Taking that first Step

I’ve been tagged by Indistinct of In God’s Hands to post on taking that first Step. A good opportunity to go back to the basics.

STEP 1: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable”

If I had had any sense at all, I would have taken this Step before I turned 19. By then I knew I had a very peculiar problem with alcohol and one that I was helpless to resolve. I couldn’t drink the way others drank. When I drank, my personality changed after as few as three glasses of wine, more quickly if I had gin or sherry. I felt intensely euphoric, more high than intoxicated. Everything sparkled and I felt renewed, light-headed, uninhibited and slightly dangerous but at the same time absolutely in control of everything in the universe.

The feeling didn’t last and was succeeded by an intense moodiness. I felt very very sorry for myself. I was likely to take offence. There were emotional arguments and scenes, in which others accused me of being unreasonable. There would be sulking and ultimatums. I considered myself a logical and rational person and the alcohol seemed to addle my thinking. I becam childish and petulant. Very strange. To counter this alarming development, I drank faster and became preoccupied with making sure there was enough for me to keep drinking. While others around me gazed into one another’s eyes or told jokes, I watched the levels in the bottle and glasses, and plotted to get the last glassful out of the bottle. I was a little prig who would never think of stealing or cheating, but I would sneak drinks and lie about how much I had drunk. Alcohol turned me into a thief and a liar.

Towards the end of a drinking bout things would get hazy and I was prone to tearfulness or deep incoherent rages. Sometimes I would not remember getting home or the last bit of the conversation, or the fumbling acrobatics of removing my contact lenses or peeling off underwear. I noticed that others were concerned about me and that they suggested I not drink on an empty stomach or while I was ‘upset about things’. I wondered if I had some kind of deep-seated personality flaw that only emerged around alcohol. I recall writing in a diary that alcohol brought out the worst in me and my life seemed to skid out of control whenever I was drinking. But I loved drinking, that was the problem. I loved it, no matter what it did to me.

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable”

If I had been asked about Step 1 in those months just before my 19th birthday, I would have agreed and felt relief. I might even have stopped drinking. I shall never know because I went on drinking regardless of the lack of control.

Around about the time I turned 19, I apparently had sex with a man I scarcely knew and then accused him of raping me. He told a friend of mine about his scary experience with me, otherwise I would never have known about it. I was in an alcoholic black-out for about 10 hours. That was the most horrible and bewildering experience, and I went to see a Freudian psychologist up at Student Health. I didn’t talk about drinking vodka and orange juice all afternoon before the sexual incident and he introduced me to the notion of ‘fugue states’. He made copious notes on my interesting lapse of memory, and I privately decided I would not drink around other people, I would drink alone where nothing bad could happen to me. In a room without a telephone, so I would not make embarrassing calls I didn’t know about.

STEP 1: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable”

Twenty years later I had stopped noticing what I did when I was drinking. It was all too familair and getting worse. The blackouts were terrifying and the vomiting and hangovers wrecked most mornings. I knew I was desperately alcoholic but I could not imagine living without alcohol. I didn’t like to think about my drinking and I drank to forget I had a drink problem. There were no concerned friends because I drank alone behind closed doors. I hoped nobody knew I was alcoholic but I really didn’t give a fuck what they thought.

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable”

When I finally found myself vomiting uncontrollably and vomiting blood and spending most of the day unconscius, I realised it was time to stop. I still had a job and my colleagues thought I was having a good holiday and resting up from a bout of gastric flu. I still had a furious and frightened housemate. But I wanted to kill myself, if only I could stay conscious long enough to figure out how to do it.

And I could not stop drinking. I wanted to stop and I could not stop. I just kept trying to drink in between bouts of vomiting. I would come around at 3pm in the afternoon or 2am in the morning or 10am or 5 pm and I would reach for the bottle. Nothing existed except alcohol. I spent my days sprawled next to the toilet bowl and had a bottle of wine or Scotch or vodka beside me. My clothes were spattered with vomit and regurgitated alcohol.

