- Alcohol
- Faith
Submitted by: Abby Foster
I am Duke and I am someone who has long-term recovery. May 15, 1989 was the last day I took a drink. It was not the first time I tried to get sober, but it was the time Mom and Dad took me to treatment and it stuck.
There were a lot of explosions along the way before I entered treatment. You don’t get sober at 21 by mellowing your way into the room. When I drank, it was like my hair caught on fire; bad stuff just happened. At that point, I was in the last semester of my third college. I was getting ready to be “not invited” back one more time. I reached the point where I began hanging out with younger kids because the friends my own age were already done with college. I came home with a lot of shame. I lived at my parents’ house and went to the junior college.
I felt like I was running out of options. I was just failing at life. So, really, the bottom line is that I felt like I was stuck.
I was a bartender at the time and all my buddies from high school would come to my bar and I would tell them all lies about how things were. I said I was going back to Arizona in the fall, and “you know, it’s no big deal.” I watched my friends graduate from college and experience life, while my backup plan was to go to a buddy’s apartment and sleep on his couch because I was getting ready to get kicked out of my parent’s house. That’s where I was May 15, 1989.
On my first day of break, my parents took me to treatment. I just kind of walked into treatment thinking, “maybe they’re right.” Maybe life will be OK without alcohol. That was kind of the first half of that step zero. I was just like, “ok”. I stopped fighting just a bit. I had already been attending 12-Step meetings for four years and every time I walked into a meeting I would tell myself, “There’s got to be something else. This is really good for people. I’m really glad that it is here for them.” And then that grew to me being glad there was a place where I could be honest about alcohol, but that was as much as I could give. I wasn’t fully on board.
Because I was so young when I found sobriety, I had not walked through as much pain as older people. So, I did not always have that motivator to dive all-in with the steps because it didn’t feel so life-and-death at that point in my story. But I was desperate enough and willing enough to stay. I had a couple of friends I watched go back to drinking and saw them crash and burn. That kept me in the rooms long enough for the steps to take hold of me.
I was 21, the black sheep of the family, and oldest of five kids. I have a very motivated family and I am had crazy story after crazy story flow through the town about me. I had flunked out of a couple of schools. I had very little self-esteem. So, in early sobriety, I began counting days and celebrating my progress. That was an important gift that I got early on. I got to be proud of me again.
Obviously, I still had some work to do, but some of my shameful behavior had stopped and I was able to make amends. I had forgotten what having self-esteem was like. Once I started to get a little taste of sobriety I wanted more. It was something I could get myself behind. I didn’t realize how much of me I had lost until I started to get some of me back.
“To thine own self be true.” For me, it means I know and God knows. I’ve got that magic cell phone of prayer so I should call Him and ask Him. It doesn’t always mean that I am going to follow what He tells me, but maybe I follow it 50% of the time. If I really live this truth, I know there is a balance between being codependent and selfish. And how do I find that middle line? I know I’m motivated to do things for reasons. If I can kind of remove most of that motivation that’s either selfish or co-dependent, then I’m free from the outcome and free of resentments. Because it’s really all one life, one person, one God. At the end, all we have is our relationship with our higher power.
And then a day came, after 20 years of sobriety, that I had a great moment. I was doing a research study with my 12-year-old son and the assignment asked how long modern mankind had existed. We found a video on YouTube from Stephen Hawking. In it, Hawking talked about mankind (and mankind’s large frontal lobes) having been around for a hundred thousand years. The universe has been around for thirteen point four billion years- so mankind as we know it’s been around for only a tiny amount of that. And an idea hit me—the idea that there is no God, and I was sold a bag of beans.
My foundation was cracked. I realized at that moment I had not expanded my view of God in all these years. So there I was, not sure if God exists, and if that’s the case, it would be a game changer. If God didn’t exist, I should be on cocaine, drinking whiskey, and going to strip clubs. Luckily, after all of those thoughts, I did what I had been taught to do when I am not thinking straight. I got on the phone. I left a message for two different people. The third guy I called answered and he talked me through what was going on with me and helped me to dig deeper.
It turned out, I was experiencing self-pity over being divorced and not being in a relationship and I wanted an easy fix by going to a strip club– my brain was using all of its tricks to get me there and be convinced that it was ok. I couldn’t see that on my own– I needed help. So once I was able to see the selfishness and self-pity, I was able to go back to God, who wasn’t there five minutes beforehand, and patch that foundational crack by reading 86-88 in the morning, and spending time with God in prayer and meditation.
I can fall prey to misery and depression. The tools that I use to combat those attackers are the ones I was taught- going to meetings, working with others, being of service, telling on myself, and letting myself be vulnerable. It circles back to the question: do I trust God or do I not?
A while back, when I had only three years of sobriety, I was in the process of moving from Louisville to Florida. An old timer told me it would take me three years to feel as comfortable in Florida as I did in Louisville. That pissed me off. So, I went out of my way to prove him wrong. And I was successful because I did what they say to do: I reached out, I shook hands, I made calls, I tried to find guys my age. I accelerated the building of fellowship, and that’s not my normal being.
When I moved in my sobriety, I remembered that lesson. Go out of your way to find a friend. It works very easily with male friends. You know, you can usually spot them. They have a couple of buddies and they bring you in with them. But you got to go stick out your hand to ask what they do after the meeting. So I would say that, actually, the words of that old-timer motivated me enough to prove that the fellowship is everywhere. If you put a little effort into it, you’ll find it.