Author's Note: Today I'm celebrating 600 days of sobriety and I'm back with another installment from my memoir writing class.
I've shared a bit about my sobriety journey in previous posts, but this is a different account of that story through the lens of what was going through my head. Those thoughts are delineated in italics below. When necessary, I've altered details to protect people's anonymity.
What the f*ck am I doing?
My Uber came to a screeching halt in front of a towering gothic stone church with bright red doors nestled between two brick apartment buildings in the West Village.
My cell phone vibrated just as I was getting out of the car.
A text from Chris: I am so sorry, but I will not get there on time, but I texted my friend Mark. He's going to look for you. Let's plan to get dinner after. See you soon!
Should I just abort the mission and go back to Williamsburg?
This was the last place I wanted to be, and now the person I was supposed to meet was leaving me hanging. I was furious, scared, and mostly in disbelief I'd found myself at a church again.
I'm already here, so I should just stay. Besides, I just came all the way from Brooklyn.
I felt like a fish out of water and didn't know what to do. And the fact that I was alone at a church only made it worse. I wasn't there for a church service, but being in a church with any group was enough to trigger my PTSD from being in gay conversion therapy.
But this will be different. I'm not here to talk about how to not be gay. I'm here to figure out how I can live sober.
As much as I didn't want to admit it, I knew if I traced all of the problems in my life back to a single source, I'd find myself at the bottom of an empty wine bottle. The pandemic pushed me and my imbibing to a breaking point. Some friends staged a mini-intervention weeks earlier and told me they wouldn't socialize with me if I was drinking, which meant, in their words, they would never see me again. I was angry and ordered us another round of martinis as a joke. No one laughed, and I finished most of the martinis. A couple of weeks later, my pandemic love affair blew up during an alcohol-fueled fight the day before we were going to sign a lease to move in together. So now I was effectively single and homeless, needing to find a new place to live in less than two weeks when my lease was up. And I was skating on thin ice at work because I recently started drinking as soon as I woke up so I wouldn't have the shakes and regularly missed meetings and deadlines. Things were swirling out of control, and I knew I needed to do something. I remembered my friend Ryan was sober, and if there was anyone who could help me, it was him.
Wow, how the tables have turned.
We were both conversion therapy dropouts, so if anyone got me, it was him. He had called me years earlier when he was battling addiction. He checked himself into rehab, and I was one of the few friends he contacted. I called and left messages of encouragement every few days for the first few weeks he was in treatment. Now he was 5 years clean and sober, and I was calling him at the end of my rope. He shared how he got sober and told me to find a recovery meeting, listen, raise my hand, and find a sponsor.
This sounds like a bad multi-level marketing scheme or a cult.
More than any other city in the U.S., New York City took COVID seriously. And even though at least one dose of the vaccine was jabbed into most of the arms of the city's 8 million residents by the summer of 2021, gatherings of any kind were still not allowed, including recovery meetings. So, on June 20, at 11 AM, I attended my first recovery meeting by logging on to Zoom.
This is awful. I promised Ryan I would do this, but I hate all the virtual bullshit we've been doing for the last year, and I can't handle another Zoom anything.
As I sat through the meeting, I hated that I related to so much of what I heard being said, though the "God" talk made me cringe and was enough for me to close my laptop. I had been through this circus before and wasn't about to get back into the ring. I had prayed for years for God to change my sexuality, which didn't work, so I had little faith God would help me become sober. I'd have to do this one without Divine intervention. Still, something about it felt comforting and familiar, so I kept listening and eventually raised my virtual hand.
Hi, I'm Tim... and I think I'm out of my mind for saying this, but I AM an alcoholic.
I attended four, sometimes five meetings, a day on Zoom for the first few weeks. I was lonely, desperate, and willing to try anything. It was great getting to log in at any time of the day and hear people's stories and find some comfort or hope in their words. I still couldn't get over the religious sound of it all, but everyone seemed to be bought into it. It wasn't that I was irreligious, it was the combination of bringing God into a recovery process that made me uneasy.
I guess there may be something to this if it’s worked for all of these people.
I did as Ryan said and found myself a sponsor. I called him every day, and he started introducing me to other people, like Chris, and made me call three other alcoholics every day. That was part of the program for the first 90 days: Attend a meeting, call your sponsor, and talk to three other alcoholics. Rinse. Repeat.
Are you crazy? I am a busy person. I can’t possibly go to a meeting every day for the next 90 days! And call people on the phone? I don't talk to anyone on the phone except my mom once a week. I'm not about to try and make conversation with complete strangers every day.
Three weeks into sobriety, COVID restrictions in New York City began to ease up, and in-person recovery meetings were starting to open up. I'd have to leave the safety of Zoom and go into a room with other people, where I didn't have the option to go camera-off or log off and disappear if I wasn't feeling it. Chris told me about a gay recovery meeting he liked that was reopening in the West Village and asked me to meet him there so we could meet in person for the first time.
I should just go home. I can do a Zoom meeting instead.
"Oh, hey, are you Tim? I'm Mark!"
Damn it, Chris.
"I saw you fidgeting on your phone and figured you must be who Chris told me would be here. It's your first time at a live meeting, right?"
OF COURSE I'M ON MY PHONE. I AM FREAKED THE F*CK OUT. LEAVE ME ALONE!
