Suzie Sherman:
This is And The Next Thing You Know. It’s a podcast about how our lives go exactly not as we planned them. I’m Suzie Sherman, coming to you unironically from week 21 of the COVID era. It probably can’t be stated too strongly that I didn’t anticipate we’d all be sheltered at home during a deadly global pandemic, when I was figuring out the theme of my podcast, but here we are, several months into this. I hope you’re all taking good care of yourselves and staying as safe as you possibly can. If you want to hear a piece we did about people’s feelings in the first months of the COVID crisis, cue up the episode “Panic in a Grocery Store Parking Lot” from back in March.

Okay. Let’s get on to other ways that life takes meaningful turns. In this episode, I talk to my guest, Cisco, about how being sober isn’t just about not drinking booze. Cisco’s exploration of sobriety is no less than a spiritual quest, and it’s a daily examination of how he can be of better service not just to himself, but to the people in his life.

We get into the weeds of his story by way of work pressures, sex clubs, racism, trauma, queer bar culture, and yeah, I figure out a way how to squeeze in a reference to late stage capitalism in this episode too, if you’re keeping track of that reference. Cisco is a designer, a writer, a musician, and a human. Two notes before we start: content warning for this episode – we talk about family sexual abuse. We also talk about youth sexuality, public sex, drugs, alcohol and recovery. I also want to make an important correction. During our conversation, I refer to what I call a “parable” about falling into a hole in the road, and the source for this story is actually a 1994 poem by Portia Nelson, called “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters,” so let’s give credit where it’s due. You can find the full text of the poem and a lot of recitations and interpretations if you Google it. I’ll also link to a sweet illustration of the poem on YouTube in the show notes. And with that, this is my conversation with Cisco.

Cisco:
I think I used to tell myself stories about why I drank. I mean, I should say first of all, I’ve known you for a long time, and I started drinking alcoholically pretty recently. I was like a late bloomer alcoholic…

Suzie Sherman:
Like you felt like drinking was strictly recreational for a long time.

Cisco:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Suzie Sherman:
and it wasn’t something that you felt like you identified as needing to change.

Cisco:
Absolutely. It was very recent. So, we’re at 2019, and I’ve been sober for three years. And, essentially, my drinking and like when it really got … My first alcoholic drink, right, like what I refer to as my first alcoholic drink, I know exactly when it was, and that is super trippy.

Suzie Sherman:
Your first drink when you identified yourself as an alcoholic, is that what you mean, as opposed to your first drink with alcohol in it, which maybe was when you were 12 or whatever?

Cisco:
Yeah, exactly.

Suzie Sherman:
Okay.

Cisco:
The first time I drank that I became acutely and consciously and subconsciously aware of the effects of alcohol being something that I wanted. So, I’ll explain it to you because it’s really funny. I was working at this financial services company with a really good friend of mine, Eric. The company was going to go under. We knew that the company was going to go out of business in, let’s say four or five months. We had four or five months left of working, and so what we started to do was to stockpile our cash and to make like plans for how we were going to live after that because we’re like, “This thing is going down.” What ended up happening is that this one day at lunch, he…we go to get burgers like a block away from where we worked, and he says to me, he says, “Do you want to get a beer with lunch?” I was like, “Sure. I mean, not a big deal. Company’s going under.”

Cisco:
“We need to cut loose a little bit here.” Like, “This is going down. This is about to get really more, like really sad and really depressing really quickly. May as well have a beer.” Everything was fine. Then, they were …

Cisco:
It hadn’t even happened yet. The real moment was that I came back from work to the office, and I noticed an extra spring in my step. There was something that had happened as I sat down to create a profit model on Excel. There I am like working numbers and formulas, and all of a sudden, I was happy. And something clicked in my head, and I now can trace it back to that day of realizing that work was fun if I had a drink in my hand.

Cisco:
Something clicked that day because … The company went down, four months later, I’m working from home. I’ve started a company with a couple of friends, and one of the people that I worked with would come over to the house at about 11:00 in the morning, 10:00, something like that, and she would bring a bottle of wine with her, which we would crack open at about 2:00 or 3:00. Maybe sometime around there. Like we’d put in a few good hours, but not really that many, right? By about 3:00, she would kind of like toss her head back and she would say something like, “Ugh, the good we do.”

Cisco:
Like, “I’m going to crack the bottle open.” What’s interesting is that, yeah, so I would have a glass of wine at about 3:00, maybe 4:00 tops. That’s as late as it would go, but the thing I would keep doing is I would keep working, so I would have a glass of wine in my hand and I would keep working, and so my brain slowly started to correlate productivity and sort of doing and being productive along with like mommy’s happy juice, and as long as I had … Like I could have a glass. Like who the fuck cares? Like I’m not hurting anyone.

Cisco:
That was my story, right? Like I’m not hurting anyone. So, from that, from that era forward, it just slowly progressed. Fast-forward, you know, I’ve gone, I moved across the country, and I started to notice now that like I was buying a bottle, and I was finishing nearly a bottle a night by myself.

Suzie Sherman:
Of wine?

Cisco:
Of wine every night. I was having a six-pack of beer, maybe four, never zero. Always like one or two, three, four. It was like, it was a progressive situation, and I could see it happening, but I didn’t really want to do anything about it because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

Suzie Sherman:
It felt like you were being perfectly productive and getting stuff done in your life, making this change by moving across the country, which was a big change, big transition? The moment that you’re describing when you were having lunch with Eric, when your company was about to go down was also a really big, a really scary, probably stressful transition, so there’s a context going on in this progression and there’s a lot …

Cisco:
Yes.

Suzie Sherman:
It sounds like a lot of stress and transition that may or may not have been felt on a conscious level. It’s easier to make those scary changes less conscious.

Cisco:
That’s it.

Suzie Sherman:
if you have your friend, the bottle with you.

Cisco:
I mean, that’s what it was. I had been a pothead since I turned 18, right? I went to college, I went to Stanford, I grew up in Southeast L.A., and one of the ways in which I negotiated this new world that I felt totally not a part of, not qualified to be there, didn’t feel I was good enough to be there, one of the-

Suzie Sherman:
Say the phrase that just came to me was this new world of white people.

Cisco:
I mean, it was. It was, and I can now talk about it being that way, but back then, I didn’t. I just thought it was me. I just thought there was something wrong with me that I didn’t feel like I fit in. It’s like, “Well, no, honey, you didn’t fit in.” That was a part of what your coping strategy is, like medicating to bring everything down and just sort of sitting in that for years, that’s your way of keeping everything down a notch.

Suzie Sherman:
I’ll say, I mean, I don’t want to diminish what you just said about self-medicating with pot when you got to college, but it’s also pretty developmentally appropriate to experiment with drugs when you’ve got your new freedom from your family, and you’re living apart from them, and you’re making new friends and partying and stuff like that, so there’s something culturally normalizing, I guess about substance use, about alcohol use.

Cisco:
Yes.

Suzie Sherman:
I’m not saying that that’s an entirely healthy thing, but for sure, there’s a social appropriateness to that as well.

