During that first year and a half or so of Ray being sick, I began working with a new sponsor. I’d worked briefly with her before when my long-time one fired me a few years back when I was actually off the rails not just in need of different direction. During that brief hiatus from her, I reached out to A, my new sponsor. She was kind and forgiving and constantly reminded me that I didn’t need to apologize for everything I was about to say or had already said. I didn’t need to be afraid of her response, and she proved that time and time again. I struggled to connect with her the first time around though, despite her unconditional love. I was so used to such a strict style of submission and judgment, that when A brought the type of sponsorship that was void of all of that, I thought we weren’t bonding. I was still tethered to my old sponsor even though the relationship had gone south. In retrospect, A helped me immensely during that time, which I was able to recognize, although much later than I should have, so it was easy to go back to her the second time. The first go around, go was too drastic though. The change in dynamics from what I was used to was too much. My former sponsor had me in her grips and by firing me, it caught me off guard. Working with A during that time was mostly fruitless because I felt like a lost puppy desperately searching for solid ground. My fucked-up version of stability was total reliance on another person, conservatorship almost. I had Stockholm Syndrome, only I didn’t realize it at the time.
Working with A this time was a completely new and spiritual experience. I was solid enough in my foundation to be able to move on from the resentment I had towards my former sponsor and focus on what mattered most, my family and reconnecting with my recovery program. She helped me work through the resentment toward my former sponsor by helping to acknowledge and feel immense gratitude for all of the good she did. She helped me see that there was love, and she had brought me wisdom, which trumped the fear and control I felt for all of those years. I would not be here without her, and I will never forget that. She saved my life and, for a moment, was exactly what I needed. For the longest time, I couldn’t make sense of why I felt so disconnected from A the first time we worked together, but now I understood it was because I didn’t believe I was capable of accepting love without conditions or trusting myself to make decisions on my own (this will become a theme in my life, just wait). My self-worth was in the gutter until all the right internal and external conditions made it possible for me to start seeing the light.
The only downside to having a sponsor like A was that her kindness and acceptance brought out my inconsistent nature. I was ready for a change and I was no longer living in fear of getting in trouble for not always doing the work suggested to me, so the pendulum shifted a little too far in the other direction. I often saw her suggestions as optional and loosely followed them. I gave myself a pass to do half-measures in some areas I deemed “not as important.” Maybe I was giving myself a break finally from the control placed over me. A rebellion of sorts. I deserved a little freedom, right? But I’m an alcoholic so I take things to the extreme, and that’s not how it works. I can’t sort of work a recovery program and sort of stay sober, sane, and happy.
Half measures may have been my MO, but there were some things I got right away when I first got sober, thank God. The obsession to drink was lifted almost immediately and has never returned. For those of you who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll explain. People can be hard drinkers and not necessarily qualify as an alcoholic. Now the tricky part, and the part that kills most of us, is we can’t diagnose anyone but ourselves. But that’s also why it works. Once I understood without a doubt that I could not drink like normal people, then I was ready to begin. The first step says “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol- that our lives had become unmanageable.” I had to be beaten into submission so much so that I could be desperate enough to admit defeat and ask for help. Those final months leading up to my surrender were grim. I would spend most of my days withdrawing, hiding in my apartment and desperately trying to get my next fix. It consumed me. Nothing else mattered, my life had become nothing more than existing to feed my addiction.
But in addition to understanding I can’t drink like other people, and I certainly can’t use drugs recreationally, I need to see that the obsession centers in the mind and has absolutely nothing to do with how much I drank. This is what sets apart alcoholics from hard drinkers. It’s the tiny, or sometimes really loud voice in my head that tells me in the morning that I will never drink again because it was too bad last night, and by afternoon starts to tell me I’m thirsty. I lose touch with reality and become consumed with the fact that I’d overexaggerated it. It erases all memory of all of the consequences I experienced over and over again or puts them just far enough in my brain that I cannot access them at that moment. Not only that, but it’s insidious. It also convinces me that I will control it this time, or maybe I’ll just have one or two drinks and be home by a certain time. Inevitably though, 10 hours and a blackout later I wake up in someone’s bed I don’t know, in a house I don’t recognize, and I have to rack my brain to piece together how I started the night with my friends and ended up here.
That happened over, and over, and over again. The specifics weren’t always the same, but the lack of power and unmanageability always were. I would have every intention of going to work when I got up in the morning, however, I was lured out of my intentions frequently. For instance, I went to a friend’s house one day beforehand and they had to finish a keg of beer or it would go bad, so I figured I might as well help them. No harm no foul, I wouldn’t be drinking that much. We were playing a harmless game where we only took one sip per minute. Well soon you forget how long a minute is and I’m lying down in the back of my friend’s car and she is parking at my job to run in and tell my boss I’m sick.
