25

It’s a gratitude day. 25 years clean and sober.  I take my cake this coming week at my home group Burnaby Men’s with George insisting he’ll bring the cake.  I joke and say we celebrate the sacraments of cake and coffee of Bill and Bob.  It’s a long fast.  Thankfully the hang over goes in weeks to months though we clean up the ‘wreckage of the past’ for sometimes years’, making amends and just living sober.  

I was a binge drinker . Much of my life was intensely dedicated but I was attracted to the ‘chaos’.  I married women who shared my pleasures.  My family was orderly by comparison.  So much alcohol and mental illness with those I was attracted to or what I attracted.  I wasn’t called ‘Wild Bill’ because I was tame.  Always the first to dance on tables and do anything on a dare.  

I remember at Homewood Treatment Centre, Graeme Cunningham saying to me ‘some people run with the cheetah’s and some people run with the turkeys, you’ve been running with the turkeys’.  My dad called them ‘fair weather friends’.  He was what men called a ‘straight shooter’.  I regret that I didn’t listen more to him.  He transformed from the stupidest man I knew as a genius to the greatest man I knew as an adult.

When I stopped drinking, smoking tobacco and cannabis, so much of that life paled. We joke and say an alcoholic 10 is a  4 with a 6 pack.  Just so much of what people do when they’re drinking has no appeal sober. Like staying up late. I love the dawn now.  I love waking refreshed and alert. I can’t imagine why I would suffer a hangover and then go back and do it again.  

I can’t imagine today ‘not living life on life’s terms’.  I don’t want to be ‘dope dumb’ on marijuana joking about how stupid we talk even if it is like taking valium and relaxing. I don’t want to knee jerk emotions of alcohol and I never want the lack of peace of mind or the ability to appreciate a natural high.  Jesus said we must be like children again to enter heaven.  I remember thinking pot was coming out of my fat cells when I regained the natural love of life and joy de vivre. 

 Do you now remember the joyful times of childhood? a celebrity friend in recovery said to me.  

Suddenly I remembered myself playing baseball in a radiant green park with happy people and a glorious sun.  When we are depressed we remember depression because we are in the valley of our minds. Only on the peaks can we see all the joy of the truly high places as well as the lows and valleys of life.  Drugs and alcohol are depressing.

Asked to remember all the things in life I was proud of and would like to be remembered for I realized that the vast majority of them occurred sober, family and church and childhood, hunting and fishing, the great romances, provincial gymnastic and volleyball competitions,  dance training and competitions, theatre performances,  cycling across Europe, study of history and literature, studying  chemistry and anatomy, medical school training, working as a country gp, delivering babies, flying doctor through the sub arctic, residency training in community medicine and psychiatry. Then psychiatry and another divorce and alcohol abuse. Then work continued but my recreation increasingly was associated cigarettes, reefers and wine.  I’d gone camping to tent and fish but now looked forward to drinking a bottle of wine and smoking a joint around the fire. There was a shift.

At first it’s fun , then it’s fun and trouble, then it’s trouble..  I remember it being trouble sailing down to Mexico and then in Mexico, Instead of sailing around the world my partner and I stayed in margaritaville.  There were good times.  Sailing was spectacular.  Playing blues in the band was fun. Spear fishing and snorkelling and sun was great but it was going nowhere . When we came home she wouldn’t get help.  I didn’t want to be around her friends or my friends that drank and drugged. I’d liked her because she had her own group of dealers and prayers . Her’s tended to have university degrees but were no less ‘friends in high places and low places’ while I had friends who were interesting the sober ones in high place and the ones who crank and did dope professionals and bikers and rural.  

