Category: Staying Sober

In the book Alcoholics Anonymous, the second chapter is called “There Is A Solution”. On page 25 of that chapter, there is a paragraph that opens with “There is a solution”. But what is that the solution to? In other words, what is The Problem?

I go to a lot of AA meetings. And at many of those meetings, I hear a lot about not drinking. I hear that the problem is alcohol. But what if the problem isn’t alcohol?

I realize that question is provocative to ask in an AA meeting. I ask that question because I quit drinking a number of times. Every time I started again. Every time I quit drinking, it seemed to me that my life got worse, not better. The whole “don’t think, don’t drink and go to meetings” was not working for me.

I have a number of addictions. A brief list includes alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling, spending. Maybe food too. Maybe internet doom scrolling. I’ve attended meetings for four of those addictions. I gravitate towards anything that provides a dopamine hit and a minute of distraction.

When I first started attending AA meetings, I abstained from drinking and taking drugs for about 4 months. And my life got worse. I got worse. I didn’t have my pain medicine anymore (alcohol and drugs) but I still had all of the pain.

After a meeting one night, I asked my sponsor what to do to recover from alcoholism, and he said “you need to work the Steps”. And it changed my life. Now my life didn’t get perfect. But it started to change. I started to change. And the obsession to drink and take drugs was lifted.

What working the Steps did for me was to help me understand The Problem. I learned that the problem wasn’t alcohol. It wasn’t drugs. It wasn’t pornography or gambling or the internet.

It was my alcoholism. It was me.

I wasn’t happy when I learned that. Far from it. I learned that I have a void. People call it “a hole in my soul”. For me it is a sense of “Not Enough”. I read in a Patrick Carnes book on sex addiction “Out of the Shadows” a phrase (and I’m paraphrasing here) that Carnes core message was “I am not enough, there isn’t enough, the world is not a safe place, and my needs can only be met with sex”. I related to that.

I had been trying to meet all of my needs with a combination of alcohol and drugs and sex and spending and porn and….whatever. Whatever I could pour into the hole in my soul to temporarily help me feel like I was enough. And none of it worked. And I became addicted to all of it.

I also learned that I couldn’t just “stop drinking and go to meetings”. That wasn’t a solution for me, and I didn’t know why. Now I do. I now understand that The Solution is a spiritual solution to a spiritual malady.

Part of my spiritual solution comes from connecting with all of you. By trying to be authentic, and transparent, and by trying to help others.

Thank you for letting me share!

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

I wrote this essay for another site. I wrote about how some people approach life one way, and other people approach life a different way.

I think the lessons apply for those who are recovery. As you are reading this, instead of asking “how much money do I need in retirement?”, maybe ask “how hard do I have to work at my recovery?”

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

I read a fable when I was young called The Ant and The Grasshopper. In the fable, the ants worked and saved every day, and the grasshoppers played and enjoyed their time in the sun. The grasshoppers teased the ants, because the grasshoppers were having a lot of fun in the sun.

The ants kept storing food, and the grasshoppers told the ants “don’t worry-there is enough!”

Until winter came.

I am an ant. I work and I save, and I plan for winter.

But I watch the grasshoppers, and it looks like they are having fun.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am having an affair with a lady who works for our local financial services firm. This firm was founded by some super-ants. She is a super-ant. She has worked for this company for about 15 years. So we save a lot.

But I struggle with “how much do we need to save, and how much is enough?” Some days I want to be a grasshopper and purchase a Porsche, and other days I want to be a super-ant and find pennies in the sofa and rush them to the bank.

How much is enough?

I have read that 50% of all Americans have saved nothing for retirement.

How much do we need for retirement? That is an ant question. There are a lot of ways to answer it, so I will share one way.

One calculation is to take your current annual spending, and multiply it by 20. That is an estimate the amount of savings that can last all of your retirement. That allows an approximate 3-4% withdrawal every year, forever, assuming that your investments gain 3-4% a year.

For example, if your annual spending is $100,000, then you need $100,000 x 20, or $2,000,000, saved for retirement. If you withdraw 4% of that a year, you withdraw $80,000. Hopefully Social Security fills in the rest.

But 50% of Americans have nothing saved.

What happens to the grasshoppers when winter comes?

A generation ago, companies provided pension plans to their employees. An employee who worked his/her entire life at a company could retire with a pension that provided for a reasonable retirement.