I feigned a smile, nodded, and held my hand out to shake his but quickly changed it to a fist bump, realizing I still needed to learn how to negotiate people's COVID precautions.
Why am I so awkward?
Other people started showing up, hugging each other, and acting like they were best friends. Something in me didn't trust any of it was sincere, but at least many of the guys were cute.
Maybe I'll find a date or a rebound out of this...
A line started to form in front of the church. Doors would open in 10 minutes. We were a gaggle of gays who looked like they were in line to get into a bar in Hell's Kitchen or hop on the Sayville Ferry bound to debauchery on Fire Island. But not today. We were lined up in front of a church to show our vaccine cards and attend a recovery meeting.
I don't care what anyone says. This is not how I will spend my Friday nights for the rest of my life.
The idea of being back in a musty church basement made me nauseous. Thinking about it transported me back to the countless hours of my life I wasted in a circle of folding chairs with people who didn't look too dissimilar to the ones I was standing in line with today. We shared our sob stories and our struggles with our sexuality, and prayed prayers none of us believed but hoped to God may actually work. I didn't want to get myself into the same predicament again.
There is still time for me to leave. I could go and never see any of these people ever again.
When the doors opened, the crowd poured into the church's sanctuary upstairs instead of heading to the basement as I expected. A place of honor. Pews were blocked off for social distancing, and we all had to sit six feet apart. The air conditioning in the church wasn't working, so we were all slowly being boiled alive.
This really is like being in Hell.
Mark pointed me out to people he knew, and soon a flood of people came by and introduced themselves to me. I was thankful to be wearing a face mask to hide my facial expressions. It was too much for my introversion. It felt like I was at a gay brunch without the social buffer of bottomless mimosas.
I have to get out of here. Maybe I could fake a heat stroke?
The meeting started with the Serenity Prayer, and I almost leaped out of the pew for the door. We prayed the prayer during every Zoom meeting, but somehow saying it in unison in a church felt different. I wanted to run, yet something about this felt different and kept me glued to the pew.
It's only an hour. I can do this.
A gay man wearing a Britney Spears-adorned crop top and extremely short short shorts stood at the podium leading the meeting reading something that sounded like religious literature. The entire room was filled with people with every good reason not to set foot in a church, yet they were here, not hiding themselves or any bit of who they were. They talked openly about their struggles with alcohol, party drugs, random hookups, and many things I never dreamed I'd hear broadcasting from the PA system of a church. If old church ladies had been in the room, pearls would have been clutched. I found myself blushing and laughing. A lot. That was one thing I couldn't get over about the spectacle I witnessed. Every version of recovery meetings I'd seen portrayed in movies or TV was sad and awkward, but that wasn't the case here. People in this room were laughing and joking even though what we discussed was a matter of life or death. There was a levity to it that was refreshing. It was the most honest service I’d ever attended in a church.
My life would have been so different if I could have been this honest decades ago.
When I was 16, I made a deal with God that if He would change my sexuality, I'd spend my life in service to Him. Keeping my part of the bargain, I worked for Evangelical megachurches for almost a decade while going through gay conversion therapy. When the change didn't happen, and I was honest about it, I was kicked out of the church, lost my job and community, and had to start all over at age 28. Alcohol was my way of soothing the pain of losing everything I'd lost and helped me feel comfortable in my own skin in a world I was terrified to enter. Eventually, the magic elixir started poisoning my life, which brought me here.
I hate knowing I belong here.
The speaker that night said, "the opposite of addiction isn't sobriety – it's connection." And there, in the steaming church sanctuary on a July night, I started to feel a connection I hadn't felt in a long time. I was in a space I felt excluded from most of my life, but for the first time I felt like I belonged. I raised my hand, said I had 22 days sober, and the room erupted in thunderous applause. It was like an altar call at a church service when someone responded to ask Jesus into their hearts. Strangers approached me afterward to meet me and asked me for my phone number. It was weird and wonderful at the same time.
Why do I always get myself tangled up in these kinds of things?!
After the meeting was over me, Chris and Mark walked to get dinner at an Indian restaurant around the corner. We talked for hours over plates of butter chicken and basmati rice and slurped down mango lassis to cool ourselves from the sweltering heat outside. They shared their stories of how they ended up in recovery and what it took to stay sober. I was awed by how candidly and honestly they shared their stories. There was an instant connection and camaraderie and for the first time in a long time I felt seen and heard. We eventually hugged goodbye as we parted ways and made plans to see each other at another meeting the following night.
What is happening?
I showed up at a church hours earlier feeling completely unhinged and isolated, and now I was leaving with two new friends and a glimmer of hope that I could change. And I felt a connection with God for the first time in a long time.
Maybe this is what my therapist calls a "corrective experience"?
There have been many of these experiences in the last 600 days I've been sober. It's a milestone I'm grateful to have reached, but I still have a long way to go, one day at a time. One of the most extraordinary things I've been given is the gift of a new perspective—a new way of seeing myself, my past, and my present. It gives me hope for my future.
So here’s how I see things now…
I got kicked out of the church for being gay, which led me to alcohol. Alcohol eventually brought me back to church with gay people to figure out how to stay sober by having a relationship with God.
God really does have a sense of humor.
Loved reading this! Proud is an understatement!
I’m looking forward to day 666!!