I love being busy at work.
I really do not like listening to my coworker’s radio because it plays the same songs over and over and over and it makes me cringe and grumpy.
I’m really, really, really excited for the weather to get warmer so I can read outside and walk around more.
One of my colleagues I’ve never met is in town this week. He’s also an alcoholic. Nothing about him makes me think ‘that man’s an alcoholic’ & it is proven yet again that alcoholics don’t have to be of a certain age, skin color, gender, economic status, etc etc. “The disease is more open-minded than those of us who have it.”
I’m so glad my boss understands that I physically cannot meet this deadline for these massive spreadsheets I’m working on. She goes “It’s ok, no worries.”
Those are just some thoughts I had on my way to work this morning.
I’ve been thinking lately of 2 past roommates. One from the 12 Step House in the summer of 2016 and one from my current sober living house. I bring you, Susan and Marge.
The one from the 12 Step House, we’ll call her Marge, was a middle-aged woman. She was beautiful in the eclectic, not your typical blonde-haired blue-eyed sense. She was hilarious, witty, and (most of the time) enjoyable to be around. She had a background in culinary, was a gifted chef, and could make a delicious spread out of scraps from the fridge and canned food in the cupboard.
I actually initially met Marge at the treatment center I went to before the 12 Step House. She came in, fragile and broken, like the rest of us, but had something else about her that I couldn’t put my finger on.
I remember sitting outside at lunch, crying and bent over from laughing so hard at her sarcasm. When I was stuck in a treatment center, examining everything that’s wrong with me and all the behaviors and thoughts that drove me to drink until I physically could not consume any more alcohol, laughter was very, very welcome.
After getting to know Marge a bit, I learned that her rehab stints were in the double-digits. I learned that for the last 30 years, she drank for several months or years at a time, went to rehab, really wanted to stay sober and clean, and would do so for a period of several months or even years before it started all over again. Her story consisted of being a sous-chef at big-name restaurants in downtown Chicago, being single and childless in her mid-40s, both parents still alive and well, an only child, born and raised in the Midwest, going back to school for various courses of study, among several other admirable and interesting things. She had a big personality that attracted people, and like many alcoholics, it was partially to serve a purpose of seeking approval.
It doesn’t matter how BADLY you want this, it comes down to how much pain it caused and accepting that you MUST make changes to not endure the pain any longer.
(Side-note on seeking approval… I am extremely guilty of constantly, obsessively seeking approval and people-pleasing. I want to make everyone happy, and in doing so, I often put my own well-being and happiness on the back burner. I think this is a characteristic of alcoholics, especially female alcoholics. The desire to make people approve of everything… my performance at work, in sports, in school, my internships… my parents’ approval of how I conduct my life, manage my finances, make choices… society’s approval of me as a young woman, a person, a college graduate… I constantly need approval for EVERYTHING. If I feel that I have failed someone or something with the way I make choices and live my life, then that is simply unacceptable to me and I sometimes feel like I just CANNOT go on until I fix it and receive the approving nod from therapists, house managers, roommates, coworkers, bosses, parents, judges, the list goes on and on. I obsessively try to be PERFECT… the perfect roommate, the perfect sober-living resident, the perfect daughter, the perfect employee, the perfect probationer, the perfect coach, the perfect god-damn everything in all places at all times… fuck. It’s exhausting. I haven’t learned the subtle art of not giving a fuck about what other people think of me, at least not fully. I’m a lot better than where I started, but I’ve got to get this people-pleasing, perfectionist shit under control, because it’s putting a huge weight on my shoulders all. the. time.)
Anyway, so I could relate to Marge on several levels… having a big-girl job, being educated, being an only child, trying and failing at sobriety (though, I have not tried and failed as many times as she and I hope to GOD that I never do), seeking approval, having alive and well parents that are very much a part of our lives. She was one of the first people, really the first person in the few treatment centers I had experience with at the time, that I really understood on a personal level.
At this point, I was struggling. At the time, I really wanted the life I knew sobriety had to offer. But, the menacing “one last time” thought was in the corners of my mind, and it would stay there for another year. But, being so down in the dumps, depressed, feeling like a failure in all forms of the word “failure,” and trying to grasp the idea of becoming a member of AA, she brought me comfort in knowing that there are people, like me, who struggle, like we were.
I should mention that the first time I had heard of things like the “Big Book” and the 12-steps like “powerlessness” and “unmanageability” was at this treatment center (Gateway).
