This is the step where a lot of people say “I’m out” and tell AA to fuck off forever. I don’t blame people who don’t or can’t dredge up every horrible memory from their past. People have different experiences of trauma, and confronting everything at once isn’t always healing; there’s a good chance it will only induce more shame. But for many people (myself included), there’s another element at play: Resentment serves a valuable, even protective, purpose. When I was drinking my guts rotten, I didn’t want to think about the damage I was doing to other people with my behavior.
People always say drinking helps you ignore the consequences of your behavior, and that is absolutely true. That may be alcoholism’s number one selling point. The problem is that when you quit, it’s not like anyone throws you a fucking parade. The best you can hope for is that they’ll forgive you eventually. But for a while, you really do just have to do the work and wait. At sixty days sober, I was like a burn victim walking around in brand-new skin—a falling leaf, or a suspicious glance from Josh, could have crushed me. Six months in, facing some of that stuff felt . . . well, not good, exactly, but like pouring peroxide onto a wound. It hurts, you marvel at the bubbles, you bandage it up and wait for it to heal.
It took a full day to read all my lists out loud and discuss them with Dallana (step 5) and an evening to carry the inch-thick pile of papers to the beach, where she planned to have me burn them (step 6). We drove in a blinding late-fall downpour to Alki Beach in West Seattle—a sandy stretch of shore that, on an ordinary night, looks out across Elliott Bay at the postcard skyline of Seattle. Tonight, though, the view was obscured by driving rain, and as we staggered out onto the wet sand, the raindrops battered the hood of my black L.L.Bean windbreaker like a jackhammer. We scanned the long expanse of the beach, searching for anything that looked like shelter. “There!” I shouted. “Look! Is that a bonfire?” Improbably, it was—a mile, it seemed, down the barren beach, in the middle of a deluge.
We ran back to the broad sidewalk that runs along the beach and started hurrying toward the flicker, and by the time we got there, we were soaked to our socks. I hung back, a little embarrassed. “Hey, excuse me, do you mind if my friend and I use your bonfire for just a second? We need to burn something,” Dallana said, addressing a group of people gathered around a cooler under a rickety awning. It took a minute to get their attention. “Oh my god, yes, totally!” the lone woman in the bunch finally exclaimed, staggering our way. “Would you like a beer?” “No thanks, we’re good, we just need to borrow your fire,” Dallana responded. “We were surprised to see someone out here with a bonfire on a night like this!” I added.
“Oh, yeah, me and these guys, we do this every single Wednesday, no matter what!” the woman slurred, beer sloshing over the rim of her Solo cup. Her companions, all guys, nodded, looking bored. “Come sit down on my lap, Stephanie,” one of them cajoled. Stephanie grabbed another beer and flopped down next to him. “You guys should join us!” she said. “Thanks, maybe we will,” Dallana replied. We threw the papers in the bonfire, where they turned into ash almost instantly.
Thirty-four
Clearing the Wreckage
The steps are not a requirement for getting sober. But going through the steps was important for me—if I was going to try AA, which seemed like a pretty good idea since nothing else had worked, I had to try it with my whole heart. So I embraced the stuff that made intuitive sense to me—cataloguing the “wreckage of my past,” as the Big Book puts it, and letting it go—and when something annoyed me or felt ridiculous, I just rolled with it. I knew there was no magic to any of this, but I did it because it couldn’t possibly hurt. Left to my own devices, I would be passed out on top of a bottle somewhere, or in another hospital emergency room with an IV taped to my arm. Fuck it, I thought. I’ll memorize another goddamn prayer if it keeps me from that.
