“Once I was seven years old …”

“Once I was seven years old my momma told me/
Go make yourself some friends or you’ll be lonely/
Once I was seven years old”
—Lukas Graham

That song, of course, has nothing to do with alcoholism. Yet that opening line fits perfectly today (May 21, 2015), and every day, since I acknowledged that my disease would kill me through it’s soul-sucking, fear-driven, isolating pathology. That was May 21, 2009.

I am so grateful to be here and do so sober, clear-minded and able to, no matter the obstacle, have a fighting chance at dealing with life without burying my head in the sand.

At times I wasn’t sure I would stay sober in the several months of 2015-2016 that I will count among some of the worst in my life. I wasn’t sure I would make it to today, my seventh “birthday.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“Even if I do,” I remember thinking at times, “it won’t be the kind of sobriety I want. It won’t be recovery for sure. It will be the false pride of white-knuckling, the same type of false pride that put me in this predicament.” (That’s a story for another day.)

But I just didn’t drink. And it carried me through long enough to begin to participate in my own recovery again. To be here today and feel like I belong here.

That kind of talk doesn’t mean a whole lot to people who haven’t read the sacred texts for living (I joke), it just means when my ass was in the grips of a whole lot of drama, some self-created and some handed down without me asking (again, I joke), I found a little thing inside that helped me to stick it out and not make matters worse by sneaking a sip or two of go-away juice.

To be fair, I had three big incentives to not fall down that rabbit hole I had climbed out of seven years ago: Priscilla, Riley and Tyler. I kept going to work, doing what I could to get up every day and earn a living, to forge ahead for them.

At the same time, however, I was grappling with so much guilt, doubt and depression, and I felt all alone. It was as if I forgot all that I had learned over six years of recovery. I had forgotten my friends, and that I was allowed to lean on them for guidance and to liberally pull from their toolboxes at any time. I just had to call. Yet I didn’t do that.

OK, maybe I did it once. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect, I can see clearly. I did what my “coach” advised over and over again from the day I meet him on my first trip back to the Valley after a 30-day stint in rehab—I did the footwork. Even though I was suffering physically, mentally and emotionally, as was my family, I keep looking for some light at the end of the tunnel, just like coach said.

I’m not totally there yet, but the pieces are slowly sorting themselves out, incrementally falling into proper order. It’s a different order, though. Intentionally so.

Today I find myself in a totally different career than I started in 23 years ago. It’s a been a steep learning curve, and, if I’m honest with myself, I have had a hard time letting go of those comfortable jeans of two decades for these new threads—figuratively and literally, as I own more ties than I ever have in 42 years on this earth.

But it’s a welcome and needed change, for the whole family and for my interminable condition. The intense grind of daily journalism spoke to my disease and speaks to my personality. I was what I did, a journalist first and a person second, and the more chaotic and dysfunctional the work environment, the more I thrived and became obsessed. It’s nice not to have to feel that way any more, or be the guy who had a lot to do with creating that environment. My former co-workers would likely agree.

Year 7 brings with it a lot of change to come, and revisiting the things that worked earlier in my recovery to reassert some of the stability I had lost this past year. In with the with new, in with the old, to tweak the idiom a bit.

Yet I don’t consider that resting on past successes; rather, I’m returning to the solid foundation needed to rocket into that fourth dimension of existence (sorry, you’ll have to look it up yourself).

So, yes, “Once I was seven years old …” and, no, I don’t have to be lonely.

Written May 21, 2016.