The idea of sobriety, to a drunk, is terrifying, far off, and totally necessary. To maintain the delusion that you are a reasonable, functioning, GOOD person, you must always have it in the back of your mind – Someday. Someday I will get sober, of course. This isn’t forever, just for now.
Sobriety is a fiction – like writing – you wield to keep yourself drinking.
Someday I will stop. Of course. The voice that whispers this is the same voice that says fuck it, and it says them both with utter conviction, utterly convincing, so long as you don’t stay sane long enough to really interrogate it.
When you do start the interrogation – if you do – the voice reveals itself as a serpent in the potential Garden of your mind. Not Satan – you’re not getting off that easy – but a great deceiver nonetheless.
The interrogation begins with visibility. You have to shine the light on the voice, like a haggard detective teasing a confession from a smirking criminal. You have to admit to yourself that it is a problem, that it lives inside of you, and that it does not live inside most people. You have to see it. To identify it. To name it.
Faced with the actual, impending, absolutely necessary reality of sobriety as opposed to the abstract idea of it you’ve lived with for years or decades, the serpent raises its voice, talks faster.
“Turn off that fucking light! Let’s talk, in the dark, quietly, like we always do.”
It doesn’t want you to know its name. It certainly doesn’t want you to speak it.
It took me a while to say to myself that I was an alcoholic, and even longer to say it out loud.
When I finally did, I was writing a story for a storytelling competition. I led with,
“Hello, my name is Reid, and I’m an alcoholic,” knowing damn well that every other alcoholic in the audience would immediately chime in with, “Hi, Reid.”
It was a joke. I had to make a joke of it to speak the truth. That’s almost always the case for me.
The first time I said it to my wife – Said, “I am an alcoholic” – I was reading her this story, probably two years after I’d stopped drinking.
That’s how stubborn the serpent is. Two years of being sober and I hadn’t summoned the strength to name him aloud.
Until that time I acted as though I was doing it for Kelly. For us. She said she didn’t want to have a baby until I had a year of sobriety.
That seemed reasonable.
So, as the good folks in Alcoholics Anonymous say, I white knuckled it.
I just didn’t drink. I wrestled the serpent, all the time, and there’s a reason snake wrestling isn’t a recognized sport. It’s hard and no fun to watch.
When the serpent’s words aren’t working – “She’s gone for the weekend, she’ll never know. What harm could it cause? No one will know but you and it will be such a RELIEF”– it starts to squeeze.
Some squeeze harder than others. Mine, like me, wasn’t particularly brawny. I didn’t have much for withdrawals. I didn’t drink every day at the time I quit, just on weekends, so my body wasn’t relying on a daily intake, didn’t depend on it.
But, for some people, there are major physical consequences to quitting cold turkey. There can be seizures. You can die.
I got lucky, but don’t use my luck as inspiration. Talk to your doctor. Don’t dry out alone.
So my serpent didn’t squeeze very hard, but goddamn can that thing keep talking in the face of scorn and resistance. And its memory is pristine.
“You’re feeling good, confident. Remember everything you put Kelly through? Falling down the stairs. Pissing the bed? You don’t deserve her. Do the right thing, come back to me and let her move on.”
Or
“This will actually STRENGTHEN your sobriety! You need to go out with a Bang! You need to go out with a really bad one or a really good one and I’ll keep alternating which it should be until you’re dead!”
Or
“You’re selling yourself out! Reid Messerschmidt is not a sober family man, he’s edgy and loud, magnetic. Sober Reid won’t be those things. Who will give a shit about Sober Reid?”
There was that. There was Sober Reid and Drunk Reid. They were two different people, and they couldn’t comfortably coexist.
Sober Reid, I thought (because the serpent told me), didn’t always know what to say and do. He was introverted and awkward. He didn’t take risks. Was conservative, even – in action, not ideology. Lower case c conservative – and god help you if you’re that.
Drunk Reid was a daring extrovert. An emotional and situational adventurer. He prided himself on getting in and out of strange situations. He didn’t think about anything, let alone how to stand, what to say, what to do with his hands. He was neurotic, but in a fashionable, fun way. He was INTERESTING.