I don’t believe in the power of prayer to change anything material in your life. I don’t even know if I believe in God—certainly not a God so small and petty as to care whether I, Erica C. Barnett of Seattle, get the job I want or get sober or continue to exist. What I eventually came to believe is that there is a power in the universe beyond my understanding, and that when my own life becomes too large for me, I feel better if I give some of those things up to whatever’s out there. I just say, “Here you go. I can’t take these. You hang on to them for a while.” Or I focus on someone else, especially when I don’t want to. I find that praying for people—something as simple as, “I’m sending good energy out into the world for this person”—makes my own life easier to bear. Usually, by the time I’ve spent a few minutes thinking about other people and letting go of my problems, I find that I’m ready to face them. I don’t know why it works. It just does.
If you think AA made me get religion or turn all pious, let me disabuse you: AA, at least at the meetings I go to in this godless corner of the country, is about the least pious place I’ve ever been, and talk of Jesus (or any specific religion) is strictly discouraged. When I talk about prayer, I really do mean: Talk to whatever you believe in, even if it’s your friends who’ve supported you or the mystery of the universe or the power of science to solve all the remaining mysteries. Here’s my favorite, which Dallana taught me when I told her how angry I still was at James: Hey, God. You know that motherfucker? I’m praying for him. And goddamned if it didn’t make me feel better—just praying for that fucker, whoever he or she happened to be. I may not believe in a God who cares about every grain of sand and blade of grass, but I do believe that it’s free will that gives us the ability to let something bear down on us our whole lives or let it go. Hey, God? That fucker? Praying for him. Willpower alone won’t get anyone sober, but it can keep you from getting maudlin about all the work you have cut out for you once you are. “Think of how much work you did every day to stay drunk all the time, and put just as much effort into doing this work,” Dallana told me, and, to the best of my ability, I did.
And then I started making amends. This, if you’re following along in your books, is the dreaded ninth step, the one they tell you not to worry about until you get to it, at which point you will worry about it a lot. Maybe you’ve been the bewildered recipient of a call from someone you haven’t heard from in years, nervously asking you to meet for coffee because they have something they need to tell you in person. “No, I know, but it’s really important.” “Okay, what is it?” “Well . . . I’ll tell you when we meet.”
To get started, Dallana had me divide my list of everyone and everything I resented into three columns: The people to whom I would definitely make amends; the people to whom I might make amends; and the people to whom I would definitely never make amends. When I was finished, there were more than fifty names. “Okay. You’re gonna make amends to all of these people.” At this, I barked a laugh. Make amends to my birth mom, whom I was ready to never see again if it meant avoiding the shame of acknowledging what had happened between us over the holidays? “But not yet. For now, we’re going to start with this list.” Phew. At least I wouldn’t have to start with “randos from Linda’s,” the bar where I used to pick up guys at 2:00 A.M.; that amend was in the future, in the “maybe” pile. She handed me the page on which I’d written the “easy” ones—Sandeep, who’d loaned me $6,300 to pay off a debt collector; my parents; my friends Josh and Lisa and Stephanie and my new friend, Renee, who’d shown up at my apartment with soup shortly before I went back to Fairfax—and told me to close my eyes and put my finger on the page.
“Really? I have to start with John?”
“Good a place as any.”
John was a tough one. For one thing, I was still pissed at him. And rightly so! That fucker—I thought to myself—never loved me, never had any intention of leaving his wife, manipulated me into abandoning relationships that had real potential. . . . And then I stopped. Making amends is supposed to be about the other person, not my ego, right? What better place to start, then,
than with someone who would be a real challenge? I wrote out what I was going to say in the form of a letter. My first draft began:
Dear John,
I think you’re pretty familiar with how these things work, but if you aren’t, here’s the deal: Leaving aside any wrongs I think you did to me, I’m telling you what I feel I need to own up to on my part from the time before, during, and after we were seeing each other, before and after everything fell apart.
First, I think I need to address the fact that I was drinking during a significant portion of the time we were seeing each other, after the point at which I said I had stopped. This probably won’t surprise you, but I had a lot of relapses in the years after 2008, when I first tried to quit drinking, and I deceived you by not telling you what was going on. There were times when I wasn’t really present for you like I should have been, both when we were together and when we were apart and arguing or doing things to make each other jealous or having innocuous conversations in which I wasn’t, if I’m honest, 100% there.
