In 2004, I was still active in another disease, alcoholism; that stumble that I mentioned is not something that I actually remember as I was in a brownout that night, an ambulatory blackout. I remember awaking in pain and with a foot too swollen to put a shoe on it. Ice and aspirin and I was fine within days or never.

AA_Anniversary_Medallion_Cobalt_BlueHad my alcoholism not gone into remission four and a half years ago through a lot of work, I would not: be writing; know about SMA; know that I was born with SMA; or be walking at all, probably. I would not have the income that I have (Social Security Disability), which is a very small stipend but it is regular; I would not know eighty percent of the people I now call friends; I would not be in the relationship that has outlasted the few relationships I had ever adventured my way into and out of over the years.

I would not be walking because I would not know what was happening, would not have complained to anyone, much less a doctor, and probably would be on a walker by now instead of a cane. I would have silently suffered with a fear that my condition was one I “had drunk myself into,” which would probably frequently be a thought immediately preceding another guilt-riddled binge. (SMA is a genetic disease, and its symptoms would have appeared when they did even if I had been a teetotalling professional athlete.) When I was active, I liked feeling bad, feeling guilty, feeling self-pity, even, because I liked the relief for those feelings that I had in a bottle. I enjoyed feelings, good and bad, only insofar as I could suppress them.

Alcoholism is a disease, a psychological and physical one, in which craving supplants all emotions and that emotion directs all actions. All addictions seem to share that simple self-centered rule and draw vitality from this circular emotional logic. The solution is simple but difficult; for me it involved getting involved with life, doing for others, with others, and noticing that I am not the center of the universe and that you all are not my creations, figments of my imagination. The trick was getting me to want that, to notice that I did not know or had forgotten all this.

About ten years ago, maybe eleven, I tried to contact my future self, the 2014 edition of me with several years of sobriety. I called the A.A. hotline and some nice person listened to me for a bit and then he told me he would get me in the morning and bring me to a meeting. I of course did not go. The first step in recovery is to admit “we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” I knew my life was becoming a wreck already, even with a good job, but … I knew nothing else. Ten years ago I was on Step Zero—I knew that MY life was wrong somehow—but I did not come into recovery until 2010; I do not wish those six years on anyone, even people I detest.

I do not wish SMA on anyone, even people I detest, too. The beautiful thing about bonking into real life is that the best people I know are alcoholics and addicts taking their recovery seriously and people with neuromuscular diseases—like SMA and SCA and Friedreich’s ataxia—people who expand their lives and their possibilities even as their boat changes course on them and coach me to do so, too.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 15 asks, “Present-day you meets 10-years-ago you for coffee. Share with your younger self the most challenging thing, the most rewarding thing, and the most fun thing they have to look forward to.”

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Daily Prompt: Stand by Your Brand

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Years ago, I urged the young son of a friend to start using a theme song, as he always seemed to be humming something whenever he entered a room. He was 10 at the time and found it funny that something like this would be noticed, but since most 10-year-olds are egotistical, he loved that someone noticed a quirk. I told him that if he had a theme song, whenever people heard it in his absence they would think of him and wish for him to suddenly appear.

I do not know if my friend’s son now has a theme song that reminds his friends of him. I kind of hope not, since it might be insufferable, instead.

It is easy to brand oneself but it is quite hard to re-brand oneself; I have had several experiences with branding myself, being branded by others, and attempting to re-brand myself. And part of that has to do with having had a “signature beverage,” as the WordPress Daily Prompt for August 22 asks: “Captain Picard was into Earl Grey tea; mention the Dude and we think: White Russians. What’s your signature beverage—and how did it achieve that status?”

Having a signature anything usually infers affection from one’s friends towards you. When I was young, I hated getting labeled, in part because it never seemed affectionate at all and sometimes when I heard it, it meant that the next sound I was going to hear was a fist coming at my face. I started wearing glasses at age eight: “Four eyes.” Starting at about that same age, most years, I outgrew my Christmas clothes by spring, leaving me with exposed ankles for the rest of the school year. For some reason, this look, which revealed something but I do not know what about me—poverty? personal clothing cluelessness?—led to the most violent reactions from my school mates: “High waters!” was the exclamation and shoving me was frequently the action. I do not know why, and to this day I check the cuffs on my pants.

Thus, I loved having a “signature beverage” after I went to college. It was a label and it meant I belonged with some group (any group) somewhere (anywhere). And I controlled it. I picked it. I had friends and I was going places.

