The Waiting is the Hardest Part
You’re pulling my leg. It’s raining cats and dogs. Hold your horses. Put your ducks in a row. Kick the bucket.
Probably every language has slang expressions that native speakers use comfortably and that confuse the hell out of everybody else.
Many common English expressions go back centuries, and disputes aplenty arise over their origins. These arguments typically involve the habits of Medieval peasants versus what resulted after some monk tried combining a couple of French words. My favorite etymological tempest in a teapot is over the expression “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” The Warren Commission’s version is that in late-nineteenth century American tenements, people could hear it when someone living upstairs took off their shoes and dropped them on the floor. The noise from the first shoe would awaken a slumbering soul on the floor below, who would then lie there, unable to go back to sleep knowing a second loud thud was coming any time now. The other shoe is our modern sword of Damocles, always hanging over us, ready to fall and destroy us anytime now.
Modern psychology traces the adult fear of coming catastrophe to childhood trauma. That theory meshes with my own experience. Of the two parents who raised me, one was an alcoholic and an archetypal mean drunk. My home at night turned into an emotionally and often physically abusive place. At 5:00 p.m., I would hear the freezer door open and the first ice cubes of a long evening clatter into a glass. When I became old enough to link those sounds with the transformation of a kind person I loved into a menacing one I hated, I became terrified of the arrival of five o’clock. I became more and more afraid as the school day advanced. When I got home, I remember watching the clock like someone on death row. Every day, I waited in fear for the shoe to drop. And it always dropped.
As an adult, I carried this idea of my fears being realized into everyday life. Even though the other shoe no longer had anything to do with a scary parent, I still felt danger hanging over me, fearing “something” was going to ruin my life anytime now. Maybe I had done something sometime on some case that would resurrect and get me disbarred. Maybe at my next checkup I’d learn I had a fatal disease. Maybe when I got too old to work, I’d discover I hadn’t saved enough money, and I’d be homeless. Especially in my gut, impending disaster was, to use an idiotic phrase, a definite possibility. A possibility can’t be definite since it doesn’t exist in the first place, but it perfectly describes what I squandered a lot of my life energy fearing.
I used drugs to manage my fears, and my drug addiction brought me to recovery. I stay in the program because I don’t want to relapse, but there’s another reason that is equally important to me now, if not more so. Many years ago, I heard something in a meeting that I will never forget. A young man attending his first meeting shared that he was still in active addiction. When he finished speaking, an old timer told him, “I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is you never have to use drugs again. The bad news is that drugs aren’t your problem.” After doing my Fourth Step1, I appreciated how tightly that comment fit me. It was fear, not drugs, that littered my inventory. In every important area of my life, I was afraid of something happening that I wouldn’t “survive.” But, as my sponsor says, survival is not the same as living. I lived in the grip of what he calls “the fear clench.”
I’ve learned through sponsorship that “the unexpected and uncontrollable” is going to happen to all of us, and that each time it does, we can try to control it. This is what fear tells us to do, even though we know from Step One2 that control is an illusion. When we respond with fear, our opportunities for living shrink. We try to manage the world by making our own world smaller. We can choose not to swim so we won’t drown, but that means we’ll never go swimming.
“The other real choice we have when we experience the unexpected and uncontrollable,” (my sponsor again), “is to be honest, have courage, and be available for life.” One of my favorite lines from Harold and Maude is when (spoiler alert) Harold says to a dying Maude that she simply can’t die because he’ll have no life without her. “I love you,” he pleads, “I love you.” Maude tells him, “Oh, Harold, that’s wonderful. Go and love some more.” (1:25:43)3 If you have not watched this film stop everything and go do so.
Since entering recovery, I can still attempt to control the people, places and things around me. This is why I pray I will keep practicing the program for the rest of my life. Preventing a relapse remains a critical reason I still attend meetings, including LAP support groups. But my main reason for attending now is that I want to keep learning how to live. A life influenced by fear is not happy, joyous, or free. I want to keep improving as a person. I want to internalize the program so completely that I feel, not think, my way to the right choice and right action. I don’t want to be someone who can’t drink; I want to be someone who doesn’t drink.
Even though I believe there is no “other shoe,” I can still behave as though it’s still above my head. Though it happens much less-often than it used to, I can still act like someone in full-blown active addiction, even though I’m not using any drugs. There have also been times, when I’ve followed the program pretty well and been rewarded with serenity.
I had a dog who, before my daughter came along, I loved more than anything I have ever loved in my life. When she was eleven, she was diagnosed with cancer. She lost a leg, and the vet said she might live another six months without chemotherapy, and perhaps nine months with the treatment. My wife and I decided not to put her through it. Based on my behaviors before I got into recovery, my reaction would have been to think “you’re dying, this is awful, I don’t want you to die” every time I looked at my dog, and to take enough drugs to numb every feeling I had out of existence. Instead, I told myself I’d enjoy the good days with her, and deal with the bad days when they came, not before. And that’s what I did. I had never reacted this way to anything before. Step Three4 kicked in without me even realizing it. I had the choice to spend every day fearing when the other shoe would drop. I am eternally grateful the program led me to choose differently, because my dog and I lived happily for another three years.
1 “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Narcotics Anonymous (1982). Sun Valley, CA: C.A.R.E.N.A. Publishing Company, p. 18
2 “We admitted we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.” Id.
3 Ashby, Hal (Director). (1971). Harold and Maude [Film] Mildred Lewis and John Higgins Productions.
4 “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” Id.