Why Did Peter Sink?

Upon release from jail, after posting a hefty bail, I had a frantic sense of urgency to tie up loose ends. The timing of this event seems nearly providential in hindsight, as I had just volunteered to coach my first youth sports team, and the first practice was that same night. I had not eagerly signed up for this coaching job, but as I waited in jail the importance of this position swelled into a symbol of my responsibility and thus the need to fix my behavior. The vanity of my reputation needed a fresh coat of paint and here was an opportunity. Suddenly, I wanted to be there for my kids, more than anything, and my grumbling about volunteering turned into a must-have, because I wanted to save face and give the appearance of a good father. Aside from my drinking I did give all to my children, but now the shine was off the penny. Redemption was my real motive, not goodwill. For my children had never seen me stumble so publicly and spectacularly. Knowing that my image had fallen dramatically stabbed me, as I thought of the children’s disappointment and confusion. I felt as if I had taken a pin to a beloved balloon and popped it right in front of them. Actually, the metaphor of me as a balloon full of air sounds about right.

With only a few days left with a valid driver’s license, I scrambled about the city taking care of errands, one of which included purchasing gear for the team I was to coach. Preparing for coaching became a focus, because it was something positive amid the guilt of returning home, where I had to face the music of my best friend, my wife, who I knew I had failed.

I had entered into marriage half-heartedly and because of that, I never elevated marriage to be the centerpiece of life, where it belongs. We had not married in a church and the idea of sacredness around marriage did not even occur to me. Yet she always remained my best friend and even in times of strife we overcame our differences to come back together. We could not live apart, without each other, because we share a real love that has foundation in our roots of friendship. How she ever put up with my nonsense will be the great mystery of my life.

But irresponsible drinking and the predictable unpredictability of the bad nights loomed over the marriage. This arrest and jailing was a breaking point. Even without an ultimatum from her, I had already declared a do-or-die demand against myself to stop drinking once and for all. My shame cut deep and I resolved to change. This turning point in my life and our lives together put pressure on the marriage, for which I am forever guilty of and sorry for.

Five years later, I am beyond grateful for these events. Without this arrest and turning point, no progress would ever have been made. The experience of “hitting bottom,” which I thought had happened many times before, finally and truly slammed into me. In prior fiascos, I must have only scraped the bottom because somehow I always forgave myself and returned to old behaviors. I typically scoffed at the cliche stories of people who quit drinking, considering them hypocrites, especially those who became moralizing holy rollers and “Bible Beaters.” Wouldn’t I be like any other hypocrite after spending twenty years partying only to become a teetotaler? So I was careful to quiet my resolve to quit drinking without becoming a denier of others, always thinking of this Kahlil Gibran line in The Prophet regarding hypocrites:

…who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters law-breakers?

I needed to clean up my side of street and let others worry about themselves. So I started coaching with fervor and attending AA meetings once again. I attended an Evangelical church several times only to find the hand-raising and concert-style service too foreign to my senses. I couldn’t embrace the Evangelical way even though I appreciated the people. I sought books on Eastern philosophy, but AA became the refuge for a time again. Through AA, once again, I had allowed God to exist, but without belief in miracles. That was a bridge too far. But in accepting God I at least had a handlebar for life, something to hold onto in this struggle of re-learning how to live. That’s truly what it is. For anyone who is replacing the substance or being at the center of their life, an entire re-training must be undertaken in learning how to live. While this process took place, doubt was never far off, often creeping in, challenging every step toward change.

I remember one of the first times that prayer proved to me that it worked. Yes, I said prayer - that action that elderly people partake in, and sometimes those crazy young adults that you try to avoid. Yes, actual prayer, as in folded hands and looking up to the heavens and feeling a surge of the heart - that kind of thing.

A friend asked me to go see a movie, Transformers 2, and since I had enjoyed the toy as a kid, I agreed, thinking that a night out would be fun. But the Transformers movie proved so horrible, and so unnecessarily long, that I felt like would writhe out of my skin. The non-drinking and stress of trying to keep my depression under control came to a climax in the movie theater, spurred on by the absurdity of the movie. So bad was the movie that I said the Our Father about ten times to outlast the cinematic torture and to avoid insulting my friend, who loved the movie.

I realize this is a ridiculous anecdote about the power of prayer. Watching a movie is not any kind of hardship, but in the moments when we discover things about ourselves, it’s not always poetic.

And in all seriousness, all Transformers movies should be destroyed.

By then I had learned to pray a simple way, and I use it to this day. When struggling, I was taught to ask God for strength and direction. Besides rote memorized prayer, I didn’t know how to pray, and maybe I still don’t, but I do know how to ask for strength and direction. This always helps, and I can repeat it over and over if needed. Along with that I can ask God what is the “next right action” and direct my energy toward that, whatever it may be. The third thing that I learned to try and try again was to pray for the “willingness to be willing” to believe. I’m sure these sound silly, as they definitely did to me at first.

Then there is the quote that changed many things for me: “Surrender to win.”