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable”

My housemate begged me to get help. I didn’t know what the word ‘help’ meant but there was one last resort and I had oten considered it. So I called AA and oddly enough I slept all day after that call and went into my first meeting sober and bathed and neatly dressed, even though I looked like hell. I could identify with everything that was said. A bright-eyed ash-blonde woman whom I hated at first sight told me: ‘You need never drink again.’ It sounded like bliss, a novel idea — imagine not having to drink! — but I didn’t think I could go more than two or three hours without a drink.

But I wanted to stop drinking with all my heart. If I did not stop drinking I knew I was going to die. I had no life, I only had this desperate inner battle around alcohol.

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable”

And the miracle was that I stopped drinking. One day at a time. I went to meetings and listened. The rage and blaming and self-hatred and shame slowly died down inside me. As the sober days passed, fortified with fruit juices and plenty of sleep, I began feeling an emotion I could not recognise for about eight days. It was gratitude. Somebody out there had heard me. The unstoppable trajectory had been halted.

The first Step is an understatement of my final chaotic days as an active alcoholic. I took that Step before I even walked into the rooms. I knew that I was powerless over alcohol and always had been. I knew my life was a non-life, a muddle of lies and unpaid debts and hollow pretences. Unmanageable. Decades of alcoholism had hammered the feelings out of me and ruined my health. There was no self, just a broken shell, the sensations of skidding and falling and crashing. I don’t really know if I would call myself human.

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable”

The first miracle was that admission of defeat and how it stopped the unmanageability right then and there. The next miracle was recovery and receiving a new life. I admitted I was powerless and a new source of power was able to enter my life. Everyone who has recovered from alcoholism or addiction knows what I am talking about and none of us can ever really explain it.

Weekend sobriety

Went off to bed early with a large mug of Horlicks, fell asleep and woke at midnight with a raging temperature, shivering and my stomach very upset. Lay awake and convinced myself that I was going through a bout of malaria. Got up and sponged myself down, went back to bed and slept dreamlessly for hours. The fever seems to have broken.

It is really just unseasonal flu and because I can’t take antibiotics, it is taking a while to work through my system. Reminds me a little of those early weeks of jittery sleeplessness and emotionally oscillating like a yoyo that I went through when I first sobered up. The impact of alcohol on the body is devastating and when that alcohol is removed the body goes a little crazy, as does the mind and the emotions. I remember that I couldn’t think straight or concentrate and was amazed at AA members advising me to read the BB when I could not take anything much in. I needed the support of meetings and phone calls and just to sit it out until the withdrawal symptoms stopped.

When I was in the UK I would often see a grey-faced and wobbly newcomer being given a great big indigestible copy of the Big Book by some well-intentioned member with 16 years sobriety and grin to myself, thinking, ‘It will be a while before you get to that!’ Some recovering alcoholics have shockingly bad memories and many cannot really recall what early sobriety felt like. They want to discuss the intricacies of Step 9 with somebody who can scarcely keep down a glass of juice in the morning and is addled by withdrawal. A friend emailed me yesterday and told me in a postscript that while in rehab she did all Twelve Steps in her first three weeks, being coached and guided by a gung-ho counsellor at the rehab centre. ‘When I got out of there,’ she wrote ‘I realised I couldn’t remember any of them except something about having my sanity restored and that made me indignant because I didn’t think I was insane.’

Getting sober and moving on from our drawn-out alcoholic adolescence takes time. I realise that more and more as I learn to live from day to day without being intoxicated or self-medicating or numbing myself out. Just staying conscious and aware, letting the moods come and go, learning from whatever the day has to teach me

There is a beautiful misty dawn coming up over the fields and it looks as if this will be a hot spring day, leaning into summer. A rooster’s cry in the distance (many villagers on smallholdings keep poultry). I feel grateful to be awake and able to appreciate the sweet dawn air. It could all be so much worse.

The heartache will heal in time. The writers’ block will ease up. There will be better days and harder days. Right here and now I am just drinking my lukewarm coffee and looking at the sun burning mist off wet grass.

