EndGameNYC

In response to the OP’s question, I don’t see a whole lot of people claiming that things went smoothly or that very many things got better by virtue of putting down the drink alone. So, no, I don’t agree and am stumped as to where all these comments are. If they do exist, I’m certain their numbers are greatly overshadowed by the more realistic comments that describe the process of getting sober.

As I believe is true in most cases of making major changes in life, or when major events are thrust upon us that require major changes in order to manage or to just survive them, perception plays an important role. I define perception here as the way we interpret the events we experience in life and not as taking events objectively or on face value alone. At it’s very best, black-and-white thinking is misleading, and the reality of becoming dangerous and destructive is only a half-step away.

Early sobriety sucks for most people. I don't think I need to give a detailed list as to why this is so. Even the most optimistic and determined person suffers greatly from such a dramatic change in lifestyle, a change in our being-in-the-world.

I wasn't at all interested in getting sober when I finally put down the drink, but I had few options and little choice. So I scratch my head when getting sober is described as a function of being "ready" or being "motivated enough.” My sense is that these things are true or make sense only in retrospect, given, for example, how many times people describe themselves as ready or motivated to get sober, only to fail repeatedly at getting there. Besides, how do I as a drunk even know that I'm ready or motivated to make any substantive changes in my life? The phenomenon of denial also throws off my judgment and my internal compass when I'm drinking, allowing me to regularly lie to myself to the extent that I may even believe that I would be better off waiting until the time is “right,” that I may not really, after all, have such a big problem with drinking (When all is said and done, I do make it to work each day.), or that I just need to control how much, how often, and when and where I drink. I've seen this scenario played out here on SR and in my own life hundreds of times. So, saying that I was ready to to stop based on the fact that I finally did stop this time falls within the relevance of the kind of logic that tells us that at least broken clocks are right two times a day.

Meaning in life and struggle are inseparable. We’re built to take for granted things that come easily to us in life, and to value more those things that are the product of our labor, our struggle, our heartache. I don’t see any rational way to dispute this. If you want substance and meaning in your life, you need to be willing to struggle for it. I would go as far as to say that the struggle itself is where meaning in life resides. I’ve yet to find it anywhere else.

Faith helped me. I’m not at all religious and, unless I suffer a traumatic brain injury, I don’t see this changing. Faith, for me, is believing not in something that is utterly impossible to achieve or exist, but believing that I have the to capacity to survive my own struggle on my way to what I am becoming: I will never be a finished product. Faith is not a thing that we either have or we don’t; it’s a task, a way of being in the world. It’s easy to believe in things that are more or less easily obtainable. It’s easy to believe in the trust, loyalty and support of people who are indebted to us or who are otherwise attached to us as a result of their own psychopathology, such as in the case of co-dependency, obsession or other versions of psychological dependence, wherein the relationship is one such as exists between a subject or a person and any other external object in the world, like a car or a video game. But neither of these things has anything to do with faith or, perhaps more accurately, with being faithful. Yes, I know and have known many people who claim that they don’t believe in anything. I silently add the word ‘yet’ to such statements, given the fact that they’ve stated that they believe that they don’t believe in anything, in itself, a statement based on faith, and camouflaged as fact. How does anyone accurately assess that they don’t believe in anything?

I hear and read a lot of well-meaning statements that attempt to persuade people to be a certain way along the lines of “You have to believe in yourself, before anyone else will believe in you.” “You have love yourself first before you can love anyone else.” And, in relation to sitting for a job interview or going on a first date, “Be yourself.” I don’t make any of these recommendations, and don’t in any useful way know what they mean. I intentionally avoid the injunction to “Be yourself,” or, worse, “Just be yourself.” This recommendation is perhaps the most complicated of all and, at times, the most dangerous in terms of personal integrity. Particularly in early sobriety, how do I know who I am? How do I go about just “being myself?”

Before I first got sober in 1983, I knew that I had a great many dreams and goals, none of which I did very much about, if anything at all, in terms of achieving them. I knew that failed romantic relationships weren’t my fault or responsibility, that I knew how to solve all the problems in the world besides my own, that I had a good sense of what was “wrong” with other people (though not a clue as to what was truly going with me). I might pass that off as being very young, but even if that were so, it didn’t bring me any closer to knowing who I was. Besides, there were many people my age who handled and worked through such things much better than I could have imagined.

A great many of us struggle with the concept of self-identity through the course of our lives. It is, perhaps, our greatest struggle. We’re mostly on intimate terms with our habits, our tendencies, our likes and dislikes, though often less so when it comes to our strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I believe it’s more helpful to concentrate on our perceived strengths rather than focus on our perceived weaknesses in terms of growing as a person and making progress as a decent human being, if those are the terms under which we choose to assess ourselves. Based on personal and professional experience, I've learned many of us have little idea about how other people experience us, except in the case of very extreme or very reliable behavior on our part, the latter of which takes time. And, even still...

I have no idea what people mean when they tell me to be myself before a job interview. I believe that most of us struggle with this within the context of presenting ourselves as being a good match for a particular interviewer about whom we know very little, if anything at all. The interviewer is generally not as interested in seeing who you are as much as she is in believing that you’re capable -- or that you at least have the potential -- of doing the work that needs to be done or, even better, to do it in a way that surpasses the requirements of the job. But not always. So, as the interview approaches, we start to get a little anxious and may even panic. “What the F**K does ‘be yourself’ even mean?! If I’m myself, they’ll have security escort me from the building!” Yeah. So, we grab an off-the-rack identity in order to survive the interview or to avoid saying anything that’s “wrong” or “stupid” which, in turn, muffles our passion for what we do or for what we’d like to do, ultimately yielding to an executioner that carries many identities, including but not limited to “I’m a people person.” “I’m never late for work.” “I love working with people.” “My one weakness is that I tend to take on too much responsibility.” And the last thing that the now-buried truer self hears is “Next!” Who I truly am never made it to the interview. Or the date. But enough of that for now.

Faith offers the possibility of living a meaningful life. Like love, faith is not a thought, a process of thinking or believing, or a conclusion of the mind. Faith is a task that is demonstrated in what we do, and what we avoid doing. It is both an attitude and a way of being in the world, the conviction that no matter what I want to accomplish, I will do whatever is necessary to get there. It’s a belief in what I’m capable of pushing myself to do in order to get to a better place. And just as soon as we’ve discovered that we’ve made such a commitment, we let go of the outcome entirely. If not, then this is not an act of faith, but of standard operating procedure that offers a certain probability that I’ll get what I want. A dispassionate relationship with all that is external to who and what I am, of who and what I see myself as becoming.

The process of faith, of doing whatever I need to do to get where I want to be is, in itself the outcome at every moment. What and where I want to be is to be alive in the present moment. Faith isn’t about something that I’ll do, or achieve, or get somewhere or sometime down the road, some phantom that only exists within the confines of my imagination but does not and may never exist in what we’ve come to know as reality. It’s about what I’m doing in every moment to get to a better place and accepting that that “better place” is likely to be something very different than what I originally envisioned it be. The better place is in the doing, in the struggling. In the end, and unless I’ve missed something very important, that’s all we truly have.