If you stay sober long enough and you find a solution that gives you a sufficient substitute, a person can look back and see that the obsession is gone. Sometimes it leaves quickly like it did for me. Some people are plagued by it for a while before it’s gone and they hold on to their seats, literally, in meetings so they don’t leave, because that’s how powerful it is; or they leave and we either read about them in the paper or see them back again soon. With some people, I’ve seen the obsession come and go. This is something I can’t even imagine. It comes out of nowhere, like a freight train and its only path is that of destruction. I say I could see a relapse coming in someone, but the truth is, I have no idea what keeps people and what doesn’t. I mean I know my solution, but I don’t know what combination of it is the key that’s keeping me sober, so I just keep doing all of it. I’m reminded time and time again what a miracle it is for me to be sober. But for the grace of God, there go I. I don’t know why I get this life and others don’t, but I’ve never taken it for granted, even if I don’t always do what I’m told. I understand this with certainty, which is why I have a fighting chance. I may be my own worst enemy, but by some miracle, I always see, eventually, when my self-will runs riot.
So working with A was a blessing and also a curse. I understood at a deep level that recovery was my only option. I also understood immediately that at the end of the day, my connection with my God was my moral compass but I needed to be willing to do a few things. Get honest with my God, work to keep my side of the street clean as much as possible, and strive to have the best possible relations with everyone and everything- if I do all of these things, I have a really good chance of staying sober. Those things I’ve always understood, and for the most part have kept me in check because I value them above anything else, BUT, and that is a big but, it doesn’t always mean I’m great at it. I still have the mind of an alcoholic, so I am a glutton for punishment, and often find it much more pleasurable to endure much worse pain in the future for a minute of acting on impulse in the present. This is what got me into trouble the most in early sobriety, and still occasionally now, and is what has often separated me from my sponsors and others in recovery.
Sleeping with someone who said they weren’t with their girlfriend anymore who also happened to be one of my best friends at the time, isn’t exactly taking the high road and keeping my side of the street clean. I heard my old sponsor say one time that my behavior is between me and my God and if I’m willing to deal with the consequences I can behave any way I want. I’m sure she didn’t mean that, or probably say that at all, but that’s what I heard so I went with it. That reasoning got me in a lot of trouble with my friends and fellow sober people, and kept them skeptics for a very long time. My relationship with God was solid, so solid I must have been under the impression we had some sort of get-out-of-jail-free deal. It was not solid enough, though, for me to not act like a total fool. I really lived out the, “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” to the fullest. The thing I had on my side, though, was my consistency when things would end badly. I was always willing to eventually admit what I’d done to my sponsor even if it required me to make amends. I was always willing to clean up the wreckage. I held up my end of the bargain on to the ”deal with the consequences” part, no matter how much pain it caused me and others.
At the end of the day, yes, my relationship with my Higher Power trumps everything, but I also can’t keep any secrets from at least one human being. That’s the power of sponsorship. It doesn’t matter who it is, if you clean house with just one other person, that’s the magic, and that’s why recovery is so profound.
This was something I struggled to fully understand until I finally left Helena. I had been cherry-picking what my sponsor was privy to and that doesn’t work. Self-reliance got the best of me. On a subconscious level, I knew I needed to not keep secrets, but I convinced myself that they weren’t always important enough to share. Despite my trust in God, I missed the mark because I thought I could handle it on my own when in actuality I was living in self-will. The entire point of sponsorship is relying on another to help direct me away from myself and toward God. Faith without works is dead and the work was trusting that I didn’t know best. I may have told a friend what I was thinking or doing, but that friend didn’t vow to be my accountability partner and therefore on some level also doesn’t have all the facts. I can tell everything I’m thinking, feeling, and doing to different groups of people, but without one person knowing all of it, I get to stay sneaky, which is my MO and by definition is alcoholic thinking. It kept me sick for a long time in recovery, and it kept me from fully comprehending or achieving the psychic change that needed to happen so I could live out the life of my wildest dreams.
I can’t imagine how frustrating it was for A to show up for our scheduled weekly appointment only for me to either no-show or call and cancel last minute. I did this with my former sponsor too. Or with her, I would skimp on the readings I was supposed to do and bullshit my way through it as if I had, or speed read in the car while I waited outside to go in. I had changed a little, at least I didn’t do that part with A. It’s progress, not perfection, right? That form of bullshit I grew out of and thank God. But my laziness and unreliability are still something I’m working on.
I finally was able to let one person in, and it singlehanded changed my life, but it took moving to Missoula to figure that out. If I had known how to from the beginning, it would have saved me a lot of heartache. I never fully understood the real power of the psychic change or experienced it entirely until I started to get completely honest with one other person. In fact, the relationships I began forming were all like that. Honest, trusting, and hauntingly authentic, at least to me. I had changed, and therefore my relationships began to transform.