There is some truth to both of those depictions, but they’re false in spirit. This is an insidious way to lie.
Sober Reid is more self-conscious than Drunk Reid was, but certainly not more than Hungover Reid, and Hungover Reid was in charge a lot of the time. And I’m by no means conservative in action. Might I have been had I not spent a decade of my life with no real control? Perhaps. But I DID spend a decade of my life with no real control, and it taught me a few things – how to get weird among them.
But I didn’t know any of this at the time.
I coped with all of it in a few ways, some healthy, some not.
First, the unhealthy:
I sought a legal, non-addictive, non-disruptive way to shift my consciousness, something to fill alcohol’s vacated role. This, to avoid leaving you in suspense, does not exist.
Weed I’d tried, and it’s still not legal where I live. I knew from experience that I’d overdo that, and there would absolutely be disruption. Getting high made me want to listen to music and not much else. Eat, I guess. The serpent told me I could just do it at night, after Kelly went to bed, that she wouldn’t even have to know – They have edibles now! – but it wasn’t a convincing argument.
So I did some research and landed on Kratom, which is a plant with opiate qualities that is not actually an opiate. I think it’s related to the coffee plant. I had to order it from a sketchy website, but it wasn’t illegal. You can get it at some of the less reputable gas stations these days.
It came in small Ziplock bags and looked a lot like pot. You can make tea out of it, or just ingest it. It’s fine. Makes you feel kind of pleasantly sleepy, but it’s one of those subtle drugs that kind of lingers in the periphery. It’s the kind of drug that constantly makes you wonder if it’s doing anything or just a placebo. Still, I immediately bought a ridiculous amount and started taking it all the time, despite its lack of any really satisfying tangible effect. I’d go out with friends and literally just eat this dried leaf at a table at the bar. It was ridiculous and didn’t last long.
My healthier and ultimately effective coping mechanisms were two:
I had an office in the basement with a couple of weird thrift store pictures on the wall: A giant, bucolic beach scene that I’d had with me since Post Landing – a calming homage to the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink – as well as a mischievously smirking old-timey kid next to a huge bike, who I called Pip, after the kid in Great Expectations. I decided to cover the walls in thrift store pictures. It became its own compulsion. I went to thrift stores constantly, in search of just the right art. I scoured antique stores and Boys Ranch’s and Goodwill’s for dusty, obscure portraits, unique prints, old photos. It was fun.
There’s something about a thrift store that is so reassuring. The things in there have lived many lives, have ended up here despite starting somewhere else. They have stories to tell. This wild eyed, garishly painted bust of Jesus Christ was manufactured somewhere in China 70 years ago, maybe, shipped overseas, bought by some hopeful artist or bored tinkerer or devout weirdo, painted lovingly in their home, sat on their shelf until they died, maybe, or moved, or downsized. Maybe it was inherited by their child, maybe it went to a thrift store in Texas and was bought by some other hopeful drunk, placed on their mantel, witnessed their struggle, brought reassurance or judgment, was even prayed to, perhaps, and then was again abandoned, somehow made its way to a steel shelf in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting for someone else to love it.
People grappling with their own introversion – which is every introvert I’ve ever met – tend to be nostalgic and materialistic. Not materialistic in a greedy sense, but in the way that they connect with things when they can’t connect with people. We have a deep desire to physically interact with the things that have imprinted themselves upon us. It’s not enough to remember a shirt you wore every day for a year when you were eleven, although you do that often enough. You want to find and buy and wear that shirt again.
Within a year, I had filled every inch of white space in my office with pictures of dead people and art, lined the shelves with strange busts, knick-knacks, and the wistful detritus of my youth.
It’s an ongoing project. Things are moved, replaced, jiggled, and reset to allow room for more. It looks like my head exploded and my psyche painted the walls. It’s beautiful, a living collage of ME, and I love it.
It reflects what I want to do with this show, which was the second coping mechanism.
As I mentioned before, I’d always called myself a writer. It was time, in my sobriety, to make that true.
But what would be the medium? Writing a novel didn’t seem an effective way to fend off alcoholism. Too many of the writers I admired had lost that fight.
I’d been listening to podcasts for years, they were the background noise to everything I did, a way to stave off silence and introspection.
