Healings FAQ No. 19, Katie MacBride
Healings FAQ No. 19, Katie MacBride
"If there’s a God—and there may well be—my tiny, human brain isn’t going to be the thing that figures it out."
In my experience, nothing about the process of getting and staying sober is linear. I probably attended at least 10 recovery meetings throughout my twenties and thirties as my drinking went from bad to worse to catastrophic—meaning I knew I had a problem, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. I’d promise myself I was done, then drink again, try a meeting, then head back out. This zigzagging is common. What a lot of alcoholics come to realize is that a part of them knew they were problem drinkers very early on. But it can take decades to meet the version of yourself who’s ready to quit. You zig and you zag.
And quitting itself isn’t the final stop on this meandering path. First, a lot of us relapse. That’s no fun, but as the saying goes: Relapse is part of recovery. But if you stick with it and get some time under your belt, the real work can start: peeling back the layers of denial and self-delusion you built up over years of substance misuse. There’s zigzagging here as well. Maybe your ego swells and you discover a new gear of asshole-dom, because for the first time in decades you’re paying your bills, having regular bowel movements (oh the glory), and getting real adult sleep, and dammit you should get a medal for all this, right? (Nope.) Or maybe you dig deep enough to unearth some long-buried trauma, and it haunts you until you ask for help coming to terms with it. Maybe sobriety gives you a chance to finally address underlying mental health issues, and you spend months trying to get your meds right, dealing with side effects all the way. Chances are it’ll be a combination of things like this—you go up, you go down, you go up, you go down. And all the while what’s missing is the one thing you came to depend on to help you navigate life’s turbulence.
Come to think of it, taking off in a plane is a pretty good metaphor—at first it’s bumpy as hell, and the seatbelt sign stays lit for longer than you think it really needs to be. But eventually, if you stick with it, you do reach a kind of cruising altitude. It doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps along the way, but things calm down enough that you can get up, stretch your legs, have a drink—metaphorically speaking!
Today’s Healings FAQ guest is Katie MacBride. While I do not know Katie personally, I get the sense from her writing that she’s reached the cruising altitude phase of her sobriety. A writer, editor, and librarian (!) whose work has appeared in places like Vice, Buzzfeed, and Rolling Stone, Katie is in her sixteenth year of sobriety (!!). She recently dropped a new essay over at Memoir Land about her final days as an alcoholic, and just last month started a newsletter called Ask A Sober Lady, whose title is self-explanatory. Informed by her background in health and science writing, Katie’s approach to these topics is both compassionate and grounded. If you have questions about the cruising altitude phase of sobriety, or any of the phases that precede it, I suggest you send them her way.
And now here’s what Katie had to say when asked to share her views on death and god. Thanks, Katie!
What happens when we die?
Something! Or nothing. A few years ago, my grandmother—quite literally on her deathbed—asked me this question. I think she must have been on a lot of drugs because I have no idea why she asked me of all people, but here’s what I said to her: I think we stay with you (there were quite a few family members in the room) and there’s no more pain. I believe the last part of what I said the most. Even with the drugs, she was in excruciating physical pain before she died, and the one thing I knew for sure was that, once she passed, that pain would disappear.
I’d like to believe that when I die, I’ll get to be with my Grandma, friends I’ve lost, and every dog I have ever loved, but if that’s just a fantasy that makes the end a little less scary, it’s good enough for me.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
Probably 3? This is going to be a recurring theme in my responses, but I am significantly more scared of being in prolonged physical pain than I am of dying. When I was 21, I had a freak thing happen that required emergency surgeries and the partial removal of my colon. I was in the hospital for about a month and in horrible pain for even longer. The kind of pain that makes a morphine drip feel like half a Tylenol. There are things worse than death.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
Partially because of my own behavior and partially because of bad luck, I have a solid little collection of near-death experiences. For closest, it’s probably a tie between surviving a .4 blood alcohol (which would have been well within its rights to kill me) and the colon thing—at one point, I went septic and had to be packed in ice and rushed into another surgery.
I learned something from each experience: 1) bodies can tell us things, and 2) bodies are fragile. Until I survived the .4 BAC, I had flatly refused to believe that I was an alcoholic. There was plenty of evidence, I just chose to ignore it. But the doctor explained to me that people who are not chronic alcohol users do not typically survive a blood alcohol that high; I was only able to because my body had gotten so used to booze. It was the beginning of my sobriety.
The bodies-are-fragile thing is, I think, pretty self-explanatory.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
I’m pretty much the definition of an agnostic: if there’s a God—and there may well be—my tiny, human brain isn’t going to be the thing that figures it out. There is so much about the universe that we haven’t learned and probably never will. It’s entirely possible that a God or God-like entity exists, and it’s entirely possible it doesn’t. I don’t need—or even particularly want—to know for sure.
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
Yes and no. At the risk of sounding like the California hippie I am at heart, I feel most spiritually connected when I am in nature and with animals. I’m lucky to live in a gorgeous, rural area in the Pacific Northwest, and can immerse myself in nature just by walking out the back door. I struggle with meditation, but I enjoy just sitting quietly on the back porch, petting my dog, listening to our goats graze or play, and hopefully seeing a heron in the creek or deer in the bushes. It quiets my brain and calms my nervous system in a way I imagine more traditional insight meditation helps others.
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally—a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.
This is a tough one because I don’t know that I can really explain my spiritual worldview, much less identify a text “essential to the formation” of it. In college, I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard; it’s a gorgeous book, and she writes about nature with such insight and reverence—I think about it all the time. Also, it taught me the word “fecundity,” which is just a really fun word to say.
Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story was hugely helpful to me both before and after I got sober. I’ve never encountered someone who articulated how I felt about drinking better than she did. For some people, the Alcoholics Anonymous book is their core recovery text—Knapp’s Drinking is mine.
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
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