It went on like that for several pages.
I showed the letter to Dallana and she just laughed and laughed. “This is all about you! You need to make it about him. I want you to rewrite this and take out everything that’s about what he did to you, and just talk about what you did, and say you want to make amends, and end by asking him how you can make things right.”
So I did. I apologized for being drunk all the time, and for flaunting the fact that I was having sex with other people, and for a dozen more things I had done, unintentionally and on purpose, to make him miserable. And I got through it. Sitting stiffly across from him at my kitchen table in the new apartment—paper shaking, rushing through it, barely able to look him in the eye—I read the letter, asked him what I could do to make it right, and burst into tears. I can’t tell you I remember what he said—probably something about not lying to him in the future, and just staying sober. “Well, I should go,” he probably said, and I probably said, “Okay,” and he probably opened the door, his mop of hair, now turning silvery, grazing the frame as he turned toward the stairs. What did I want in that moment? An acknowledgment? An apology? For him to say, “I really did love you” in a way that seemed either totally convincing or satisfyingly fake? Whatever it was, I didn’t get it. Instead, I was left with a feeling that I had done the hardest possible thing, and that I’d have to do it another twenty, forty, fifty times before this voice—the one that told me I had done things that were simply unforgivable—would quiet down.
But I was wrong.
It only took another three weeks before I started to understand why making amends to people was worth it. (I get why apologizing is important—I’m not a monster—but the systematic process of making things right was just a completely new concept for someone who once started writing a life-skills book called Half-Assing It. You can probably guess what happened to that one.) Operating from the same instinct that used to get me out of bed at six to hit the gym before work, I had decided to get the hardest calls out of the way first. That meant my dad was next—Dad with whom I never shared a personal detail, Dad to whom I had once blurted drunkenly, “It just seems like you don’t even love me!” Dad who is the most rational, least squidgy person I know.
“Hi, Dad?”
“Hang on, let me put in my Bluetooth. . . . I’m just out here at this hotel we’re working on, and you would think that someone would have communicated to them that they needed to move everybody out of here before we came in to refinish all the bathrooms, but there are people just living here, and we’re not gonna be the ones to give them the eviction notice—”
“Dad!”
“Yup?”
“I’m calling for a kind of serious reason. Do you have a minute to talk?” (Thinking: I bet he thinks I’m calling to ask for money. Again.)
“Sure, lemme just go in this other room where I can talk. . . . What’s up?”
“So, I want to make amends to you for the way I’ve treated you over the years, including when I was drinking but also before that, when I just wasn’t grateful enough to you for all you did.”
“Okay.”
We’ve all been there, right? That moment when you start confessing to something and you realize you can’t turn back—the second after you say, “We need to talk,” or “I have to tell you something,” and the other person sits there waiting in anticipation, not knowing if the next words out of your mouth will be “I’m cheating on you” or “We have to break up” or “I’m pregnant”? I don’t know what my dad expected me to say in that moment, but I know what I did say, because I had it written down in front of me, and I tried to make it sound natural as I read it to him over the lousy cell-phone connection. I told him I was sorry for all the times I had showed up drunk and lied about it, or forced him to reason with me on the phone when I was hysterical, or pretended everything was okay except when I needed something from him. I told him I was sorry that I hadn’t ever tried to have much more than a superficial relationship with him. I told him . . . well, it just kind of all poured out, four or five handwritten pages of everything I was really far too scared to say to him. I couldn’t possibly do it. So I just kept talking until the words were gone. “I’m sorry for being distant from you over the years, and for failing to do my part to let you know that I love you and that I care about what’s going on in your life, too,” I read. “I’m really grateful to you for teaching me to be independent and self-sufficient, and I’m sorry I haven’t expressed that to you more often.” I ended by telling him I was sorry that I had failed to accept him for who he is and for trying to force him to be someone he wasn’t—someone more like me, every nerve ending right there on the surface. Then I was quiet for a second. “So, I guess the last thing is, um, what can I do to make things right?”