“Surrender to Win” is more powerful than I ever imagined and despite the words sounding like giving up, the reality is that you rarely ever need to win. Most arguments and wants have a pointless foundation. Look at social media or comments sections on websites: do you see anyone winning there? What a mess of egos gone wild. But this saying goes way beyond helping extricate oneself from internet conversations. This touches real life, which is where the surrender to win mantra performs a strange magic that softens, heals, and can even build a fortress of strength.

Once I could see that I personally did not need to win all the time, I started to win in a different way. Surrendering removes desire for the need to be right. Surrendering lessens my ego’s need to be special. The things worth surrendering for are as follows: to allow my belief in God, to elevate my marriage above myself, and to worry less about my wants.

There is a fourth idea that I picked up regarding my struggle with belief in a Higher Power, and that was to start small in terms of a deity. I still remember after attending a meeting, standing outside of a Greek church, a man told me to make the street light my Higher Power.

“For now, just give thanks to that Street Light for everything in your life.”

“Seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“Ask the Street Light for help every day when you get on your knees. Right now, that Street Light is greater than you are. That’s your Higher Power.”

“Uh, ok.”

Stupid as that sounds, this was a place to start, and I am quite certain there is no organized religion in the world that would suggest this, but I know from myself and various other doubters that choosing something simple works, like a stapler or a plant or lawnmower - or a street light.

If you play this game and allow some object to be your Higher Power, and really pray toward it for strength and direction, that street light will amaze. Comical and ridiculous? Absolutely. But so are human beings and sometimes laughing helps kickstart ideas and change. I recall praying, “Street Light, please help me today. Help me to not drink and to be nice to people and not be the ass that I usually am. Keep me from acting like a moron. Help to be a better father and husband and son and co-worker instead of my typical narcissistic self. And maybe I can try to swear less, too. Thank you, Street Light. Amen.”

If it sounds like I’m making light of establishing a Higher Power or finding God, I am not. Not all people can easily return to believing in God once they have fallen away or become agnostic or atheist. As I lost my faith during my teenage years, I lost the ability to believe or even find a reason to pray. Devoted religious people seem to be unwavering in their faith to the point that they cannot even fathom how someone has doubt. Therefore, those people always seemed unapproachable to the unfaithful like me. If anything I felt this gulf between believers and non-believers pushed doubters away rather than invited us to try, because to have doubt felt like a weakness or a character flaw. Those with faith don’t seem to struggle, or at least don’t give the impression that they struggle, although I know now that’s not the case. Everyone struggles. Faith is usually portrayed as something you either have or you do not. I suspect doubt finds harbor in every mind and heart, even among regular church-goers. This explains why the Street Light faith worked for me - it allowed for the possibility of faith.

What I see happening with addicts and alcoholics is that the best path back to faith is through this wide gate at first, not the narrow gate. The Street Light God works because it doesn’t make one go from preschool to graduate school in a single leap. The idea that someone who has completely rejected God or Christianity could jump back in immediately to religion, to “change and become like children” is not likely or even reasonable to expect. There is an education and processing that needs to happen, and the main reason this education and process needs to take place is because many of these people, like me, never learned why we were really going to church in the first place.

Sure, we learned why on the surface: to save our souls, to be forgiven our sins, and bring us to everlasting life. Ok, great. Now what does that all mean? I had no idea.

But surely I cannot be alone in the experience that growing up, I learned all the things to say at the right time in church, but beyond the procedural there was a lack of knowing why all the hubbub, vestments, and stained glass. I spent years attending Wednesday night religion classes, never missed a Sunday, and was an altar boy for six years. I even read my Children’s Bible with fascination, and felt that being Catholic was a real part of my identity.

I just didn’t know why.

While I saw the inside of a church often, I was simultaneously learning a great deal of science and math as the years progressed. Moreover, the teaching of “questioning everything” became a prominent point in education. To search and explore questions about the natural world was a moral good. Science was slowly undermining my faith, not by its own fault, because science is a search for truth, just like faith and philosophy but in a different domain. The problem was this: while I was learning to excel at school and question everything, the Mass and Church was a static part of my life that did not seem to accept questioning.

A major fork in life happened when I asked an adult about the stone being rolled back at Jesus’s tomb. Surely, if someone rolled the rock in front of the tomb to close it, then a person or persons also could have rolled the rock away from the tomb. Even if the tomb was sealed, metal tools could have unsealed it just as easily. And the answer I heard back from a respected elder person was: “Don’t ask questions, just believe it.”

This comment caused an earthquake in me because as science seemed to question and correct itself, religion appeared to not want any arguments. Science, even in its wild tangents throughout history, did seem to right the ship, given enough time, if the findings changed. The response of “Don’t ask questions” shook me because prior to that day I had been coming to faith like a child, because I was a child. In school, having been in “gifted” programs (still not sure how I was selected into these programs) we read books critically. The same notions of reading seemed applicable to the weekly readings at church, but being rebuffed I started to doubt and even secretly laugh at some of the stories. Along with the rock at the tomb, I found many other questions, and if they could not be discussed or took a long time for myself to explore, I didn’t have interest enough for the pursuit. I was of a generation that got a “lite” version of understanding faith, hence the major drift of unaffiliated people today. With a lack of deep understanding, other things took the place of religion. Sports more than anything became a kind of replacement religion. School and parties filled the other spaces. When I began to observe political Christians behaving badly, I conflated them all into one homogenous group of hypocrites.