Cisco:
Agreed. Completely agreed. Also, I haven’t talked about this much because it always sounds a little bit weird to me anyway, but like I grew up in Southeast L.A., but I felt like aliens had dropped me off to be cared for by this really nice Mexican couple or something because I didn’t really feel at home until I discovered like Patti Smith and David Bowie, and people that I could look at and be like, “This is where I came from. These are my people,” so going to Stanford was the first time that I was able to really rebel, because before then, I was just trying so hard to like survive, went from like dumpster diving to like hanging out at Stanford. And it was, I think what I was doing there was actually having my like eyeliner, smoking behind the bleachers, moment that I think a lot of kids have earlier,

Suzie Sherman:
Um, uh huh.

Cisco:
and I think I just never outgrew that phase.

Cisco:
I actually think that that’s a part of how I always associated my drinking and my using. I think it was always, it always felt like a rebellion. It always felt like a fuck you to the system, like whatever the system was, but I was kind of hurting my own body. It’s like saying fuck you to the system by hurting yourself.

Suzie Sherman:
It’s such a great point.

Cisco:
It’s not really actually furthering any cause.

Suzie Sherman:
Right, right. There’s so many cultural associations we make with drinking alcohol, with using substances, I’m just going to say. I think there’s a lot of, obviously, there’s a lot of different cultural resonance with different specific substances, but let’s just, I’d say focus on smoking pot and drinking, which is like … I don’t know why this is. Why do we confer upon it, this notion that it’s sophisticated, that it’s adult, that it’s taking charge of ourselves, that it’s communicating, yeah, a certain kind of rebellion, a certain kind of aesthetic that we associate with, especially if like really creative alien-like music like David Bowie or Patti Smith, or thinking about that early punk movement, or that certain kind of aesthetic, then there’s a certain association with certain kinds of substances and drinking that makes you feel a part of it, feel associated with it, feel cool by association?

Suzie Sherman:
I think your point is really an important one because I think there are a lot of self-destructive habits, thought patterns, ways that we put ourselves in a jail, in a box, by diminishing our own physical and mental health and drinking, using substances can be one of those things. It isn’t for everyone, but it can be a slippery slope, and there’s, again, there’s a socioeconomic, political, cultural context to it where there’s a way in which we self-immolate, and we force ourselves into these boxes because of these huge cultural assumptions. I mean, we can go on a lot of different topics with this. I think for me, this shows up around fatphobia right? Like the larger culture says it’s healthy to eat certain things and not healthy to eat certain things, and there’s this whole individualized notion of how we manifest our own health, but there’s such a destructive mentality that is completely culturally ingrained that actually is destroying our mental health and destroying our physical health because we’re internalizing these big cultural norms.

Suzie Sherman:
This hooks in to what you said somehow. I think I feel like I’m navigating around the central point there, but just to reemphasize your point that you made, like there’s something ironic and twisted about thinking about like how alcohol or substances are part of like your aggrandizement and your sense of like power and your finding your sense of self, but actually it’s ruinous to your body.

Cisco:
Yeah. I don’t think you were just circling around it. I think you went right in there, honestly. I really do. I think that this is going to seem a little out of left field, but maybe it’ll make sense.

Cisco:
I feel deep emotional pain when I go into my part of Southeast Los Angeles where I’m from, and I see other brown folk, my brown community, the community I come from, flocking to Best Buy to buy large screens on credit, but in the same breath, talking about how we don’t have the resources to do things for ourselves. This is a broad generalization. What I’m trying to get at is that life, without placing judgment on why we medicate with either electronics, or food, or booze. The process of living is negotiating with ourselves, right, how we want to go through that experience, and hopefully, we get to the end, having learned some things about how we want to go through the world.

Suzie Sherman:
I can’t help, but … So funny, I think. I’m going to have to start keeping track of this, but like every … I think I’ve talked about late stage capitalism in every single podcast episode so far.

Cisco:
Yeah, it’s low-hanging fruit, you know? Grab for it. It’s there.

Suzie Sherman:
Right, but like what are the options that our cultural economy are giving us, right? Consuming the products of capitalism is one. I mean, it’s one of the ways that we assuage our death anxiety, like … Yeah, so as you say, like all of these things have to be integrated individually in our lives. What are the choices that we are going to make to like drive the demons away, but also what choices is the overculture giving us?

Cisco:
When can having a drink be just a choice that you’re making, and when do you realize that you no longer have that choice, because I know what would happen for me? This is my experience of being someone who did not have this relationship with alcohol his whole life, and yet ended up here. I ended up in a situation where I would say to myself at the beginning of the day when I would wake up with a headache and I would think, “No drinking tonight. Absolutely not.” Then, I would go through my day. I would go to work, and just the world, it’s just so fucking annoying sometimes, and then you’re just like, “Really?” Like, “Seriously, you, and you, and you?” Like, “You all need to chill the fuck out,” and you kind of like go through the day, and then I would get to like 4:00 in afternoon, and I would just be like, “Everybody, get out of my way.” I would shoot home and I’d crack open a beer. It was like, it was a decompression.

Cisco:
I understand why I got there, but I’m really glad I’m not there today, because what ended up happening is that I realized that it wasn’t a choice anymore. I literally was, it was my way of coping, and it was a very narrow band of emotions that you have at that point in time, and everything starts centering on alcohol. When am I going to have my next drink? The whole middle part of the day is just what you have to do in order to deserve that next drink.

Suzie Sherman:
To get there. Right. Right. Before we get to like the decision around becoming sober and deciding that this is a pattern in your life that needs changing, you’ve spoken a lot to like the relationship with work and stress and that kind of neural path that you made between work stress or world weariness, and cracking open a bottle of wine or of beer. What other contexts in your life did it show up in?

Cisco:
I think the other big one was sex. One of the things that I did, like my use wasn’t … I was like, I was drinking most days, and if I tried really hard … By the way, I could like not drink for a month. That was like what I would do every once in a while to like convince myself that I didn’t have a problem, and it really worked because it really did convince me that I didn’t have a problem.

Cisco:
The other thing though, was that I used to smoke like a ton of weed to relax, but in the end, I would actually get really agitated and paranoid, and so I would say that all my free time that I used to use to write poetry, write music, to create, I found myself not actually creating much. I found myself getting lost in the process of like writing a song and creating, not liking the product, and then throwing it away, so it started to kind of like … I’ll tell you, this was really interesting. One of the last nights that I drank, I had invited a couple of kids who worked at the local coffee shop, 19, 20 years old, really young, like really funny, and I had kind of become their adoptive uncle. I bought them like software to help make art projects, like that sort of thing.

Cisco:
And the coffee shop was closing down, so I decided to invite them over to have like a going away party because I didn’t know when I was going to see them again, and I was sharing some of my music with them. We were just sitting around, drinking a few beers, and I was playing songs for them. One of them takes the mouse out of my hand. We were both sitting at my computer. He takes the mouse and he hits that little icon that sorts everything by date. All the files in that, all my songs essentially, he sorted them by date.

