Days 126-136: Steps Without Walking

A ROOM SOMEWHERE, IN—

July 29-August 8, 2024

This piece is a blend of my journal entry and the assignments for weeks 6 and 7 from the Markus Summer Workshop. I decided to shift the focus from literal steps—the kind that have clear destinations and neat, linear progressions—to a different, more personal kind.

Days 126-136:

“‘So you are after those words you can own… Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary.’

Those are the things to put inside your box, or boxes. Put them in there, then shake them up.

Hear that sound? That’s the beginning of your song.” - Peter Markus

A man wiser than I pointed to me, his soft, smiling eyes suggesting, ‘We’re searching for the Truth.’ He asked if I’d like to lead the room. Seven years sober, and my stomach still performs its familiar gymnastics at the thought. And it’s good, I reminded myself—it’s good that I can still feel.

“My name is Zach, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Zach,” the room echoed back, each voice welcoming me home.

“Are there any topics or burning desires or sobriety-threatening issues you guys would like to talk about? Or, more importantly, don’t want to talk about?”

“Humility,” a voice said.

I nodded. “That’s a good one.”

“Zach, alcoholic,” I restated. “Grateful to be here, grateful to be sober.”

“Hi, Zach.”

“Great topic. Thanks for suggesting it. I always need more humility, or at least a better understanding of my role in life. Living life on life’s terms now that we’re sober, humility helps keep our expectations grounded in reality, rather than the fantasies our minds create to escape our pain. I’ve learned that facing life as it is, not as I’d demand it to be, not only keeps me sane but also allows me to pursue goals, dreams, and things that matter to me in a life of recovery.

“I’ve been walking across America for the last four months for paralysis awareness, for my friend Greg who’s paralyzed. I met him back home in Michigan at a physical therapy clinic called The Recovery Project—a fitting name, considering the nature of where we are right now. I wouldn’t be able to take on a task of this size if it weren’t for you guys, for these rooms, for this program. I’ve wanted to do this cross-country walk since before I got sober, but I wouldn’t have made it past the first bar or liquor store on this route if it weren’t for this fellowship. I promise you that. You literally saved me from myself. I’ve been humbled a lot in my life. You don’t come to a place like this if that isn’t true, and God only knows how many times I’ve re-learned the lesson of humility on this current journey I’m on. I’m a slow learner, though. Even now, I still wrestle with what my sponsor calls ‘right-sizing’—finding that balance where I don’t see myself as too important or not important enough, but just as one of many, deserving of love.

“Humility isn’t something that comes easily to an alcoholic. As you all know, the alcoholic’s problem isn’t the drink. The drink is just a symptom—or the drugs, or what have you. Our problem is centered in the mind, in the way that we think. ‘We have a thinking problem, not a drinking problem.’ You’ve heard that one.

“My misunderstanding of humility wasn’t one of those things that automatically resolved itself when I first got sober. Like most stuff we do in here, humility is a daily practice, and if we’re not working on getting better at it, we’re often getting worse. In fact, I was so far removed from reality when I first came into these rooms that I hadn’t the faintest sense of what it meant to be humble. The word ‘humility’ was an oxymoron for me in those days, meaning something like ‘you’re so bad it’s good’ and ‘you’re so good it’s bad’—the best and the worst, two sides of the same extreme coin. This is not a sustainable perspective to approach our daily lives with, not for people like us at least.

“We, as addicts, have that tendency to lend our worldview to a black-and-white lens—‘all or nothing’. We can’t help it; it’s part of our DNA. Therefore, in my mind, humility carried a judgmental connotation that was binary. Judgment, so long as it was mine and mine alone, was the foundation on which the dilapidated house I called my life was built. See, there was this mark that I was missing, and I felt that my failure to hit it sentenced me to a life of self-hatred, and that I was to practice that lifestyle publicly with my words, actions, and an unwillingness to hear another opinion, or else my self-loathing didn’t count on the universe’s scoreboard. It was a conviction. Well, really more of a blind certainty that made me difficult to pet, so to speak. ‘Yeah, yeah, but you don’t really know how bad I am’ and ‘You wouldn’t love me if you knew the real me.’ Shit like that—the typical stuff that makes you push people and their love away.

“One of the many problems with that covert form of self-centeredness was that the mark I set for myself was a standard of perfection, and I applied it across my entire life, especially in matters of right and wrong. If I couldn’t be perfect, I was convinced I deserved to feel worthless, unworthy of love—that, in fact, I was those things by nature. I think in the beginning, it was a warped attempt at being the best version of myself, to validate myself, to make myself worthy of love by forcing the issue that I wasn’t, but ultimately, it burnt me out to a suicidal skid of a man, and it became just another excuse to not try anymore, to seek oblivion. I’m not sure I could’ve stated that so plainly while under the constant influence of drugs and alcohol. I probably would’ve dressed it up as some complex idea to not look like the full-fledged idiot that I was, and still sometimes am, but if you looked at how I was living my life, if you looked inside my mind, you would’ve seen that that’s what was really going on.

