Loving Me Until I Love Myself: The Miracle of These Rooms

I’m coming on three years this month since I was thrown out by my wife in an ambush of sorts that I dubbed “A Savage Divorce” when it happened, arriving home from a trip abroad with the locks changed and all my stuff packed neatly into my car, ready to be tossed away like yesterday’s garbage.

The long and short of it was that my partner thought I was working too much and she was also aware I was drinking after work at a local bar, and the petty infighting from her indigence at my relapse led to an irreconcilable round of fighting. My swollen alcoholic mind said that if I was making good money, I deserved to have a drink after work, but to her it was a slippery slope she thought would lead to stronger stuff, which it later did, so now I’m an alcoholic and a methamphetamine addict, climbing uphill into a recovery that couldn’t come too soon for me.

Amidst this power struggle over what I believed I deserved and what she required in our marriage, I one day foolishly bought a plane ticket to Thailand, to show her that I didn’t need her and I could split at any time if she didn’t watch out.

Reality? I could go at any time, but I shouldn’t have, and it’s now one of my greatest regrets in a life where I’d never spent a lot of time on regrets because there was always another possibility just around the corner, but at 52 now and sorely missing what I had, I’ve have been forced to squarely face my alcoholism, my addiction, and the prospect that of all the many loves I’ve enjoyed in my life, my wife was certainly the best I ever had and it’s entirely possible she’s the last I’ll ever know.

She found the electronic ticket printed out on my desk in the house we shared in Santa Cruz, California with our three cats Gracie, Dave and Zelda. It had been an impulse purchase, I explained in couples therapy a few days later, charged to my credit card because I felt pissed off at the time, but now I was really scared that it was a silly thing to have done. I promised I would return it and not go on a solo journey without her, but she not only told me I could go, but that I should go in order to decide if I was really in the marriage or if I wanted out.

And though she never laid out for me, “it’s either drinking or me,” to this day I wished I’d seen the writing on the wall before I flew to Bangkok and to Phuket to hang out on the beach in the tropics, my favorite escape from the confusion of my modern life. Within ten days I really wanted to go home to her and the cats, but she told me on a Skype call with the video off not to ever come home, that she’d received some texts from me in the night that I didn’t remember sending but she knew I was drunk in their sending. To top it all off, she’d seen some pictures on Facebook of me drinking, and suddenly at the age of 49 after thinking I was done with my romantic quests on this planet, I was shut out and homeless, never to see her or our cat children again.

And of course, like any spurned husband, I went on a three year bender in both California and Thailand, never stopping the party because losing the love of your life is one of the darkest roads you can be on.

“Hello my name is Pearl Tiresias, and I’m an addict and alcoholic.”

These are now once again words I say least once a day in meetings in my home state of New Mexico, and say them I do for I really believe them, because I lived my addictions like there was no tomorrow. And yet really, I was just wishing it would all just end, not with me in recovery really but me in a body bag, because if there’s one thing regret can do for you it’s make you believe there’s nothing left to do, no redemption to be had, no other true love to hold your hand on this very lonely planet. Eventually deported from Thailand and sent back to the USA a little over six months ago, I don’t think for a minute anymore that I’ll get the luxury of death but instead that my life will simply suck unless I get sober and stay sober, and find recovery like a dying girl in search of a cure.

Within Alcoholics Anonymous and the recovery movement in general, people talk about how the progressive illness of alcoholism and addiction eventually leads us all to “jails, institutions, and death.” Ah, but if only death came quickly — it’s possible that lots of us would never find our way to recovery, but what I now understand based on experience is that untreated alcoholism and addiction just leads to lonely drinking and using, a certainty in your mind and your heart that you’ve never grown up and you never will, and that haunting foreboding of never having lived up to your potential with a life you really love and a person to share it with.

So now I go to meetings as often as I can, not searching for love as if an AA meeting were a singles bar or a 3-D Tinder app in the Metaverse, but to find a deeper sobriety through a sponsor, the steps, the group, and a Higher Power to figure out a way to stay sober and simply “learn to love myself.” This mess? You’re kidding right? But I go to meetings to solve my mountain of problems as best as I can, get the kind of sober time that makes growing up a stronger possibility than ever before, and which makes finding and living up to my potential a facet of my life that I am hoping I can look forward to for the rest of my life.

But there are dark points in this road also — the terror of looking back to what I once had, what I have now lost, and what I’m supposed to do now. While these times aren’t all day as they once were, they still can flatten me in sorrow and self-pity for a long, solid, and frightening hour or two where I send emails that are never read to the woman I loved so much and who left me, hoping that she will break the silence and agree to love me enough to at least talk to me again.

My wife and I were together as a couple for over six years, but didn’t marry until the year before our divorce when I was 48. While the memory of her burns strong within me as inspiration to continue on the road to sobriety, there were others before her who I am learning to see with different eyes in examining the patterns of my addiction. Drinking and using go hand in hand with emotional dependency on others that has put me in a place today of being careful not to date yet again until I’m sober at least a year and likely more, so that I have time to learn to live with myself alone with the help of my sponsor, the group, and my Higher Power. And maybe someday I’ll write a bit about all those wonderful lovers and why their love is missed as I trudge this road and engage this journey, but for now I’ll be content that the ones who love me more than I love myself today are within the rooms of AA, helping me learn how to love myself, grow up, find my potential, and give me the opportunity to really believe that my best life is yet to come. It’s not possible to feel that everyday, but when I do feel like the best is yet to come, I consider the possibility that the love of my life is not behind me but in front of me, staring back at me as I look into the mirror, growing up slowly and finding a new potential that I never thought possible before.