I Think Differently, Therefore I Am Different

“Cogito ergo sum.”
– René Descartes

I was asked the other day, “How did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

I do not know how I have stayed abstinent from alcohol for three years, having been unable to abstain for about seven years. I do not know how I got addicted to alcohol, how I stopped drinking, or how I’ve stayed stopped.

My inability to know nearly nullifies me.

Good enough writing

When Dr. Leslie Mellichamp at Virginia Tech taught us René Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum,” I felt the rapture of recognition. I toss my thoughts into the air like fall leaves, let them tickle my skin as they stream around me, lean back surely, delightedly, into their thick, crispy heaps.

I think, therefore I am.

When I started drinking, something began to decay. I remember writing a poem in honor of a former student’s graduation in 2008, feeling deeply, but straining to find words, baffled at the struggle to follow Coleridge’s guidance – “the best words in their best order.” It’s the last poem I ever wrote.

I cannot think, therefore I am not.

I have been in therapy with Dr. H. since just after my mother died in 2011. She astutely, indirectly, oh-so-carefully, oh-so-occasionally, brought up drinking. I remember her telling me in January, 2012, she had heard an NPR story about the CDC’s report on women and drinking. I Googled it. I took tests for problem drinking. I qualified. It would be almost a year, however, before I stopped drinking. That was three years and one month ago today.

I have chronicled my three years of abstinence as pretty much unrelenting suffering.

I cannot think, therefore I am not.

To counter that belief, the only thing I know to do is to do.

If I work, and, through my work I help, therefore I am, if only a little bit.

The work that came my way in the third year of my sobriety was helping people struggling with addiction. No matter what I did, I could not help.

I cannot help. Therefore I am not.

Suffering threatened a bonfire.

Between sessions in October, I shared this thinking with Dr. H. in a piece of writing. She speaks eloquently and, of course, grammatically, but this is what I remember she said at our next session:

“You think wrong. Here’s how you think wrong. Here’s why you think wrong. Here’s how to think differently. If you don’t think differently, you will continue to suffer.”

I was aghast. Confrontation withdraws heavily from a relationship’s bank account. Her years of oh-so-carefully, however, had built a bountiful trust deposit.

Hmm. I think, therefore I am. If I think wrong and can right my thinking, might I exist again? Might I save myself from the flames?

She essentially said I had to accept it all. Everything that had ever been said or done to me, everything that I had ever said or done, I had to swallow the ocean of it into my own gut. And keep it down.

I’ve been at it since. I spit mouthfuls of acceptance at anything that’s even hot.

Then I glug it back in.

I don’t know how to get or stay sober. I do know how to accept that my ability to think – what I cherish most about being me – is lessened by alcoholism, perhaps forever.

I think well enough, therefore I am enough.

I’m not a fan of that. But if I accept it, I simply feel better.

I think, therefore I write. Even if it’s only good enough writing.

This post began on a lovely leaf of lined, white paper.