Imagine… trying to comprehend just how badly you’ve fucked your life up, fucked relationships with family, fucked finances, fucked your license and driving privileges, driving yourself into a black-hole of suicidal thoughts and addiction, and then you get to a place like rehab, where you NEVER in a million years thought you would end up, and finding out that there’s this entire worldwide organization where people actually organize themselves, read about, believe in, practice on a daily basis, and commit themselves to a program. Then imagine meeting someone that you relate to, and you realize you’re actually not in the wrong place, you’re right where you need to be. Then you find out, wow, this person has been doing this for 30 years… I don’t want to do that! And you keep learning things like… only 3-5% of alcoholics/addicts actually recover in the long run, that more than half of people in treatment are there NOT for the first time, and this is a life-long commitment you have to be willing to make. Someone tells you… ‘you know, you can never drink again,’ and your first thought is literally ‘I’m going to die.’ Then you start making ultimatums to yourself, like ‘well, if I get cancer, I can surely drink then’ or ‘When I’m finally 80, then I can drink.’ You realize that you actually don’t know yourself, like at all, and you have all these emotions and feelings and thoughts that you haven’t had in years, possibly decades. You realize ‘I’ve got a lot to do, and I’m stuck here.’ You realize you’re going to be stuck there for a long time, and what’s going to take even longer, is fixing all the fucked up shit you did to yourself.
When I got to know Marge, all of that occurred to me, like all at once.
Anyway, so I left Gateway before Marge did, and pretty much went to straight to the 12 Step House.
About a month later, the managers at the 12 Step House let us know where about to take in another roommate. They tell us her name is Marge.
Now, since there’s not a lot of Marge’s in the world, I have a pretty good feeling I know who is going to walk through that door. Sure enough, Marge walks in.
I ask, “Did you stay at Gateway all that time?!”
She says, “No, insurance cut me off about a week after you left. I went home with D [boyfriend] and I relapsed, and I realize I need to get out of that environment if I have any chance of getting myself better.”
I am super excited there’s someone I already know moving in with us. I can’t wait to catch up with Marge and get all the deats on what happened at Gateway with who and what after I left. I also realize we’ve got a damn good cook in the house.
Shortly after Marge moves in, I see another side of her I didn’t expect to see.
One night, she is pacing around the house, hands on her head, talking to herself like ‘oh man, what am I gonna do now? God please help me! I don’t know what to do! I don’t know how to handle this!’
I tried to ask what was going on, but after realizing I was in above my head to try and help, I left her alone with her imminent breakdown.
She goes into the office where the case managers were at the 12 Step House. I see her breakdown… a total breakdown of heavy sobs and gasps of air. They close the blinds so we can no longer see what’s going on in the office.
I don’t know what went on that night, and I don’t know what caused the breakdown, but shortly after that, Marge was gone for a week.
It was very abnormal for a resident to be gone and their room and belongings left as-is because the 12 Step House had a huge waiting list. We were told she would return but weren’t given any other details.
She came back eventually, with bags of belongings in hospital bags. Clearly, she had been at the hospital, but for what?! I correctly assumed it was a relapse, sadly.
Apparently, she just had enough one day and went to the park with lots of booze. She got so plastered that the cops had given her tickets for indecency and public nuisance (or something of the like). She had spent the night in jail, then was sent to the hospital for detox and several days in the psych ward, and had returned to our house with a pending court date.
I felt bad for her. Like, it’s one thing to slip. It’s another to slip, fall, and be kicked while your down. I realize she did this to herself, but as an alcoholic, sometimes we just don’t do what a rational person would. As an alcoholic, I think that while the decision to go to the park and buy booze was hers, the decisions made after that very first sip were not hers and she was no longer in control — alcohol and the demons that alcohol awakens were in control.
Fast forward…
Now I’m living in Chicago a year and a bit later, in a new sober living house, finally having surrendered to alcohol. That thought of “just one more” got me and all of that nonsense is detailed in the blog posts starting with “Relapse”.
I get on the bus to go to work one day, and when we stop to pick up other passengers, I see a familiar face. It’s Marge!!!!
She’s moved into another sober living house in Chicago, and is giving sobriety a go again. I am elated to see her, I am so happy she’s alive!
We had a short talk because she had to get off the bus soon after.
One of the things I admire about Marge is her willingness to keep trying. She’s been battling alcoholism for 30 years, has been sober and then relapsed time and time again, but (at least to my knowledge) she STILL hasn’t given up. This disease of addiction is SO POWERFUL that when you are sober, the disease keeps growing stronger, and when you go back to drinking/drugging, you’re immediately worse off than you were before. Knowing that she’s gone from abstinent to drunk to abstinent again, I can’t imagine (and don’t want to imagine) the courage and bravery it takes to once again say ‘I need help.’
