I didn’t grow up in a well-manicured suburb where my family was constantly keeping up with the Joneses. We weren’t constantly eating out for dinner, heading to Cleveland to buy designer clothes or going on fancy vacations on our holiday breaks. We barely kept up with ourselves, what with my dad working two jobs and my mom making sure my sister and I didn’t tear the house apart when she wasn’t looking.
My hometown was barely a thousand people, and my graduating class was under a hundred. (For reference: my high school sat right in the middle of an Ohio cornfield.) In other words, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to compare to myself to—but that sure as hell didn’t stop me. Every single day, whether I was riding on the school bus or trying to be invisible in geometry, I did the dark math between what I didn’t have and what everyone else seemed to have. That feeling followed me through life. Eventually, I drank over it, trying desperately to shore up something inside me. Bizarrely, when I got sober, those comparisons didn’t end. In fact, in sobriety, they’ve only gotten worse.
Looking back on it, I didn’t envy other people’s things so much as their quiet, easy peace of mind. I was deeply, uncontrollably jealous of how parents and friends and siblings could just sit there and enjoy a life of no worries, as if their worlds were trademarked by Bobby McFerrin. Not a care in the world. When you’re a kid, you can sense financial strain like wood that’s starting to sag and rot. You can’t see it, but you can feel it in every overheard conversation and longer-than-normal pause at the grocery store. When you’re poor and you don’t really understand it, everything in your world is just slightly warped and softer to the touch than it should be. And that’s part of what informed my drinking. With enough alcohol in me, I didn’t feel as “less than.” I didn’t pay attention to it.
Alcohol worked all kinds of black voodoo magic on my brain, especially when it came to how I ranked against other people. I started convincing myself that none of it mattered. I didn’t want their promotions, their opportunities or their money. And while I routinely drank myself into a place where I’d shut down, I could still feel that lie curling around inside me like oil. Turns out, I desperately wanted the things that other people had—I just didn’t want to work all that hard for them. When I graduated college, I had a degree in English from a state university. (Quite arguably, the laziest degree you can get.) Oh—and a job as a projectionist at a shitbox movie theater. I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire at 22. I’d focused so hard on getting good grades that I’d forgotten the part where I had to do something with my life. So when all my friends started getting internships and job offers and moving away to bigger cities, I wasn’t confused—I was angry. I was baffled how life wasn’t working out for me. So I drank.
When you’re young, a lot of the people in your life start taking wide, elliptical orbits away from your planet. Some of it’s deliberate; some of it’s unintentional. But for me, people would vanish from view for years and when they suddenly come back around, they’d be married with houses, SUVs and Costco memberships. I had booze. In all the ways other people knew how to successfully lock down a job, I knew with military precision all the closing times of neighborhood bars and liquor stores.
I also discovered credit cards which, as an alcoholic, is a lot like giving a lightsaber to a hobo. The hobo doesn’t know how he lopped off his arm in the dark, but he sure thinks the weapon is pretty. Credit cards are the idiot’s shortcut to happiness. They helped connect me to booze and people and, therefore, cope with the world. When I decided that a full-time job just wasn’t for me, I retreated to grad school in Arizona. I nurtured my alcoholism like a potted plant, giving it lots of sunlight and plenty to drink. Even there, everyone around me seemed to have life figured out. My colleagues traveled to exotic cities on semester breaks, they made epic shopping trips to bookstores and they invested in expensive outdoor gear. Me? I went out to a bar almost every night (making damn sure to go out with a different person each time) mainly to blot out the fact that I was so miserable being me. And round after round, I’d pick up the tab. I’d do it conspicuously, too. The more people witnessing it, the better. I didn’t care if it was a $150 tab. That was just the cost of a good night out, not to mention people noticing what a generous, well-to-do person I was. For a few fleeting seconds, it made me feel like who I actually wanted to be, like I’d fallen off a New York Times society page or something. I was giving to the poor. With enough booze racing through my veins, I’d forget that I had maybe a few hundred dollars to my name before calling home to my parents for more.