Cisco:
I didn’t know what he was doing, but it suddenly, I was like, “Whoa, what are you doing?” He sorted them and he looked at the last one, and he said, “When is this from?” He said, “Hmm, it’s 2012.” Well, the year was actually like 2015 or 2016. It was 2016. He said, “Oh, this is from a little while ago,” and that just fucking cut to the core because here I am, like one of the most important things, the way that I define myself as a human being is as an artist, probably more than anything else.

Cisco:
To have my reality opened up for me right then and there and to see that I wasn’t making anything anymore, that I was running on fumes, that was hard. That was a hard wake up call because I would sit down and make music once a week, but where was the product? That’s when I realized like, “You’re not making anything. You’re sitting down to make stuff.” Then, you have some beers, and then you throw away what you make because you don’t like it. That was one really important area, probably more important than work honestly.

Suzie Sherman:
You started actually by talking about sex, and then you went straight to music.

Cisco:
Yeah. I wanted to do the easy one first, and the reason … It’s almost like in order. Like I would go to work first, then I’d come home and make a little bit of music, and then when I’d start getting that itch at about like 9:00 or 10:00 at night, I would go to a sex club. And one of the things that I started doing, like alongside of smoking and drinking was like I was huffing poppers.

Cisco:
At first, it started, I want to say innocently, but I don’t think you end up innocently doing poppers. I think somebody offers them at a party or something, and you’re like, “Oh, what are these?,” and then you do them, and you’re like, “Whoa, this is crazy.” Basically, to boil it down, for five years, every single day when I would like masturbate or like, it was always doing poppers. By the time I got sober-

Suzie Sherman:
Not just at a sex club or out of the bar, but-

Cisco:
Not just at a sex club. I had a home, like …

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cisco:
To me … It’s like, I don’t know. You can’t see, like when you’re going down a staircase that’s kind of dark, you still have the light from the floor that you’re coming from, and then slowly, as you start descending, it kind of gets darker and darker and darker until you’re like, “Holy fuck, I’m in the dark.” That’s kind of what it was like. I just, I know now, as I look back at all the little choices that I made and the situations and the context that I was in, there’s nothing … I don’t have moral judgment against the things that I did. I don’t actually have judgment about anyone doing any of these things. It’s that for me, it just became like a little, small world that just kept getting smaller and smaller. I would go to work, overwork, work for 12 hours, come home, write a shitty song and throw it away, go to the sex club and huff poppers, and I swear to you, that I just kind of did the same thing over and over and over again. That’s just what I did.

Suzie Sherman:
When you went to the sex club, was it about the sex, as well as the poppers and the alcohol, or was it more about poppers and the alcohol than sex? Do you know what I’m asking?

Cisco:
Yeah. Yeah.

Suzie Sherman:
I’ve had … I mean, I’ve definitely in the last, over the last decade, really, I mean, I’m going to pretty much place it at when my mom died, so let’s say over the last decade or so, plus a lot of other things that happened then, but I definitely got into a whiskey habit. I have a different relationship with it now even than I had with it a year or two ago, but over the last five years or so, I’ve also had a karaoke habit. Going out to karaoke, there was a certain amount of time for me when going out to karaoke was the secondary goal. The primary goal was to drink whiskey, was to be in a social environment with a good buzz on, right? That karaoke was for me in a lot of ways the excuse.

Cisco:
Yeah. I mean, I’ll tell you what the real drug was. The real drug was checking out, because most of the time, what I would do when I would go to a sex club or a dirty bookstore, it’s the same feeling that you get when you’re watching bad TV. It’s the same feeling that you get when you eat a twinkie. Your body wants something, and when you give it the shittiest version of that thing, your body’s just, it’s okay, but it learns to accept it, and then it gets comfort from it.

Cisco:
I’ve always been a really sexual person. It’s just kind of like my jam. I got my start at the Montgomery Ward’s bathroom, so it’s like a pre-teen. You know what I mean? Like tapping my foot, just sort of like waving that red flag at like the bull of desire, just getting like really in there when I was really young, because it’s like I became sexually active as a child.

Cisco:
It wasn’t my choice to become so, and so the downside of like being sexually abused is actually that once your eyes are open to that kind of an element in the world, then it just stays open. You don’t lose sight of the fact that the world is a sexual place, even when it’s associated with like people that you’d rather not be sexual with because they’re related to you or whatever, so as in my early teens, I actually started looking for sex. That was something that I, like I just thought, “Well, why not? This is what it means to be gay. This is what it …”

Cisco:
I just assumed that. I wasn’t happy about it. I definitely felt like I was doing something wrong and I felt dirty because of it and I felt a lot of shame having, growing up Catholic, but I also, it didn’t stop me. I’ve always had this really uneasy relationship with it, and from-

Suzie Sherman:
There’s like there’s a way in which an experience of sexual abuse leads to a repulsion in a certain way, like whatever. So complicated, right? So complicated around feeling maybe like it was your fault, or feeling dirty, or like this isn’t right, but at the same time, not a …

Suzie Sherman:
Feeling dirty or like this isn’t right but at the same time, not a total disavowal of sexuality because there is something… I mean, sexuality is powerful and it’s beautiful and it makes you feel good as well. So there’s such a… Gosh, intense is not even the word for it but just sort of, there’s always, I think, that perilous tension for people who’ve had sexual abuse around the pleasure of sexuality and the complete revulsion of it.

Cisco:
Intense, is a good word. I mean, deep, deep, and it’s slightly dark too. One of the things that I had to work through in therapy around my sexual abuse was feeling complicit in it. And I think you might have hinted at that a little bit. I don’t think it’s uncommon for… Because I’ll speak for myself, I don’t know about anyone else. But the way that the abuse started with my uncle was that I wanted to feel close to a human being. My parents didn’t hug me. They weren’t physically affectionate people and my uncle was. He would hug me and I’d be like, “Okay, I matter to someone.” That’s literally how starved I was for attention and for love, for physical, for an embrace, to be held as a child.

Cisco:
And I think what ended up happening for me was that I was getting that from my uncle. It was that pretty soon that sort of led to, “I’ll go sleep in his bed with him” because we were all sleeping in the same room, me and my brothers and my uncle. And then eventually it got to the point where other stuff started happening, the lines got blurred. And so in my head as a child, all I kept thinking to myself is, “You started this by wanting to be physically close to an adult.”

Cisco:
And I’ve come to understand it and to just be okay with it and to forgive myself and to forgive him. Because I think that that is fundamentally… They always say this right, but forgiveness is like the gift you give yourself. That ability to completely let go of the rage, the shame, all that stuff that was associated with it is a part of my sobriety. It’s all connected. Sobriety for me is like a spiritual path. I know some people define it as a medical process or a psychological process. They’re all different ways of defining it but for me, it’s been a spiritual path, primarily.

Suzie Sherman:
This reminds me that when we were formulating what we were going to be talking about for the podcast and your sobriety was really the most front and center theme, from my perspective, as someone who is sociopolitically oriented and psychologically oriented, I always think about trauma, right? So there’s definitely trauma roots for you. I’m not making, bifurcating between sociological, political, economic, spiritual. I think it all arises in a certain context, in a certain kind of soup of living, right. It’s all of the same. So of course your sobriety is going to come from a context. And this is one of the deep roots of the context of what led you to realizing that sobriety was a path that you needed to take in order to integrate and make sense of your trauma, right?