There were many I loved. Marc Maron’s WTF was especially important to me. Maron’s a recovering addict himself and, though his show’s not about that, he brings it up regularly and his ability to exist as a sober person was inspiration in itself. I listened to every episode, collected every word about addiction, banked them, and used them when they were needed. Sobriety is when I needed them most, but when I was in my darkest days, they gave me something to consider for the future, a possible way out when the time came.
There was the intense, carefully considered storytelling of This American life, Ira Glass’s calming, kind, intelligent voice, which grounded me in reality, made me want to be a better person. A deliberate person, which is the opposite of a drunk.
There was the ecstatic goofiness of Comedy Bang Bang, a show built around the sheer joy of discovery.
There weren’t any rules.
It seemed the barrier to entry in the podcast world was pretty low, it was my best bet for getting my words in front of an audience, and I could do it.
So I started to plan. Honestly, I barely remember this. There’s this weird thing when you’re getting sober, where you feel, for the first year, like a drunk just not drinking. A dry drunk. Or that was the case for me, anyway. My brain was still trying to figure out how to function properly. I imagine neurons firing where they’ve never fired before, my brain slowly lighting up like a city at dusk, healing itself. I was still groggy, my thinking a bit muddled.
By the second year, you think you feel like a sober person. By the third year, you realize that was ridiculous, that THIS is what a sober person feels like, and then this happens in every successive year after that. It’s partially why sobriety birthdays are such a big deal. They give you a chance to assess how you feel different from a year, two years, three years ago.
I still have the notes from working out what this would be, so I know I made lists of topics, watched documentaries, started reading more vigorously than I had in a decade, probably ever.
I read a few books by Erik Larson. These are billed as nonfiction, and they are, but read like novels. And it occurred to me that some of the glue holding the thing together must be fabricated, and I asked myself whether that mattered. I decided it did not.
If I’m told that, say, Chester Arthur ate a chicken sandwich on April 5th 1882, and he, in fact, ate a bowl of soup with no sandwich, how does that affect me or current reality in any way? Even if I’m told something far more outrageous, that while Chester Arthur was eating his chicken sandwich, it was snatched out of his hands by a Bigfoot and he spent the rest of his life trying to get it back, which is why he only served one term in office, does that change anything that I know or how I live?
I don’t think so. It would be a much more fun story and might cause me to have a stronger belief in Bigfoot, but I’d be much more likely to assume that Arthur was mistaken and was just the victim of a mischievous monkey. Also a good story.
So that was intriguing to me, an idea I thought I could explore. The first element in my new, sober, still suitably odd and engaging thought process.
And then I remembered Chris Gaines, Garth Brooks’s weird, pop alter ego from the 90s, and it recaptured my imagination.
I started to write, without any real idea of what would happen. If you want to know what did happen, go listen to the Chris Gaines episode. I think it’s pretty good.
It was a revelation.
I had my outlets.
The one thing that everyone considering sobriety should really be told is that it will leave you with a shocking amount of free time. Shocking. You’ve got mornings, clear headed afternoons, unimpaired evenings. This is daunting. You’ve got to fill it up somehow, or sobriety won’t stick.
There are two other things you should know before you get sober.
- Life will get incalculably easier, which, of course, is a good thing, but doesn’t always feel that way. Drunks thrive on the struggle. It’s a part of the package. Maybe we’ll complain about it, but deep down, the wiliness and animal instinct needed to pull off functional addiction is itself addictive.
- Shame and regret are useless. Counterproductive. They can only hinder your recovery and are best tossed away. Feel your feelings, but move on as quickly as possible without totally pardoning yourself from the actual, outside harm you’ve done.
I hadn’t realized this yet in my first year, and it was hurting my marriage.
Kelly, obviously, was happy that I wasn’t drinking, but she was still wary, as she should have been. She didn’t trust me. And her feelings were still hurt that I’d been willing to almost tank our marriage for drunkenness.
I was so busy beating myself up for the same thing, that any outside condemnation felt superfluous and cruel. And when you’re forced to face your feelings for the first time, you are very raw.
So every time she expressed her feelings of hurt, I felt unfairly attacked. Wasn’t I doing the thing she wanted me to?