She would get so impaired she couldn’t work. I’d party on the weekend but I’d go to work and I was seeking help seeing professionals and told that my problems wasn’t the joint or wine I drank but the impaired wife doing cocaine. The lying and destruction increased . My unforgettable line was , “I can go to work and help. a hundred people or stay home and help one person. I can’t do both.”  I’d been years of covering for her.  I was so tired of being told a man would handle his wife. She was not a pretty site drunk and stoned though we’d both been younger. We were passed the magic forty year old place where you’re expect to be able to get your act together.  She lied and lied and lied.  It was impossible.  I never liked cocaine but she sure did.  I didn’t like the people around cocaine either. I’d liked the hippy wine and reefer world but this cocaine crowd was mean. My former friends who had fallen to cocaine were the same.  We joke that an alcoholic will steal your wallet but an addict will not only steal your wallet they’re help you look for it.

I just couldn’t carry on. I was working harder than I’d ever trying to cover for her when she suddenly refused to get out of bed forever or see a doctor. I knew this couldn’t go on.  She’d had a grow operation and with friends of her. She’d moved all the money I made into her accounts except for what required my signature.  In the end it was apparent that she’d been financially scheming for a year.  I remember thinking I’m trying to make this work and she’s been stabbing me in the back.  Separation and divorce.  The times she almost killed me and the times drunk when she almost killed us both. I saved our lives so many times, the worst being when I went off the bow wave of a tanker coming out of San Francisco harbour in the fog having again messed up the radar and lied when I asked if she’d touched it.  

I don’t want to ever be back in a relationship with someone drunk and stoned. I don’t want to ever be drunk and stoned again. I can see her behaviour clearly but only know that I was a mirror. I loved in AA the ‘restore us to saniety’ clause. I never realized how insane I was but I certainly saw how insane she was, yet I was with her and our friends were too. It was a bad sit com, something out of a Kardasian bizarro world.

I remember thinking that my life had gone wrong when I was sexually abused by my professor, when I was a psychiatry resident, when I committed adultery when I saw so much learning to understand the insane.  I thought when was my life right and remembered church and prayer and meditation. I was going to return to Winnipeg to talk to the people there I knew and trusted.  I was going to leave psychiatry and maybe go back to being a country doctor or just get out of medicine all together.  The psychiatrists I knew were drunks and addicts and as I learned the depths of my wife’s deceit and even the deceit of my therapist and authorities in general I became paranoid.  My fair weather friends stole from me as did my ex wife. Manly I’d taken nothing of hers and we’d lived on my income as most of our times she’d been a student and took her own income.  I remember thinking that as a man I was powerless and that maybe I could become a woman because I was really tired of having all the responsibility and accountability, all the blame and none of the praise.  I was utterly confused too. I’d spent 20 years with women to have a family but after marriage I learned they didn’t want children.  They wanted a daddy.  Their fathers were alcoholic or absent.  But God were they beautiful, brilliant and fun. I forfeited joy and peace for fun and drama. Not a bad trade when young but time marches on.  

I had been in church as a boy with my brother and mother and father and that was the oasis I aimed for. A Christian friend asked if he could help and offered to rent me his trailer . He didn’t smoke dope and rarely drank.  I returned to church.  She’d refused to go. In psyhiatriy the psychoanalytic professors hearing I meditated as a disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda and a follower of Christian Dr. Carl Ridd I was summarily told that meditation was harmful and must stop and that if I wished to continue my training with these two psychiatrists I had to leave community medicine and stop taking Christian studies courses while in residency.  I had left surgery and family medicine and now was told if I wanted to be a psychiatrist I needed to be a devotee of the megalomaniac analyst I who I frankly admired.  Psychiatrists then were a weird mix, mensch’s and devils.  All were charming and highly skilled. We learned from the psychopaths , narcissists and borderlines. We walk miles in their moccasins and they get under our skin. We are as much artists of the mind as scientists. I was naive and vulnerble.  I was also obedient.  Thise who rise high in systems much have this trait of obedience as the rebels get pruned.  Systems are like military organizations.  They’re like religious organizations.  The abuse of power is ubiquitous.  

I was willing to stay a doctor sober and clean. I was encouraged to go to AA and asked my friend, Kirk, who I trusted if he trusted AA. Kirk and I and been spiritual disciples our whole live, he a follower of Prem and me a Christian doctor who’d taken a detour in better living with chemistry, the tantra yoga,Daost path.  