Notes from a sickbed

That sounds very literary and invalidish, but in fact I have arisen from the sickbed, crammed with flu meds and fuelled with fresh orange juice, and the sun has come out. Self-care is not difficult if one is not pouring litres of alcohol into a sick body and I have a large bowl of oranges and bananas and papayas and tiny green limes on the kitchen table.

Yesterday afternoon I walked down to see the lonely Sheila — the rain caught me in a sudden cloudburst and I arrived soaked and miserable. She was surrounded by friends all eating cream cakes and drinking champagne, and holding court like some hypochondriac courtesan. I was furious. Nothing so irksome as wasted sympathy and Sheila is quite capable of sorting out her loneliness without my help. So I refused cream cakes or champagne, stayed for a short while and then dragged myself home to bed.

Tossed and turned for hours and kept getting up to drink water and refill my hot-water bottle. Had a call from Una, enthralled by an electric thunderstorm with sheet lightning but miserable and wanting to come home. Read some of Thomas Moore’s Dark Nights of the Soul which made me feel like a metaphysical sissy.

I have invited a friend over for lunch and will make a great vegetable soup to have with crusty bread. If I call the vegetable soup minestrone, I can toss in little bits of pasta and that will take the soup into a higher dimension of cucina peasant cooking from Italy. Let me see if I have some tomato puree in the store cupboard…

Calling long-distance

When Una called from Johannesburg International Airport, the rain was crashing down so loudly I could hardly hear her.

Her plane arrived half-an-hour early and she found a big Sotho airport official in a blue uniform and asked where she could get a decent cup of coffe and a light breakfast.

‘I don’t know Cape Town very well, you see,’ she said to him, flustered.

‘Yo mama,’ he said and roared with laughter. ‘This is not Cape Town any longer, this is Egoli (the city of gold) and you must hit the Spur restaurant running. Fried eggs and tomatoes and a good steak!’

Johannesburg, Egoli, the city of gold. For years I would look out of plane windows and see the yellow mine dumps rising up all around the skyscrapers, looking down on the wealthiest city in white South Africa, built on the blood and sweat of exploited miners and those elusive seams of gold running underground to the deepest shafts in the world. Every now and again there are sudden sinkages and streets, bungalows, suburbs fall down into seemingly bottomless pits. The miners die in the rockfalls and mistimed blasts and still the search for gold goes on, deeper and deeper, even though the seams and ribbed veins of gold are mined out for the most part.

Enjoy the city! Lap it all up, I say to Una and she hesitates. The last time she went up to Johannesburg was 40 years ago during her nursing training and she stayed in a racially segregated nurses’ residence with other young white Afrikaner meisies and cried each night to come home to her mother in the Cape.

If only you were here, she says wistfully. I privately thank God I’m not there. She needs a break from me. Many of you, my blog readers, may feel the same way. That last post was seriously depressing. I hate to sound negative. I hate throwing curved balls at the desktop screen.

But sometimes just telling the truth changes something about that bitter truth, makes it somehow more palatable. And less of a secret. Thanks to all of you who emailed — I am fine, really.

Village life in the sun

The ferocious wind dropped suddenly and I snatched up library books and rushed outdoors. The blossom is nearly gone on the ornamental plum trees and the oaks are massed bright green. A group of young truant schoolgirls had taken shelter behind large bushes, petting and cavorting. How do I know this? Because they had taken off their school uniform blouses and bras and laid them carefully over the foliage and I could hear the laughter of boys. Bare-breasted girls frolicking under trees in blossom. Sometimes Africa is a very pleasant place to live.

All over the village there are funerals for youngsters who have died of AIDS, many not even 20 years old. Families dressed in black are walking down to the graveyard or queueng for buses. But life goes on among the young as it always will, irrepressibly. Unstoppably, despite war and plague.