I have had bartenders who knew which beer I liked. I have had bartenders who made me the perfect martini: “Bone-dry,” I would say. “Allow the vodka and the vermouth to exchange pleasantries but not mingle or get each other’s phone number.” (I was a wit.) A twist of lemon peel. (“Olives? Do I look hungry?”) I have had liquor store proprietors fetch me my bottle upon seeing me enter.

Towards the end of my drinking era, several friends attempted to stage an intervention on my behalf. There is an expression in recovery that a “alcoholic will get you drunk before you get him sober,” and that sums up the intervention. We all drank. I am rarely a charismatic or convincing individual, but when I need to be …

These same friends, when we now go out to dinner, now order for me. They order a pitcher of whatever for themselves and order a Sprite for me. I can order it for myself, but it is a cool moment for all of us because, as secret as I wanted to keep my consumption years ago, it was no secret to them, and my sober life is no secret now. It is the best damn Sprite I have ever had. Each time.

I have a label—a “signature beverage”—a personal brand I can now enjoy.

Daily Prompt: Punch the Clock

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 21 asks, “If money were out of the equation, would you still work? If yes, why, and how much? If not, what would you do with your free time?”
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I have my final pay stub somewhere around here, detached long ago from the check whose sum it explained. It dates from late June 2010 and I should bronze it like a baby’s shoes.

As it is for me with many other aspects of a common American—well, not just American, human—life, my relationship with work is, um, not uncomplicated. Off the top of my head, from age 15 till 40 I held 14 different clock-punching jobs from almost as many employers, with a couple employers that hired me more than once. Not included in the list is the newspaper reporter job I quit via fax machine the morning of day one, because I really am a terrible employee and I guess I wanted to prove it quickly, and the one time I was paid for an acting gig (onstage with a cardboard box on my head and a ukelele in my hands—it was a little avant garde, and getting paid five bucks made it even more so).

Life for me for the last four years has been nothing but free time, however—yet I have never been quite so productive. I am the person for whom this question was written.

I have not been another person’s employee since the summer of 2010, when I was asked to leave my last job, which I had not enjoyed very much for three years and nine months, because I had not enjoyed it very much for three years and nine months too many. The manager and I decided that I no longer needed to consider him my boss and he no longer needed to consider himself my boss. On that much we agreed, so we parted company and even deleted each other from one another’s Facebook. It was that serious a firing.

The symptoms of my diagnosis had been prominent for most of the three years; I started walking with a cane in 2007. When the symptoms of adult spinal muscular atrophy first showed, they came suddenly. Only recently have I learned that this is a common experience among people with neurodegenerative diseases. When walking becomes difficult—in my case because the nerves that had been sending (ever dimmer) signals to my legs (which had started to atrophy from receiving ever dimmer signals and thus were not being asked to work)—the end of normal walking comes as if everything had been just fine one day and the next day as if one’s shoes had been nailed to the ground or one’s co-workers had painted the floor with superglue. (I must not have liked the job very much, if I thought such a prank was possible!) It is sudden and scary when the progression of deterioration is undetected and even undetectable until the day it is completely not.

Since my last job was not a high-paying one and did not offer free or simply less expensive health insurance, I had none. So I neither spoke with anyone about my developing deterioration, nor did anyone suggest I do so. But being suddenly unemployed (so very unemployed my boss had unfriended me, please recall) meant I could get poor people’s health insurance, Medicaid. (This is before the Affordable Health Care Act, which also has in fact benefited me.)

With Medicaid came the, “Hey, doc, what gives with my legs?” conversation, and, eventually, the answer(s). With the answers came Social Security Disability, which is my sole income as of right now. If I had had insurance at an earlier date, perhaps I would have received the diagnosis and declaration of disability earlier and been able to leave my last employer on better terms. Entertaining such hypotheticals is a highly un-useful pastime, I find.

My barber asked me recently, “What do you do?” And I replied, “I am a retiree.” As I have written elsewhere, I am an alcoholic in recovery, sober several years, and I am living “Mark’s Life, Version 2.0.” The universe has afforded me a second life (not the online virtual community, a real second life), and the opportunity is not being wasted. I am writing, every day, on a schedule of my own fashioning, speaking with and sometimes counseling people.

There are three jobs every person in recovery thinks of pursuing, as I certainly did: becoming a counselor (but the hours of training are arduous), becoming a truck driver (perhaps because a desire to escape partly fueled the addiction and does not leave), and, after being told by enough people, “You oughta write a book about your stories,” a writer. Luckily, I already was a writer.

From Elvis Costello’s 1983 album, Punch the Clock, “Everyday I Write the Book”: