When I first got sober in February 2018, I was 120 lbs overweight. I dropped most of that weight in the first year, mainly from pure depression. I lived on a steady diet of coffee and cigarettes. My first couple of years were hard; there was no pink cloud, no feeling of accomplishment, just defeat. No one really talks about that. It’s not very attractive and after all, attraction is the promotion. But the reality isn’t a pretty picture at all. For people like me, getting sober is ugly. Alcohol was my solution, and when that was taken away at 39 years old, I was not okay.
The literature talks about seeking outside help, and I was in therapy—both court-ordered and voluntary—for at least four years. But that was all played pretty close to the vest because my particular sponsorship chain took a hard “AA will fix everything, it’s all spiritual.” You just need to spend more time meditating. And I’m not knocking that—I’ve loved exploring meditation, both its origins and various ways to practice it. I’ve spent the past eight and half years refining what mindfulness looks like in my life, but that’s another post for another day.
Fast forward to three years sober, and I had gained most of my pre-sobriety weight back. My diet had gone from cigarettes and coffee to cigarettes and Ben & Jerry’s. And lots of meetings and meditation.
I have some ongoing back pain from several injuries, and I went in for an MRI because it was getting worse. They stopped it early and told me I needed to go see my primary care doctor as soon as possible; they had found something on my liver. Just in case that didn’t scare me enough, they said I may want to consider getting my affairs in order. My sponsor told me to just trust God and pray about it.
I was 42 and my third child had just been born.
Doctors were freely, if not somewhat recklessly, throwing around words like cirrhosis and cancer, and I couldn’t smoke enough cigarettes, go to enough meetings, or meditate hard enough to calm down from that kind of talk. I was three years sober, a father of three, and I was dying. I was dying an alcoholic death at three years sober, except now it was because I could not stop eating. And my depression just got worse.
Three months later, I was told I had fatty liver disease and I wasn’t going to die, but the damage I had done to my body by that point was catching up with me. I collapsed in my bathroom while getting ready for work. I blacked out, and when I fell, I got a mild concussion from hitting the wall on my way to the floor, followed by a mild seizure. When I came to, I called 911, and the last thing I heard as they loaded me into the ambulance was, “He doesn’t have a pulse.” I woke up sometime later, and I was in the ER.
I’d love to tell you I got some answers and made some changes, but the truth is, I was in the hospital for a week and the doctors had no answers for me. I found out I had high blood pressure, but that was the only thing anyone was able to tell me. The bigger shock, however, came when no one except my wife and one of my friends from AA came to see me. No one called, no one texted… just silence. I chaired 3 or 4 meetings a week at my home group. I held several service positions and took meetings to treatment centers. During that time, I was also sponsoring 5 or 6 guys. I was doing everything AA asked me to do, and crickets. The fellowship was nowhere to be found.
I started thinking, “Maybe I’m crazy.” Maybe I had just imagined people telling me I mattered to them and that we were family. I could not come up with a rational reason why no one that I was “walking shoulder to shoulder” with was there.
Then it hit me: I must have died in that ambulance. I was dead, and this is why no one showed up. For the next three months, I became more and more convinced that it was true: I was dead and the afterlife was a nightmare where I just had to watch the people in my life forget about me slowly. I was having a full mental breakdown at three years sober.
Towards the end of December, I was standing outside smoking and shaking from being so cold and coughing non-stop. I realized that I was alive, but I wouldn’t be much longer if I kept going like I was—and that was my last cigarette.
A few months later, I walked into a gym. My resting heart rate was 110. I was on three different medications for my blood pressure; however, my BP was still 155/110 on average. I couldn’t do anything without sweating and thinking I was going to die. But most important to me, I was having a hard time carrying my 10-month-old son.
Five years have passed since then. There have been many ups and downs, but I’ve never stopped trying. I’ve lost most of the weight. I’m down to two BP meds, but I may be off them both soon. My resting heart rate is 62 bpm, and I’m running again. I no longer go to meetings, not on a regular basis at least, and haven’t really in almost a year.
The thing is, I’m better than I have ever been. I’ve done the work and had a personality change sufficient to overcome alcoholism. It’s what the book promises. There is nothing about being locked in a basement white-knuckling it, being afraid that if I don’t stick to a specific dogma, I’ll drink again. But there’s also precious little on how to live this new life I’ve been given.
I felt like I was breaking away from an abusive relationship at first and I wanted to run back and beg for forgiveness. But something had to change. Something was not working for me in AA. I wasn’t going to drink—not anytime soon, at least—but I was dying. People kept saying “go to more meetings,” “keep coming back,” “have you prayed about it,” and on and on and on. All well-intentioned, I’m sure. I don’t think anyone was trying to harm me, but it wasn’t enough. It was more than “not being popular,” but not being popular may have saved my life. If I had fit in cliques and just done what I was told, I would be dead.
The only thing I knew for sure was I had a family and I wanted to spend time with them, and the better I ate and the more I worked out, the better I felt. So, that became my priority. I started there and have never felt the need to leave.
Bill Wilson frequently talked about the need to take care of the body, about how he thought this was of more importance than almost anything for long-term sobriety. In his later years, he became deeply focused on biochemistry, nutrition, and physical self-care, believing that untreated physical imbalances were often the root cause of emotional instability, depression, and relapses in long-term sobriety.
I stumbled on this as much by accident as anything for myself. No one was really talking about this at meetings. AA blasphemy for sure, but Bill himself wrestled with this very thing. In his later years, he cautioned that expecting spiritual practice alone to cure a purely metabolic or nutritional deficiency was a mistake—that a sober alcoholic whose body is biochemically malnourished will struggle to maintain the emotional peace long-term recovery requires.
Learning to listen to my body has done more for my mind and my recovery than anything else I’ve ever done in sobriety. I’m not ruling out meetings—I was at one a few weeks ago and still go if someone asks me to meet them. I just no longer feel like that’s all I need.
I think I’ll go for a run.
Leave a Reply