The Earthquake

Before getting sober I had always been afraid, anxious, jumpy. I also had a lifelong habit of waking up inexplicably terrified. That's probably why I had to drink so much, to tame that monstrous anxiety. I learned how to hide my angst at a young age, and I hid it well, But it was always there, haunting my days, a swift current of fear that ran through me the way I imagined blood ran through other people. As I get older and spend more time in the rooms of A.A. it is dissipating, and that is a huge relief, but I still am and probably always will be somewhat high strung. I blame this chronic anxiety on my very first memory, a memory from when I was just a baby. An event powerful enough to sear itself into my gray matter, becoming, as those things do, part of my psyche.

That first memory is so bizarre that I often wondered if it might be a dream. But I know that it’s not. It’s always been there and it’s as deep and profound as any memory I have.

I am a baby and I’m in a crib in a very dark room. Something has jolted me awake quite suddenly. I feel as if I have been lifted and then very gently dropped, a curious sensation but not unpleasant. There is another baby in here with me. We are in what must have passed for twin cribs in those days - a large square double size crib with a divider in the middle, making one crib for two babies. The other baby in the crib is my twin brother, but of course I don’t know that yet. All I know is that he is sitting up in that adorable way that babies do and crying. I want to comfort him. I wonder what is happening. I crawl to the divider and stand, holding myself up with both hands on the railing. My legs feel weak, shaky, unstable. I’m not scared, just curious, and I have this overwhelming desire to soothe the other baby. The room is dark, my brother is crying. Suddenly a shaft of warm yellow light streams into the room, bright and welcome. Help is on its way. I turn toward the light, the door is opening, and that’s it. 

I don’t have another clear memory until age four when I am playing on some swings and loving the feeling of weightlessness and the cool air rushing past my face and through my wispy floating hair.

But that first memory has always been with me and I recently asked my mother about it. She told me, to my great surprise, that my memory was most likely the earthquake. A small earthquake that rattled Scarsdale, New York (of all places) in 1968. My mother had been downstairs in the kitchen with my older sister when the cups started to rattle and slide across their shelf. “Did you know what it was?” I asked her. “No. Of course not. Earthquakes in Westchester? Whoever heard of such a thing?” “Well what did you do?” I asked. “I made sure your sister was safe and then I ran upstairs to check on you and your brother, but it had stopped. I never felt another one. It was so strange. Why do you ask?” she wondered. “Because I think that is my very first memory” I told her. “Light coming into the room the night of the earthquake. It’s so clear to me” I told her, “like it was yesterday.”

“That’s impossible.” She shut me down. “You were too young. Babies that young don't have memories.” But I did. But I do. And I want to lay my lifelong anxiety on the fact that my very first memory is of an earthquake in a place where earthquakes don’t happen.

It’s not just that though, and I know it. It’s the faithless, hopeless, alcoholism that runs deep in my veins that used to make me so anxious all the time. I know I am this way because of some perverse twist of my genetic helix but also because I grew up with parents (separated, I think, even before the earthquake) who were both, during my childhood years, profoundly infected with the disease of alcoholism. I don't blame them for this, how could I? I see alcoholism like any other disease. Like diabetes. Would I blame a diabetic for having that disease? No. But would I be sad if they refused to take their insulin? Yes. I would be.

It’s a tense balancing act, living with alcoholism, like walking on eggs, praying to break none. Eggshells would be an easier option, but who cares about walking on eggshells? Eggshells are already broken.

All animals, when threatened, have three options - fight, flight, or freeze. As a child my go-to option was to freeze. Just freeze, be quiet, play dead, until “it” all blew over.  It worked pretty well for me for quite a while. But the external freezing made my internals freeze as well. Drugs and alcohol allowed me to unfreeze, to actually thaw a bit. And that warmth, that gentle softening, was what I loved the most.

Years ago, in early recovery and flooded with fear, I spilled my guts to my friend Matt one day while waiting for our A.A. meeting to start. “I drink because I’m scared,” I told him. "Scared of people. Scared of life. Scared of everything really. I’ve always been scared - but I wasn't scared when I drank. All that fear went away when I drank. And now that I’m not drinking it’s all coming back.”

“That happens” Matt told me. “But a drink won’t help you now. That ship has sailed. You know that. It will blot the fear out for a little while, maybe, but never permanently. And never without consequences.”

“So where do you think all this fear of yours comes from anyway?” Matt asked me kindly. “What is the source of that fear?” “It comes from that damn earthquake!” I said, and I told him the story. “If it wasn't for that earthquake scaring the bejesus out of me as an impressionable little baby I could have been normal!” I laughed.

“Normal is wildly overrated” Matt assured me, and with that the meeting started, so we stopped chatting and settled down, eager for our daily dose of medicine. A medicine that - if I were to believe the fellows sitting with me - would make my fears, if not disappear, then at least become quite manageable…if I was willing to do “the work”.

The whole thing sounded so cultish to me. “The work”, like some brainwashy voodoo that I didn’t really understand.

But the idea that I could be free from fear, free from anxiety, that I could learn to live in a state of serene acceptance, was so novel to me, so exciting, so enticing, that I decided to give the “program” my full attention.  If I could be free from fear for even one day I thought I would be happy.

Yet I still felt untethered, unmoored.  Without alcohol to soothe me through the end of most days my anxiety was so bad that sometimes I had no other option but to lie on the floor face-down in a child's pose to feel safe. I would do that and I’d feel better. I’d rock to and fro on my yoga mat. Like a baby trying to self-soothe. I remembered then, while in that humbled state, that I used to do that as a child. Rock myself to sleep every night, for years, waking up with my sheets in a twisted knot and the hair on the right side of my head in a big nasty tangle. And I saw that was exactly what I needed to do once again. I calmed myself by physically rocking when I was a child and with drugs and alcohol as an adolescent and young adult. Now I would have to learn, all over again, how to self-soothe. This time without my favorite central nervous system depressant….booze.

In early sobriety I didn’t think I could do that. My anxiety was taking up so much space in my mind that I honestly could not imagine it being gone. “What fills all that space?” I asked Matt after the meeting that day. “All that space in my head where my anxiety lives? What fills that space?”

“You’ll see,” Matt told me. “Stick around…you’ll see.”

I didn’t trust Matt (because I didn’t trust anyone yet) but, to my great surprise, I was beginning to trust A.A. And even though I most certainly didn't want to be a part of the largest global organization that no one (initially) wants to be a member of, I knew, early on in my recovery, that these AA-ers were my people. We share a common enemy, the disease of addiction, and that is our bond. We have a fatal disease that, left untreated, has the power to make us self-destruct. As if all of us addicts have malevolent aliens actively festering inside of us, simply waiting to take us down.  These A.A. people had found a way to band together, fight the disease, and apparently live a pretty nice life while doing that. And they laughed...a lot, which surprised me.

I started to see everyone in the meetings as joyful warriors, their sobriety a superpower. And I wanted to be a warrior. I was definitely still hurting. I’d had my ass kicked by addiction and my own internal Richter scale was still swinging wildly between a horrible jittery 8 and a shaking and quaking 9.5 on a daily basis. But I wasn’t dead yet. Slowly over those first few months of early sobriety I gathered enough strength (with my new brothers in arms by my side) to start fighting.

Which is what I decided to do.