Obviously, I should have found a second opinion for my questions about the rock at the tomb. All of my doubting would have found the right answers if I had met the right mentor. But in a small town there isn’t a surplus of intellectuals running around quoting Augustine and Aquinas, ready to respond with the words needed to address such things. If Karol Wojtyla or Joseph Ratzinger could have been cloned in the 1980s and 1990s and sent to each parish worldwide, I have no doubt myself and millions of other kids would have remained within the faith. To be fair, the person who told me not to ask questions wasn’t equipped to answer my questions and I should have asked others, but the river of culture carried me away.

Life became exceedingly busy in the teen years, with sports and homework and jobs and friends and girlfriends and trying to secure beer for the weekend. Church faded into a Sunday event before NFL football. Wednesday night religion class became less relevant as I was so often tired from sports practice and slogging through math problems that I was checked out in religion class, just there to punch my ticket by memorizing Hail, Holy Queen or some other prayer. A sense of the meritocracy in the world started to become clear to me. It was no longer “by the sweat of your face you will get your bread” it was rather “by the firing of your neurons you will get a job.”

A second major event occurred that altered my thoughts on what it meant to be Catholic. Sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s, each week after church there would be “Bush for President” flyers on our car’s windshield after church. The pro-Life movement took off and without anyone telling me or saying so, it became clear that to be Catholic meant to be Republican. Yet in a farming community, the political choice and leanings of the early 80s trended toward the Democrats. In any case, my point here is not either political party being right or wrong. My point here is that the Church appeared to have aligned with one party, and I became confused as to the purpose of religion if elections were now invading the space carved out for God. In fact, I could not tell if the Church was part of the Republican party or if the Republican party had joined the Church. Conversations around politics became awkward, as clearly the people had split somewhere down the middle, since America was pretty much 50/50 on the two-party system then just as it is today. Even then I saw no way that either party fulfilled what I thought the Catholic faith was all about, and today I know that neither party fulfills Catholic Social Teaching, as each side has different takes that do not exactly fit. Actually, I don’t see how either party can work for any Christian. I guess you just pick the one that seems the lesser of two evils for how you see the world.

These windshield flyers changed the way I saw Church. Such lowly, earthly things as elections seemed irrelevant to the Mass, but now various people in the local parish were stirring up the flock. I knew people that did a lot of charity work but they were not pro-Life. I knew pro-Life people that volunteered and prayed often, and lived holy lives. The divisions made no sense to me, since I knew that not a soul inside that Church on any given Sunday was without sin. Yet some people who seemed to be good, certainly holier than me, were dropping out of the pews. I didn’t realize it at the time but these events began to shape later thoughts on how I viewed the Church, especially once the abuse scandals started seeping out.

In hindsight I can review my history and see my own psychological quirks and problems, but I can also see the starting blocks where the rise of the “nones” or New Atheists began running. By the time I graduated high school, faith became a minor aspect of my life, unless you count my faith in Dionysus, the God of liquor and partying. Still, a flicker of belief remained and I wasn’t ready to let faith go yet, even though in the post-Confirmation years I just thought of myself as Catholic, despite living zero of the values. Prudence flew out the window. Temperance? No, are you kidding me? Faith, Hope, and Charity? I would have thought you were referring to exotic dancers’ names.

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To my surprise, while being assigned a cell, the jailer made me watch a video on how to deal with sexual assault during my stay. This hotel was definitely a one-star rating. I asked the jailer if rape was an actual possibility on my first stay and she laughed and said, “Not likely.” Not exactly reassuring.

When I entered my cell, I met my roommate, a man with a face full of tattoos. He moved aside and let me pass, then stayed near the doorway so he could watch the TV in the distance through the sliver of a window on the door. I settled in with my bundle of items, a towel, some soap, my spork for meals, and an ample sense of displacement. I recognized immediately that my feeling as a first timer in jail differed greatly from my roommate who was doing 90 days for repeat drug and other convictions. Clearly to him, the cell and surroundings had a normalcy that I did not yet share, and with luck I wouldn’t have to learn. I settled on the top bunk (on another plastic coated mattress) without even unfolding my blanket and I stared at the ceiling.

In my pursuits and hobbies, I often sought isolation and privacy so that I could think and not be bothered, always choosing hobbies and activities solitary in nature, such as reading, drinking, woodworking, writing. Even with people present, drinking seemed more of a solitary pursuit since myself and my fellow drinkers were after the escape more than camaraderie, or perhaps through camaraderie we sought the desired escape. Now I had full isolation.

Mission accomplished?

