Accumulation
I listened to a podcast interview of Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian who has been, for the past 35 years, studying and writing about how budding aristocracies grab power and, eventually, destroy economies. I learned a lot and found the interview both fascinating and terrifying. But I missed some of what she said because I was distracted. I was distracted pondering the fact that I don’t have 35 years.
I study and write about intimacy and addiction. In 35 years I’ll be in my late 80s, and no one wants to read about sex from a person approaching the century mark, although Betty White cracked sex jokes all the way to the end. But I’ll be an old man, not an old woman, so where she sounded spunky and vibrant, I’ll just sound creepy and perverted.
The clarity of permanent sobriety is mostly a good thing. But the clarity brings with it a growing sense of lost potential. Like what if I started my half-century quest for knowledge in my 30s instead of my mid 40s?
As an active alcoholic, I was a compartmentalizer. Most people with a habit of incrementally fucking up their lives and relationships are. I would go along for a few weeks or a few months, drinking somewhat moderately and keeping things reasonably well in check, then I would overdo it – stay out late, make an ass of myself in public, or keep my wife, Sheri, up arguing through the night. I would sober up and begin apologizing and promising to be sober, or at least to keep my drinking under control. After a few days of licking my wounds and apologizing, I would feel pretty good, and I would box the whole incident, and the associated shame, neatly into a mental container and put it high on a brain shelf away from day-to-day access. And the cycle would start over. It was an endless loop, some variation of which most high-functioning alcoholics and their partners are painfully familiar.
But for my wife at the time, and for me now in retrospect, it was an accumulation of incidents, none of which were satisfactorily dealt with until I was years into alcohol-free healing. Compartmentalizing is just another form of stuffing down. Sure, I apologized and made a new plan to avoid catastrophe, but the new strategies always failed and my apologies fell on ears rendered deaf by years of trauma and broken promises. No matter how remorseful and sincere I was, it didn’t bring back the time lost in the cycle of addiction.
Lost time accumulated.
One of the most inspiring people I know earned her PhD just after turning 36. An impressive accomplishment in any circumstance, my friend did it while navigating the alcoholism of her husband and the most tragic ending imaginable. From what I can tell, most people who pursue doctoral studies earn their PhDs in their late 20s or 30s. A research PhD gives foundation and credentials pointing in a specific direction for the body of work the person plans to accumulate over the course of their career. Say, the next 35 years. It’s not glamorous or particularly lucrative, unless the person cures cancer or something. It is a noble career dedicated to standing on the shoulders of the people who came before in that particular field, and adding to our human understanding of something worth understanding.
I’m incredibly jealous of those who had the clarity and direction to pursue that path in their 20s or 30s. Not their mid 40s like me. I have a graduate degree, but not a PhD, because in order to do deep and impactful doctoral studies on sex and intimacy, you have to be willing to move to one of the handful of institutions that do that work. In my 20s or early 30s, I was untethered. In my 40s and 50s, I’ve built something I can’t justify leaving in pursuit of a younger person’s dream.
Am I experiencing a midlife crisis? I don’t think so. I’m not dissatisfied with my life. My marriage is stronger and more joyful than I ever imagined possible. My kids are smart, emotionally stable, and exploring all the decisions of early adulthood, and that is incredibly rewarding to witness. I love living so close to the mountains, and the connections I have made, both locally and around the world, are a blessing to this extrovert’s need to rub shoulders and share new ideas and experiences.
But despite my vivid awareness and thankfulness for my undisputable blessings (through luck and effort I truly believe I am in the top 1% of the top 1%), I am also becoming increasingly aware of opportunities lost to my alcoholism. Greedy much? Definitely. But goals, satisfaction, and regrets are a matter of perspective. Someone who is cold wants a coat, while someone with a closet full of coats, but only five NBA championships, never thinks about buying a new coat while in pursuit of that sixth ring (apparently there is lots of Michael Jordan in my social feeds lately – I could use an analogy of a constitutionally-ignorant dipshit pursuing a third term as president, but I don’t want to piss off 39% of my readers, so I won’t).