In the library the staff were playing Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Holding Out for a Hero’ loudly and I hummed as I searched for books. Alan Hollinghurst paperbacks with warnings ‘Unsuitable for teenagers’. Books I donated to a library starved of gay or lesbian literature. Nobody seems to have caught on to the indecency of Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet yet. Great hideous flower arrangements of dried proteas on the tables, donated by a farmer’s wife, thick with dust on the feathery pink spikes. Billy Graham and Joseph Brodsky misfiled side by side. The young librarians in headscarves, poor and with bad teeth, bopping behind the main desk. A petition on the front desk that reads ‘Keep our library free of pornography’. The same person has listed all her friends and forged their signatures.

Came back out past the garage workshops blistered with sun and reeking of oil spills. The hot silent pavements, the silence and watching gazes behind shutters. Small towns hold terrors that only those who have grown up in them understand. I never drank as a teenager growing up in a small town of philistine hatred, but I escaped into books and wild fantasies as if my life depended on it, a bad start to life.

And I chose in mid-life to return to a village in South Africa, to live here where the freedom of thought is non-existent and endure again the parsimony and moralizing craziness of my youth.

It doesn’t always make sense. But I lived in the city for more than 20 years, the most beautiful city in the world, with Table Mountain toppling into the mirrored bay each morning, the silver trees glittering above Rhodes Drive, the blue skies and sweep of mountains and enthrallment of a city thrumming with jazz and brilliant printed fabrics, markets selling ebony and planed carved masks from Gabon and Mali, terraces hung with globes at night suspened over the ocean, cantilevered balconies for pleasure, golden globes swimming with moths. An infinitely lovable and heartbreaking city, unique and unforgettable. But I am not a city person at heart. I love the wilder empty spaces of Africa. So that was that.

And now the wind is coming up again in chaff and dust. I am in a house with the curtains drawn against the glare, listening to Stravinsky in a cottage with a field in front of it against a clear view of mountains. The landscape is heavenly, all I need to do is learn how to live with myself.

End of the day

Sometimes I get this very tired feeling around certain topics to do with recovery and alcoholism. I can’t wait to see how unenthralled I shall be with them after a decade or so (one day at a time). Every time I am asked to say something or write something on the subject of ‘prayer and meditation’, a number of warning bells go off in my head. The subject is full of pitfalls, rather like chatty asides on the US presidential elections, amusing unless you think of possible consequences to do with war and more illegal invasions or the brutal glossing over of torture etc. Then there is nothing to be said and so much needing to be done that nobody knows where to start.

But eloquence from spiritual writers aside, it is sometimes not enough just to quote Thomas Merton or Thich Nhat Hanh or Julian of Norwich and sidle off quietly. I have come to understand that recovery and the gift of sobriety opens us to understand reality more compassionately and perceptively and that the numinous is to be found in the most unlikely and mundane of places. And the only way to encourage others to share their experience of this is to share my own.

Here is something I posted on a forum dear to my heart but prone to all the glib cheerleading that passes for spiritual enthusiasm and faith talk online. I couldn’t say very much and yet I do feel that somehow in these discouraged days I am learning to recognise what I have in common with every other suffering alcoholic and with all of humanity. Which sounds dangerously grandiose, but I have come a long way from thinking of myself as a tormented mystic….

“Each time this topic comes up, I post with great reluctance because it is difficult to speak of something so travestied and liable to misunderstanding. Alcoholism made a mockery of what I once called my ‘faith life’. The movement from desperation to gratitude is one for which I don’t have words. The traditional religious language doesn’t seem to fit. In recovery, many of the compassionate and perceptive insights shared with me have come from AA members who would define themselves as agnostic or atheist.

“Earlier today I was reading a review of the novel Home by Marilynne Robinson, looking at the theme of the Prodigal Son. Her character Ames, a failure by all accounts, comments: “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’” The reviewer pointed out that each of us is lost and a failure, trying to find our way home and that we are all without exception weeping and in need of comfort. There is nobody who is not bereft and struggling at some level of our being, nobody who is not in need of comfort. It moved me very much to think that we are all included in this image and invited to reach out to one another.”