But that’s obviously not how feelings work.
Resentment lingers long past any termination of wrongs.
I would do something that, to me, felt like such a vast improvement over how I had been that it was above condemnation. But I was still a human being in the world. I couldn’t expect to be held to a lower standard just because I’d knocked the bar down so many notches.
It took work. It took time. That work was subtle and undramatic and I won’t bore you with it here.
We’re good now, I think, and when we talk about my drinking days, it doesn’t feel like an attack, because that is no longer me. That’s Drunk Reid. We all know he was an asshole, let’s have a laugh about it.
As I sit here writing this, it occurs to me – not for the first time – that paradoxically, my sober memories are less clear than those from my drinking days, which makes describing them difficult.
I think this is the case for a few reasons.
- Timelines become less distinct as you get older, obviously. As a kid, and as a young adult, everything seems momentous, and you work over them again and again in your mind. The stories, as they say, become etched in your mid. As an adult, hopefully, you spend less time etching.
- In my drinking days, I was consistently having traumatic experiences, inflicting them upon myself. Traumatic experiences imprint themselves in ways that the steady march of contentedness can’t. They mark off the days, signposts by which you can measure when everything else happened.
- The drinking stories have a short arc, which more often than not, can be reduced to the following: Expectation, elation, chaos, consequence. The arcs of a sober family man are longer, and less immediately dramatic, though much more meaningful over time.
So I’m left with a broad overview and a few milestones.
The first is the birth of my son. I’ve told most of this story before, in the episode called Otis and the Rabbit, and I won’t retell it here, but I do want to talk about sobriety and fatherhood.
When Kelly and I decided it was time to have a baby it felt like the end. Like the final death of Drunk Reid after a long fight against my will power. That Kelly trusted me enough to make me a father was a massive step, but I’m not sure I understood how massive it was at the time. When she told me she was pregnant, it meant the real end had come. To start drinking again now would make me a monster. This felt like a demarcating event, after which even the serpent couldn’t argue that drinking was justifiable, and to have gotten to that point felt like a victory. But unlike the engagement and buying of the house, there was no victory lap. I’d learned my lesson. This was a somber victory, or stoic anyway.
The lingering idea in the back of my head, the faint but still present promise of the serpent, had been that maybe we weren’t done yet. Divorces happen all the time and men go on to formidable second acts. People DIE. That’s how the HEROIC second acts begin.
This is a dark thought, I know, but when a liar is cornered, the lies become unhinged, especially when that liar is an extension of your subconscious mind.
But I knew, and know, that there are no heroic second acts for a drunk – not ones that involve drinking. I’ve played through the various scenarios that could theoretically get me drinking again, and the inevitable result of any of these scenarios, even in my imagination, is sad and gross. A burden and a disappointment to me and everyone I love.
No heroics, only tragedy.
And I already have my heroic second act. The sober one, where I’m a Dad and a husband and life is steady and sweet.
I said before that this is a happy story, not a sad one, and I realize I’ve yet to really deliver on that promise, but here it is:
Sobriety is a goddamned gift that makes everything that came before it worthwhile, and sobriety as a father is especially sweet, I think.
I’ve talked about the self-knowledge, experience, and gratitude that are the result of ten plus years of lost control.
These are magnified by fatherhood.
I look at these kids and can’t even believe that they exist, that I’m here for them to exist, that I’m present and GOOD at being their Dad.
When you’re a drunk in early adulthood, your maturity is stunted. I didn’t learn any practical life skills beyond basic survival, trivia, and what I read from books in all that time.
A problem would arise, and I’d adjust my life around it, instead of just fixing it. Once my air conditioner broke and, instead of even attempting to fix it, I was just hot and sweaty for an entire summer. Then I bought a new one. I also grew up with a father who probably couldn’t change a tire – if he could, I never saw it – so I was already behind.
Now, I get to learn with my sons. To rebuild myself from the ground up with the perspective of a man who has lived a life. It’s a joy. We’re constantly discovering together, and my stunted maturity means I can take some childish joy in it all.
I’m also lucky to have a wife that knows how to do things and a father in law that taught her all of that, and is patient enough to teach me as well.
