The Sidebar: 12 Signs "You" May Be An Alcoholic; #100DaysofFlowers Top Photos; The Secret to a Long Life
And a comforting recipe for oven-fried chicken.
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What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?
— George Eliot
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Secret to a Long Life:
My Dad is 93 and a half years old. He has drunk a glass of V8 Juice every morning for the last 70 years. Every morning. Just sayin’.
🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃🥃
12 Signs “You” Might Be An Alcoholic – a personalized laundry list.
Recently, writer Dana Leigh Lyons (of Sober Soulful) added Sixburnersue to SoberStack, her excellent annotated directory of Sober Substack newsletters. Here is the description:
Sixburnersue: Susie Middleton is a cook (and author of four cookbooks!), gardener, writer, editor, sometime photographer, and former (and future) small farmer. Over at Sixburnersue, she writes about finding serenity in nature and navigating long-term sobriety with tools and lessons learned while growing flowers and food, cooking, and spending time outdoors on her island home in Martha’s Vineyard. Her tapestry of nature, creativity, and sobriety is pure delight!
That was totally lovely – and it got me thinking that since we have some new readers over here, I might need to jump back to the dark days and tell a little of my story. And maybe share something that could be helpful to people struggling with getting sober. (Even though I mostly try to stay in the present, where serenity-seeking is a favorite pastime.) This little list fell out of me today, but it could just as easily have been part of my written first step — and probably was. Back then, my sponsor asked me to answer this question: “How had your life become unmanageable?”
My husband calls this The Parade of Horribles. (Old friends and family, feel free to skip over this. I understand it will make you squirm.) The scary thing is that this is only the short list. Every year that I’ve been sober I’ve realized more and more ways I allowed drama, chaos, fear, and self-will to run my life. The amazing thing is that as I approach my 17th sobriety anniversary, I’m also still finding more and more cool ways that sobriety makes my life better. (See flowers and chicken below.)
🥃 12 Signs “You” Might Be An Alcoholic
1. You are 18. You drink more grain alcohol punch at your first ever campus mixer than the guys who invited you — and you remain standing. You use half of your college meal points (which your parents have paid for) on alcohol purchases, which is possible thanks to a very permissive attitude about alcohol at your southern university in the early ‘80s. And unwitting parents.
2. You are 19. After freshman year, you arrange to take all of your classes in the afternoon so you can sleep off a hangover in the morning.
3. You are 21. The editor you work directly for at your first magazine job in New York likes to go out after work to drink a couple Scotches. Or three or four or five. She decides that you make the perfect drinking companion. You learn to drink Scotch on the rocks. You learn about drinks that substitute for dinner and taxi rides you don’t remember.
4. You are 29. You tell the nurse practitioner at your physical that you drink two drinks a day, thinking that will get her off your back. She proclaims that you are alcohol-dependent; you are incensed. You really drink twice that much at that time (much more, later). You continue drinking for another 15 years.
5. You are 39. You wake up one morning to an empty wine bottle with another open and half empty. You have just finished reading Drinking, A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp. You think, “Hmmm,” and quit cold turkey for three months. Convinced you are fine, you then return to drinking for another five years.
6. Flashback. You are 12. Your mother administers bourbon and Percocet to you for menstrual cramps. Your uncles offer you beer at family gatherings. You are 17: Norwegian cousins challenge you to shots of aquavit at Thanksgiving dinner. You accept. A (different) cousin dies of alcoholism.
7. You are 40. While entertaining at home, you maintain two drinks at all times – one glass of wine you are sipping slowly out in the living room where everyone else is, one Scotch you have in the kitchen cabinet that you are gulping when you get up to “check” on dinner. You always have a drink at home before heading out to drink more at a party. You always make sure there will be alcohol at said party.
8. You are 44. At the beginning of the year, you make lists that say things like “drink less,” “watch drinking,” “cut back.” You have a journal that you write down the days you do and don’t drink, as you repeatedly try to stop drinking daily, which you have been doing for 27 years. Your drinking comes up in couples therapy.
9. You try to cut back by marking a wine glass with a piece of tape that indicates a 5-ounce pour. Two of these are considered okay for a woman to consume – in a week. You drink two of these portions one evening, congratulate yourself on your restraint, and proceed directly to pour yourself a third glass. And so on.
10. You ask your (then) husband to monitor your drinking. Ha ha. Together you agree that it is okay if you drink while out to dinner at restaurants. You begin to eat out a lot. You meet him at the restaurant after work and drive yourself home with one eye shut to keep the yellow line from blurring.
11. To avoid embarrassment at the liquor store, you alternate between three different stores in two towns and you buy in bulk. When it becomes clear that one 750 ml bottle of wine is no longer enough for an evening, you begin to buy the 1.5L size. From there you move on to a 3L box of (cheap) Australian wine, hoping this will cut down on the daily detours to the pop shop on the way home from work. On evenings when the spigot on the box appears to be dry (panic), you learn to cut open the box, remove the plastic bladder bag, slice it open, and remove the remaining cup of wine still in the bottom of the bag.
12. You are 44 ½. You develop a tremor in your left hand and experience bouts of severe vertigo that make your head spin to the point of nausea. You wake up at 3 a.m. and drink a Scotch to go back to sleep. You black out while shopping online (still a relatively new thing in 2006) and order an iron cross from the Sundance catalog without knowing it. It arrives on one of those days where you’ve just drunk again after trying to go a day without, which you can no longer do. If you stop, the lack of endorphins signals the brain to crash into a dark, depressive mood, which you cannot muscle through and do your day job.
You put down a glass of red wine on Christmas Day 2006 and plead with God. 🙏🏼
💐 #100 Days of Flowers #Serenity #Sobriety
As an antidote to the no-good, horrible list, I offer you one of the lovely things I’ve learned about myself in sobriety: I need to spend some time outside every day; I must engage with nature and seek out beauty. Flowers are at the top of my beauty list.
On Thursday, I posted the last of my #100daysofflowers on my Instagram feed @sixburnersue. I began posting on the summer solstice. I’ve done something like this a few times over the years (in sobriety), and honestly, it is a lot of fun for me. Sure, it’s an obligation, but one that is easy for me to fulfill compared to most of the things I deal with every day, including a lot of deadlines. And in the process, I’m guaranteed to spend time in the garden every day hunting for beauty. In those few minutes, I’m completely absorbed and anxieties slip away.
I also love the challenge — how to find another different flower on day 45! 75! 99! (Okay, I admit, I was ready to be done on day 99. Maybe day 89.) Solving the puzzle is soothing for me. Believe me, I’m not growing thousands of flowers here, so some days a photo of a weed had to do. There were dahlia plants I waited on for 98 days to produce one bloom.
Best of all, some of my friends said that finding the new flower on their Instagram feeds every morning brought them joy. And that makes me happy.
I thought you might be interested in seeing the photos that were the most popular. I grouped them into loose themes that took shape over the 100 days.
1. Arrangements and bouquets.
This was the year I practiced making flower arrangements with my extremely limited knowledge. (Mostly from books; still hoping to take a class.) On a day when I had made an arrangement or a bouquet, and if it had a new flower variety in it, I could post it as part of the #100days.
2. Big blousy blush-colored dahlias.
What’s not to love?
3. Everything apricot.
This is my favorite flower color so I probably had my thumb on the scale here.
4. Neon colors.
So cheery, and loved by all.