“I think AA is a good group. I know people who belong and they’ve done well.  I think it’s good that you’ve stopped drugs and alcohol.  I didn’t think that was making you happy. I’m sorry that you and your wife have separated but I never thought she and you were that compatible.  But yes I think AA is a good thing.”  

I’d stopped drinking and left the drug crowd and was detoxing on a hillside with my Bible and my shotgun. The bikers I’d been staying with who stole my money, possessions and vehicle were threatening to come by one night and kill me for the registration.  They never came by but I saw they’d sold my vehicle without registration. I learned that I obeyed laws but so many didn’t .I was so naive. I’d also have all these ‘god’ moments. Events were constantly synchronistic.  Good came to me. I was free of the baggage and suddenly out of the dark I was in the light and it was uncanny how my relationship with God restored. I’d actually thought I was beyond God’s love.  

Bernie showed up in his new truck, the ex wife had destroyed my truck, I was riding a bicycle American Express wanted to claim, my ex wife having with her lawyer and her millions used up all my money on lawyers who said ‘she and her lawyer are refusing to meet so they’re using seige techniques to destroy you and ruin you financially.’  I’d given the last of my money to the lawyer to free my accounts to pay the rent. I was getting charity and food from the church and Christian friends. I went to welfare and the woman screamed at me saying that a ‘doctor can’t get welfare…welfare is for the poor people…you rich men can’t expect poor people to pay you….get out of my office…you’ll get nothing here.”  Every day was humiliation. I’m still hoarding food as again I was hungry like when I left my father’s home.

So i went to church and I went to AA and I trusted Christians .  I trusted godly people. I was lied to by the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I was lied to by psychiatrists but I’d been a family physician , a member of the family physician of canada before becoming a specialist in medicine and psychiatry. I found myself trusting family physicians and Godly psychiatrists. I’d extend my trust to Sam Sussman , an Orthodox Jew. I had named the psychiatrist who raped me drunk and stoned out of the blue and left field this powerful connected man ‘made me his woman’ and ‘bred me’ as my engineer friend liked to put it.  He was a misogynist.  I am still confused.  I was the wife in my marriages to female doctors doing the cooking and cleaning as well as working each day. My colleagues most had wive ‘s and mothers of their children and they went home to the traditional division of labour but I was married to female doctors and never had any support. They did school , I did the wifely duties, and worked two jobs for their ‘desires’ and maintained us while they brought in stipends.  I realized that the guy who said marriage was institutionalize prostitution was talking to me. I was destitute after divorce and they were wealthy yet I’d spent the marriage helping them academically literally dragging them to the library to study and sitting beside them as a study coach, I was ahead of them. But women repeatedly put me down projecting their anger at their husbands and boyfriends who somehow got ‘served’. I never got served’.  I cooked and cleaned and worked.  As a psychiatrist I was most interested in the escorts and their pimps. I was fascinated having pimps as patients and learning how they trained ‘their bitches’.  Exact opposite to all I did.

I read Gottman of Love Lab fame and learned that I was a master at verbally winning battles but lost the war because my wives held onto resentments.  They had horrendous relationships with their alcoholic families and their horendously abusive mothers and I’d had this straight arrow ex military engineer who supervised hundreds of men and a religious Baptist loving mother who had wanted a daughter but had me and couldn’t have more children. I failed her because while I was apparently the prefect child I left home. I preferred running with the pack and had this spiritual path that took me away from the safety and love of home. I truly was the prodigal son.  I came home after I left and then left again. My parents were always there for me. I feel sorry for so many who haven’t had that. The trouble was always my pride.  

Pride is the original sin.  Alcohol and addiction create the mental state of ‘egomania wth inferiority comp;lexes’.

I’m thankful to day because of all the people who helped me to surrender to God and let go of self. The Swami song say ‘mother father have I none I am he, I am he, blessed spirit I am he’.  In my training in theology I learned that there is God and me and if I wanted to know God more fully I must let go of ‘me’.  I had to learn to trust God. The last 25 years have been good. Better and better.