What bothered me most was the tarnish of the crime against my otherwise good reputation, dubious as it was. My fake humility could really only be described as damaged vanity. Through years of misbehavior while drinking I had otherwise behaved and kept up appearances. I believed I was a good person, sometimes, while also hating myself. A kind of motto that I told myself was: “Self-hatred is my greatest motivator.” The meaning intended by this awful idea was that I was a capable person who could will or force tasks to completion, primarily because I believed I was not deserving of anything. Nothing in this world was owed to me, and I was no different from an ant on the sidewalk that gets his work done without expecting a reward. At the same time, I could be a real diva if anyone disrupted my personal time or bothered my sensibilities. And I wanted the attention and praise of others, kind of like can be seen in every post on social media where the implicit cry from the poster is, “Look at me! Notice me! Please, validate my existence! I want approval because I’m craving to be loved!”

I’m not sure how these notions came to be in my mind, but now I know that it was flawed, and for some time I blamed a Catholic upbringing for sourcing this lament. I knew this wasn’t entirely fair because I had spent ten years listening daily to albums like Nirvana’s Nevermind and Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom, and assorted 90s rejectionist music. As a case in point, the song “Breed” by Nirvana, which I still love to this day, starts out with these lyrics:

“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, Care if it’s old. I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, Mind, don’t have a mind.”

Likewise, to reference Sublime (a band I also still love), I think of the accumulated impact of listening to “What Happened?” some ten thousand times and how this band might have altered my worldview:

“Threw a bottle at the bouncerDidn't think that he was coolPissed in someone's drinkAnd threw a bike into a pool”

I would add some of my favorite Ice Cube and Tupac lyrics as well but surely the idea is established. Partying recklessly is what I’m hinting at here.

More likely than my church-going youth causing my self-destructive tendencies, rather, I suspect that it kept me from going full anarchist and torching the streets. The rage of youth burned fierce and I wanted to rebel. Self-destruction was so metal, so gritty and real. In reality, it was just like riding on a rollercoaster where you want the thrill of near-death adventures while buckled in with a seatbelt and shoulder harness. Rock and Rap music just presented the rebellion I was after. They were my cheerleaders.

But the fire of youth can be difficult to manage and outlets will be found, on purpose or by accident. I believe that avoiding feelings, not talking about feelings, allowed internal brooding to swell into self-loathing and self-destructive behaviors. All of that touchy-feely stuff was not part of my life. Rather, I deemed it a ridiculous outgrowth of modernity, a kind of New Age, California-way that deserved no review. Today I know better: talking is good…and California is still, well, California.

I held too many contradictions in my mind. On the one hand, modernity had the answers, on the other hand I felt its efficiencies were wearing away meaningful work. It certainly hollowed out the farms and factory jobs in my corner of the world as consolidations and outsourcing crushed the local economy. I ended up becoming a software engineer but I could never truly love my line of work since I saw blue-collar and agricultural work as more real and the people in those vocations far more interesting. The software and IT business world of sterile screens never did excite me. There exists a kind of affluent boredom in the modern office that lacks heart, because the occupations themselves only require our head.

In those college and early adulthood days, I pretty much sought moral anarchy. Yet I also wanted order and rules, with a yearning to do the right thing. On one hand I wanted education and on the other I thought ignorance was bliss. Basically, let me try to be honest, since that’s the point of writing this: I just wanted it my way depending on how I felt at the time. I felt that truth was malleable to my current state. My worldview morphed constantly and made no sense to me, and eventually I threw up my hands and found drinking and disdain to be a good corner to hide in while I progressed through time on this planet. I had all the answers, but no conviction. I could not articulate anything and therefore thrashed about like Ahab, wanting the answer to surface next to me so I could name it, kill it, and mount it on the wall.

This drifting way of life, eventually, brought me to my weekend in jail, for which I am now most grateful.

When I woke up in jail, I was flushed out of my cell to breakfast, I realized how much like a fish tank the common area was, where people watch the new person, where furtive eyes peek constantly. Sitting at a table by myself I suddenly had three men join me and start asking questions about why I was there, how long I was staying, and finally, to the point, if they could have any of my food, my leftover soap, and any extra phone card minutes when I departed the jail. Remaining quiet for the most part, I observed the comfort with which the regulars roamed the jail versus the corners where others sat quietly.

As I was being brought before the judge, they strung five of us together in conjoined handcuffs and led us to a holding cell. In the cell we conversed and I learned that two of those with me were booked on heroin charges, and to my surprise, they were discussing how to get one of their mothers to post bail in order to be released…so that they could go buy more heroin right away and get high again. The poor woman, I thought. Addiction this strong seemed impossible to overcome, yet I heard them scheming a plan that would likely financially obliterate this mother. Another man had a drunk driving charge, too, but he had been driving with a child in his car. He looked wounded and I could see his pain because he had a face bearing misfortune. He just looked unlucky, and I began to realize how lucky and fortunate I had been, always, always, in my trip through this world. But one thing seemed certain - none of them in there but me seemed to be thriving in life, at least not in what our culture deems as success. I didn’t get the impression that they had grown up in houses that took pride in good grades and ate home cooked meals every night.