Cisco:
Yeah. I mean-

Suzie Sherman:
Not the only root but one of the deep ones.

Cisco:
But one of the deep ones, for sure. So one of the things that I would find so interesting was that I would ask myself while I was standing there, three to four times a week, going to a sex club and I would ask myself, “Cisco, honey, what are you doing here right now? You’re not even horny. What are you doing?” And at first I asked it with a really angry tone because I was just really pissed off of myself. I’m like, “Get it together. You are being a total loser here.” And my therapist, who is a wonderful human being really taught me over time that if there was something I really wanted to change, that judgment was definitely not going to be the way to get there. But that curiosity and compassion were in all likelihood going to be the tools for actually changing behavior.

Suzie Sherman:
If it wouldn’t be too annoying, I want to give you snaps for that.

Cisco:
That’s awesome. But I mean-

Suzie Sherman:
For sure. [crosstalk 00:00:33:09]. Oh, my gosh.

Cisco:
You know what I’m saying?

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah. Yeah. Judging ourselves harshly for something that… Especially when we’re in a pattern and the pattern is reinforced physiologically, shaming ourselves and blaming ourselves and being shitty to ourselves is definitely not the way to break that pattern. It’s 100% not the way to break that pattern.

Cisco:
And I mean, Buddhists have this principle called the second arrow, which I think is really interesting, which is… I’m going to totally fucking butcher it but whatever. It’s really simple. It’s just like, imagine that you get shot by an arrow. That sucks. It’s painful. And then imagine that right after that, someone takes another arrow and shoots you in exactly the same place.

Cisco:
That second arrow is like the shame and the judgment. Right? The other thing that we’re doing is, it’s a form of discomfort. It could be something that we’re trying to work through but if you create this distraction or this reason to essentially… What is Tara Brach say about it? It creates a fundamental form of self-aversion.

Suzie Sherman:
Self-aversion?

Cisco:
Yes.

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Cisco:
It creates this moment in which you can say and separate the self from the action, when in reality it’s just you, it’s okay. Bring that person in, right, and say, “I see you.”

Suzie Sherman:
Let me try to understand this thing that you just quoted from Tara Brach.

Cisco:
Who’s fucking brilliant, by the way.

Suzie Sherman:
I have people very close to me who will agree with you. I haven’t delved into her oeuvre yet, but are you saying that the… Or is she saying or are you paraphrasing what she’s saying, as the self-aversion, the behavior that constitutes the self-aversion is the getting down on yourself about a behavior.

Cisco:
Yes.

Suzie Sherman:
Is that what it is? So it’s doing the behavior. So let’s say it’s a behavior that you feel is a problem for you, being shitty to yourself for the behavior is a way to disavow the behavior from yourself.

Cisco:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Suzie Sherman:
Is that what it is? It’s a mechanism to separate yourself from the behavior.

Cisco:
Or it’s the result, at the very least. And again, I’m paraphrasing and I’m interpreting. It’s kind of like, I make out of other people’s approaches what I can. I don’t completely understand it. But I’ll give you another example. I used to have lots of random pains all over my body. Right. And I would immediately go to like, “Oh my God, I’m dying. Oh, I have a headache. I must have a tumor.” I just kind of go there. And one of the things that I started doing was to recognize that when I was having a feeling or a thought like that, that I thought might be pain, that instead I could actually experience it as discomfort. Right. And to not put a whole layer of interpretation on top of that, which is like, “Something’s wrong.” It’s that moment of “something’s wrong” that adds a whole layer onto the experience of the discomfort that actually results in suffering.

Suzie Sherman:
It amplifies it.

Cisco:
It amplifies it-

Suzie Sherman:
Not necessarily the literal pain or discomfort, but it amplifies that sense [crosstalk] of suffering and increases anxiety. It increases stress.

Cisco:
Yes. And it positions it as something alien to the body as opposed to a communique from the body.

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Cisco:
It is the self. It is you. Embrace it. And I think that’s what I’m saying about acting out sexually by doing poppers or smoking, whatever it was, for me, I think I was trying to stop those things and coming down on myself. And the only way that I was actually able to change some of those behaviors was by not shaming myself and being like, “You know what, I guess I’m an addict.” Being proud of it. You know, not proud like… But yeah. No, actually not being ashamed because it’s the silence around these issues that I think contributes to our inability to deal with them as a society. Being an addict or feeling addictive tendencies towards something, maybe if we all talked about it more, maybe we’d have collectively better ways of dealing with it.

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah. I mean, naming things is powerful. Being able to recognize a pattern or recognize something going on for you that’s contributing to distress and being able to see it clearly; that, I’m assuming for you, has been a gradual process but there are some moments that were turning points for you.

Cisco:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Suzie Sherman:
So you describe this as being at the club and going to the sex club, doing poppers, at some point feeling like, “I’m not even horny, why am I at the sex club? What’s this about?” So I’m curious, that sounds like a generative kind of experience for you along the way of making the connection that, “Oh, actually I’m recognizing this is a problem.”

Cisco:
Yeah. And also if I left here today… I mean, I happen to be in a monogamous relationship, so I’m not going to go do this. But I could leave here today and go to a sex club, know that it was a problem because I don’t really want to be spending my time going to sex clubs because they kind of turn out to be a waste of time and I want to put my energy into something else.

Cisco:
But even if I did, I still wouldn’t walk away and judge myself that’s, I think, what I’m getting at. What I want to do instead is to gain more awareness of what that means and what I’m telling myself like, “Oh, maybe it means you want some company. Maybe you’re lonely. What if you called people to hang out? What if you acknowledged that you have needs for intimacy? And what if you ventured to believe that someone might want to spend this time with you in an intimate environment, instead of needing to go to a sex club?”

Cisco:
Again, not that there’s a problem with it, but what I noticed was that I wasn’t even getting out of it what I really wanted. It was just a condition. It’s like I said, it’s like tuning out. It’s like when you watch bad TV, that was the feeling I would have, is I would be standing there. It was like the feeling of waiting for something to happen.

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Uh-huh (affirmative). How do you mediate that desire in the context of being-

Cisco:
That’s right.

Suzie Sherman:
In a monogamous relationship. You’ve decided that going to the sex club is not something you want to do. It would be problematic for you in this context.

Cisco:
Yeah. It’s not a part of the agreements I’ve made. And if I don’t want to be in this situation, then I have the power to change my agreements. And yeah, it’s funny, I feel a little bit like we’ve skipped all over the place and I’m just like, “Does any of this make any sense at all?” [Crosstalk 00:40:57].

Suzie Sherman:
For sure. A hundred percent.

Cisco:
Because I’m just like, “What is going on? What am I talking about?”

Suzie Sherman:
No, this is great. I feel like we’re in a very conscious trance together, where whatever is coming up is coming up but there’s a reason. It’s not necessarily a divine orchestrated reason but I feel okay about where we are.

Cisco:
Good.

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah.

Cisco:
I’m going to choose to feel that as well.

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah. Do you have a sense of not being present right now?

Cisco:
No, it’s-

Suzie Sherman:
Check in with our dynamic right now.