Fast-forward past all the blackouts, the detox and rehab, the DUI and the lost jobs. Cut past the miles and miles of credit card debt. (Some of those credit card statements read like I was geocaching every single bar in Scottsdale, Arizona.) Cut to me sitting in one of my very first AA meetings. I was comparing myself with everyone to see if I even was an alcoholic like them. (Spoiler alert: I was.) But then I found something creeping up inside me—something black, sticky and familiar. My old frenemy: jealousy. The chairperson was pointing around the room, celebrating anniversaries. Someone next to me celebrated a year; another person celebrated five. They seemed so comfortable with it. Their sobriety had a relaxed, lived-in quality to it.
“Anyone else have a length of sobriety they’d like to share?”
Without warning, I shot up my hand and blurted that I had a month. Everyone clapped. I got a coin. Lying was a reflex and I did it like breathing, so that was nothing new. But I immediately felt a lightning bolt of shame. I couldn’t make eye contact. I never returned to that meeting, and I went out drinking a few days later. Ironically, during that relapse, I drunkenly Googled old people I remembered from my crazy days in grad school. One of my bosses—an influential state politico and family man—had invited the office to a Christmas party at his very nice ranch house in north Scottsdale—all perfectly xeriscaped and put-together. His wife and doting daughters were so full of life. We climbed atop his roof that night and I just marveled at not only the view of the valley, but just how much I wanted this life of his. This is where I’ll end up, I promised myself, drunkenly cataloging everything he owned. He had literally everything I wanted. I could sense the love from his family and the respect from all of us.
Years later, while I drunkenly cruised Google, I gasped when I got to the results. There was my boss’s face in an Arizona newspaper headline staring back at me: Influential Arizona Politco Found Shot to Death, Had History With Drugs. My kind, big-hearted boss. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. All of that time I’d spent comparing myself to him—and none of it was real. He’d been involved with hardcore drugs and shorting mid-tier dealers, winding up shot to death in a shitty part of Phoenix. I’d been comparing myself to facsimiles or shadows; a house staged by a realtor when you’re trying to sell. Ultimately, none of it meant anything. Comparing yourself to anything is an empty transaction.
But in sobriety, I can’t help but compare myself to other people’s sobriety. I still legitimately get jealous of it. If someone new saunters into my home group with a few weeks of sober time under their belt and they come across calm and composed, I get annoyed. Who the hell do they think they are? And then, more than once, I’ve found myself sitting there and listening to their share, trying to zero in how they simply didn’t know what they didn’t know. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve actually wished some horrible, ugly relapses on people who seemed to talk too knowingly about their “recovery.” Turns out, all I wanted was to knock people down to my level. I wanted them to feel as bad as I did. That was true more in my actual sobriety than it was in my active drinking. I was happy when someone was making genuine progress, but I didn’t want them to be doing too well.
In sobriety—especially in AA rooms—we carefully measure time and applaud progress. We notch moments like we would pencil a child’s height against a doorframe. But when I start comparing what you have and what I don’t have in sobriety (better job, happier marriage, less debt), I may as well take a washcloth to those pencil marks. What got me into recovery got me here into recovery. End of story. It’s my journey—zig-zagged as it may be. The second I start worrying if someone has the game figured out better than me, I’m sunk. I’ll have officially lost sight of why I’m sober in the first place. I’d be a shadow again—not quite here, not quite there. And I’m not in the rooms to needlessly compete with another person’s program. I can’t compare myself to anyone else but me—and even then, that’s like putting one of Adam Sandler’s “comedies” in serious critical competition against, say, a Paul Thomas Anderson film. Nothing good’s going to come of that. But comparing myself to me is at least simpler—and fairer. It reminds me that I’m an actual person now. I’m not a ghost or a shadow (as I’d lived my life), just like all those friends’ families had been.
There’s a quasi-famous river in the wilds of West Virginia near where my late grandfather grew up called the Cheat River. Based on the particulates in the water and how the sunlight strikes its surface, it always appears calm and shallow when you’re standing right by it. Wade a few steps out into it, though, and say farewell. It’s actually many dozens of feet deep, suddenly “cheating” men out of their lives. That’s precisely how I feel about the appearances of other people’s lives. They’re all just like that damn river. I can only compare myself to me which, for the first time ever, actually means something now. For better or for worse—I’m finally a person. If I compare myself to anyone else, especially in sobriety, I lose a big part of myself in the transaction. I’m always going to come up short. When I make comparisons to others in recovery, I’m far closer to the bottom of that river than I ever need to be.
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