Honestly, I thought of them mostly as knuckleheads and wanted to get away from them. I did not love them as neighbors or equals. The experience reminded me of days spent in a military barracks, where many of the same character types seemed present. Imagining that jail to be an Army barracks did not seem much of a stretch. After all, we all wore the same uniforms. I felt I was made of better stuff than most of them, that I was morally better in some way. Yet alongside this notion, I also saw myself as this lowly blight on society. Again my thoughts made no sense in their contradictions. Was I good or bad? My measurement of worth came only by achievements rather than something intrinsic. The “work hard, play hard” principal: I imagined achievements like money and honor was the purpose, with pleasure and escape as the reward. The movement toward a goal was righteous, and missing the mark was bad. And clearly these people in jail, I thought, had failed in life, worse than I had.

My notions of altruism and equality, I realized, were shadows and projections from my reading and my books. My empathy and caring was best kept fresh in isolation, not in interacting with actual people with real flaws. For if I really believed in people and saw the good, I would have applied it here in jail, but I only saw the shortcomings and wanted to flee from these ne’er-do-wells, even though I simultaneously considered myself one of these screw-ups, but to a lesser degree. Somehow I flip-flopped between seeing myself as a good person and a degenerate, as if I had all three of Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov brothers, Dmitri and Alyosha and Ivan, all rolled into me. I was a good intellectual degenerate jerk. A drunken idiot atheist with a heart of gold.

In a way, I was right. From that list of attributes, I carried some with me daily, and set others down, and picked up different ones to play with. In talking with the other jailbirds, they too played with these toys of personality and behavior in making their way each day. In fact, I could see that their flaws and mine mirrored one another, depending on the hour. Yet I still thought I was not like them. All of them. My aim exceeded theirs, my thoughts went deeper, my personhood was somehow imbued with specialness. My life meant more and they were fools.

Yet I was in the same place as all of them.

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I awoke facing the wall. My mouth like cotton, I sensed something amiss and an old familiar feeling. When you wake up from a wild night where memories are sparse, or non-existent, a moment of panic can grip you due to the uncertainty of place and time. The drab detox dorm room had two beds in it, with waterproof mattresses. I rolled over to sunlight blasting through a window and the first thing I saw outside was a Coors Light billboard near a highway. The irony was striking. I had been drinking that watered-down slop the day before, along with whatever else I could funnel into my face.

An old familiar panic gripped my forearms and shoulders, and stirred in my gut. I had noticed this many years before, even during my first mornings after drinking. If humans had souls, or a root essence, I thought, you could experience it via its absence in shaky morning-afters when the five senses lay crippled by the hangover. As the saying goes, “Faith will tell me God is present when my human senses fail.” Except it was kind of opposite of that, because with my failed human senses, I felt the horrific emptiness because I had wholly rejected faith.

The notion filled me with dread that some part was missing, or had departed, or was still downtown at the bar, and I needed that essence to return to me. I needed that part to put the rest of the senses and self together again. Whenever I had awoke in a house full of responsible people, my typical response to this lost feeling was to show artificial health and vigor, to get up and appear normal and recovered, despite wanting to sleep, or disappear, or die. I’ve noticed the same in others, often at business conferences, when a drinker clearly had a rough night or did something foolish, but they rise and pretend that all is well. The lengths a hungover person goes to in pretending stuns me, from my own experiences and from watching others.

To my horror, a clock on the wall showed 4 o’clock…in the afternoon. Having slept all day and not yet called home, this clock signified my betrayal of my wife and children. The mistake I had made this time could not be ignored or charmed over. This error in judgment and prudence leapt past the usual cause of grievances in our household. Worst of all I had been drunk driving while I had a responsibility for my children and should have woke up at home, not in detox. I knew immediately that this would be a scar upon all of my relationships. All of them. Everyone important in my life suffered because of my choice the night before.

Over the coming hours I cycled through the process of denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Then came the shame and the guilt. I had learned about the difference between shame and guilt in a prior attempt to stop drinking. Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, whereas shame is feeling bad about who you are and that you don’t deserve love. Since I like to hold pity parties for myself, I tended to choose a la carte from both of those classifications.

Several years before the arrest, I had tried earnestly, voluntarily, to quit drinking, doing a 28-day outpatient program, to fix myself and address the question of “What is wrong with me?” The propensity to drink and make a mess of life ate at me enough that I had decided to get help. In this circle of misfits, I nearly walked out on the first day when I read the 12 steps on the wall. The second step required capitulation to a “…Power greater than myself.” That verbiage really, really bothered me.

But I stayed. I stayed in that program and did the 28 days, learning a great deal about addiction and how my “lizard brain” works. Indeed, I still know to this day that it is my lizard brain that wants Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 3 AM.

At the urging of counselors, I attended AA meetings, and even tried to believe in a Higher Power. At the time I was atheist or agnostic, depending on the hour, and I leaned left politically, mostly only to lean away from the religious right. My position was not for specific issue, but merely against all things religious, which I felt poisoned the world. At that point in my life I subscribed to the sermons of Hitchens and Dawkins. The deconstruction of my belief in the Christian faith is a long story. More on that later.

