One of things I appreciate most about the recovery community is the way everyone encourages self reflection by freely sharing, out loud, openly and honestly, some of the most powerful experiences of their lives. These shares can be revelatory both for the people listening and for the person sharing. At first, I only wanted to share after I had rehearsed the words in my head, trying to deliver something funny and yet insightful, revealing but not too revealing. Those didn’t feel right; they didn’t feel honest. I had to learn to be comfortable opening my mouth to share before I knew what I was going to say - something that I have never been comfortable doing. I have found that this kind of sharing, where I know I have something to say on the topic but I don’t know what it is until the words start coming out of my mouth, is the kind of sharing that does me the most good. Sharing in a meeting has a similar effect as writing a blog post. When the words are coming out I’m learning something about myself, and the fact that other people are hearing (or might read) those words somehow makes it more real, or gives it a larger impact, or makes it more healing. Listening to, and reading the experiences of other people also helps. It can confirm or validate my own experiences, or give me new insight into myself. And it creates a connection between me and other people that I know, somehow, is a core part of the human experience but which has consistently eluded me for so many years.
It has been through this kind of sharing, and listening, that I’ve realized something about myself. I have been, for most of my life, what I would call a bad friend (or brother, or son, or partner) to the people I have had friendships with, all the while believing that it was the other person who was a bad friend to me. It’s been an interesting plot twist in my thinking, giving me the feeling I get at the end of a movie where suddenly you realize what you thought was happening was completely different from what was actually happening all along (see The Sixth Sense). I have written about friendship a few times before, mostly focusing on the realizations that I’ve had since learning I was autistic. In the recovery community I’ve met a lot of people with similar experiences who have helped me see a pattern. In most of my friendships, I’ve been focused on my needs and not particularly attuned to the needs of my friends. In practice, I’ve been very sensitive to friends not meeting my needs even as I completely neglect theirs. My autism diagnosis I think explains the origins of this behavior, and it’s also the kind of behavior I hear a lot of alcoholics reflecting on.
I am a considerate person - that’s how I think of myself. What is hard to recognize, and what I have resisted so strongly, is the fact that the way I see myself and the way I show up are not necessarily the same. I believe myself to be a considerate and kind and generous person, and therefore I must be all those things. I am certainly very good at noticing when other people are not kind and considerate, and I am very quick to hold resentments against them for it. I’ve held an underlying assumption my whole life that I don’t do to other people the things that I find upsetting when others do them to me. It’s like I have a notepad in my head where I’m keeping score of all the times I have called them first, all the nice things I have done for them, and all the not nice things they have done to me. But I never make note of the not nice things I do to them or the nice things they do for me. I’m “keeping score” in a very selective way. Why do I want to keep score at all? What does that do for me?
Keeping score is part of living with resentments and having a relentless focus on myself. Always feeling like I’m not getting enough, or that other people are getting too much. Framing things through a winner-takes-all mindset, where I believe that everyone is out for themselves and I need to do everything I can to make sure that I win and they lose. Because if I don’t win, I’ll have nothing. Keeping score comes from a lifelong belief that I can’t trust people, that I need to preempt the risk of getting hurt by never getting too close, or by disappearing as soon as I think the tide is shifting in a relationship. Keeping score is the result of living life for myself, making sure my needs are taken care of first, and assuming that everyone else is doing the same thing. Keeping score comes from a fundamental belief that everyone’s goal is to hurt me, or embarrass me, or expose me not for what I am but for what they imagine me to be. Ultimately, keeping score is about fear.
The irony, which was lost on me for the balance of my life, is that by unfairly imagining the worst in others, I embodied the worst of myself. In the name of “protecting myself” from the bad intentions of others, I hurt people in exactly the ways I was afraid of being hurt. When I got too close to people, I would subconsciously do something to sour the relationship, or just vanish, before they had the opportunity to do the same to me. I couldn’t understand what I did to make other people upset, even as I actively engaged in upsetting behavior. I resigned myself to the idea that people didn’t like me and didn’t want to be around me, feeling unfairly judged and rejected, without fully considering how my behavior impacted others or what role I played in creating the reality I found so distasteful.
All of this made being around other people a generally painful experience for me. When I discovered alcohol, I found a method of reducing the pain. It made it easier for me to be with others, and I thought it made me more fun for others to be with. That’s part of why alcohol was so alluring - it provided the illusion that I was more fun, more easy going, more likable. I was encouraged in this illusion when people would tell me they preferred drunk Sam to sober Sam, or hand me a drink when I said something annoying. They want me to drink because I’m better when I drink. In reality, many of the most hurtful and obnoxious things I did were done while intoxicated. Alcohol helped me get by without trying to change.
Not drinking has been an evolving experience. Fear and pain, followed by the search for alternative ways to numb them (consciously or unconsciously), intense self reflection, unaltered by alcohol, eventually coming to the realization that the way forward requires deliberate work. That work includes connecting meaningfully with people and consciously working on how I want to show up in relationships of all kinds. It’s helped me learn that it is possible to become the person I so long imagined myself to be - kind, considerate, and even generous. I’m not fully there yet, but I now see the reality that I avoided for so many years, and I know I work to change.