Cisco:
It’s quite the opposite of that. It’s more just the speed with which I… I think you’ve known me for a long time. I just kind of went zero to 60 in three seconds flat. I was like, “I’m a child of abuse.” And just like-

Suzie Sherman:
We went right into it. You went right into it. Yeah.

Cisco:
I went right in there because I think what I’m really getting at is I don’t know that all of this messiness means something or that it all has a cogent theme. All I know is that most of the people that I talk to, who I’m contemporaries with, are trying to make sense of their lives. Everyone is trying to make sense of this fucking random collection of shit, that is kind of happening to them, around them, with them, with and not with their consent. And everyone tries to kind of have it feel okay. And this is just my version but as I speak it and as I talk about it, it sounds really messy and really dark to me is kind of what I’m-

Suzie Sherman:
You know, when you get to your forties… To disclose a fact about you that I know and about me, right. I’m in my late forties now. So you… I think we are right around the same age.

Cisco:
Yeah. I’m 46. Yeah.

Suzie Sherman:
Oh, Yeah. We’re really close. So yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely had that sense of like, I’ve been through enough decades of consciousness that I can really look back on a body of experience in my life and see patterns and see ways that I get in my own way and see my struggles with intimacy and my struggles with work and my struggles with that ultimate drug of wanting to check out, in whatever form it takes, right? Whether it’s a whiskey or whether it’s eating French fries, when I knew that my digestive system doesn’t tolerate it well. Seeking a distraction or pleasure or watching the entire 15 seasons of Supernatural again, even though I’ve already seen it, instead of engaging in creative work that I want to be doing.

Suzie Sherman:
The ways in which we fall into these patterns, even though we have decades of consciousness and experience and wisdom, that allows us to have more of a perspective on our lives and more of a perspective on what it is that we want and how and actually the tools and skills that we have amassed to achieve what it is we want. I don’t think experience in the world and in our lives means that then we are experts at executing what it is we want, right?

Suzie Sherman:
There’s that Buddhist parable that comes up a lot, I think, which is like, you are walking down a road and you fall into a hole. And then the next day you set out on the same road, you see the hole and you fall into the hole. And the next day you set out on the road and you see the hole, you remember having fallen into the hole but you fall into the hole anyway. And I think all of our existence really is… And I’m not trying to ascribe a particular meaning to it but there is something about that experience which is like, “I’m amassing experience in the world. I know myself better. I have the ability to act more skillfully. Do I always act more skillfully? No. Can I be kind to myself about that? Sometimes.”

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah. I mean, I think that, at least for myself and people who are peers, who are in their forties and fifties and sixties, you know, you…I think there’s a chance. There’s always a chance but I think at this age and developmental level, there’s a really interesting, nice, harmonious opportunity to be able to acknowledge all of that experience in ourselves in the world. And see that we can act more skillfully and more kindly to ourselves and more healthfully for ourselves. And when that doesn’t happen, sometimes we can be kind to ourselves and forgive ourselves.

Cisco:
It’s beautifully said.

Suzie Sherman:
We’re never going to be totally actualized or be able to access the wisdom all the time.

Cisco:
I want to fall into the hole with loving awareness. You nailed it.

Suzie Sherman:
It sounds fun.

Cisco:
I mean, the hole’s there. If you end up falling into the hole, I’m not going to judge you. And I’m probably going to be in there, at some point. You know, it’s interesting. I was writing a parable. I don’t know. Have you ever tried writing a parable?

Suzie Sherman:
I don’t think so.

Cisco:
How can I say it? It’s a little self-important. I acknowledge, it’s sort of like saying, “Look, I’m going to start a cult.” But it’s like I was writing a parable because it started occurring naturally. When I would have conversations with other friends. We’re at that age, as you said. And I noticed that there was some way that I kept describing how I saw life. And essentially the parable is… I’ll give you the abridged version.

Cisco:
But basically, you walk up to a river and you notice that there are other people standing on your side of the river and they’re picking up these sacks and they’re filling these sacks with rocks. After you fill up the sack with rocks, you tie it to your waist and you start crossing the river. And you notice that everyone is doing this. So you grab a sack and you fill it with rocks, you tie it to your waist, then you start crossing the river.

Cisco:
And as you start crossing, you come upon somebody that you love. You see your mom and she’s kind of dragging her bag kind of slowly. She looks like she’s having a hard time. So you take a few rocks out of her sack. You put them into yours. And you keep walking against the current, trying to get to the other side. And then you kind of get really tired. And you’re like, “I love you but you need to take your fucking rocks back. I need to handle what’s here.”

Cisco:
And then you see some people floating down the river on these inner tubes. And you’re like, “Where the fuck are your sacks of rocks?” And they’re like, “What are you talking about? Bye.” And they kind of keep going. So you finally get to the other side and there’s a person standing there just chilling out. And you’re like, “Okay, now what?” And they’re like, “What do you mean?” You’re like, “What do I do with my sack of rocks?” They are like, “What sack?” And you’re like, “The sack of rocks that we were supposed to carry across the river.” And this person is like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I keep noticing people doing that but I have no idea why people are doing that.” And you’re like, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Cisco:
So I don’t know where this is going. But I think my point is that I’m at the point where I see that what all of us are doing, it seems, is trying to just get across that fucking river. And I feel like we’re carrying shit. And I feel like we decide at a certain point in time to, like, not carry it anymore. Or if you’re going to carry it, to at least be more aware of why and how you’re carrying it. And I don’t know. It’s all very like Judeo-Christian. I get it that to me they’re very apparent structures that I’m recalling as I write that story. But that’s what it feels like. It feels like life is work.

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah. Or we feel in some way obligated to carry the rocks but no one actually asked us to do that. I mean, you could also look at it and Freudianism is inside Judeo-Christianity as well. But it’s sort of like at some point you develop the superego which tells you to carry this burden. But actually no one really told you to carry the burden. You’ve just created that structure intrapsychically.

Cisco:
Yeah. They are all things that we-

Suzie Sherman:
You’ve interpreted the parental imagos.

Cisco:
Oh my gosh. It’s amazing. Well, there are these things that we do as human beings, like I have an interpretation of what addiction is. Okay. So have you ever noticed how dogs lick themselves in one place until their fur starts to fall off?

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Cisco:
I think of addiction as like an autoimmune disorder. It’s an autoimmune disorder. Essentially it’s the body needing to put energy or do something and you start doing it repetitively to your own detriment. Of course, if the dog thought about it, they’d be like, “Oh, I shouldn’t lick myself.” But that’s not what you’re thinking. All you’re aimed at is the comfort that you’re getting from that act. You wouldn’t blame someone for having an autoimmune disorder. Right? That’s silly instead you’d be like, “Hmm, what can we do about it?” You know? And that’s, I think, from going to meetings and talking to people. That’s the sense that I get is that people were just trying to be okay in the world, you know?