But about 25 years ago, companies started eliminating pensions (called defined benefit plans), and started moving towards employee-funded programs, like 401ks (called defined contribution plans). Defined contribution plans require employees to take charge of their own savings.

That approach works well for ants. It doesn’t work well for grasshoppers. It also doesn’t work well for people who don’t make enough to save 10% or more of their annual income.

How much is enough?

I have met people who have lived in refugee camps. I know a couple of people who have been homeless, one of them for over a year. Some of my relatives lived through the Great Depression. Some friends have been in war zones.

These are people who did not have much. But they don’t seem to struggle with the concept of “not enough” in their lives. But I do.

I was getting a haircut on Wednesday night, and the woman cutting my hair said “God will provide”.

Really? What about for my friends who were homeless? What about for the people in refugee camps? None of them chose to be there, and some of them were really smart, really hard working people, who were caught up in circumstances.

What about “God helps those who help themselves”.

Maybe. Let me think about it.

I drive 120 miles roundtrip every day for work. I don’t recommend it, but I have a great gig, which happens to be in Princeton. So I drive.

There aren’t many gas stations on my route. The middle 50 miles has no gas stations at all. So I have to be conscious of how much gas I have left.

How much is enough?

About twice a year, there is a “mother of all traffic jams” on my commute. A truck overturns, spilling its contents on the road. Or there is an accident with a fuel spill and a car fire.

Whatever the cause, a couple of times a year, my ride turns into an adventure. And “how much gas do I have” becomes an issue.

During one of these traffic jams, I spent 4 hours in the car. I saw several people who ran out of gas, pushing their cars to the side of the road.

So I make it a practice to always have at least 180 miles of gas in the car in the morning for my 120 mile commute.

Mrs. Urchin took my car out last night, and left it with 175 miles of gas.

So I stopped at the gas station this morning. Because I don’t want to run out of gas on the Pennsylvania Turnpike during the mother of all traffic jams.

With love,
The Recovering Urchin

I wrote this essay for another site. I am posting it here, because it applies for people in recovery. My experience is that the average result in life isn’t what I want. My experience is also that the average result in Alcoholics Anonymous is not what I want.

Think about that when you read this essay. Do you want the average? Or do you want something better than that?

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

The Law of Averages is a principle that states that a large randomly selected subgroup is likely to reflect the population as a whole. For example, if 10% of the entire population is left-handed, then it is likely that 10% of a randomly selected large group will also be left-handed.

But that law doesn’t work with small sample sizes.

Like my family.

Sometimes I have a conversation that starts with “most people don’t live the way we do”. Allow me to explain.

Do an internet search on any of the following lifestyle behaviors- diet, exercise, smoking, drinking, saving/spending, TV watching, etc. Type in “the average American ____” for any of those behaviors.

The average American watches 35 hours of TV a week. Five hours of TV a day.

The average American marriage lasts 8 years. The American divorce rate is 40-50 percent. (Are all of the remaining marriages happy marriages? Probably not.) So the average marriage may not result in divorce- but it doesn’t look very happy, either.

The average school loan debt just passed $30,000. The median American household (not individual- household) salary was just under $52,000. Meaning if two partners each have $30,000 in school loans, in a house with the median income….well, it’s going to take a long time to pay those school loans.

The average American savings rate is about 3%. But the median (the most frequent) savings rate is 0%. I just read online that 4/10 Americans have no emergency savings. None.

The average American male weighs 191 pounds, and his ideal body weight is 162 pounds.

18% of American adults smoke.

Only 3.2% of American adults are vegetarians.

Only 30% of Americans have a passport. Many of those with passports don’t use them. So the average American is never going to see London, or Paris, or Rome.

So what’s the point?

The point is that I live a different life than most people. Not better. Not worse.

But a lot different.

Have you ever seen the movie “The Matrix”? In that movie, Keanu Reeves does some time travel. He has an experience where he exists in a place, but he is separate from that place and the people who live there. He can see the other people who live in that place, but they can’t see him.

My experience is like that sometimes.

At our house, we sit down for dinner, and we talk about life in the Matrix. We don’t call it the Matrix, but that’s what it is.

We have two TVs in our home. This year I watched part of the Super Bowl, and part of a basketball game during the Final Four. That two hours of TV makes me the super-user of the TVs in our home. I cannot remember the last time anyone else in my family turned on a TV.