I think of her from time to time and I pray that she is OK. I pray she’s still sober and is counting down to her year anniversary. I haven’t seen her since that day, so I don’t know if she’s even still around Chicago. Even though I have her phone number, I decide to keep her at an arm’s length and let the Universe decide when we cross paths, for my own sobriety’s sake.
I pray I don’t have to move back into sober living again when I’m in my mid-forties, childless, single, and struggling, like she does. But that’s NOT to say I don’t admire her for it. She has the strength and the courage of a warrior.
It’s also worth mentioning that when you have friends in recovery, or just know of someone as an acquaintance, you happen to see them and think “wow they’re still alive!”…. hmph.
The other person I’ve been thinking about lately is a past roommate from the current sober living house I’m in, we’ll call her Susan.
Susan was another middle-aged woman, and again beautiful in her own way. She was single, but had an estranged teenage son. She would have had another child, but got an abortion in her late teens during a particularly heavy drugging stage. She grew up in an Army household that moved around quite a bit, and was adopted. She knew who her birth mother was, but didn’t grow up calling that person Mom, and hadn’t talked to her in 20 years. She had also served several years in prison, and had that ‘hard shell’ that people often get after being in that type of institutionalized environment.
While at the sober living house, Susan would show 2 sides of her personality. The first side was pure humility, knowing she didn’t know everything, and believed her purpose was to become a counselor and an author to share her heartbreaking story to the masses. The other side was, well, incredibly unpleasant, intimidating, belitting, know-it-all, “I’m better than you” mentality.
In AA they say that anyone can recover “if they have the capacity to be honest with themselves” and that some are “constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves,” and those people probably do not have the capacity to recover from addiction.
I truly believe Susan is a person who is constitutionally incapable of being honest with herself, and therefore, cannot recover. At least not until she can get brutally honest with herself.
When I moved in, Susan globbed on to me. She started doing things that I was doing, and roommates took notice. For example, when I first got here, I went to the library almost every day and I finished at the same pace. She started going to the library, checking out books, and reading. While it’s a very healthy habit and coping skill, and I’m glad I influenced her for the better if even just for a short time, other roommates would say to me “Judith, Susan’s starting do like mimic what you do and say. I’ve NEVER seen her pick up a book, and look at her now!”
For a while, the friendship was welcome. She knew how to get around Chicago, what areas to avoid and such, and I knew nothing about that. She had ideas of places to go and things to do, and I was open to the companionship. I didn’t realize at the time, but she invited me to do things that cost money, like a going for lunch or grocery shopping, and would guilt trip me into paying. She would say, “my paycheck comes Friday, I promise I’ll pay you back” or “I’ll do your chore for you if you can get me $20 worth of groceries to get me through the week.” Being very new in sobriety and having that niggling people-pleasing thing I talked about earlier, I obliged. As I said, I seek approval, and upon moving into the house it was clear that Susan was a big-dog around here, so of course, I wanted to get on her good side. I think I spent probably $200 on groceries, transportation, and lunch outings with her.
Then, I started feeling drained around her. I started quietly escaping the room she was occupying, purposely coming home late when I knew she would be home, going for a walk to have a cigarette instead of going on the back deck because she was already on the back deck. I was avoiding her because I felt like my personal batteries would drain rather quickly around her.
She wanted to talk about herself all the time. Anytime I tried to say something, I would get quickly interrupted with the ole “Well I do this and I do that…” Like, ok, I wasn’t asking for an opinion or even a response. I felt like I was a wall that she was talking at. I wasn’t a person she was conversing with, I was a wall that she was talking AT.
I think she started to take notice I was avoiding her, and she dealt with it by trying to control and manipulate me. One evening, she came home, all pissed about something. I was so over it. First, I could tell the instant she walked in the house with the way the door was closed. Second, I had enough of her whining and angry sides. Third, I had a long day that day and I just wanted some peace and quiet. I was still very new in sobriety and had a relatively short fuse.
She starts screaming about how she left her debit card in the ATM (like one of those ATMs that swallows your debit card when you’re making a transaction). I said “I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m sure the bank has it.” Other roommates chimed in with similar responses. Out of nowhere, she SCREAMS at me “Judith, I’m talking to YOU! What, do you not CARE THAT I LOST MY DEBIT CARD?! ALL MY MONEY COULD BE GONE! ANYONE COULD BE OUT SPENDING MY MONEY RIGHT NOW! HOW DO YOU NOT CARE!?!? GOD YOU’RE SO SELFISH!”
At this point, I walked out the door to escape the room that was closing in on me with all the screaming and belittling that was going on. Several roommates follow me out. I start to tear up because I hadn’t been screamed like that for a long time, especially when I know I didn’t do anything worth a screaming-at for. Other roommates try to make me feel better, saying ‘she shouldn’t have gone off on you like that, I think she went off on you because she knows your trying to get away from her and it’s making her feel insecure. You’re the only person that’s paid attention to her in months.’
