Defining Moments

by Janet Levine

I’m sitting in the Family and Friends Support Group. I should be empathizing, sympathizing, supporting the addicts in the room and, especially, the addict in my life. Instead, I simply want to whack them.

”Get on with your lives,” I want to scream. Stop loving your addiction. But that, I have come to realize, is my fantasy. Theirs is a very different dream.

My sister tells me how she knows few, well two—her husband, me—people who can break their addictions alone. She wonders why, and I think back to the Family and Friends group. They not only love their addictions, they define themselves by them.

When I was first trying to stop drinking, I went to several AA meetings. I hated them. I did not want to stand up and introduce myself as an alcoholic. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life “recovering.” I wasn’t in denial. I was well aware of the fact that I had a drinking problem. But being an alcoholic seemed to me akin to being a teacher, a doctor, a salesperson. It was a definition. It told people who you were, what you did, how your saw yourself. And I did not see myself in that way.

So I stopped drinking—and no, it wasn’t all that easy. I pushed alcohol off the stage of my life, and decided that I would never, ever, ever let it back on. And when I wanted a drink, when I craved the feelings that alcohol brought me, oh well. I just could not, would not take that drink.

It wasn’t the only way to do it. It may not even be the best way to do it. Getting help from professionals is surely a smarter way than my insistence on going it alone. But the professional can only help the addict get where he or she really, truly, honestly wants to go. The addict in my life says all the right things, but doesn’t match his actions to his words. I don’t believe that he wants to go to sobriety yet.

It’s scary looking at the world through clear lenses. There is pain and fear and rejection and unhappiness. There is also warmth and security and acceptance and joy.

A friend who had far more reason than most to blunt her pain with drugs or booze says she got through by simply putting one foot in front of the other. Nothing heroic, just doing it, every day. While she wouldn’t, I define her as a hero.

I’m back in the group, looking and listening to too many people who don’t want to give up their addictions. They may stop drinking or taking drugs eventually, but most will cling to the persona of the alcoholic or addict. I am annoyed and disappointed with myself that I am so judgmental and yet, as I sit here, listening to their stories, I realize that this, too, is a defining moment.

I cannot chose their side; I’ve been there and it is not a place to which I will ever return. I also know that I can’t say anything. My very words would be suspect. Only they can chose how they want to be defined. Perhaps above all, that is the choice that shapes a person’s life.