Sober I went to AA with the former head of UBC psychiatry. I continued to see Christian Psyvhiatrists who helped me deal with the addicts and alcoholics in government who abused their power rather frequently. I was blessed to know the lawyer Jonathan Meadows and lived in this great psychodrama of my life.  I was often not the centre state. The play was called William Hay but there were all these bad actors trying to make it all about them. Meanwhile I was listening to the big black Milton who in AA said he pasted a message on his mirror ‘you’re looking at the problems’ to remind him it’s his perception that is the problem.  AA taught me that alcoholism was first a ‘thinking disease’. I had thought I had thought I was spiritual but I’d worshiped the demon drink and demon pot and demon tobacco.  Now I thank God for the early deep breaths I take in the morning. Now I’m writing gratitude lists each morning thanking the Lord for my dog Madigan, my long term friend and lover Laura and all the precious people in my life. I also thank God for the ‘enemies’. The College of Physicians and Surgeons resident pervert was a trial as is the PM today. I was so thankful for the fourth step in AA and Bernie, Hank and Father John who helped me work thought my resentments and fears. I was so hurt and angry and frightened and betrayed. I really wasn’t a good man or a good husband. I probably was a pretty good doctor. I joke and say I fear a class action suit from the 100 babies I delivered who get together and find they share a thumb printed on their forehead because I held too tight guiding them into life. I also think that any day the thousands of people I convinced not to suicide will sue me for false promise.  Yet I did my best and thanks to the amazing teachers and those who went before me and the College of Physiccians and Surgeons, and the Royal College of Physiians and Surgeons and the Canadian Medical Protective Associations and the Society of Addiction Medicien and Christianity and AA and frankly and friends and dogs and cats I’ve done okay.

I’m alive and 25 years ago I so suffered indescribable and utter ‘incomprehensible demoralization.  I had such anxiety and was told by an old internist in a late night meeting of International Doctors in AA, “anxiety is a measure of your distance from God and a measure of your humanity.’  I know God is an experience and not an idea. I used to say I knew Christ and Christ consciousness but today I know Jesus as a friend. God is good all of the time.  

I continued to hunt big game with my friend Bill Mewhort shooting moose and deer and bear with him. I continued to sail and sailed solo on the SV GIRI San Francisco to Hawaii in winter through a hurricane. Thanks to Dr. Willie Gutowski I worked a couple of years in Saipan in sobriety so enjoying meetings on the beach with Frank beneath palm trees watching the sunset.  I loved learning from Phillip another sailor doctor and wise man.  I still struggled with the inclusivity of Christian churches caught between the LGBT include church of Peter and the exclusive church of my evangelical friends. I loved studying theology with the purest deepest Catholic psychiatrist John whose paraplegia he may as well have called his ‘glad gethseame’ like the catholic priest friend of Bill Wilson.  All the Christians I knew and admired were living inspirations as they were persecuted in Canada like the disciples of Jesus were.  I was blessed to go to Israel and make so many trips to conferences all over the US and be with the finest of men like Nady and Art and Carroll and Dick and men and women who are now dying or dead. I loved my friend George in recovery , another physician who would go for dinner with me before an AA meeting as we’d talk about baseball and life and love.  I’ve been truly blessed despite being a kafetch and having the worst tendency to slip into rabbit holes and whine with self pity. My military friend who told me ‘you’ve got one foot in the future and one foot in the past and you’re pissing on your day, get your head in the same room as your ass’ also said ‘get down off the cross we can use the wood’.  

