For the first half of my life, I was beset by the disease of addition. Not that there was was anything fancy or glamorous about my case: the substance I was addicted to was merely beer.
["Open Mike" is the off-topic Editorial Page of TOP, in which we consider the things we cannot change as well as the things we can.]
I'm having one of my visual (or ocular) migraines this morning. They're so weird. Fortunately, mine are "acephalgic," which means they're not accompanied by headache. But for the time being I can't see the computer screen very well, and reading is tough.
Street corner
I just passed a milestone. Thirty-three years ago yesterday, I was at a crossroads. I was standing on a street corner in Georgetown, D.C.; I had finished what I needed to do for the day, and found myself with three or four hours to kill. My first thought was reflexive: go get drunk. Fortunately, another, more recent habit kicked in at the same time: I could go find a support group meeting. It was the day after I got out of the inpatient alcoholism treatment center at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, meaning, my first full day on my own. At the treatment center, I had gone to four meetings a day. Although a much newer one, it had become a habit too, and it suggested itself with equal force.
On Google Street View I found the exact spot where I stood that day: the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and P Street in Georgetown. I had probably just come out of Second Story Books on P Street, where I would have spent an hour or so browsing through all the used photography books. I stood on the curb for a long time. The two options—get drunk, go to a meeting—seemed exactly balanced, and I didn't know which impulse to follow. Finally, I decided to see if I could figure out where and when a meeting was. I went back into the book shop and borrowed their phone book, which gave me an address. A card on a doorway barely a block away told me the next meeting was at 7 o'clock. That was only four hours, and I figured could make it that long. So I held off walking into one of the bars that lined Wisconsin Avenue. The new habit won. When 7 o'clock came around, I was in my seat. It was my first meeting "on the outside." And I'm happy to say I haven't had another drink from that day to this. I'm 66, so the 33 years since then is half my lifetime right now.
Those early days of sobriety were truly ugly. Outside of meetings, I had very little support—and I didn't have much support inside the meetings, either, because I didn't listen very well and I didn't speak or interact with anybody. They were big, unruly groups, easy to get lost in, and I slipped in like a mouse and stayed in the back and didn't utter a word to anyone. The big problem the rest of the time was fighting intense cravings, and the equally difficult task of making the minutes go by. I was crawling out of my skin; it was agony just to exist. I was told to take it "one day at a time," but that seemed overly ambitious. A day was too long to think about. I had to take it an hour at a time. Sometimes ten minutes. I was also told to go to 90 meetings in 90 days, but that was too few at first: I remember days when I took a seat in the meeting room at 7:00 a.m., again at noon, and then again at 7:00 p.m. Honestly, one of the reasons I stayed sober in the early years was because I was scared to go through early sobriety again. My last drunken binge had lasted for three months, and I was (and still am) pretty mentally foggy about that time. Try as I might, I cannot remember how I got into rehab. But I remember the aftermath all too well.
Alcoholism is a progressive disease. It gets worse and worse. Recovery is the opposite: it gets better and better. Seven weeks in, it finally became clear to me that it was getting easier. Somewhere between five and seven years in—I can't pinpoint it any better than that—I realized I had lost all desire to drink. Today, my sobriety is my most precious accomplishment, the baseline of the rest of my life. I still work on it every single day. That might strike you as overkill, but you know what? Whatever it takes. I don't want to go back to where I was.
All clear!
And what to you know, that visual migraine has passed now. I wish I could take a picture of it for you; it's truly weird. You see the zany patterns with either eye, and with eyes open or shut. So much that can't be photographed....
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Michael: "Mike, Thanks for a great post today! I'm almost seven years sober, and I agree that recovery keeps getting better. I could never imagine myself having the great life that I have now back then."
Gary: "Mike, thank you so much for sharing your story. It is so uplifting. I hope it can be inspirational to others who are struggling. Over the weekend, I lost my college roommate to the consequences of alcoholism. He struggled for years. He went to rehab a couple of times but couldn't stick with it. I feel certain he never reached a point where he could see that it was getting easier. I feel hollow today. There was nothing friends or family could do to change the course. It is encouraging to hear of your success. Thoughts and prayers for you and anyone else who has struggled with this problem."
Mike replies: Very sorry to hear of your loss. We who recover are a lucky few—most alcoholics die drinking or die of drinking. Continuing recovery can be lighthearted on the surface, but it's deadly serious deep down.
Calvin Amari: "Lack of sobriety and photography has historically been a bad combination. After potassium cyanide was introduced as a wet plate collodion fixer by the Gaudin brothers in 1853, there was a sharp uptick in darkroom deaths, generally cause by directly drinking the potion, mistaking it for some other liquid."
Stephen Jenner: "Very well done Mike. I wish that I could banish cigarettes from my life. For nearly fifty years, I thought that my addiction was pot, but once I had decided to stop, it was easy, just a few days without, and I have never bothered with it since. It seems that it was my group of friends, who were (and probably still are) potoholics. That was the hardest part; not seeing those familiar, friendly faces. No, my real addiction was the plain old boring cigarette, and it seems like it will never go away. It is my reason to get out of bed, it is my reason to eat (the post-prandial), and I have to have just one last ciggie before I go to bed at night. Not one of them ever makes me feel better, or even any different, and yet, I still have to have it."
Mike replies: Totally sympathize. I smoked for 14 years and quit at 28, when, after a full year of concerted struggling, I just woke up one morning and thought, "I'm never smoking a cigarette again." And I never have. Weird.
It's a serious addiction. It's been a long, long time since I've actually looked into this, but here's what I remember: Nicotine is the most addictive substance known to humankind, something like 100 times more addictive than heroin by weight; the only other known use for it is as rat poison; and, if you injected all of the nicotine in one single cigarette directly into your bloodstream all at once, it would kill you. After quitting, it takes 16 years for your risk to return to the levels of a person who never smoked. Smoking is implicated in a large number of deleterious health effects. There seems to be a marked actuarial shelf at age 40: your lifetime risk goes way up if you are still smoking after that age, making it very important to quit before 40 if you can. However, stopping at any age is considered to be an obvious way to improve your health: a whopping one in three smokers will suffer health and longevity effects from it.
On the other hand, although you wouldn't play Russian roulette with those odds, that means that two in three smokers escape its depredations. My grandmother smoked from age 14 to age 88, when she died of non-smoking-related causes. So hopefully you are one of those.
Mark P. Morris: "Much congratulations on your recovery! I have had a visual migraine once. It was as if I was looking through a kaleidoscope and at the periphery was normal-ish sight. One of the weirdest things in my entire life. I did not even know it was a migraine till many years later."