recovery

Expect Success

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It was my least favorite question in school. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

On one occasion, I remember being forced (forced!) to draw what I pictured my life to look like. If I had had the sense of humor I claim to have now, I would have drawn someone who was capable of drawing. Maybe I would have drawn someone holding a board with many colors on it. The person would be wearing a smock. (That was how Mr. Volk, our art teacher in elementary school, dressed. It was almost a parody of a cliché of someone’s idea of an artist.) The caption to my drawing would have stated that I hoped I would be able to draw when I was a grown-up.

Or maybe I could have drawn something representing a desire to be funny someday. A “Tonight Show”-type desk or a microphone in front of a brick wall. But no, as when I was asked to verbalize what I wanted to do when I was a grown-up, which I reacted to like it was a trick question, as if there was a perfect answer that I could glean by reading the cues from my questioner (“Mrs. Arms wants me to say that I want to be an … astronaut! I’ll draw an astronaut.”), I could only draw a stick figure wearing a tie. I want to have a job. Isn’t that what I am supposed to say? It’s already afternoon and there’s an Abbott and Costello movie on, so can I go now?

Except I would never say out loud to anyone that there was something I would rather be doing, like watch a movie. As a kid, I think I saw adults as something to be tolerated. They did not know more than me, and those that I conceded did know more were pushy about it, which is I why (I guessed) they were teachers. My stick figure with a tie (red, in my memory) was basically my dad, the only adult with a job that I was aware of. (Teachers? I am sure I wondered how that was a job. The freakiest thing in life—ever!—came whenever we saw a teacher in the grocery store, in the outdoors life. They shop? Doesn’t the janitor just fold them up and put them in a storage closet at the end of the school day, once the last detention bus has pulled away and a ride had been found for the last kid whose parents were divorcing and screwed up the daily negotiations over who was supposed to pick her up?) My stick figure with the red tie represented my eight-year-old’s deep inner knowledge that I was destined to be someone’s employee, probably working with or on numbers instead of what I thought I wanted, which I did not think anyone wanted for or from me: to work with words and sentences.

I also never imagined, neither out loud nor on paper, in writing or in stick figures, a family life. My imagination was that limited. Marriage and family appeared (in my limited view) to be things that people seemed to fall into upon arriving at a certain age. For me, something never envisioned became something never worked toward. One does not live to be 43 and single without some effort at failure devoted to the cause; the wonderful news is that I am now 46 and not single, and life has opened up for me.

As a kid, I simply did not see the point to imagining something in the far-off future. Why bother when it is going to be so different? My gosh, I wish I had had the foresight to say something like that out loud to my teachers. I just tried to read their prompts for what they seemed to think I should say I wanted. “Draw your dream house.” I drew the house I then lived in, a three-bedroom, single-level ranch, the only home I’d known, but in a different color. With a swimming pool. Within a year, in real life, the house had been painted (not my imagined color) and a swimming pool installed. See? The distant future, my distant future, would take care of itself.

It has taken care of itself, I guess, in that I am still here. The only distant date that caught my imagination was 2000. In the 1970s, that year always came with a preface: “In the year.” “In the year 2000, I will turn 32 and … perhaps have a more detailed and creative imagination than the one I have now, in the year 1979.” But ever since then, in adulthood, every time I have written out a five-year plan, I have veered completely off from it within six months. The one time I started a 401(k), I lost that job within a week. Eight months ago, my housemate and I were supposed to move to a new apartment and the very day that I officially changed my address with the post office, a task that nowadays is more of an official-sounding representation that one is moving than it is something totally necessary, that very day, thirty minutes after filling out the post office’s online form, I was told by my housemate’s mom (of all things) that I was not a part of the move and that my housemate had been lying to me about the move for six months. Two very positive things resulted: I moved in with a part of my girlfriend’s family and my girlfriend and I are closer together; I no longer live with a sociopathic housemate or the mother. Life has taught me to retain my lack of a detailed and creative imagination and yet be open to possibilities.

Because I did not have an idea of adult life, my life so far has been nothing like what I imagined. There is a difference between being a grown-up and an adult. For much of my life, I have been a “grown-up,” that stick figure with a red tie that I drew long ago. On good days, I wore a tie and looked like I was an adult, but was not. I would hold a job for a while and become bored or distracted by what could come next or stressed that I was expendable (the perpetual worry of a stick figure) and move to the next part of life. I remained open to possibilities, but sometimes the possibilities grew narrow. They no longer are.