Of the many, many things I learned in that 28-day recovery group was that rich or poor, left or right, educated or uneducated - alcohol and drugs do not discriminate. These substances will overpower the strongest will and beguile the most cunning mind. They will feed a person’s vanity and shape an ego into whatever form desired. They will lift you up or bring you down, whichever you want or think you prefer. For me, drinking was the “tree of knowledge.” I suppose that makes Captain Morgan the serpent. Replace the symbolism in Genesis with whatever your vice and I suspect that the same story can be told. Whatever entices and mesmerizes and steals goodness away from you, and replaces love in your heart with negativity is probably your own apple on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Unfortunately for me, even if I avoid one tree, sometimes I find a second tree, or a third.

Detox is a primarily a waiting area, where you dry out until you can be taken to jail. Hence, each drunkard is allotted ample time to think and commiserate with others in the same state of limbo. What frustrated me most was that a month before the arrest I thought I had made the life changes I needed. I had quit tobacco and started exercising, and I was learning to drink socially, controllably. For a month I had done well.

So what happened?

The same thing that always happened.

In hindsight, the spur to action a month earlier had been from drinking too much on a work trip and regretting the outcome. Thus, like every cycle before this cataclysm, I trod the same path: drinking lightly for a time, then back to drinking heavily, onto regret and shame, followed by abstaining and declaring a life change, and lastly looping back to the beginning.

The same cycle repeated for twenty years.

A drinker will always forgive himself in order to drink again. The only difference this time was legal consequences, which apparently is what it took (after all, the system is called the “Department of Corrections”). I needed a correction. Until the arrest I wasn’t unscrambling the obvious message to wake up.

An AA group visited to the detox facility to hold a meeting. I joined their meeting, almost eager to share that I needed to join AA and get on track, as the disturbance in my family and home life was quaking in me.

I had tried AA before, for a while. But rather than 12-stepping I did 9 steps and then dumped my sponsor. He had urged me to unhitch from the past and latch onto AA, full-time, but the group felt cultish and separated from the world that I had to live in. Too much God, I thought. I wanted something more scientific, like SMART Recovery or psychological explanations or pharmaceutical solutions. I had read the Big Book and other AA materials and found them fascinating at first, but it didn’t stick. Reading and re-reading the Big Book struck me as pseudo-scriptural and the writing didn’t feel profound enough to merit such continual attention. The chapter titled “We Agnostics” made me realize what an unoriginal thinker I was, as I was like the chapter’s archetype: “…so touchy that even a casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism.”

It always stings when I find out how predictable and regular I am.

My tendencies, I felt, did not need the full treatment of AA, as “some of us are sicker than others.” Truly, some people have a much worse struggle with alcohol than I did, and I listened in pity to those people. Surely those people needed the whole program. But I had issues with parts of the Big Book and felt that AA took an anti-intellectual turn in saying that problem drinkers tend to “…read wordy books and indulge in windy arguments, thinking this universe needs no God to explain it.” To me those were fightin’ words, since books and knowledge sustained me. I saw science and progress as the ultimate good, and spiritualism and religion as backward-facing fanaticism and wizardry.

In my half-hearted AA attempt, I reached the “Pink Cloud” stage where everything was wonderful, where quitting drinking was easy, and life was grand. Call it my Pollyanna phase. Then, as the AA members and alcohol counselors warned me, the Pink Cloud passed me by and regular cold fronts came around with blustering sleet and negative windchill. I lasted about a year sober, got my one-year chip as evidence, but never fully bought into the program. I said the prayers and joined hands and even (kinda, sorta) liked saying the Our Father with the others. I almost always left an AA meeting feeling lifted up (although my sponsor warned me that feeling good wasn’t the point of meetings, but it was a nice side effect).

I can only praise AA, despite not attending any more. So many people slam it for not being the answer, that there is “too much God” in it. But it gave me a toolkit for dealing with life that was far better than the portrayal of AA in TV and movies. TV’s portrayal of the organization is absurd and disconnected from reality. The numerous proverbs I learned in those rooms still help me in the grind of days. At a meeting, people drop these one-liners into conversation that seem backwards at first, but then become profound upon inspection. I would marvel at the phrases after hearing them the first time. Sometimes they don’t make sense until a day or week later. “Surrender to win.” “Wear the world like a loose shirt.” “Don’t trust your feelings.” “There’s nothing so bad happening in your life that a drink can’t make worse.” “Principles over personalities.” “One day at a time.” “Progress, not perfection.” “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” “Do the next right action.” “Thy will, not mine, be done.” “Perfection kills.” “An expectation is a planned resentment.”

Hundreds of these sayings exist and I mutter them still today, and probably always will. I could write much about each of those sayings and how each has helped me interpret my predicaments. They also summon a memory of a person or a face from a meeting. But above and beyond all of those sayings, in usefulness and practical application to life, is the one prayer that is said at every meeting. The Serenity Prayer. Yes, the corny Serenity Prayer.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Trite or not…this sentence acted as a gateway for me to even consider, to even deign or lower my high and mighty self, to accept that there might be a Higher Power or God over me. It also taught me that whenever I use the words “trite” or “corny” or “cliche” in a sentence, I expose my cynicism toward anything wholesome or time-tested. Those words are like my tell in a poker game. I liked to apply those labels to anything old-fashioned or traditional. Those trite and cliche things were tired and expired, and I was so modern and smart. It’s funny now, with hindsight, my way of life was what had become tired and expired, and certainly cliche.