Ugh… so at this point I feel bad, I feel like I shouldn’t have walked away and just let her talk (or yell, or scream) about leaving her debit card in the ATM. She has no one she can talk to. I’m the only one that even pays attention to her.
So, a few days later, she comes up to me and gives me a tearful apology about how she’s working on her anger and she’s really sorry she blew up on me and that I didn’t deserve to be treated like that. We hugged, and I walked away like, well my mind is pretty much made up that you’re not so great to be around, so I’m a-gonna keep you at a distance.
Two-sides — the one angry, intimidating, red-hot rage side, and the other, tear-filled apology, humble side. These two sides showed themselves quite often, day after day, and it was no wonder I was the only one that paid attention to her after a while.
I felt (and still feel) bad for her. She has so much emotion and mental illness (bipolar, depression) that goes unaddressed. She runs the people that care for her into the ground and then she walks all over them and then she wonders why no one listens to her. I can’t imagine being so wrapped up in myself and so sick (for lack of better words) to not realize that I’m perpetuating my own madness. Her ‘hard shell’ doesn’t allow too many people in, and once people are in, they are in the grips of Susan. I feel bad that she has so many demons to conquer, all while battling mental illness and addiction.
Well, while she was in this house, she achieved over a year and a half of sobriety. It wasn’t her longest stint of sobriety, but that doesn’t matter – a year and a half is nothing to look down upon.
While she was here she was also on probation for theft, drug-related charges, and some other things. She completed her probation a few months before she left (aka, got kicked out).
While I was away from the sober living, in jail, I got word that she had left. Mind you, I was in jail so I had no idea what happened and I just assumed that she ‘dropped dirty’, meaning tested positive for drugs.
I come home and get the full story — she stole a helpless roommates (I say helpless because this woman that she stole from is 70-something years old) iPhone, and not only did she steal it, but proceeded to manipulate the WHOLE house into believing it was someone else.
Now, in the previous months, things had gone missing. Make up, perfume, $20 bucks here, $300 there. She was always adament that it wasn’t her, and was one of the new roommates or something. All along we had a suspicion it was her because she was just so adamant that it wasn’t her and in fact, she would get something stolen right after someone else had something stolen! How ironic.
The house manager evacuated every room in search for the missing iPhone, because Old Lady had a feeling it was Susan, but didn’t want Susan to feel singled out for fear Susan would cause her physical harm.
House Manager evacuates Susan’s room, and Susan attempts to bring her purse with her. House Manager says “purse stays here” and Susan puts up a fight about leaving her purse behind. Low and behold, the iPhone was in her purse, in the same case that the Old Lady had it in, but had been factory restored, resulting in a loss of all data, pictures, notes, etc. Old Lady was devastated because she didn’t know how to back anything up on her phone to the cloud, therefore, all this stuff was stored solely on her iPhone.
So, Susan gets kicked out for stealing. She probably stole much more than that, like all that missing money and shit, but she was caught red-handed with the phone so it was the phone that did her in.
Susan begs House Manager to let her stay, just for the night, so she doesn’t have to find a place to stay. House Manager says absolutely NOT, you are now a threat to everyone in this house, you must go now or I’m calling the police. Unfortunately, Susan was discharged from probation just days or weeks prior, so the incident would no longer be reported to a probation officer who could threaten jail or even prison time for violating probation.
So, Susan leaves. House Manager works with Susan (fun for her!) and provides us updates on Susan on occasion.
Recently, Susan relapsed. She picked herself up and dusted herself off for a short time, but House Manager says she hasn’t been to work in weeks. House Manager says she was caught stealing and went back to jail. House Manager says no other sober living home will take her because it is known, within the sober living community of Chicago, that this woman steals and is a threat to roommates.
I think about Susan in the sense that I’m on probation, and I’m not staying sober solely for the fact that I’m on probation. I’m staying sober for me, and me alone. When I’m off probation, I’m determined to not go back to the ways that got me on probation in the first place. I think about Susan as a reminder that I have to be BRUTALLY HONEST with myself about the lifelong struggle I will forever have to deal with that is sobriety. If I catch myself thinking ‘hmm, wine sounds like a good idea…’ I remind myself of what happened to Susan (and Marge) and I get real with myself, saying ‘wine sounds like death.’ If there’s one thing that AA preaches that is true to me, it is that I have to be rigorously honest with myself otherwise I’m constitutionally incapable of recovery.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Judith
A Day in the Life of Judith 