“What a stupid, crazy burden to force yourself to carry, and it was especially bizarre that I didn’t hold others to the same benchmark. My sponsor, having struggled with the same problem, pointed out the arrogance in my suggesting that I, and no one else, was to be held to a standard of perfection. It was a way of saying I was better than someone else, even if I couldn’t see that at first. Like, have you mercilessly, masochistically aimed your self-worth at perfection before? Good luck not drowning in booze to dull that edge. I was setting myself up for failure. But in some sense, I think failure was what I was after. Failure, to me, was a more honorable outcome—a more interesting, romantic, and macho thing to attach my name to—than surrendering. I’d rather have lost than quit—that’s it right there. Quitting was for pussies, I thought.

“But, in reality, even that was a facade. Because I couldn’t quit, even if I’d really wanted to. And I wanted to. I tried to on my own a million times. But I was too afraid to admit that what was happening to me was out of my control, that I couldn’t manage my drinking anymore, so I sold myself on some half-baked story riddled with sorry excuses to preserve my addictive behavior, because when your life is falling apart as an alcoholic, the last thing you have to hold onto before your one-way-or-another death are your lies. That’s sort of the deal we make with ourselves at the breaking point, isn’t it? ‘We’re as sick as our secrets.’ You’ve heard that one, too. You can keep your lies, but they’ll cost you everything—your life included.

“And to reclaim anything of value, let alone a speck of self-esteem, you have to trade in those lies and get brutally honest with yourself, and you have no real point of negotiation in that exchange. You gave up your ability to negotiate long ago. You gave up your leverage when your disease decided for you that it’s the only thing that matters. That’s what happens when it runs its course: you’re no longer driving the bus you alone are responsible for. We can only control whether or not we take that first drink. As soon as we decide to take it, all bets are off. I always explain it to ‘normies’ as watching someone else ruin your life in the first person, and the accompanying horror that you wake up to each day at the realization that you’re still accountable for everything that asshole does. Whether or not you remember what he does is of no significance whatsoever; because he is you, and the damage is being done regardless.

“However you frame it, the final outcome is the same: all you have left is your fucked-up narrative that no one other than you gives a shit about, much less believes. So, there you are—all alone. Congrats, Zach, you did it. ‘Humility.’ You’re the best worst thing there is, and you got what you wanted, yeah?—total, unadulterated isolation. Never mind that it’s because you’re completely insufferable to be around. At long last, everyone will leave you the fuck alone! How the hell is that a life worth living?

“So, onto a solution to this problem I’ve found to be valuable and reliable. There’s this C.S. Lewis quote my sponsor says when he’s reflecting on the concept of humility, on how we can frame it in our minds both pragmatically and in a way that makes it emotionally approachable as addicts, as people who are chronically terrified of any flavor of criticism that isn’t on our terms. It goes, ‘Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.’ As it turns out, I have to take the microscope off of myself to be free, to really see and be myself. I must, with an urgency of life and death, get outside of myself, my mind, my judgments, my rigid certainty that my experience is the most important—the most real simply because I’m at the center of every experience I’ve ever had. Self-loathing does not equate to humility or negate the fact that this obsession with my own imperfection is one of unchecked selfish, self-centered, and self-seeking behavior. And, I’m no better, no more enlightened, no more spiritual than another just because I’m able to see this more clearly now. Lest I forget where the fuck I came from and repeat my insanity.

“What I need to be is grateful, grateful that I’m still alive, sober, and have a place to come to learn these tools. We’re not only here to stop using drugs and alcohol; we’re here to learn how to live our lives without them. Humility is one of the tools we use to do just that. ‘Happiness is an inside job.’ That’s another one my sponsor likes to say. When I’m practicing humility in earnest, I should be finding that it’s easier to love myself, not harder, and therefore don’t need outside validation or an external substance to alter how I’m feeling, to feel good about myself, to be okay with who I see in the mirror. I have to set all that stuff aside and allow myself to feel what’s really there, exactly as it exists in that moment, to work through it raw and vulnerable-like. This fellowship gives me a place to not only do that but to not do it alone. ‘My mind is like a bad neighborhood; if I go through it alone, I’m going to get mugged!’

“As I went through that process, as I saw you guys get outside of yourselves to help pick me up—help me pick myself up—from my absolute lowest, most excruciating moments of defeat, that ‘right-sizing,’ that thinking of myself less, that notion of being one of many who are worthy of being loved without condition, became an apparent Truth. And I don’t have to pretend or fake it. I felt it when I looked up from my rock bottom and saw how it works through the way you guys conducted yourselves; you can feel it when someone is living it. I could feel by being around you, tangibly feel in my bone marrow, the freedom in which you all lived your lives—you who were once like me, now no longer prisoners of self. How could I be like you? You told me that things didn’t have to be perfect, that I didn’t have to be perfect, just honest, open, and willing. You said if I wanted what you had and was willing to go to any length to get it, then I was ready to take certain steps. And because I did, through something so much greater than myself, I’m alive today in the only way that matters—my mind is free. I’m free.

That’s all I’ve got tonight. Thank you for being here, and thank you for letting me share. I love you all.”

“Thanks, Zach,” the room echoed back, the words washing over me with a warmth I’d chased in every bottle. And it’s good, I reminded myself—it’s good that I can still feel.