FINDING YOUR RHYTHM
Don’t poison yourself, that’s a major key [Khaled voice] // Photo by Allison Perlwitz
“Yeah so… I play the drums now.”
Imagine trying to slip that into a conversation, as an adult, with a group of friends who’ve known you their entire lives.
What the fuck are you talking about? Immediate pushback - rightfully so. You sound insane right now. Well, true, it’s certainly not something you can just proclaim out of the blue one day. The hell you do. They’ll scoff, poke, and ridicule - if they take you seriously at all, that is. Better hope they don’t ask you to play something - that shit’s gonna sound like your hands belong to two different people.
They’re right. You don’t play anything, not yet at least. It doesn’t happen overnight, or anytime soon. Well, OK then, I’m just learning to play the drums. That’s more like it, you tell yourself. I bought a drum set. I bang on it every day and night. I want to do this and I’m showing the effort. But it sounds fucking terrible, because you do not yet actually play the drums. You have to find your rhythm.
That is what the first year of sobriety is like after a lifetime of drinking.
You’re not sober yet. You’re just learning. How to be social. How to move through a room full of people. Where and when to add to the conversation. What to do with your hands. All things that have been on auto-pilot for two decades. No checks or balances, never second-guessed, let alone thought about the first time. For years alcohol acted as a metronome, the metronome. Now it’s up to you. You have to find your rhythm.
In social situations where I normally shined (or did I?) I was now impatient, moody, stressing for no reason. Everyone seemed so stupid. Was I this stupid? What are we even doing here?
Oh no. Am I Fun Bobby?
As the year goes on, however, you start to find something that resembles a basic drum beat. One day at a time. You just keep showing up, and progress reveals it’s face. Some will still doubt; your intentions, your commitment, your strength. Just wait until the Pink Cloud lifts, they’ll say. The only thing that can prove them wrong is continuing to show up.
The more you play, the better it sounds. Keep banging away.
By year two, its becoming clear that you’re on to something. You sound a little more competent, a little more confident. People might even tap their feet when you come around. They encourage your progress and are encouraged themselves. Maybe I can do this too, they think. The doubt starts to fade. The smiles are genuine, the words are thoughtful, the gestures are calculated and sincere.
The soundtrack to life simply starts to sound better, and you remember every song in the morning.
Now after three years!? You got the bounce. You put the work in and it shows. People tap their feet, they nod their head, they sing along. You’re moving through life with intention, with a renewed spirit and a hard-earned pep in your step. Not only are you carrying yourself differently, but you understand why. You taught yourself something about yourself. The lessons learned are self-evident. You put the time in, and it wasn’t easy.
As a matter of fact, that shit hurt.
“All my hard work and lonely nights, no sympythy”
Living in Myrtle Beach, two thousand miles from my support system, I can assure you the hardest part has been the lonely nights. Socializing was already tough here because of the demographics. The average age is 55 and going up. The restaurants and attractions are geared towards tourists, which are generally couples and families. Even the staff turns over quick. It’s hard to be a regular anywhere when you never see the same people twice.
They also haven’t caught onto the NA/mocktail/THC drink movement, making it tough to go sit at a bar. You want a what? A beer without alcohol? Hey Joey get a load of this guy.
Because of it being so transient - there are more second homes and rentals than actual residences - it lacks any sense of community. There is no hometown pride because it’s not anyone’s hometown. People come, get drunk, and leave.
Sounds nice, unless you don’t drink and you don’t leave.
The lack of community means there are very few ‘third places’ for sober people. You can go to the gym, where I’m found so frequently I could receive mail there; the beach, where you can stare at the ocean and talk to God, or church; where you can stare at the back of someone’s head and talk to God. I usually choose the beach. There’s no library, very few parks and no real arts scene to speak of.
I’m telling you right now: I learned to play the drums in a land where there are no fuckin drum sets.
“And if I aint goin to work then I’m goin to the gym”
I wasn’t passive about it. I went on the offensive. I made resolutions to go out more, to talk to strangers more, to seek out connections of any sort. Coming from CR that had never even registered as something that would be a challenge here. There were always people around - a community that I helped cultivate - that I can still count on to connect with at the push of a button. I’ve made friends there, without any problem, throughout my whole life. I could just do it again right? Well the more I tried and failed here, the more discouraging I found it to be.
Was it… me?
I literally questioned myself - out loud at times [Editor’s note: don’t do that!]. I decided - after doing so much looking inward that it could classify as an endoscopy - that the answer was a resounding no, it’s not me. I’m doing my part, holding up my end of the bargain. I’m trying. But there is no such thing as a one-sided connection. It requires the other half, one that I cannot muster out of thin air. I’ve traveled quite a bit over the past few years and something that has become clear to me: most places I go, I don’t have muster up a thing. Connections are made easily. They are natural, organic, and real: the opposite of here.
Now if we’ve never met, that might sound like giving up to you. But we probably have, so you know I don’t give up on anything (not even when I should!) not when it comes this journey and certainly not on sobriety. So I’m going to keep showing up. I’m going to keep banging away.