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a way in which you can extrapolate that to mental health in general. A lot of people talk about this, I think it’s a really useful thing to think about is, you don’t blame someone for breaking their arm. I think there is a way that physical suffering doesn’t get the same kind of stigma as mental suffering. And so there’s all kinds of stigma that’s attached to mental health challenges that people have. And I think same with addiction, same with…

Suzie Sherman:
Again, I’ll go back to the experience as a fat person. There’s so much stigma attached to being fat at all. A bystander in our culture, looking at me, he will have all kinds of assumptions about me being lazy and worthless and not worthy of love. And all of these really awful harsh ideas about what the meaning of fatness is. But they don’t know anything about my genetic endowment or my physiological makeup. They don’t know anything about my life. They don’t know anything about my dietary habits. They know nothing about me.

Suzie Sherman:
So, I think, same of addiction, right? If you… And I actually don’t often use the term addiction. So, that’s interesting. That’s something we could talk about too. But I like to talk about substance use and alcohol use in sort of a more neutral terminology. But that’s a set of behaviors that people have all kinds of assumptions about. But as with food and with substances, there are physiological interactions going on that often govern what the brain and the gut are telling us to do. And it has nothing to do with personal discipline or laziness or failure to engage in your problem or whatever. I mean, there are so many different layers to this experience for people.

Suzie Sherman:
Addiction, especially with alcohol and substances have so much more to do with trauma and social isolation and not having our physical needs met and not having economic stability. It’s correlated with so many different socioeconomic factors that it has virtually nothing to do with personal lack of discipline. But it gets ascribed that way, culturally.

Cisco:
I mean, it’s interesting. That’s one of the… I mean, not to mention to go back to that example, right. Where someone is making a set of assumptions about who you are and who you aren’t based on what they see. My big question is what does someone gain from that judgment? Do you know what I mean?

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Cisco:
To what end? How would someone find themselves in the situation where that judgment is necessary? I mean, that, right?

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative). That kind of goes back to what you said earlier about the Tara Brach thing of the dissociating the… kind of creating a mental construct that’s supposed to ward away that thing because I can tell you 100% that people who have negative attitudes about me as a fat person, they themselves want to ward away fatness. They don’t want to be fat. So, that is definitely at play. I don’t think it’s often consciously at play for people but I do think that’s a layer that’s in there.

Cisco:
I mean, it’s-

Suzie Sherman:
Right?

Cisco:
Absolutely.

Suzie Sherman:
And as it is with racism. And I’ll say as a white person as well, right? The idea of white privilege and the fact that my life is so much easier than the average person of color’s life, in a lot of ways. That I’ve got so much power conferred onto me in society as a white person. Right. That I think that that dynamic is at play with racism as well. Right? White people having an attitude that is a racist attitude, part of that, kind of some of the shadow of that is it’s that warding away of that experience.

Cisco:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Suzie Sherman:
Which is…it’s…There’s a prayer in Judaism… I’m a Jewish person as well. But in Orthodox Judaism that we talk about some, which is a prayer that men do that they thank god that they’re not women. Right. It’s all of the same mentality, I think, of warding…

Suzie Sherman:
It’s all of the same mentality, I think, of warding something away.

Cisco:
And it’s interesting because when I was thinking last night about coming here and hanging out with you and I was asking myself, “What do you believe in, Cisco? I’m just curious before you go do the same, what do you actually believe in?” Because if you show up, I was curious about what I was going to sound like.

Suzie Sherman:
Like what would you convey?

Cisco:
What would I say, if I could be conscious of it? And the one thing that kept popping into my brain is that we are one, the one thing that I keep learning over and over and over again at this point in my life is that the root of war, of isolation from one another, of judgment, all of these things is this fundamental disconnection from the truth that we are all connected and that we are all one, which is a spiritual principle.

Suzie Sherman:
Uh-huh (affirmative).

Cisco:
And it’s freaky as fuck if you don’t want to go there, not you, but I mean, if one does not want to go there. But that is where I am in my life, which is why AA was the solution for me, is that what I have found by going to AA is a spiritual community in which I can have a process by which to live my life in a way that is emotionally sober. The not drinking thing, to be frank, is a very small part of what the AA experience is, but being an atheist, right, I don’t believe in… I’m not deistic, I’m spiritual, but I don’t actually… It was hard. And it was weird to be like, “Are you really going to hang out with all these people who believe in God? What is this about?”

Cisco:
And I guess what I’m really getting at is that you can experience that separation and the creation of the other and the self and the other, you can experience it in a secular form and see it as the root of sexism, racism, war on countries that we want to dominate. And it’s the same thing. It’s the same spiritual basis of every form of violence, which is the lack of understanding that unless we are all happy and cared for, have food, have dry shelter, have a safe place to be, that that is the problem. I know this is so out there, but…

Suzie Sherman:
It’s totally not, it’s not out there. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, yeah. The basis of all of that division and violence absolutely is about othering ourselves from people, othering other people, right?

Cisco:
That’s right.

Suzie Sherman:
So the disavowal of the humanity in each of us, and we do that internally as well, right?

Cisco:
Yes, yes.

Suzie Sherman:
So this is a good place to ask you, how was it becoming apparent to you that you needed to, I guess going back to like that brilliant thing that you said earlier about… That was so brilliant. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. “The real drug is checking out.” So I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, that sounds like maybe that’s a concept that came to you through therapy possibly, but I don’t know if that’s a concept that sort of came to you as you were becoming aware of alcohol and other substances being a real problem for you that you really needed to get clear of.

Suzie Sherman:
And I’m really hearing you that this is really, it’s a spiritual project. It’s a much bigger project than just the location of the suffering in your life around alcohol or substances, or having sex when you’re not even moved to have sex or overworking and not taking care of yourself or whatever form it took, right? So that it’s a bigger spiritual project than all those specific things, but your track toward sobriety and engagement in AA were really big pieces of that puzzle. And your sobriety is something that you take really seriously. And you’ve been sober for three years now, just over three years now. So tell me at the point that you’re starting, you’re starting to recognize that this pattern with alcohol and substances in particular, you’re starting to notice that it’s not working for you anymore. So what are the ways in which you’re noticing that it’s not working for you anymore?

Cisco:
Well, one of the things that I noticed is that when I would be at work, it would start to turn into about two o’clock. It would get to like two o’clock in the afternoon and everyone would get on my fucking nerves. I literally was just like, “Leave me the fuck alone.” The good I do here, kind of making myself into a bit of a martyr, and I just couldn’t wait to get home. And what that would stop me from doing was actually interacting with the people that are in front of me. And I was already shooting myself into the future where I wouldn’t have to feel any of that stuff. And so what I realized was that that moment was starting to happen earlier and earlier in the day. It used to happen at 5:00, then it started happening at 4:00. Then it started happening at 3:00.