Slow on Sunday morning

Slept very badly, got up at 2am and read for a while. Dreams to do with my mother’s suicide, those old spectres that come to us at our most vulnerable hours. Lay in the dark and listened to the wind blowing across the valley and owls hooting as they hunted down by the river.

Woke to the relief of a bright windy morning. Church bells pealing out from the ugly red-brick Dutch Reformed Church up the road. Low-grade depression is just one of the occasional bugbears of recovery and I am lucky I have never been through the recurring clinical depressions I have seen friends struggle with over the years.

Making a large pot of lentil soup for lunch. The good thing about dried brown lentils is that they swell up and last for a long time. The bad thing about lentils is that they seem unending. Overseas I bought some Puy lentils in nifty cardboard packaging, tiny and brown, the caviar of lentils. They tasted of excellent chicken stock and, well, lentils.

Being poor doesn’t bother me. Being depressed is worrying because writing fiction demands a high level of imaginative interaction between invented charcaters and remembers place, and the lack of energy makes it harder.

My housemate has arrived back from church with all the village gossip bubbling out of her.

‘You’re depressed!’ she says accusingly. She can tell instantly, the same way I can detect she has toothache or arthritis or has suffered an angina attack. We know each other so well, beyond illusions.

Lentils with a sympathetic hug sounds a better prospect.

Breezy Saturday

Got out of bed and went out into the back garden in my pyjamas, thinking vaguely about going for a walk around the village. The wind is like ice and clouds are massing to the north. More rain.

Back indoors, put on coffee and began a biography of the poet Stephen Spender. Our local library is a little short on new books. The church ladies read voraciously and then scribble ‘Rubbish!’ or ‘UnChristian!’ in the margins with blue biro pens, along with crossing out all the ‘swear words’. They would shocked to hear that some might think they are defacing public literature. On the last page of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Gate of Angels, somebody had scribbled ‘Tripe’ and signed her name, illegibly. A volume of Jilly Cooper has the recommendation ‘Full of filthy sex’ written on the frontispiece and underneath a disappointed reader has replied ‘But repetitious!’

It is a relatively quiet weekend in the village, neighbours walking dogs, the African Zionists up on the hill drumming from dawn to dusk, schoolboys playing cricket on the playing fields across the road and Una keen that I accompany her to the Anglican church tomorrow. The old Victorian stone church was thatched for many years and burned down by vandals two years ago. Now it has been rebuilt but has long kikuyu grass growing all around the building so there are fleas everywhere and a very restless congregation.

Before getting up this morning I lay in the darkness, snuggled under quilts and listening to birdsong as I made up another chapter of the fiction I am working on. The moment I begin writing the chapter down it will go wrong and have to be changed and the possibilities will all dry up. That is the reality of writing. But it was such a pleasure lying there telling myself stories as I did when I was a child, the comfort and wishfulness untempered by the need to write it down. It felt as though I was dreaming myself awake.

And back to work again –

New dawn

Woke early and when I went into the kitchen the back lawn was silver with dew, birds flying from the tree to tree, the sun not yet over the mountaintops.

My neighbour came by and asked me to come and admire his massed plantings of clivias (apricot-red trumpet flowering perennials named after Lady Clive of India) at precisely 3pm this afternoon. He was going up the road to send a seedless young pomegranate and a Turkish fig through to a friend who is a botanist at Kirstenbosch.

This is the annual clivia visit — each spring we sit together in the wood-panelled dining room and have tea out of his Limoges china (dreadful stewed tea) and then we walk up and down the rows of clivias. The naturalist William Burchell was the first explorer to find clivias growing wild near the Great Fish River of the Eastern Cape in 1815. The seeds were sent to Kew. Now clivias are hybridised all over the world and pots of the red or pale yellow Clivia miniata surround Chairman Mao’s embalmed body in Tianenmen Square in China.

