- Alcohol
My pen name is Grant Arboro, author of Cracking Up: A Memoir and 100 Days of Sobriety Daily Meditation and Prayer. My given name is Sean, and I am an alcoholic. I use my real name here with you to honor your effort in sobriety and because rigorous honesty is the only survival tool that pays my admission into recovery. I’m honored to share my story of recovery here with you heroes and fellow recovery friends.
Since childhood, I have always felt that I didn’t quite fit in with the human race. There was the universe, with all you folks who filled it up, and then there as me. I was born into this world with a sense of separateness or chronic moderate alienation. I had a decent childhood. As with many of us addicts and alcoholics, there was some abuse by my mother’s boyfriend but it was not sustained. I thought the abuse and the demeaning nature of it caused me to be alcoholic, but I learned later in recovery this was not the case. I drank initially because I loved the effect it produced. I realize today that, regardless of a childhood of happiness or abuse, I was born an alcoholic addict, born just a few drinks away from being a drunk. Today, like someone who is born with a birth defect or one who has to manage diabetes, I understand that I have a disease or at least a genetic disposition toward alcoholism.
My childhood was more or less normal after my mother remarried when I was six years old, with the exception of an anxiety panic disorder that, at the time, I feared gravely but did not understand. Through high school, I had a few beers. But I sang in a rock band in the local music scene and devoted myself primarily to music, chasing girls and smoking cigarettes. Then came college. I don’t know what clicked that night, but it happened. And I started something I just couldn’t stop.
Invited to a fraternity party and distraught with acclimating and fitting in to the college scene, I had my first real drinking session. The party was arranged around a supply of beer and booze. Everyone was laughing, dancing, flirting, yelling and drinking, drinking, drinking. I chased down a beer, followed by another and then another. Within 30 minutes of arriving to the party, all my distress over my dysfunctional youth and my sense of unease with the world and its people vanished. I remember looking at my beverage and saying out loud, “Oh, THIS is what’s been missing the whole time!” Alcohol suddenly, in one night, revealed itself to me as the missing puzzle piece. I suddenly fit right in with the human race. I was finally a part of the human species. I belonged. And so I drank all the time. I literally became a walking, talking bottle of beer. I was in heaven. Within the year, I realized I really couldn’t control how much I drank. But that didn’t matter because I didn’t want to stop. The party must go on.
Then suddenly, it stopped working. Actually, all the wheels flew off, and I was in hell. Near graduation, I mutated. I started getting into brawls and fist fights and began demonstrating less than savory sexual conduct around girls. I thought I was glamorous, but the women rightly thought I was creepy. I was trying to recapture the gift of serenity that alcohol initially gave me, but it failed. Alcohol didn’t lend me the happy buzz or relaxation any longer. It simply ignited a craving for more, which always led to silly action and demoralizing consequences. I returned to my hometown, met a girl, got into graduate school and realized that if I were to grow up, alcohol needed to be removed entirely from my life. There would be no sanity, no family, no home, no career, no car and no future while alcohol dominated me. I lost all control attempting to control it. Vacations from booze lasted only a couple of days and were followed by even worse binges. So I admitted myself into a local intensive outpatient rehab center.
After six months of structured sobriety, I faithfully attended 12-step meetings and stayed sober for five years as I completed graduate school. Then my body healed, and the liar returned, as they say. I slowed down my meetings, stopped calling my sponsor and coasted along for a year or so. One day following a quarrel with a family member, I looked in the mirror and asked myself, “What alcoholic or addict can stop using for five years? I must not be one.” With that, I promptly went into the pantry in the garage, found a full bottle of alcohol-based mouth wash and drank all of it. This time with alcohol, the consequences were much worse. This time around, I gave away my marriage, my home and nearly lost my career as an occupational therapist practicing neurological rehabilitation on patients. The carnage lasted four more years.
Upon my return to my 12-step fellowship, I was beaten down, bloated, sick, alone, and lived in a rundown apartment that stunk with decaying carpet and rotting wood. I will never forget that smell. This time, I was indeed sufficiently horrified. People welcomed me back. They told me it takes what it takes. I had tested the theory that our disease is an elevator that only goes one direction: down. Likewise, I have never heard a person who stepped out into that madness and then walked back into recovery and bragged about how much fun they had.
Life is much better today. I have a Higher Power that I center my universe around. I am remarried. I am a writer now, finally putting my journalism degree to use. I have a home. I have two wonderful children. I am active in recovery and sponsor other guys seeking sobriety. I still call my sponsor each day as he is one of my closest friends. I am grateful to God for what I have, each and every day. To date, I have over six years in sobriety. I had feared to find out what would replace alcohol or that there would be a hole in my life where a cold wind blew through where booze used to be. Then I realized the hole had to be filled. But with what? It came to me slowly: life. The hole must be filled with life. Today I fill that hole with hiking and walks with my wife, playing blues guitar, camping and bicycling with kids, recovery fellowship service, motorcycling with other sober guys and writing.
I have jotted down my many gifts for one reason: you can have them too.
Yours,
Sean
aka Grant Arboro