Try explaining to someone that you’ve never seen Seinfeld. Or Cheers. Or Friends. Never binge-watched a show, because you haven’t watched a show since the 1980s.

I have turned on a TV series since 1980.

We are all vegetarians at my house (except for my dog). Being a vegetarian isn’t rare anymore, but it isn’t that common. I recently ate at a restaurant that had no vegetarian main courses. The one “vegetarian” option had bacon in it. I’m not making that up. My daughter and I had to order a side salad as our main course.

As a result of our diet, we are all at our ideal body weight.

We avoid debt. Our hope is that our girls graduate college without any school loans. That’s the plan, and we are sticking to it.

We travel. Some people tell us that we travel a lot. I’ve travelled to 41 countries, a total of 105 times. My girls have been to 14 different countries so far. It’s what we do for fun, so it doesn’t seem like a lot.

I have been to 5 continents, and I have a trip planned to the sixth (in New Zealand) in six weeks. I’ve been to AA meetings in 14 countries on 4 continents. I’ll go to a meeting in New Zealand soon.

In the movie “The Incredibles”, the family has an adventure, and at the end, Violet is speaking with a young man. He tells her that she looks different.

She replies “I feel different. Is different ok?”

The young man replies “Different is great!”

I hope he’s right.

Have you ever found it more difficult to go to an AA meeting? Have you ever found it more difficult to go to the gym, or stick to a diet, or do anything else that you know is good for you?

So have I. In fact, I am going through one of those times right now.

I have an internal messaging machine that says “I don’t wanna”. It goes off any time I have to go to the dentist, or take my dog out for a walk when it is raining, or put on a suit and a tie.

Usually I don’t have that experience when it comes to going to AA meetings. I normally run to meetings. But right now, my energy is lower, I am kind of cranky, and I think “I don’t wanna go to a meeting”.

I should mention that I have this experience once in a while. Maybe it is the change of seasons, it is getting dark a little bit earlier in the evening, and there is less sunshine.

Whatever the reason, I feel an inner heaviness right now. Work seems more difficult, exercise seems more difficult, going to meetings seems more difficult.

It feels like gravity is 1.3x stronger right now than it normally is.

So what am I going to do about it?

I mentioned in the last section that I have this experience sometimes. Periodically I have an internal heaviness. What I do about it is that I ignore the messaging. I ignore the things that I tell myself, especially the negative stuff.

I put one foot in front of the other. Literally.

I map out my day, with a list of tasks that I am going to accomplish. Then I do those tasks.

I remember what I have heard so many times in meetings: “This too shall pass”. I know from experience that my inner darkness is a temporary things. It is just visiting, and it will get bored and go away.

Until then, I am going to a meeting tomorrow morning. I am going to exercise right after the meeting. Then I am going to take my dog to the park.

I will do the same thing the next day, too.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Whether I want to or not.

Because I will be a lot happier if I do.

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

My friend Michael suggested that I write about a couple of my blackouts. He thought it would be helpful for some of the newcomers visiting this site. Here is one of them.

So let me set the scene…..it was 1979, I was going to school in West Philadelphia. I was 17 years old, and I was working in a bar call Doc Watson’s. (Go back and read that again-I was 17, and working in a bar).

Doc Watson’s was a dive bar. College students could get a cheap pitcher of beer and a pizza for about $5. From Thursday night through Sunday night, the place was always packed. I waited tables, delivered pizza and beer to my classmates, and made at least $100 in tips every night. One hundred dollars a night was a lot of money forty years ago.

My shift was from 4pm until 2 am, two to three nights a week. The hours from 4pm until 9pm were kind quiet, with the pizza-eaters. At about 9pm, the beer drinkers came in, and the bartenders filled pitchers of beer as fast as they could.

Doc Watsons was where I learned to drink hard. Up until then, I had a casual approach to my drinking. But at this bar, we had 15 minutes (from 2 am until 2:15 am) to clean up, and drink as much as we wanted for free. Since there was only 15 minutes between 2 am and 2:15, I spent less time on “cleaning up”, and more time on “drinking as much as I wanted for free”.

Over the course of several weeks, I learned how to drink at least a pitcher of beer in that 15 minute period. I learned to drink fast. That didn’t seem to be a problem for me. I lived about 4 blocks from the bar. I would get drunk, and glide back to my dormitory with a buzz and a hundred dollars in my pocket.