I’ve become an ADULT adult at a rapid rate. The person I was even five years ago isn’t gone, but layers have been added. I was effete, impractical, neurotic, vain, smart, and obnoxious. I’d often say things like “I do not care for the out of doors”. Sobriety and fatherhood have made me more masculine, slightly more practical, far, far less neurotic, unconcerned with appearance, and infinitely less obnoxious.
I’m still very smart, obviously. And still pretty obnoxious.
I enjoy being outside. I love to mow a lawn. I’ve now chopped down four trees with an axe, if you can believe that. I can and do address problems as they arise, mostly. I no longer worry that I might accidentally pop my eyeball or refuse to swim in a lake because something might bite my penis, two things I was weirdly concerned about for a long time.
The number of mistakes I’ve made in my life are incalculable – to quote the Ben Folds song – “I don’t get many things right the first time, in fact, I’ve been told that a lot.” But with mistakes comes wisdom, with the added benefit of an emotional intelligence that can only be attained through prolonged misery.
I’ve often said that my super power is always knowing the most hurtful thing to say to a person at any given time – that, and being able to tell people which celebrity their baby resembles – and that is true, but the flipside is also true. I think I’m better equipped to understand how someone is feeling than most, even if I’m not always equipped, yet, to engage with that feeling.
This makes me a GOOD Dad. Not just a physically present Dad, though I’m that as well. An emotionally present Dad, a good Dad. I deeply love my kids and I tell them that constantly. I let them be who they are. I listen. We have actual conversations where we both come away having learned something.
The second sobriety milestone was a close friend – one of the Whiskey Kids I mentioned – who was also struggling with alcohol.
No specifics here – that’s his story to tell, mostly – but viewing his struggle from a sober remove was enlightening, allowed me to objectively – somewhat objectively – watch what I myself had gone through.
It was horrifying. Maddening. I was MAD at him, even though I, of course, knew that I’d been exactly the same way just a few years before.
If you’ve never done it, trying to talk to a drunk about their drinking is hopeless. When a drunk is drinking, after a few incidents and interventions, all they want to talk about is getting sober. They’ll weep and promise, plan, hope, alternate lies and brutal honesty. They are completely illogical, but so sold on whatever line of logic they’re on at the time that you almost agree.
Do not try to talk to a drunk about their drinking. It’s completely useless.
When a drunk is not drinking, it’s almost as bad. The gaslighting is relentless. “I know!” “I don’t want to talk about it!” “I’m fine!” “You’re making a big deal out of nothing!”
Experiencing this as the intervener gave me a better understanding of what I’d done to the people around me, justified their anger and resentment.
Eventually, my friend agreed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I agreed to go with him.
I hadn’t gone to AA before. I don’t know why, exactly. The idea of it appeals to me – it’s like a secret society – but it took me two years to call myself an alcoholic out loud and by that time I felt pretty secure in my sobriety.
But going to AA was an experience. The first meeting we went to was an all men’s meeting. Saturday morning. Probably 200 men there.
If you’re not familiar with AA, it goes like this. Some meetings are different, but this is the one I went to.
The men gather in the service area of a large church. Coffee and donuts are available. A lot of people smoke outside. Most sit around one of the couple dozen tables set up, but many also sit on folding chairs along the periphery.
You’ll see people there you know. People you didn’t know had a problem. You’ll nod at each other. You’ll see people you know of, because they are visible in the community. Local celebrities. You will ignore that they are that.
You’ll see young people, and old people. People dressed up and people who look like they have to get back to the corn field when this is over. People that look like they’ve had a hard week and people that look like they’ve already gone for a jog this morning.
One person chairs the meeting, announces milestones, reviews any business. You go around the room with everybody saying, “My name is Reid, and I’m an alcoholic” to which every other person responds, “Hi, Reid”. It does feel like church, but only the good parts of church, the community parts.
Once the group portion is over, everyone splits off into small groups, and this is where things get interesting. The small groups, in this case anyway, meet in small Sunday School rooms, around tables and on chairs meant for young, tiny children.
This is humbling.
I thought about how the kids that would have Sunday School here the next morning had no idea what kind of business was taking place in this room today. I wondered about who had been in my Sunday School rooms before me, when I was young, and what had been said there.