My point is that I am keenly aware of how lucky I am. But the work of recovery and growth also leaves me keenly aware of how much time and opportunity I wasted.
I thought I half-ass glided to a 3.0 undergraduate business degree in my early 20s. When I pulled my transcripts in my 40s to send to graduate schools, I realized I stumbled drunk across the finish line with a C+ average. When I cashed out my 401k because I thought I needed the money to navigate early days of small business ownership, what I really needed was to stop wasting hundreds of dollars a month on booze and to find a better fucking way to survive. We bought our three-bedroom house twenty years ago with full intentions to pop-the-top to make more space for our family of six. Not only did I “never get around to” the renovation, but I let the house fall into disrepair with tiles falling off the bathroom walls and desperate need for exterior paint before I got sober and got going on fulfilling my home-ownership responsibilities.
I don’t have more income now than I did back then. I just take two steps forward for every one step backwards now. Progress was elusive as a high-functioning alcoholic. My brain was too busy with the mental gymnastics of alcohol to be creative, inspired, determined, or effective. I spent my disposable brain capacity considering if I had, or had not, a problem with alcohol. I created elaborate rules around my drinking because I prioritized keeping the toxin in my life above all other goals. Those plans and rules and strategies and tactics took massive brain power, as did the regret and shame processing when my rules inevitably failed. The mental gymnastics of alcoholism devoured all of my brain power when temporarily sober, thinking about the next time I would drink or twisting the narrative from the last time I had over-consumed. There was no cranial capacity available for shower tile, much less putting a couple of bedrooms in the attic, when alcohol was part of my life.
So the regrets and missed opportunities accumulated. The C+ average on 4.0 potential. The evaporated 401k and the same house floor plan from two decades ago. Starting a career fifteen years too late because my curious mind was previously too busy to be curious. It all adds up.
So I am simultaneously in the best place I’ve ever been, and also far less financially stable than I could be while playing catch-up in my understanding of the things I yearn to understand.
My realization about accumulation adds to my discomfort with the word, “recovery.” We can never recover lost time, lost opportunity, lost relationships, or lost momentum. We can get sober and stop taking two steps backwards for every one step forward, but there are things lost to addiction that can never be recovered. Awareness of the accumulation factor must add to our universal understanding of the perils of alcohol.
We all know that alcohol crushes families, results in DUIs and other legal consequences, ruins people financially, has deadly medical consequences, and leads to job loss and career destruction. But I have uncovered some additional repercussions of alcohol consumption that need to be added to the discussion.
Alcoholics are 18 times more likely to rape their partners than the rape that occurs in the general population according to my research (survey of 337 partners of alcoholics) compared to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey for 2010 (the most recent year for which data is available). Eighteen times more likely to rape. That is a staggering statistic. Also mind-jarring is my research that reveals that 38.6% of relationships experiencing alcoholism are sexless or near-sexless, 2.4 times the rate of the general population. Over a third of partnerships navigating high-functioning alcoholism have given up on, or are repulsed by, sex.
Add that to the reasons given two paragraphs ago to stay the hell away from alcohol. Stay away, that is, if you don’t want to look back on your life and consider the accumulation of consequences.
Sometimes a person gets drunk and falls off a bridge and dies. Much more often, the fall takes decades of accumulated compartmentalized incidents. Everything from house projects that you “never quite got around to,” to climbing on top of your partner while she was sleeping, and finding that she was too paralyzed to resist much, so you kept going. You probably think of it as an overdue act of marriage. There is a four letter word that accurately describes it in a much more concise way.
I bounced back. I am in a better position than when I started exploring alcohol in high school. There is simply no doubt about that. I have my health, my family, and a bright future. But I also have something new to write about. Something to add to the list of consequences of alcohol. My life is great, but it could have been so much better. I didn’t suffer legal consequences. I never got divorced and I didn’t lose my career. I didn’t suffer a financial collapse, and I didn’t destroy my liver.
But as lucky as I am, I didn’t get out without consequences.
I can’t ignore my accumulation.
If you are ready to deal with your accumulation, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety for high-functioning alcoholics in recovery.