It’s not perfect - nothing is - and I have certainly have not yet mastered the craft.
But I can confidently say, that after FORTY-ONE MONTHS and counting: I finally found my rhythm.
Now here’s the part they don’t tell you about, or at least no one told me. So I’m doing you, reader, that favor right now.
THE EMOTIONS. Good God. The emotions.
Nostalgia. Regret. Euphoria. Love. These are the neighbors you thought moved away forever. Now they stop over at odd times and stay all day. They linger, they gossip. They stretch their legs out and get comfortable. You have to learn to live with them. You’re the host of this party now. Sit with them, accept them. Try to figure them out, rather than ignore them or brute force them out the door. See, thoughts you can change. You can think positively; you can ask a thought to leave. But emotions? Emotions have to see themselves out.
Photo by Allison Perlwitz // Allison was able to capture the pain in my eyes by [checks notes] pointing the camera in my direction.
[Editors note: Alright, the pain-in-the-eyes joke is one I lean on a lot, only because I don’t know what else to do with these sad ass eyes, lol. I made the same joke the last time she shot me and I obviously haven’t gotten any better at hiding them. All I can do is make jokes and look away.from people I love]
In fact, the only people I can think of off the top of my head with more pain in their eyes are Miles Bridges of the Charlotte Hornets and Andre Agassi on the cover of Open. In Agassi’s case you get the gist of where it came from before you even flip to the second page; Miles is a little more tricky - after doing some research it would seem that’s not just his pain in there, but other’s too.
This is not really company I’m trying to keep, so I hope my eyes cheer the fuck up soon. I swear I’m OK.
Back to sobriety - one of the things I only realized in hindsight was how alcohol abuse numbed everything on a larger scale, across a longer time span - thoughts, feelings, ideas - were all under the influence whether I was drinking at that very instance or not. It was dulling emotions, limiting more than just pain, skewing results of all kinds from behind the scenes. It disguises itself as part of the system, one of the necessary ingredients, running in the background like a computer program. It schedules itself in as part of the agenda, making its voice heard at decision time. At any given moment it surely feels like you’re feeling. But in reality you’ve limited the ability to experience the full spectrum of emotions.
It’s quite the opposite of you don’t know what ya got til its gone - it’s more like you don’t know what was gone til ya get it back. It won’t be for quite some time - months, years even - that you realize that the alcohol has actually cut off access to levels 7 through 10 on the emotion dial, and holy shit 10 is loud.
As the days go by, the numbness goes away, like the blood rushing into your leg after it’s fallen asleep. And once it’s regained feeling, you can’t believe what you were missing. Love feels like melting into the earth. Gratitude feels like finding purpose. Loneliness feels like dying. And none of them are just dropping by for the afternoon.
Well how about some good news: [Editor’s note: YES please. Jesus.] It will change your body and mind for the better - quickly and drastically.
The liquor fell right off of my face. I recently saw my driver’s license photo from 2010 - it looked like I was wearing a skin mask of myself like Vincent D’Onofrio demanding sugar water. You don’t need to ‘put a base down’, which is what I used to call dinner… nor sop up or nurse any kind of hangover. Less poison, more time and energy. What a novel concept.
I now have seven or eight hobbies. I started golfing. I have a puzzle going at all times. I’m reading more. My writing got better. I still make bad decisions (maybe worse than ever!) but at least it’s ME making those bad decisions, not my drunken alter-ego stuck in 4th gear hurtling towards self-demise.
“Drop dead sprint from the day he’s born, straight into his maker’s arms”
So, as I sit here in the middle of my fifth consecutive Dry January (and fourth go around at all the other Dry Months too!) I leave you with this:
If it’s ever been a thought, just try it. Start small. Take a day off. Extend it out another day. Build on the progress. Start a streak. Start another one after. Talk to yourself, encourage yourself. Lean on friends (but not too hard!) Listen to advice, but decide what’s best for yourself. Re-focus your energy. Be stubborn! Proving people wrong may not motivate you the same way it does me, but when you find what does motivate you: and go nuts with it. Be relentless. Take good care of yourself. It gets better, I promise.
You can change. I know, because I did.
“How you gon’ fold somethin that don’t bend, I’m relentless again.”
There are a lot of folks out there that would argue that there is no better feeling than beating a hangover, and actually, I agree… with one caveat:
There’s no better feeling than beating your last hangover.
Mine was August 23, 2021, and I am never going back.
My instagram DM’s are always open and my email address is stew@stewgetsbuckets.com // If anyone needs to talk, about anything; sobriety, photography, life, the garbage ass Charlotte Hornets, anything, I got you, hit me up. God Bless.
Giannis gets the tip over Miles Bridges at a Hornets home game in November 2024, taken on my phone.
[UPDATE - 1/16/25] Here is a video of Miles Bridges mentioning the Hornets are “starting to get in rhythm” posted around 2 hours after I published this blog entry !! [brains-exploding-into-confetti emoji]