Drinking, Health / Wellness

Profile In Lawyer Recovery: AA And Beyond

Nicholas is a second-year associate in New York City whose recovery path started with Alcoholics Anonymous...

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Nicholas is a second-year associate in New York City whose recovery path started with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), but has taken him in a different direction in long-term recovery.

He says…

My drinking and drug use ramped up when I started law school. By the second year, I blacked out every night, and mostly always alone in my apartment. I started doing a lot of designer drugs and speed. By the following summer, I was throwing up stomach bile every single morning. I couldn’t punch my zip code into a gas station keypad because my hands tremored. Nobody wanted to hang out with me anymore, and I was going to get kicked out of school. It was also clear that I was going to die.

And so it was that I agreed to go to detox and rehab. But rehab was a bubble, and the real world was overwhelming. Alcohol was in TV shows, commercials, movies, billboards, bus ads, lunches, dinners, birthdays, happy hours, and everywhere else I seemed to look. The first AA meetings I went to in New Jersey were filled with a lot of miserable, run-down assholes. My last relapse was around five years ago, and in all respects, it should’ve killed me. Having skirted death once again, I called up someone from AA in New York City, and hobbled my way into a meeting.

This time around, things were different. There were people from all walks of life. There were CEOs of major companies and high-powered lawyers — alongside a few token, miserable dicks — and on the balance, people seemed happy and healthy. I, on the other hand, looked like a street rat. I saw them and wanted to be like them, and that’s what got me through that first difficult year more than anything else. I didn’t buy the religious stuff, but I played along anyhow, because I was desperate. Whatever they told me to do, I did, because it got them sober. And it worked.

A year of sobriety came and went. Yet while things started to get easier, the religious stuff in the program still didn’t make sense or feel right. Nor did the zealous devotion to the program that many who stuck with it seemed to have — grown adults who, 10 or 20 years later, were still incapable of making minor life decisions without crumbling in front of an AA group; who needed constant reassurance about god’s plan and god’s will. Or that by becoming a sponsor after the first year, I’d have to teach the religious stuff I didn’t really believe in to newcomer sponsees. Or the various extremes that the program framed my world in. These were lovely, selfless people, but ones who told me over and over, and quite sanctimoniously, about how worried they were about me leaving the program, and about how relapse was a certainty.

When all you have is AA, the only people you meet are those in AA, and the more it’s imposed upon you that the only way to be sober is through AA. When someone leaves, three things happen. You never see them again, they stay sober, and you never hear about it; you never see them again, and they relapse; or, struggling or having relapsed, they come back to AA to start anew. In the first case, you never find out about it through AA; in the second, you’re told to assume that happens to practically everyone; and in the third, it’s proof that leaving leads to relapse. But the data set is dishonest because it’s staggered. I’ve even met people who have gone back to having a beer once every blue moon after X years of sobriety. (Sacrilege, if you listen to AA.) They’re the exception, and not the norm, but the point is that they exist — yet you’re taught that even the belief that they could exist is a falsehood to lure you back into a bender. When really, with AA, the trick is in teaching people they need something so badly that you convince them they cannot function without it.

Because that stuff’s not true for everyone. Five years later — four without AA — and the absence of the program in my life hasn’t been a problem. The great things that AA taught me — reaching out when I need help, honesty with others, humility with myself, trying to do the next right thing, and making myself available to others in need—I still strive to do. Humility’s the hardest part, because there’s a real grieving process to getting sober. Early sobriety is the loneliest I’ve ever been. All I could think about was how much of a shithead I’d been. It takes humility to accept what happened, to sit with that loneliness and that sadness, and to try and be kind to yourself.

Over these past five years, I went back and finished my law degree. One day, in bankruptcy class, I hit on a classmate; we got married last year. She’s the best. I’ve done great work as a litigation associate these past couple of years, and I’ve also decided that I hate being a litigation associate, and am now shimmying my way out of this miserable goddamn field.

Above all, I’ve rebuilt a personal and professional identity in the barren void left by addiction. When I feel like getting bombed, I talk to a friend about it, and the impulse fades. I try to be upfront and honest. (If those don’t work, I devour an Entenmann’s cake or a pint of ice cream as a last resort. Try drinking after that.) This all seems to work for me for now.

In the end, there’s more than one way to go about this, and that’s what I wanted to share. I could not have gotten sober without AA that first year — I needed clear-cut rules and things framed in extremes, or I never would have made it. But the more I built into my life afterward, the less I needed the program. And things are a lot brighter these days.

Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption (affiliate link). A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his résumé as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. He left the practice of law and now writes and speaks on recovery topics, not only for the legal profession, but on recovery in general. He can be reached at brian@addictedlawyer.com.

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