sitcoms and mashed potatoes

[honeydumplin]

From the Book: First Year Sobriety
When All That Changes is Everything
By Guy Kettelhach


Chapter Four
Sitcoms and Mashed Potatoes;
Managing Time, Sober
pages 84-87

I owe a great debt of gratitude to mashed potatoes. Also to TV re-
runs of The Jeffersons, Gimme a Break, and Benson, and the lo-
cal seven o'clock news. They all helped me stay sober.

Like most of the people we've met in this book, I experienced
early sobreity as a revelation, a mostly positive one. Physical
changes were amazing and unexpectedly gratifying. My chronic
diarrhea stopped. I learned the joys of sleeping as opposed to the
"relief" of passing out. Suddenly the world seemed to have so
much more color in it: Even my sight seemed to get better.

What didn't at first get better was my sense of what the hell to
do with myself. Now that I'd decided not to spend every avail-
able moment in pursuit of alcohol, I suddenly had all this time.
How was I supposed to spend it? I had a vague notion it was time
to be productive in some "normal" way, but the prospect alter-
nately baffled, bored, and terrified me. I couldn't imagine how to
do it.

I'd always wondered how "normal" people got that way. That
upteenth bleary-eyed morning after the bars and after-hours
clubs had closed, on yet another day I'd decided to take off from
work, I'd squint painfully at people in business suits striding off
to their offices. How did they manage it? They looked so alive,
clean, puposeful--normal. I hated them. Sometimes I'd try to
feel superior. I was just too artistic, sensitive, iconoclastic, wise,
worldly to buy into the " normal" world they were part of. Being
conventional meant being dull. And I had a horror of ever being
that.

But secretly I envied them. They'd figured out something I
hadn't. They seemed to have some idea where they were going. I
was convinced that whatever it was that enabled them to make
money, save money, pay bills, keep lovers and spouses, take
vacation, do their laundry--whatever that was, it was constitu-
tionally lacking in me. When God put me together, he'd obvi-
ously left out some essential machinery.

Was it possible to acquire that "machinery" now? I didn't
know. All I knew was that now that I wasn't drinking anymore,
I had to face the problem of not feeling normal in a different way
than I had before. No longer was I willing to use this discomfort
as an excuse to get drunk ("To hell with the world, I wasn't
meant for it; I'll just check out!"). I found myself willing to face,
it, at first, unable to answer, a basic question about sober life:
What do I do now that I'm not spending every possible moment
getting high?

At first I did the only thing I knew how to do. I went back to
my old bar. I shudder as I recount this now, knowing how easy it
would have been to have asked the bartender to give me vodka
instead of club soda, but I didn't appreciate the risks back then.
The only people I knew went to bars. I couldn't imagine being
comfortable anywhere else. So why couldn't I just go back, but
not drink alcohol?

I found out why all too soon. Bars, when you don't get drunk
in them, are boring. I watched with a kind of clinical fascination
as old "friends" descended, drink by drink, into various degrees
of stupor. Endlessly repeated stories, stupid jokes, maudlin
protestations of love and devotion, gratuitous nastiness, and
then, finally, the blank-eyed "nobody's home but us chickens"
expression that precedes passing out into an ashtray. It got
through even my dense head: I had no place in bars anymore.
I had to find something else.

So I tried something radically new: I actually went home after
work. It was amazing how ecstatic this seemed! Finding my sit-
som reruns and the evening news, knowing that any number of
people were watching the same stuff in their own homes at the
same time, was almost exhilarating. I don't know where I got the
idea of mashing potatoes; I guess it was the most "normal" food
I could think of. But I have a vivid memory of standing in the
kitchen, looking out at the TV in the next room, mashing potat-
toes I'd bought and boild myself in my very own pot, pleasantly
watching George Jefferson go through his paces. It was somehow
both cleansing and magical. I'd discovered for the first time
something, I've since learned, many other recovering people dis-
cover with equal amazement: I could do what other people did.
And even enjoy it. Maybe I wasn't so different after all. Maybe it
was okay, at least for the moment, to be "ordinary." Normal.
Not scrabbling about for one more fantastic outta-sight high.
Maybe I could just simply be. Live with all my senses open, un-
altered. Mashing potatoes became an extraordinary experience.
It was something I could do with complete calm. I found a dif-
ferent, deeper satisfaction pounding away at a potato than I'd
ever experienced pounding down shots of vodka.

Highlights of my day though they were, sitcoms and mashed
potatoes couldn't take up all my time. There were all those
hours before 5:00 PM and after 7:30 PM to get through too. Fig-
uring out how to structure this time has taken guidance and
practice. It has meant tripping over myself, making mistakes,
trying out things that didn't always work, experienceing panic
and confusion and sometimes wonder at the new, clearer life I
found and find myself living sober. Sometimes I've overbooked
myself, sometimes underbooked. But the guidance I've received
from people who'd been here before me and had made similar
stumbling progress has been invaluable. It's taught me some-
thing crucial, something I've observed most recovering people
seem to catch onto sooner or later: No one knows automatically
how to do thing, how to live "produtively." No one is born
knowing how to open a bank account or balance a checbook, do
taxes, ride a bike, drive a car, go to the dry cleaner's, stand in line
in a supermarket, hook up a VCR, run a computer, screw in a
light bulb, have a give-and-take conversation on the telephone.
We all have to learn these thing, to learn how to live.

Maybe this sounds obvious. But how many times have you
pretended you knew something because you were too embar-
rassed or ashamed to say that you didn't? Many of us would
sooner turn inside out than admit we don't know how to do
something we think we "ought" to know how to do. As on
twenty-five-year-old recovering addict told me, "I grew up
telling my parents 'Let me make my own mistakes!' as a way of
avoiding following their or naybody els's advice. I couldn't
stand anyone telling me what to do, or even making a sugges-
tion. As a result, I don't know how to do anything!"

The hard truth I had to face in my first days and months of so-
briety was simply this: I hadn't learned some pretty basic things.
The comforting truth was that I wasn't alone: Other recovering
people were as much in the dark about how to live as I was. But
that didn't stop them. They made daily stabs at living, humbling
first steps toward figuing out how to get from A to B to C, stuff
they believed that everyone was "supposed" to know, but that
they'd somehow missed. They kept trying even when, at first,
things didn't work out. They looked and asked for guidance and
found it.