What is said now is intense.
You have a collection of maybe eight men, all sitting with their knees at their necks. You have old, grizzled farmers, local politicians, young guys that don’t look like this sobriety thing is going to stick for them. You have people that have been doing this for 30 years and people that are there for the first time. There are no political affiliations here, no races, no ages, no class. Just alcoholics.
And then everyone shares what is on their mind. Most tell their story, many of them for the thousandth time. It is emotional. It is fascinating. It is honestly one of the best and most heartening experiences of my entire life.
You really haven’t lived until you’ve hugged a 60 year old North Dakota farmer who is weeping because of how badly he’s messed up his relationship with his kids. It’s an astonishing experience.
Which is why I didn’t keep going.
I felt like a spectator. I was already five years into my sobriety and didn’t REALLY need this. And my natural inclination is to collect stories. That’s not why AA exists. AA exists to allow people in similar, impossible circumstances help each other through.
It’s a remarkable organization, if only because it has been self-sustaining for 85 years. No funding, no central organization. No real official structure. Just thousands and thousands of meetings all over the world. At any given moment, wherever you live, you can find a meeting if you need it.
And the level of emotional vulnerability at these things – especially for a group of Midwestern men – is astonishing. You just won’t find it anywhere else.
I love it, but it’s not for me.
But I’ll say this: It’s very possible that it is for you, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
These days, my life is not perfect. I have bad moods, my patience leaves much to be desired. Sometimes marriage is hard, sometimes parenting is hard. Anxiety and depression are still in my life, will always be in my life, though they have changed.
Alcoholism and anxiety are tied in a kind of endless Gordian Knot, one leading to the other, the other leading back to the one. Because of this, it’s hard to say which is the root of the problem when you’re still drinking, though in my sobriety the anxiety remains – much improved but still there – so I know now that they are each their own entities.
Now the anxiety is mostly physical – manifests itself as restlessness. It’s not pleasant. It makes me feel like I want to crawl out of my skin and sleep becomes difficult, but I can identify and manage it. Exercise helps. Eating better would probably help. I’ll get to that someday.
Depression is the same way. When it’s there, it feels permanent, but I know it’s not, and it always passes, sometimes faster than others. But I know it always passes.
Depression and anxiety aren’t the unpredictable storm they used to be, coming and going without warning, often many times in a day. There’s an ebb and a flow to them.
So life is not perfect, obviously. You can’t leave yourself behind.
But any objective view of my life now is breathtaking, relative to what it was – relative to just about any life I can imagine. I am beyond lucky, beyond thankful. I shouldn’t be here for this. I shouldn’t be able to CONTRIBUTE to something this good.
But I am.
Sober Reid is a better man – and more interesting – than I could ever have imagined. Whatever fears I had about losing myself in sobriety were such bullshit that it’s hard to even comprehend them now. I lost nothing and gained everything.
Would I have been able to do it under other circumstances? Would I be sober if not for Kelly? I don’t know. I don’t want to put the burden of being my savior on her – she doesn’t want that AT ALL – and the work was something that I had to do. Maybe I would have found a way to do it without her. Maybe not. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.
I don’t regret anything that I went through – that I put myself through – and I’m learning to be less judgmental of Drunk Reid. He was struggling with something much bigger than him. I don’t mourn (much) for lost time. All of that time was necessary, I think. I don’t cry for what could have been, because what is is all I could ever hope for. I’m not ashamed of myself. Obviously. I’ve laid everything out here. I’m happy to share my experience with anyone that wants to hear it. I hope some people find that helpful. I love talking to people who want to get sober. It really feels like the least I can do, and it happens a shocking amount.
So many people are struggling with addiction. So many people. If you are one of them, just know that you are not alone, and that you can ABSOLUTELY get sober, and that the sober life is GOOD. Good in ways you can’t even imagine. I’m sure I’ve not done it justice here. Like I said, misery is much easier to write about than happiness and stability. But however hard it is, I promise it is worth it. I promise.
Sober Reid is proud to be a recovering addict. We are a club. A secret club, of survivors and shitalkers and storytellers and salty secret optimists. It’s a good club. Maybe you should join us.
The End.