In the beginning, I would not say the first word - “God” - because I wanted to secularize the prayer, and I felt that the prayer still worked without the first word. However, without the first word, the rest still implies that you are speaking to some Higher Power, some “thing” that can grant the serenity. Otherwise, to what are you asking for Serenity if not the spirit of the universe, or Gaia, or Zeus, or…God?

So much of life can be cut to the chase with this little prayer, yet it is so simple. The Serenity Prayer in its plainness is like a razor that can cut through hard problems like butter. If I were to successfully apply the principles of that prayer alone to my daily decisions, with no other rules or aphorisms or moral guidance, I could quickly separate the meaningful from the useless. You take the problem, thought, or decision and ask yourself: “Can I change this?” If not, then you drop the subject because it’s beyond your power. If you can change it, then you decide if you are willing to take up the challenge to change it, and if you are willing, you do the work. If you are not willing, then you don’t, and again you drop it. Surely the wisdom part is the tricky thing, especially for someone who is all too human, like myself. The prayer provides a little Venn diagram for your problems, where you can place life’s issues into one of two circles: Accept or Change. Wisdom is knowing into which circle to push each problem.

By the time I had attended the AA meeting in detox, I had met many of the other people in residence with me, and found jailhouse lawyer types, hard alcoholics in denial, and drug addicts who had somehow even found a way to get drugs into detox, which baffled me. Like a field trip, detox feels like a tour, or a museum of people that are captured from their natural habitat and paused for a time of reflection.

After 36 hours of sobering up, after some tears and anxiety, the arresting police officer returned and picked me up for my next stop, the county jail. Cuffed again and back in the police car, I discussed what would happen next with the police officer, who told me I was one of his favorite arrests due to the interesting conversations that we had during booking, none of which I remembered, other than a snapshot or two captured in my mind during the blackout.

An awareness of my powerlessness had set in through the hours of detox, and the handcuffs were the physical reminder of my lack of control while I rode in the car. No choices could be made. No media, no snacks, no smart phone. Possibly, for the first time, I understood what freedom actually meant, since in taking these things away, I only then realized what unbridled freedom my entire life had been as an American in the late 20th century and early 21st century. I had been born in the most “free” time in history, with the least personal struggles - no war, no disease, no death - and yet I had invented my own struggles and even felt depressed most of the time. In fact, I had even been taking depression medication for years, all during the easiest and least challenging period in history. I kept thinking about the AA saying that drinkers suffer from a “spiritual malady” and suffer from their own will. This sense of powerlessness did a ride-along as the police car entered the county jail intake door.

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Midway through my life’s journey, I saw the lights of a police car in my rearview mirror. In a blackout, only snapshots come back to you, providing subtle hints of a night gone sideways. Usually these memories are of the worst scenes of the night. Once the mind has already checked out, certain still-shot images still register in the wetware.

I managed to get to the side of the road and go through a proper arrest. I recall refusing the sobriety test not because I wanted to contest the policeman’s assessment in court, but because I could barely stand up. I had been driving 35 miles-per-hour on a 65 mile-per-hour highway, at 4 AM, with no shirt and no shoes.

The mistake of that day had been made many hours prior to the sirens, when someone offered me a shot of liquor. I stayed strong and said no. Actually, I only said no once, then I gladly took the shot, and then another, and another. I liked claiming that “If I just stick to beer” nothing could go wrong. Light beer keeps the madness away, I believed, since you can’t drink it fast enough to get really stupid. This is not actually true, but it lengthens the process of getting wasted. That I even needed to consider this possibility speaks for itself. This propensity I considered a normal feature of people, fortifying my bias with a remembered passage from the novel Winesburg, Ohio about the men from the country coming to town for a rowdy night:

Under the influence of drink the naturally strong lusts of their natures, kept suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were released. A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into songs.

To drink was to relax and let loose, and let go of the frustrations and struggles of the day or week. I suspect that is true for many people. But there’s a problem in this notion for some of us that like to shout at the stars.

There is a saying among AA meetings: “One is too many, and twenty is not enough.” I had known for a long time, since the first time I ever drank alcohol, that I was prone to excess. Not only prone, but I yearned to overdo it. In high school and college the slogan was: “A day is not wasted if I am.” Escapism was a way of life. I found others with the same reason for existence, as we like to do for our vices. We all need our cheerleaders for enablement, whether it’s online or in person. We found camaraderie in drinking hard and finding oblivion. Together but apart in our stupors, we were modern Lotus-eaters.

Thus the way of life I subscribed to in high school and college became a continuation into adulthood, even into parenthood, and though I could keep the worst of nights to a minimum, sooner or later, the urge to go off the deep end with drinking returned, just as it always had for all the drunks through the ages. The illusion of control plays the repeatable trick upon those of us who like to escape. In so many ways the drug finds a path into our nervous system so that it can again reign over us.

