I don’t know the secret of successful long-term recovery. I do know one of MY secrets is to express gratitude multiple times a day. I’m not much for organized religion, nor disorganized religion or even chaotic religion. Still, growing up in this culture at this time, I find it appropriate to attach the word “God” to my messages to the infinite. Hence, probably a hundred times a day, I throw up the prayer, “Thank you, God!” This isn’t usually gratitudinizing over any particular thing more a thanks that I’m alive and can say thanks.
There are times, though, when I do express thanksgiving for items or situations. For example, 16 years ago I kept an occasional journal. The following, from my first day in sobriety is one thing for which I regularly give thanks. Although it doesn’t even mention alcohol, my disease cries out.
Here is my journal entry from that day:
May 21, 2007
When I got out of bed this morning, I had a plan. Not a perfect plan. Not a foolproof plan. Hell, my plan could have snapped apart like a small tree branch trying to support a bear cub across a swollen May river. Still, it was a plan.
I was going to take a bus to Dartmouth College, start heading south on the Appalachian Trail and not stop until Georgia. With just dried fruit and oatmeal to sustain me, I would walk the bottom four-fifths of the AT in two pairs of sneakers and a pair of sandals.
Every plan has loose ends, space for contingencies, room left to breathe in the design. In an excellent plan, the paragraph above would present the final problem: How will I equip myself for this three- or four-month journey? The perfect plan would include the application of a credit card or cash to expenses at an outdoor apparel shop. A good plan would answer the question in a thornier manner, involving difficult budget decisions and a willingness to compromise on any given food’s flavor for calories.
Now that we’ve covered what that second paragraph would be in a perfect and a good plan, let me now share with you what living on oatmeal and ending up walking a hundred miles barefoot is in a truly fucked-up, horrible, wretched plan — it is the heart, the clockwork, the settled part of a doomed plan. That was my plan.
I was going to walk away from everything I’ve known, take on a fake identity, a “trail name,” and, eventually, kill myself out on the trail, thereby saving my three beautiful daughters from the shame of being related to a suicide. Instead, they would have been related to one of the disappeared. That was my plan.
Instead of following out one of the stupidest plans I could have come up with, I checked into a VA hospital for treatment for my depression. I had tentatively called my trail journal, “Tomorrow is a Good Day to Die: the last days of a suicide.” I’ll now have to come up with a new title, something with a similar pizazz and, dare I say, optimism.
When I got to the psychiatric unit, they asked me questions about my drinking, and quickly figured out I needed support in withdrawing from alcohol. While that was happening, I was introduced to a program of recovery that saved my life and remains central to who I am.
My gratitude for this journal entry comes not from the lucky introduction, but from the fact I haven’t needed to write anything like it in years.
You matter. I matter. We matter.