I wanted life to be interesting. I wanted to be kept interested, interesting, and entertained. My life has been all of that and still is. It really is an adventure.

(This is an edited version of a column from July, “Adults and Stick Figures.”)

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 17 asks, “Tell us about the object of your dejection—something you made, a masterpiece unfinished, or some sort of project that failed to meet your expectations. What did you learn from the experience? How would you do things differently next time?”

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Punching Out

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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. (I was 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-and-a-half years has been nothing but free time, yet I have never been quite so productive. I will explain.

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—with pay—for a total of three years and nine months, which is three years and nine months too many. The manager and I decided (quite amicably) that I no longer needed to consider him my boss and that he, equally so, 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 complete a firing.

The symptoms of my diagnosis had been prominent for most of the three years and nine months; 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 (whose muscles 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 it 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 goes undetected and is 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 thoroughly 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 famous 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 am a writer. My days are mine, every day.

(This is a revision of a column from August 21, 2014.)

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 9 asks, “You’re given unlimited funds to plan one day full of any and all luxuries you normally can’t afford. Tell us about your extravagant day with as much detail as possible.”

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Wherever You Go, There You Weren’t

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In recovery circles it is called, “pulling a geographic.” While sharing their stories about the past and living the inebriated life, many addicts and alcoholics learn that they have done similar things. (Although I am the only person I know of who stole a commuter train. For only five feet, but still. Sorry, Metro-North.)

One of the things that many of us did a lot of when we were trying to exert control over life was run from it. Move. Sometimes cross-country. There was nothing so bad it couldn’t be fixed without filling out a change-of-address card.

Some might call this “running away from one’s troubles,” and those “some” people would be correct, somewhat. At the time, I did not see things that way. I was taking advantage of new opportunities. And now, I am grateful for all that I have seen; as I have written somewhere, if I am content-verging-on-happy about life now, how can I resent my past? I hate some things that happened to me, some things that were done to me and some things I did, but I no longer yell at ghosts. (Understand, my life is pretty not-entangled, given that I do not yet have children.)

By the oldest of old-fashioned reckoning, counting on my fingers, I have resided at more than 20 addresses in six counties across three states in two time zones. (This includes three residences in four-and-a-half years in recovery.) And there are about a half-a-dozen “I almost lived there” cities that sit in my memory like books unread on a shelf in a library I no longer have a membership card to. Two suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts; Jersey City, New Jersey; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee.

Each one of those place-names sounds to me like a bullet whistling past my head, an anecdote of a disaster that I did not have to watch unfold in front of my eyes as if I was a bystander in my life instead of a participant. I had enough disasters in the places in which I resided; and, yes, I might have found recovery in any one of those fine cities and be celebrating many more years of recovery than I have, but I did not. Life is perfect where I reside, even in its many imperfections.

Oh! and California. I had a few job interviews with newspapers in the Bay Area. It was the late 1990s and several friends and acquaintances had moved to the Golden State. (Matt Coleman, Some Memories.) By the late 1990s, several had moved back to New York, of course, but not all. I have yet to set foot west of Sedona, Arizona.

Wherever I moved, the fact of successfully landing a new job, which was always the spur for any change in residence for me, carried with it the idea that I was a success in this life and had no problems ticking away in my psyche. “Sometimes sooner, sometimes later,” as the saying goes, this hubris that masqueraded as self-knowledge always resulted in the loss of employment, change of address, loss of friends.

(I never consumed on the job. I always drank off the clock. But at some point, those two facts will be over-ridden by how much one consumes off the clock and how little one produces on the job. An illustration of the progression of addiction: I liked to drink as a celebration of successes. I worked hard and earned it, went the thinking. Publish something? Go out, get congratulations from people, drink. Finish writing something? Okay, great, you’ll submit it tomorrow. Go out, get congratulations from people, drink. Get pretty far into an assignment? It’s late, you’ll get it done tomorrow. Go out, congratulate people, drink. Start something? Cool. Go out, con … people, drink. Button your shirt correctly on the first try? Drink alone. Go out tomor … soon.)

You know, I never fooled myself into believing that I was indispensable, but did I have to prove it so often?

Wherever I went, there I wasn’t, completely. Four-and-a-half years off that hamster wheel, and I feel like I can make it anywhere.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 5 asks, “‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,’ goes the famous song about New York City. Is there a place—a city, a school, a company—about which you think (or thought) the same? Tell us why, and if you ever tried to prove that claim.”

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