Cisco:
I actually got to the point where by two o’clock every day I wanted a drink. Life was too much. And so I realized, I was like, “Oh, this is like a one way street. If you went from drinking, nothing to a drink at lunch, now you’re drinking a bottle of wine a night. Now the bottle of wine is no longer enough. This thing wants all of you, it’s not a courteous guest. It’s something that is just going to take more and more.” So the thing that I noticed was that I was becoming an angrier… I mean, I always had a little bit of an edge, but this was really, I was sounding really entitled all the time. Like in terms of feeling put out by coworkers or just felt like everyone needed to fucking just bring it down a notch. There was that edge and I’m just like, “This doesn’t… I mean, you’ve always been a little edgy, but this is a bit much. Why all the rage?” So I sort of feel like that’s kind of how I started to really notice it, was that it was a lack of patience towards other people, and not showing up, honestly. So if I knew that you were having a hard time, for instance, I might not call you because honestly I had enough time for me, for my drinking, to hang out in my house by myself, smoking weed, but I somehow didn’t have time to show up for my family members who were sick, my friends who were going through a hard time. If people would invite me to go places, I just started to not go anywhere.

Cisco:
So I just started to notice little by little that I was not showing up. And pretty soon I would not be showing up to go to work. And I knew that, and I didn’t want it to get there. So the whole reason that I actually like went to AA was because I didn’t want it to get really bad. I didn’t want to lose what I had. And from listening to people that had gone through what I had gone through, it was kind of just going to go one direction. Nobody gets up one day, and they’re like, “Oh my God. Yeah. I know, it was kind of like had a drinking problem. And then it just suddenly went away by itself.” Most people have to make a concerted effort to manage the situation. I don’t think it means you have to go to AA.

Cisco:
I chose to go to AA, and I love that I did that because it works for me. I can take all that discomfort that I have with a god and just refer to my higher power as the source of goodness between people. That’s just how I define my higher power. It’s not a god per se, but like you and me sitting in this room together, there’s an energy between us. We are conscious together. It’s neither you nor me. It’s something between us. That is what my higher power is. I don’t think it’s a god, but it’s the closest thing that I can associate to that feeling. What’s important is that it’s not me. So the basis of my drinking was really like I was in the middle of the world all the time. It’s fundamentally like a spiritual condition.

Suzie Sherman:
What do you mean by being in the middle of the world?

Cisco:
It’s like, there’s a phrase that we use in the program, but I really love it, and it feels very true, which is “the bondage of self,” that notion that when we are focused on ourselves entirely, that in all likelihood, we’re going to have a form of an imbalance, right? It’s that our ability to connect with others, our service to the people around us, how we help others and how we look to the needs of other people. That was a revolutionary act for someone that had downward spiraled into having the world be completely about them, their drinking, their use, and everyone else is really just annoying and in the way. So a lot of the conditioning and a lot of the work that I do now on myself is about liberating myself from that fundamental act of selfishness that I sort of replicate every day, day after day.

Cisco:
It’s hard to explain, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with drinking. That’s the thing that’s really odd. I never would have been able to guess what AA was about. My best friend at the time, both of her parents… What’s the word? Not associate, identify, they identify as recovering alcoholics. Two of her brothers identify as well. And so when I told her, “I’m having a really hard time quitting alcohol. I’ll say that I’m not going to do it, and then I do it anyway. And I just make up excuses for why I should do it.” And she just said to me, she was like, “Honey, maybe you should go to a meeting. You should just try it.” And I was like, “No, no, no, no, I don’t want to go. That is not for me. I’m not religious. I don’t want people talking to me about it, telling me what to do. It’s not going to go well.”

Cisco:
And she said, “I hear you, but doing nothing doesn’t really sound like a great idea. What if you went and you hated it, but at least we knew that you hated it and why? That would be a piece of information that you don’t have.” And so I was like, “Okay, let’s go.” And the thing that I experienced from the very first meeting was I just felt lighter. I felt like this thing that I had been carting around, the work that I was trying to do every day to not drink, I suddenly didn’t feel that I was carrying it.

Suzie Sherman:
Kind of like a sack of rocks.

Cisco:
Yeah. Like a sack of rocks. And, honestly, the way that I feel, and I get really emotional about this, because I don’t care what anyone does as a friend or someone that I love. I don’t want people suffering when they don’t need to suffer. So whether it’s AA or whether it’s SMART Recovery, or whether it’s none of those, and it’s just talking and maybe it’s going on walks, I don’t care. I just don’t want people feeling trapped and like they don’t have a way out, or that they deserve the suffering or that there’s no way out of it or that they’re broken somehow. You’re not broken, you’re okay, and you’re going to be okay. And they’re like, “Look at all these different pathways that you have, try them out and don’t be ashamed.” That’s what I want for the world, not for AA to be like the game in town. Who cares?

Suzie Sherman:
Right, right. There’s a cultural assumption, especially I think in the Bay area, because there are a lot of alternatives and alternative lifestyles and being, it’s a very drinky and alternative and drug doing culture. Right? And it’s also a pretty areligious culture. And so, especially I think in the Bay area, there’s a lot of stigma about AA because I think people have the assumption that it’s, in a sense, like certain brands of Christianity say that they are the one true path. And there’s, I think, an association with that. Right? And from your experience, that’s not true. And from your experience, you have met people who also for whom AA works and they don’t harbor those attitudes at all. But it’s something that from the outside we can make judgments about.

Suzie Sherman:
And truly there are people who have explored AA, and it’s not for them for specific reasons. One of them often being the insistence on the higher power and not knowing how to necessarily… not finding a comfort in defining it for themselves in a particular way other than this has to mean God with a capital G. There’s a lot of reasons that it doesn’t work for people or that people don’t stick to it. People like me and a lot of other people who do have relationships with alcohol or substances and want to ward it away and are resistant to the idea of it because it’s threatening, it’s threatening to our own patterns that may or may not be healthful for us around drugs and alcohol. Right? So there’s plenty of reasons that people are resistant to it irrationally. And there’s plenty of reasons that people are rationally resistant to it because they’ve tried it and it’s not for them.

Cisco:
It’s just one of the things that I think is kind of awesome and funny that I wish I could have my friends be like flies on the wall or have them in my pocket because I think we’d fucking laugh our asses off. I mean, there is something really funny about being in a church basement, eating doughnuts on a Friday night, it’s really fucking funny because you’re like, “Oh my god, I’m so sad, this is my life.” But the thing that I think is also really funny is that the things I was doing instead of doing that was like, it wasn’t necessarily that productive. It was like, I was literally checking out somewhere, and anyway, I’m with you. I think one of the things that I think is really important is that live and let live thing, right?

Cisco:
One of the problems with religion, right, or at least the way that religions have been constructed or the way that we have turned spirituality into a ritualized experience that then has all these power structures and knowledge structures around it, is that there’s an assumption that one religion has to be right. And I think you touched on this before, right? That’s complete nonsense, right? And in fact it drives a lot of the warring that happens.

Cisco:
And I think a part of what I was trying to get out before is that instead of discussing and arguing with other people about whether AA works or not, I’d rather collectively talk about how we live in a world that allows people to seek paths towards mental health. I find it’s a way of factionalizing people who fundamentally have the same goals, it’s like, “What are you talking about? Why are we bickering? Who cares? We should be more worried about that thing over there, which is a lack of universal health care or shame that surrounds talking about this thing. Let’s not call it addiction, let’s call it something else, fine. But let’s talk about it.” You know?

