You Just Have to Change … Everything

I figured the oldtimers at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting were making a joke. Or exaggerating. Obviously, a person didn’t have to change “everything” in order to “get sober” and live a better life. Right?

But how did my life really change? What turn on the path looked crucial? Could I leave despair behind?

A few months before my exit from G’s household — the glassworks, with the furnaces, tools, blown glass, and a newsletter for which I’d become co-writer during my 3 years as his “I didn’t mean it THAT way” wife (not at all married, although he gave me a plastic ring as his kind of joke) — I stopped drinking any alcohol. For me, by 1989, ending my actual drinking wasn’t as hard as for many others. My hardest drinking years were in my past, when I’d been a chemist in New Jersey — true, the years in Vermont of marriage to R included a lot of alcohol because “that’s what people do,” but, luckily for me, I wasn’t using it to handle my emotional pain.

What WAS I using for that kind of pain? Well, music; food; and most of all, being in physical relationships, one after another. I wouldn’t sort that mess out until after my long years in a steady marriage with DK began to put the past under a different kind of light. But it was a highly effective pattern, and somehow, more by luck or by “my Higher Power acting anonymously,” I didn’t…