Truth Speaks When Noise Fades
I’ve always been drawn to the idea of helping oneself. My first introduction to the genre of self-help was through my father. He listened to Tony Robbins and other self-help tapes as he drove my sister and me to school. On the 15-minute drive, I soaked up little tidbits of motivation and absorbed methods on developing a refined inner knowing. It served as both practical knowledge and reference points through which my beloved Father and I could communicate on a deep level.
I was always inspired by people helping others through shared wisdom. I would take notes during church sermons in my journal. I also notated my favorite quotes, lessons, and sayings from a very young age. If I learned any helpful life tips, I wanted to spread the wealth and try to implement them in my life.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
I remember one of the tapes we listened to by Jim Kwik. He was teaching a memory tip called the Peg System. He first taught us to memorize objects from 1 to 20 to help us learn any list of 20 things. One was a lightpost, two- eye glasses, three- a yardstick, four- a car, five- a glove, six- a gun, seven- a plane, eight- an octopus, nine- a cat, 10- toes, and so forth. The system allows you to attach something to the stationary objects in your mind so you remember them. As a middle schooler, this was such a cool and applicable concept. It was also a refreshing use for my mind, which was becoming increasingly occupied by constant stress.
My Mother, an alcoholic, was increasingly becoming out of control. The chaos that surrounded her could be consuming at times. Even when my Father separated from her, the chaos was always a phone call away. It was at this time that I started attending Al-Anon with my Father and older sister. This twelve-step program for families of alcoholics was a lifesaver during this period. I could not soak up enough of the wisdom shared in those rooms. This is where I learned the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I can distinctly remember realizing through this prayer that what I could not change was other people, and what I could change was me. The concept freed me because it depersonalized what I had been trying to shift as a child of an alcoholic- everything but myself. I also realized how much worse off some other people’s circumstances were. Good people were living through terrible shit in and out of those Al-Anon rooms. Some of it was far worse than my stuff, and it helped me to learn how blessed I was. It also validated for me that I had been resilient through massively challenging experiences, particularly for my age.
Fast forward thirty years. I have two marriages, three daughters, and a few careers under my belt. But what I also have, ironically, is a unique journey into sobriety. On December 27, 2021, I decided the half-drunk glass goblet of wine I was consuming and would make me feel like shit the next morning, was poison to me. I was eating correctly, exercising daily, taking my vitamins and antidepressants and didn’t understand why I still felt like crap. The lightbulb went on that I was mixing a chemical depressant with my antidepressant. It was extra calories, made me have cravings, put me almost instantly to sleep and I would wake up with a hangover no matter how much I drank. I didn’t know then, but I know now, I was an alcoholic because I used the drug to mask my pain, although only temporarily each night. When I chose to stop drinking, I realized how much I used it for mental pain because that is when I craved it the most. I craved it when my kids were being too much, when I had a long day, when I was stressed at an airport, or when I was alone or bored.
I started drinking socially at 15, and I had been considering stopping drinking for decades. But I had this moment of clarity, which allowed me to see how harmful it was to myself, and more importantly, those around me. I told myself it was just a little here or there, but I poured myself a big glass or two and indulged on holidays of course. I decided I was abusing myself, my body and my family and it had to end right there and then. I would try it for a year and see what happened.
Once I recognized this and saw alcohol as a poisonous chemical that was equal to me drinking gasoline, bleach, or arsenic, I was able to move forward. It wasn’t easy- more for another post later. I still occasionally crave that escape for my mind through a substance. Now I crochet, paint, take a nap, walk, or do yoga. But more importantly, what I had in place when I stopped drinking was being a year into graduate school. My brain, which I now recognize as needing a lot of stimuli, was occupied with challenges and a goal. Stopping drinking during this time helped tremendously because there was something to take up the mental space that drinking occupied.
Another tool was joining a Facebook group of sober mothers. There are tens of thousands of members in the group. Some women are sober-curious, some are struggling to keep one day sober, and some have years of sobriety under their belt. On this page, I have observed many intelligent, creative, and caring women struggling to get sober. My researcher brain has rudimentarily narrowed down their challenges to;
Sharing about sobriety before it has been lived through.
Not dealing with the reasons one drinks.
Replacing the drinking behavior/s with something productive
The first challenge is that we cannot boast about being sober until we have been sober, except among a few super-supportive people. I know first-hand that people who don’t get it will be defensive, they will want you to stay who you were, or they will not be supportive in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. This isn’t helpful in your journey of sobriety.
I will never forget being on a long car ride home from LA and the sobriety subject coming up with a mom friend. Our daughters were in another car with two other moms, and it was just us in traffic with lots of time to talk. A year into my sobriety and five years into this friendship, I felt safe talking about putting down the booze. When I told her I was celebrating a year sober, she was defensive. The topic became about the quantity she drank, how she needed to cut back, and how I should talk to her mother about why I don’t drink, because it would help them all. It was a big pile of denial and deflection rather than the positive experience I was trying to share. Naturally, I didn’t tell anyone else about my sobriety for another year.
The following person I told, a trusted friend of a decade, was curious about my journey, then gently questioned if I was really an alcoholic. He asked if I could honestly claim sobriety when some people go through hell with rock bottoms and Alcoholics Anonymous. He implied he had never seen this with me, so I should be careful when talking to other alcoholics who have hit rock bottom and been in AA. If I had not had two years of sobriety under my belt, this is the kind of crap that could derail my progress. No one gets to define your journey. You get to send this kind of criticism down the same drain as superficial flattery, which is precisely what I did.
Secondly, if we are not dealing with why we drink - what behaviors we are masking through the behavior - then they will come back to haunt us. Therapy and support groups are massively helpful in dealing with the underlying issues behind our self-medication with alcohol.
Third, and maybe most important, is replacing the alcohol and all the mental, social, and physical space it takes up in our lives with something meaningful. Alcohol and alcoholism are just symptoms of a dis-ease. We are in disorder about something, so we ease the pain with a little bit of poison that kills the pain, but also takes a little something away from our existence in exchange.
When there are overwhelming and unsettling issues in our lives, such as marriage, children, job, future, past, or present, and we are temporarily numbing our minds, day after day, we are not at ease. I am not saying the answer is that everyone can or should stop drinking or get a graduate degree like I did. I was fortunate enough to have my lightbulb moment and a tuition benefit through my employer, which led me down this path.
In my experience, it is helpful when we do something new and different that replaces what we numb ourselves to. So, how do we find something to take the place of the drinking and all that it encompasses in our lives? The first place to look is at things we loved to do as children. What could you escape into where the time would pass and you didn’t even notice?
I never would have imagined that my love of rocks as a child would be something other people share, yet it is, and there is a name for it-Rockhounding. I have gone to Michigan eight times in the last five years and found many groups of people on Facebook who also love this activity. It’s meditative, therapeutic, and I lose track of time when I am rockhounding. I have also rekindled my love of watercolor painting since being sober. Time disappears when I am painting, and it helps me to set my mind right in a way that work, writing, and other activities do not. Plus, I have created something beautiful that I can tangibly hold and share with others.
If you should decide to stop numbing your pain, the chaos may get louder before it gets quiet, but it’s worth it. As with the necessity of making a mess to clean out a closet, you will eventually begin to hear yourself again. You may find a voice that is not just shaped by survival or drowned in other people’s expectations, but the one that has been there since the beginning. Sobriety gave me the space to rediscover this. It taught me that healing is less about cutting away the past than it is about weaving it into something more honest. I no longer measure my life by what I’ve managed to escape from, but by what I now choose to move toward.