Recovery is ancient healing journey. Just for today was a profound awakening for me as I felt that God , omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent was here and now and for me to be with god I had to be present. The journey I ‘d begun as a child and later continued in church and school and temple and love came to this point of intersection in the cloud of unknowing at the point of Stellate reality and Interdimensional experience with each day a beginning. I pray to know God more and to know God’s will more. I have quiet time.  I meditate. I do right livelihood . I listen to the spiritual teaching of the Bible and the Big Book of AA and Kurtz book, Spirituality of Imperfection, the great teachings of the world. Paramahansa Yolanda taught “I bow to the saints of all religions’.  I never thought of a hell and didn’t believe in the tribalism religions that said ‘our little group wins and your group loses’ but I liked Pascal’s wager and Eben Alexander the neurosurgeons ‘proof of heaven’.  I’ve known sacred and supernatural.

I would love more. I would learn to be more loving not in that sentimental way but in the way of the God of Gods.  God is all. God made the devil and free will and fate are central We like to choose free will when we do something good and blame the other guy but refuse to accept fate when ‘shit happens’.  It’s all ego.  God is good all of the time. The people like the man who abused me or the ex wife who lied and stole or the college administrator whose perversion obscured her vision , all of these people were bicycle lessons like the soldier who held me hostage threatening to kill me, or the native who shot at me and all those antagonists in my play of life with me as the protagonist.  

I’m so thankful to be sober so that I have been able to live this good life with knowing people like I do,  I struggle now with gender, sexuality and aging. At the point when I’m Shakespearean with desire greater than performance no longer a consequence of alcohol but rather a product of physically hurting and slowing. I struggle to stay fit when I was always active and climbing mountains to experience the joy above the clouds with a sober friends revelling in the beauty of existence.  I loved seeing the great works of arts and museums in Edinburg Oxford and London and Paris this spring taking Laura as a companion but missing Madigan yet knowing Karen and Belinda people I could trust with my puppy while I was away.  I can trust today and people don’t lie and betray me. I know that expectations are preformed resentments and I don’t have the unrealistic expectations I had younger.  I’m more mature. Who would have guessed. But I do miss the theatre and dance world and find so many older people still pretentious and tedious.  

I’m becoming ornery with age.  I’m happy alone.  I’m less afraid.  I worry I might drink or smoke dope again and fall into the psychosis of believing the false is true.  

It’s 25 years. A quarter century, much longer than the entire time I smoked or drank. I still don’t know what I will do when I grow up.  Right now I have to go have my hair done and the biggest challenge is whether to wear a skirt or slacks.  I’m having a lot of first world problems and very few third world problems .  I’m full of gratitude and know grace.  I really am blessed but often don’t know what next. I miss the Sturges expedition.  I knew I wanted to ride my Harley there and back like I knew I wanted to visit the church’s of Ethiopian and see the black Jesus.  I knew I wanted to go to Athens and the Vatican and Mexico City pyramids ,  I’ve known what it is I have to do but now I’m able to plan the day but don’t have any real idea for much into the future. I felt last winter I was kedging my life off the sand bars of Covid and the WHO . I’m aware that Trudeau is the devil incarnate and that I’m at best a hobbit in the spiritual warfare of today but it’s hard to see.  I’m in the cloud of unknowing and just keep walking forward with Jesus.  

I need to be sober because the world is so crazy I need all my wits about me. I don’t want to be an ostrich that puts it’s head in the sand and doesn’t know who kicked it. The Donovan song, season of the witch and beatniks are out to make it rich makes me ware of my vulnerability.  I am learning to trust God more in old age. 

I’m thankful for sobriety and don’t believe I’d have achieved the long term sobriety that Vaillant of Harvard fame wrote so eloquently about without AA.  

I’ve a doctors in AA meeting tomorrow. So I know I’m looking forward to that. I’m continuing to work. I’m here. I’’m muddling along. I have a principle responsibility to Madigan who is dependent on me.  He’s a messy room mate.  

Thank you.  25 years. Thank you, Thank you God and as I learned in AA God works through people. Thank you.

I remember being tormented after I stopped drinking and smoking. I think the tobacco was as bad as the pot. I was in withdrawal for weeks to months, hiking all day and visiting a Christian psychiatrist, going to church, praying, meditating, writing, doing odd jobs to pay