I recall making the officer laugh while sitting a bright office while he booked me. Even then, under arrest, I had the need to please people, or try to charm as best I could, to avoid confrontation and evade difficult conversations. As a middle sibling I seemed to have found the way to walk the line. And how to lie, too. Lying allowed me to isolate and avoid people, life, and the small burdens of my easy life. I didn’t much care to be yelled at or made to feel dumb. Those two insecurities, well, I’ll come back to those, plus a few others.

The drunk driving charge would have taken me to jail immediately, but being so stinking drunk, I was dropped at an overnight detox center first. The night was a blur and I neglected to use my phone call to contact my wife for fear of waking her, only to leave her searching frantically for me the next day. There is much more to that part of this irresponsible story that I could go into, but suffice it to say that a general mode of selfishness ruled me.

My arrest was past due. Drunken driving charges should have been pinned on me years before, but somehow I had slipped through the net. Buzzed driving on the weekend was normal, and more than a few times in college I woke up without knowing how I had got home, until I looked outside to see my car. So the day of being arrested loomed over me for two decades, and finally, like many of my friends who were arrested before me, it was my turn. We had a sense of humor about getting in trouble. Screwing up gave us a story, as if we were still rebelling against a teacher from middle school. We shared a fake apathy as a core value, even while we worked hard to further our professional lives. The reality is that my life lacked any difficulty. I didn’t grown up wealthy, but I was from the 80s and 90s and I had faced no real hardships. I wanted to get wasted, just like the metal and rap and country music glorified. To smoke and drink at every opportunity, to blackout, to wake up in strange places - that’s what I enjoyed, or not so much enjoyed, as sought for escape. There was something to the Chuck Klosterman “killing ourselves to live” mentality with Nirvana’s nihilism, Snoop Dogg’s love of weed and disrespect of women, and outlaw country music’s unapologetic glorification of drunkenness. Add to that Fight Club and Rage Against the Machine and Smashing Pumpkins - the 90s really hated authority of all kinds.

Of course it was cool, because the music and idols broke all the rules. Same as every generation, we scoffed at the proper society our parents tried to emulate, or at least pretend toward. Add in the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet to this mix, and a vacuum had been flipped on in that “end of history” period. The good people, the adults of the community that cared, they could not contend with the surrounding influences of the world. That battle was lost instantly when the internet made every possible idea, good or bad, suddenly available to all. Before I had ever heard of a religious “none,” I had arrived to that desolate place through culture, aided by the internet, and accelerated by my discovery and love of alcohol. Alongside drinking, I added a second drug of books. Knowledge was the additive, and together I learned that booze and books can act like mortar and bricks to build a powerful wall to hide inside.

I was rather obsessed with reading everything I could get my hands on for about fifteen years, and as any seeker knows, one book leads to another, and the more you learn, the more you become convinced that you know almost nothing at all. This is nothing that I discovered myself, as Socrates said, “I know that I know nothing,” and Protagoras’ Paradox added “the more you learn, the less you know,” both of which today have been appropriated into the fancier sounding Dunning-Kruger Effect. Truly the more I read the more unstable my convictions became, but I had to read, and read more, trying to make up for lost time as a drifting youth and cram in as much knowledge as possible to find the truth, the elusive truth. But the depths and nuances of knowledge slip away like eels as you can read one argument today and the counterpoint tomorrow, only to feel yesterday’s seemingly solid worldview vanish from beneath you like sand under your feet on the beach when the wave retreats. The tales of my Bible could no longer keep up with science, literature, and technology, as I was awash in many subjects and following ideas wherever they might lead me.

But there was too much information. Just too much to take in. So I would drink from the books and then drink from the bottle, and just as soon as I thought I knew everything, another subject could be found to upend the prior subject. Through it all I held a sense of righteousness and morality, thinking that I was right all the time (and surely, I felt that most people were more ignorant than my well-read self. This pursuit of knowledge was one of my chief insecurities). I drank, yes, but it was because I didn’t need the crutch of religion, of faith in the sky-fairy. That nonsense was an empty cup, and my cup was full. Actually, I often had a cup in each hand.

With science as a sword and the history of religious violence as my shield, I scoffed at faith as the appendix of history, a vestige of ancient society concocted by fearful goat herders. I had bet the house against Pascal’s wager, that indeed it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven if that’s what it took to declare reason as the preferred path, as the road less travelled. With my cosmology of materialism hammered down, come what may, I was a good person with some flaws, who just needed to take an occasional break from drinking to get back under control. Everyone has their vice, right? In fact, isn’t it always those who pretend to have no vices where the sickness is worst, where the most heinous acts tend to flourish? My vice, often a public drunken one, allowed an open door to the skeletons in my closet. The only difference between me and a priest or rabbi or a guru was that I knew how to have fun.

And it was fun.

Until it wasn’t.

Because the motivation for all of the reading and the drinking wasn’t knowledge and escape. The urge came from the void, the pit of emptiness, which I thought could be filled with words and buried with a buzz. I came to call this gnawing feeling as the “Big Empty,” after a song title by Stone Temple Pilots.

When I was arrested, the snapshot of that dazzling blue light splash in the rearview mirror is almost a work of art in my mind, since that image marks my arrest and about-face from that void.

It was the best day of my life.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com