I hope I don’t give my fussy bachelor of a neighbour my lingering flu. He is one of those bachelors who takes excessively good care of himself and his life is organised around his hobbies and comforts. His eating habits have not changed since the 1940s and he cooks the food his mother made for him as a small boy in the Vyeboom Valley: pumpkin purees sweetened with sugar, spinach bredies or casseroles flavoured with the wild suring or sorrel, potatoes boiled with green beans, sweet potato done in the oven with cinnamon, butternut or sweetcorn fritters, melktert and koeksusters. The country cooking of Afrikaner families in the 19th century. He has a small transistor radio next to his bed and the age of the Internet has not impinged on him.

Other neighbours arrive in the early morning sunshine to take rooted cuttings from my mauve-flowering verbena and a small white-flowering pelargonium. My plants are unusual and over the years I have collected them from all around the Karoo and the foothillls of the Swartberg mountains.

I’m flattened and tired from the flu and the struggle of recent months, wish the joie de vivre would come back, some of the pleasure I used to take in my life. But the main thing is to stay sober and keep going. The depression will pass and then I can take stock. The gratitude is there but muted. I wish I could get to meetings or even sit over coffee face-to-face with an AA member.

Now I shall go out and cut bunches of purple French lavender for the bathroom, make myself another cup of coffee and email a woman in Hereford who ‘sort of’ wants to get sober and doesn’t understand why she ‘sort of’ can’t manage it. Ready to go to any lengths….

Oranges and lemons

Woke up and heard the rain bucketing down, the wind thrashing around in the trees and tried to clear my throat as I turned over under the quilt. The flu is back, my immune system low and I have a fever and sore throat.

Being self-employed means dealing with an unsympathetic boss. So I am swaddled in blankets and full of analgesics, bribing myself to stay in front of the computer with promises of hot lemon drinks and freshly squeezed orange juice.

Yesterday along with Pam and several thousand other lunatics, I signed up early for this year’s Nanowrimo.

Sigh. I hate trying to explain this. You either get the point or you are sane and cannot understand it at all. Some years ago, a few wanna-be writers got together and decided to dedicate a site to National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) and encouraged other would-be writers to try and complete a 50 000 word novel in the month of November. No prizes, no point in cheating, no consideration for the quality of the writing. It was just an ordeal, a marathon of writing to a word count.

Unsurprisingly, thousands of us signed up and Nanowrimo is now an annual Internet institution.

There is a category for ‘literary fiction’ and nothing indicates more aptly quite how absurd Nanowrimo is. You can’t write literary fiction in great chunks of hasty prose. But we all do it anyway –we get our plot outlines ready, we list our characters, we link up with other absurdists and we all commit to this nonsense because it is such fun.

Writing is lonely and the odds of getting a good sentence or two down on paper after a day alone at the computer are slim. But at Nanowrimo, there is a writing jamboree in full swing with everyone spewing out hopelessly bad sentences and all of us promising ourselves we will go back and revise.

The idea is that it breaks through writer’s block. I am not sure it does. It is a junkfest. Everyone plays at being a writer and agonises in forums and offers advice, and nobody is critical of anyody’s efforts, especially our own. The trick is to reach a total of 50 000 words by the last day of November and there is no time for polishing or revising if you want to reach that word count.

Writing fast and uncritically is a liberating sensation. Maybe it does work for some. Novels have been published based on drafts produced during Nanowrimo. Groups of crime writers and sci-fi aficionados get together and encourage each other to the finishing line. There are regional parties held offline, and people make new friends, find mentors, suck up to publishers, fall in love. Writers’ support groups are formed.

As I noted at the start of this post, the concept either resonates with you or it doesn’t. It makes no sense to me at all. But I shall be doing it for the third year running and hope to see a few other sober speedwriters there too…

Now it is raining again and I am going to go out and hang up wet towels and sheets before having some grated ginger and fresh lemon juice with boiling water, a spoonful of honey and clove or two. This is a day for indulging in the absurd. But at least I can sip my lemon toddy and know it isn’t full of Scotch and I am no longer ‘medicating’ myself with alcohol and turning my whole life into absurdity.