When I decided to leave Tom* and move to Missoula, I knew I needed a clean break. I had no idea, though, how much bigger the Universe’s plan was. More is always revealed and Missoula was my ultimate spiritual awakening. Not one white light moment, but a continuous fireworks show with no ending in sight. From the moment I arrived in the city, I felt every fiber of my being shift. The literal move from my hometown where I left the majority of my belongings in storage for a simpler more nomadic life felt different, and the results were immediate and profound. Yes, I physically left my stuff, but the 100-plus miles closed the door between me and almost everything and everyone I’d ever known creating a barrier between my old and new life making me feel lighter than letting go of any earthy thing could.
I’d been to Missoula hundreds of times before. We drove the hour-and-a-half drive, often, when I was young because it offered better food and shopping than anything Helena ever could. Despite it being just on the other side of the Continental Divide, when we would enter the city limits, I felt like I was out of Montana and experiencing the culture and excitement of a metropolitan area. We traveled some growing up, so I had been to several major cities, but living in such a rural state makes a person crave something, anything else at times, and Missoula offered that. As an active drug user, I would also make the drive, dangerously inebriated with the goal of getting more. Missoula sits just off of I-90 so the traffic makes it a prime spot to buy the good drugs. I have more memories than I can count raving at the Pride festival, stumbling through hotel lobbies with very little clothing on, or meeting up with shady people to buy high-grade cocaine or mushrooms to take back home. When Tom and I were married, we would also drive over often. Whether it was to go to a Griz game, or see a band that most definitely was not coming to Helena, or just hang out with his childhood best friend and his wife- we loved the city.
Helena is the capital city, but for some reason missed the mark on opportunities for cultural development. The sleepy mountain town is just now starting to find its groove with all the young people returning to give it a heartbeat, but it has a long way to go. The only thing Helena has on Missoula is our trail system. Yes, Missoula has a plethora of recreational opportunities within a stone’s throw of the city, but Helena takes the prize above any other city in the state and is recognized nationally for its 80-plus miles of single track, all within the city limits, most of which are accessible from the downtown area.
Bozeman, another city in Montana, roughly the same distance away from Helena, but in the other direction, gets a lot of national hype. Like Missoula, it’s the other big college town and has a lot to offer. It’s also right next to Big Sky and Yellowstone National Park, so visitors and those looking to relocate after watching Yellowstone, the television show, flock there to experience the true Montana way of life. Yes, Bozeman has many of the same amenities as Missoula, but its trendiness has tainted the culture, I think for the worse.
Missoula being the other well-known city in the state everyone says they’ve heard of when you say you’re from Montana, has preserved its authenticity as a hub for culture. So its growth, although rapid, just like basically every other place in the state, has stayed the same- cool, weird, and faithfully its own without ego. People who move there embrace it and don’t try to change it, and those long-time residents fully lean into its quirkiness. On any given day a person can walk downtown and find great vegan food, farm-to-table fare, fancy steaks, and hole-in-the-wall coffee shops. You could also pluck 10 random people off the streets and drop them in New York City, or Portland, or LA and they’d look like they belong, and not in a snobbish way. But, instead of $500 designer coats and foreign cars, they'd be adorned with their fancy Patagonia jacket dressing down or matching whatever clothing was underneath, while they drove their Subarus. The street style and people-watching in Missoula gives any major city a run for their money in my opinion. But being still in Montana you take most of us to a party and we are wearing our Patagucci, as they call it, no matter what occasion it is and we will be driving our car however old it is, because we are definitely not getting rid of it until it dies. Go anywhere in Montana, Bozeman is the only exception.
The only downside of Missoula's growth and proximity to the freeway is the overgrowing number of homeless people that set up camp everywhere along the banks of the Clark Fork River that runs right through the city.
The river is actually one of my favorite things about the city. I’ve always been drawn to water, so I’m filled with glee every time I cross one of the many bridges that run throughout Missoula no matter how many times I’ve taken the route. What’s beautiful too, is the city has structured its downtown around the river. Two paths, mostly paved, run parallel to the river on both sides and stretch for miles making it an easily accessible recreational opportunity that gives the best tour of the city. Missoula is also extremely flat, despite all the surrounding mountains, so it has embraced its bike community and rivals other metropolitan ones.
Visiting Missoula is an entirely different experience than living there, but the effects of its magic never lose their luster. It’s quite the opposite, actually, at least it was for me. Immersing myself into the community and watching as it embraced me as its own was like the warm welcome I’d been waiting for my whole life. As I write this I miss it fiercely and all the people who I grew to love so dearly. I never thought I’d want to go back to Montana once I left, but now I’m questioning whether, when I’m done with this journey, no matter how long it takes, I will return to the birthplace of where it all started.
I lived with my long-time friend Maggie for the first few months I was there. The way the Universe had to work to arrange all the things for Maggie and me to end up under one roof and what happened as a result of it is nothing short of a miracle and changed the trajectory of my life in a way I couldn’t have dreamed up even if I tried.
*The first picture is me sober circa 2014/15.
*The second picture is with Maggie (on the right) and my new bestie Suzanne (middle)
*The third is me just before I left Montana.
*As a courtesy and to protect his privacy I've changed my ex-husband's name.
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