One night I lost track of how much I had to drink. (Everything I am about to share with you has been told to me by other people). I probably had at least 1 1/2 pitchers of beer in 15 minutes. I walked out of the bar, and headed for the 38th Street Bridge, which was a pedestrian bridge along my route back to my dormitory.

The route that I was SUPPOSED to take was:

1) leave the bar, walk one block

2) turn left, cross the bridge, walk two blocks

3) turn right, go one block to my dorm

Two turns, four blocks. I had done this walk a hundred times. I still have the map imprinted in my brain.

But on this night in 1979, I made it to the bridge, and I got lost. I crossed over the bridge three or four times. A campus police officer approached me, and asked me if I was lost. I don’t know what I said to the police officer, but if I had been honest, I would have sung from Blind Faith’s song and sung “I am wasted, and I can’t find my way home”.

Looking back at that evening, there are several things that seem remarkable to me now:

I was four blocks from my dorm, I had walked that route a hundred times, and I was so blindly drunk that I got lost.

A police officer escorted me back to my dorm, and delivered me to my roommate.

I did not freeze to death. I did not fall off the bridge and die. I did not get arrested.

I saw nothing wrong with what had happened. Neither did anyone else. Not my school, not my roommate, not my co-workers. But especially not me.

I repeated most of that evening many more times while I worked at that bar.

Why do I write this for you?

If you are a newcomer, you should know that blackouts happen to alcoholics. Blackouts are memory losses that happen when we have way too much to drink. Normal drinkers don’t have blackouts, because normal drinkers don’t drink that much.

I didn’t know that. I didn’t realize that I had blackouts until I went to rehab and someone explained to me what was happening.

I haven’t had a blackout like that since I got sober.

If you get sober, you won’t have any more blackouts either.

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

The Grateful Dead played more than 2300 concerts between 1964 and 1995. They were known for their unique improvisational style, and also their unique way of bringing their music to their fans.

Most bands in the 1960s and 1970s recorded albums, and did a little bit of touring to support the sales of the album. The Grateful Dead did things the opposite way. They would do a little bit of recording, in order to support their ability to go out on the road and bring their music directly to their fans.

They loved playing their music in front of fans. They felt that what they were doing couldn’t be properly expressed in the confines of a recording studio. They enjoyed looking into the audience and seeing (and hearing) their fans singing along with songs that had never been recorded on an album. (When your fans know the words to songs that haven’t been recorded on an album, you have dedicated fans).

The Grateful Dead were the first band to allow their fans to tape their shows. That was revolutionary at the time. Their record company tried to stop the fans from recording, but the band said “once we play a concert, we are done with it-let the fans have it!” So many people wanted to tape their shows that the Grateful Dead set up a special section for tapers, called “The Taping Pit”. The taping pit at a Grateful Dead show typically looked something like this:

Deadheads would tape the shows of the Grateful Dead, and then listen to those tapes. They also would make copies of those tapes, and trade them with their friends. Most Deadheads initially heard the Grateful Dead by listening to these homegrown concert tapes.

The members of The Grateful Dead were initially surprised when they saw people recording their concerts and following them from town to town. They were amazed at the response, and the dedication required to tape them and follow them around.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I was one of those people that followed the band from town to town. I loved the idea that every show was different (they never played the same setlist twice), and even when they did play the same song a few days apart, that song would be played differently.

I went to a lot of Grateful Dead shows, because there was always the possibility of magic when the house lights went down.

Like the Grateful Dead, I am trying to make magic. But instead of making musical magic, I am trying to make recovery magic. Like The Grateful Dead, I want to give it away to as many people as I can. I love what I do. I am ridiculously lucky to be able to write for people who love to read my writing.

So if you want to set up microphones in The Taping Pit and record this, go ahead. If you want to share it with other people, go ahead. If you want to copy it and use it or read it to someone else, go ahead. The record company may not like it, but what does the record company know?

Eight weeks into the life of this site, we have an email subscription list, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and people are subscribing with an RSS feed. We will soon launch an Instagram page, because I think younger people will connect better that way.

Now it’s time for the house lights to go down. Let the magic begin….

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

On July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig stood in front of a full Yankee Stadium at his retirement ceremony, and said “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth”.

Remarkable words for a man who had been given a death-sentence diagnosis days before (Amylotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also now known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).

He later acknowledged that diagnosis by stating “so I close by saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for”.