A long pause. Was he . . . sniffling?
“Well, dang it, Erica, you didn’t tell me you were going to make me cry.”
I was crying, too. “Ha,” I sniffled. “Gotcha.”
“I guess what I want is . . . well, could you maybe call me more often? Just to let me know how you’re doing and what’s going on with you?”
I don’t know what I had expected—maybe something more along the lines of, “Pay back the thousand dollars you owe us and don’t call again until you do”—but it took a minute to process what he was asking for. That’s it? Call him more? Don’t I owe him . . . like . . . a lot more than that?
“Of course.”
“I love you, too, you know.”
Not all of them went like that. Mom was gracious but a little stiff—understandable, given the fact that she’d been the target of so much of my emotional vomit for so many years—and she thought it was weird that I thought she might feel insulted or displaced when I got back in touch with Cindy. (Turns out the massive cyclone of guilt I had whipped up about “cheating” on her by talking to my birth mom was all in my mind.) James, my old boss, told me he’d think about tossing me some freelance work, asked me for advice about someone in his life who was struggling with addiction, and then never contacted me again. My friend Renee, who is the kind of person who sends Christmas cards to acquaintances from thirty years ago and would offer near strangers her whole apartment if they happen to be passing through London, where she used to live, wanted to know what she could do for me. Nick, to whom I made an unplanned amend when I spotted him in the beer line at a conference we were both attending, was warm but awkward, understandably so.
And I still have a long way to go. Lots of friends are still on my “definitely” list, but I’ve been putting it off, probably because things are so much better between us now. I haven’t totally paid back the QFC, but I’m getting close. Tristan and Tiffany, two people I still haven’t seen my way to forgiving, remain on my “never” list, but I’ll get to them.
But all of them ended up being worth it, not because I can say, sanctimoniously, “I did it,” but
because I really did start letting go of the guilt.
Not all of it, though.
Thirty-five
Just What Is
In a dream, I’m heading to an important conference in another city, where I have to give a presentation that will make or break the organization I’m working for. I start drinking on the plane—a little red wine, something sophisticated, just to calm my nerves. The next thing I know, it’s two days later and I’m coming out of a blackout on a hotel bed, an empty bottle of vodka on the night table beside me. I’ve blown the presentation, lost my job, and have no idea how I’m going to get back home. I’m out of booze and there’s nothing in my bank account. Then it hits me: The hotel room is paid for. I clutch the sides of the bed and make my way toward the minibar.
Another dream: Josh has agreed, reluctantly, to meet me for coffee, but I decide to start drinking again a couple of hours before our date. By the time I show up, I’m a wreck—my shirt’s all twisted around my body, I can’t figure out how to pay for my scone, and Josh glowers at me from a table across the room while the cashier helps me count out 98 cents in pennies.
Drinking dreams are the price I pay for the years that I drank and prayed that no one around me noticed. These half memories, half nightmares, which still come three or four nights a week, are a form of penance that force me to relive my worst moments in slow motion, only underwater and upside down. The guilt I feel in those sheet-twisting hours stays with me during the day, and I have to open and close my eyes hard sometimes, to convince myself I didn’t relapse after all, and that no one is mad at me today, at least not for drinking, that everything’s okay. This feeling sometimes lasts throughout the morning, and I have to pinch myself. It was only a dream. It wasn’t real. Your sobriety is.
When I was drinking, I didn’t dream. Sleep wasn’t sleep—it was obliteration. Pass out, wake up, drink more, pass out again. Now, it’s like my subconscious is speeding through a ten-year backlog, and despite all the treatment and therapy and AA meetings I’ve been through in the last five years, I still feel like this nightly reliving is something I must deserve.
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