White Knuckle Dry vs. Sober

As a teenager I drank for the buzz.  The effects.  I felt magnanimous, a smooth operator and larger than life know-it-all.  The liquid courage gave me the social panache to act any way I wanted and be okay with this.  Not that everybody else liked the way I acted and I didn't care, especially while under the influence of King Alcohol.   The side effects sometimes got me.  Drank too much, woozy, the world spinning, puking.  Repentant of my wrongful ways I told myself, "Next time, it'll be different.  I'll stop in time."  And it was true.  A lot of the times I did.  B-u-t once in a while, I didn't and I paid the price.  One more time.

When I realized I was pregnant I stopped drinking so to avoid hurting my unborn child.  He was born January 5, 1976.  Then another son was born October 30, 1977, a daughter born February 8, 1979, another daughter December 14, 1980 and my last baby was a son born June 5, 1982.  All of them healthy, beautiful babies.  Finally I convinced the doctors to tie my tubes and the baby factory closed. All this time I had been white knuckle dry.

White knuckle dry for me is a state of body, mind and soul where I feel driven to control everything and I am responsible for everybody else's health, success and happiness.  If they aren't, I fail and am a failure so I redouble my efforts to make them happy so I could rest and be happy but things just get worse and worse.  The insanity winds tighter and tighter like a spring coil bound to snap one day.  Definition of insanity:  doing the same things over and over expecting different results but getting the same over and over. Jeesh.  I can still get there...definitely insane.

Anyway June 30, 1982, I relapsed.  I tried to drink my sorrows away but it didn't work.  I still had sole responsibility of my children and did the best I could but we were homeless, without their father who went to prison for possession of marijuana in the latter part of 1981.  I found a job in January of '82 but lost it in June because my car broke down, medical problems with pregnancy, etc.  We were penniless, without hope plus my youngest daughter had seizures which terrified me.  "It was all my fault" sang the chorus in my brain which overpowered the small voice in my heart that said anything different.  And I fought back.  Like the song, "I get knocked down, I get up again, ain't nothing gonna keep me down.  I get knocked down..."  I relied on my best thinking and truly did the best I could with what I had and knew during that time.  I was crazy but didn't know it.  Also throw in the hormonal stuff.  Jeesh.


My tone of voice, body mannerisms, facial expressions...fake, fake, fake.  People pleasing was top of my list.  Never let them see me cry.  Never let them see me sweat.  Try to keep it all tightly controlled deep within and smile, smile, smile as if I'm not terrified, overwhelmed, feeling almost right at the tip of out-of-control, on the edge and slipping.  White knuckle dry indeed. Clinging to whatever raveling threads of sanity I could find.  I remember well this painful time.  Where my insides were not congruent with my outside.  Living a lie.  I saw a poster of a little kitten with a paw barely hanging onto a tree branch...I felt empathy.

To me, sobriety is very different.  It is a freedom to truly be myself, inside congruent with outside.  No guessing, no faking.  It is a state of being where I am free to be me and so is everybody else.  Live and Let Live and for me to get the heck out of the way.  Let Go and Let GOD. When I use the spiritual tools to do the work...I'm set free...freedom from the Bondage of Self.  The 12 Steps are 100% guaranteed to work if I work it.  Truth is I'm lazy.  I don't wanna have to "work" it.  I want my freedom without having to do anything.  I want it by ass-mosis.  I want it to rub off from others as I leech on their sobriety and then complain about how the 12 Steps don't work while I keep holding back because it's too much work, I'll never get done, I'm a special case, it's somebody else's fault, etc.  Jeesh.  I heard the saying, "I can always tell I'm lying because my lips are moving."   Which meant to me that I may want to shut up because I really didn't have anything anybody needed until I did the work to clean my side of the street.  Then, maybe, I might have something to share that will help them but until then...let it begin with me. 


I prayed for help and experienced Divine Intervention.  When GOD steps in there is no question it is GOD because the Solution is so off the scale, something I never even thought of in my best thinking...wow.  Amazing.