I think of myself as the Lou Gehrig of recovery. I am the luckiest person I know on the face of the earth. On the one hand, I am an alcoholic and a drug addict. Those are two diagnoses that have grim prognoses. Everyone that I went to rehab with is dead. Many of the fellows I got sober with in my profession are dead. The same with members of my home group.

On the other hand, I have been sober all day today (ever since I woke up at 5 am, walked my dog, and went to a 6:30 a.m. meeting). I’ve been fortunate enough to be sober for about 10,385 days before that, too.

I am incredibly lucky. Maybe it is blessed, maybe it is grace, I don’t know what to call it. But I haven’t had a drink or a drug all day, I am a free man, my dog is asleep next to me, and I don’t have any problems in the world compared to the problems I had in the last 18 months of my active alcoholism.

There is a thought that I’ve heard shared in meetings near me. The thought is “if everyone in the meeting threw their problems onto the table, and had a choice of which set of problems to take back, I would take my own problems back”. That is absolutely true for me.

Do I have problems? Sure I do. Everyone does. But the problems that I have today are living problems. The problems I had in the last 18 months of my active alcoholism were drunk and junkie problems.

So again I say, Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth-the Lou Gehrig of Recovery.

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin

When I first started attending AA meetings, I thought that my problem was “just alcohol”. I understood that I had a drinking problem, but I thought that the rest of my life was ok. I still had a roof over my head, most of my bills were paid, and I had a decent job.

When I came to AA, I was practicing as a healthcare provider in my community. I asked for help in my profession, and they were very kind in providing help. I attended a Twelve-Step meeting of people in my profession, and they helped me find a detox and a rehab.

I did have an unusual situation when I left rehab. I was asked, as a condition of continuing employment in my profession, to sign a “recovery contract”. In order to continue practicing my profession, I had to agree to:

• attend 90 meetings in 90 days
• provide 2-3 urine screens weekly
• see a therapist one on one
• go to group therapy
• see a monitor from my profession at least once a month
• provide a written summary report of my recovery activity once a month

In order to maintain my professional license (and my career and my income) I had to agree to do all ofthose things for three years. I was really unhappy about having to do all of those things, but I didn’t really have a choice. My boss knew about my alcoholism, and signing the contract was the only way I could keep my job.

I did all of the things required of my contract (and a lot more). I attended hundreds of meetings in those first three years, provided every urine screen, attended every therapy appointment, and showed up every place I was supposed to show up to.

When the contract was coming up to the end of its three year period, I could not wait to go to the first AA meeting that wasn’t required. I couldn’t wait to demonstrate to others, and myself, that I was serious about sobriety. I couldn’t wait for “the training wheels to come off”.

I sometimes speak in paradoxes, and I am about to do so again.

I was not happy at all about having to sign that recovery contract. And I am so grateful that I did.

That recovery contract provided discipline in my life at a time that I sorely lacked discipline. That contract forced me to go places that i might not have gone on my own.

Discipline is defined as “orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior”. It was prescribed for me that I was supposed to show up certain places. Had that contract not been in place, I might not have survived.

If you’re thinking “wait—a contract? That sounds weird”, or “I totally disagree with the idea of a contract”, let me ask you the following questions. Suppose the pilot of your airplane is a recovering alcoholic. Do you want to know that that pilot is sober? Or are you willing to take a chance with your life? Suppose that the pediatric anesthesiologist for your child is in recovery, and is about to administer anesthesia to your child—do you want that anesthesiologist to be sober?

Of course you do. You may not think about it, but there are people who have healthcare jobs or transportation jobs who get sober and stay sober. And you and I have a right to know that, while they are practicing their professions, that they are sober.

That was the belief of the profession I was in when I got sober in 1990. I didn’t agree with them then, but I agree with them now.

On page 88 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous, it says “we alcoholics are undisciplined”. That is so true.

We really are. How do we get help for this? Right after, the book states “so we let God discipline us in the simple way we have just outlined”, which refers to the steps discussed in the chapter Into Action

(steps 4-11).

I realize that this essay may be provocative. Most people in recovery are in a situation where they ‘do things “on their own”. They are not in professions where they are required to sign contracts, and they don’t have discipline required of them.

At the same time, most people coming into the rooms of twelve step programs don’t get sober and stay sober.

I’d rather have had required discipline (and stay sober) than not have required discipline (and not stay sober).

With Love,
The Recovering Urchin