Suzie Sherman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That brings to mind the very real political divisiveness that we’re seeing in our culture and how devastating it is, where marginalized parties are warring against one another instead of uniting to actually create systemic change, right? Or the way that progressive Bay Area people look down on people that they consider to be hillbilly rednecks, right? When actually, and vice versa, instead of all of us together collectively finding a language to say these are the things that we’re entitled to as human beings in our society and the people in power are denying us those rights. So let’s band together and actually address this. Right? I didn’t know, Cisco, today that we were going to be talking about some of these huge tribalistic problems that we face as a society. It’s kind of cool. I’m glad. And your path to sobriety I think encompasses all of this, which is a pretty amazing thing to wake up to.

Cisco:
Thank you. It’s really awesome to share it with you, especially because forget about changing other people’s worlds or changing people’s minds. It’s like, it’s not the point. The point is to just be able to share, like when you told me like, “Hey, do you want to sit down and talk about this stuff?” That’s really what I wanted to do. I wanted to share where I was, not what AA is about, not what sobriety is about, but where I’ve been.

Suzie Sherman:
We talked a little bit about what were the signs that the pattern was such that you needed to change it, and you talked and you addressed how you went to your first meeting, like why, that conversation you had with your friend, which she sounds very insightful.

Cisco:
I think there was one. There was one sign, one thing that happened that really shook me. I was, it’s like I mentioned that I started drinking, let’s just say a six-pack a night. And I had found a ritualistic symbiosis with this amount of alcohol. I could go to work, I could come back home, I could stop at the liquor store, get it, go home, work more, drink, go back in. And it was like clockwork. It was a machine that was working, but suddenly something started to hurt right here, kind of right below my heart, kind of right below my rib cage, I started to feel this pain. And I was like, “Yeah, that doesn’t feel right. So I just kind of put it off for a little while. And then it just started hurting a little bit more.

Cisco:
And I went to the doctor, and he was like, “Hmm, let’s do some tests.” So he ran some tests, and the test came back and my ALT levels, which is, I think, it’s an enzyme that your liver makes when either it’s getting too much fat or too much alcohol. They were elevated. And he was like, “Yeah, let’s keep our eye on that.” And I knew full well what it was from. And it’s like, “I’m no Sherlock, but…” And so we kind of let it go on for a little while, but it kept getting worse. And what I noticed was that I kept drinking. I kind of knew what it was from, and I kind of didn’t want to do anything about it.

Cisco:
So fast forward, three months later, the pain at this point has gotten pretty substantial to the point where it hurt so much I couldn’t sit up at work. I would purposefully lean back so that my liver didn’t hurt so much. And I kept thinking in my head like, “But I’m not drinking that much. I mean, it’s like a six-pack or four beers a night. People drink that all the time. I talked to plenty of people who drank that much.” Right? So the rationalizing was already in full effect.

Suzie Sherman:
Yeah, it seemed normal.

Cisco:
And if you surround yourself by people who drink a lot, then you’re always going to be the one that isn’t drinking that much. Anyway, so moment of truth, I finally it’s time to go back to the doctor to check in, and he says, “Yeah, your ALT count continues to be really high,” he said, “and according to the,” what’s it called, the sonogram or the whatever, the ultrasound, “according to the ultrasound” or whatever procedure it was, “you have the start of fatty liver disease. So essentially you only get it from one of two ways. You either are eating really poorly or you’re consuming too much alcohol, so you need to eat better.”

Suzie Sherman:
Wow. That’s what the doctor said.

Cisco:
That’s what the-

Suzie Sherman:
That was the assumption that the doctor made.

Cisco:
Yes.

Suzie Sherman:
Not knowing that you’re the guy who orders egg white omelets.

Cisco:
Yes.

Suzie Sherman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cisco:
So in that moment, that connection that I refer to as a connection to a higher power, my higher power energy, that energy that I talk about between you and me, that I feel between human beings and myself, that same energy is the energy that wants me to live. That’s me reaching for life, right? In that moment, while I heard the doctor make that assumption, my, what I refer to as like my disease, my alcoholism, right, my desire to self-immolate, my desire to negate my own life could have very easily said, “You’re right, I need to eat less fried chicken.” And yet my sense of wanting to live knew that I had to speak the truth.

Cisco:
And so I said, “It’s from drinking.” And he very nonchalantly, literally did not miss a beat. He’s just washing his hands, and without turning around, he just says, “Okay, well then you need to cut out your drinking.” And he walks out the door. And little did he realize that for the next three to four weeks, I would do everything possible to not drink. And I didn’t. My ALT count went down, and when I got the tests that it had gone down, I went out and celebrated by buying a six-pack. So I don’t know what you call that. I’m okay calling that alcoholism. And I’m okay referring to myself as an alcoholic. Now, if there’s a better word or it’s like we come up with a less judgmental word in there, that’s antiquated, it doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is I know the behavior, I know what I was doing. I was fundamentally not treating myself very well and unable, apparently, to make a better decision.

Suzie Sherman:
Or unable to make a better decision that actually you could sustain-

Cisco:
Yes.

Suzie Sherman:
… over a longer period of time.

Cisco:
Yes. Without all that work, that… Thank you. That’s precious. That’s what it is, Suzie. It’s the sense of in order for this to be sustainable, I’m going to need something else. So what I started doing was taking long walks. This is before I went to my first meeting, right? I started taking long walks, and I found that if I kept myself out of the house long enough, then I would miss the window where I would drink, which would mean that I wouldn’t drink all night. And I was like, “Oh, okay. I’ll just do this.” But I felt exhausted at the end of every day. And I felt like I was running from something, if that makes any sense. I’d walk around the Castro being like-

Suzie Sherman:
You were walking from something.

Cisco:
Yes. So that sounds really not very dramatic, but it kind of is. Yeah.

Suzie Sherman:
It’s a slow motion realization.

Cisco:
Yeah. So the realization was like the liver hurting, and then on top of that, the awareness that I was doing a lot to avoid it. And then the realization that no matter how much energy I put into avoiding it, that I still felt shitty afterwards. And then, yeah, and then I realized from going to meetings that I didn’t have to feel that. And so when that feeling was lifted, it was almost like people ask me sometimes, they’re like, “So how many meetings do you have to go to?” And I’m like, “Have to? I love going to meetings.” It’s like, “What are you talking about?” It’s like going to the gym, it’s a form of fitness and wellness that enables me to have a structure so that I can make that choice really easily. Not drinking every day is really easy. Now. It was not really easy by myself. So maybe that’s the thing that I want for anyone who’s having a struggle is to just think about…

Cisco:
Having a struggle is to just think about ways of incorporating support and help. It seems like a lot of the programs and stuff like that, have that in common, right? It’s a disease of isolation or it’s an illness of isolation, whatever the right term is. That’s mostly what I look out for these days, I look out for ways in which I’m isolating. And last night as I was reading about smart recovery and I was reading about all these other modalities, they’re all doing, this is a generalization, they’re all doing the same thing. They’re all like, “Hey, let’s make new rituals. Hey, let’s incorporate others. Hey, let’s not isolate.” But how you do it, who the fuck cares? Just know that you are not alone and that doing something about it doesn’t mean you’re broken, it actually means that you’re loving yourself, that you’re doing something really, really good for yourself.

Suzie Sherman:
The walking was a classic harm reduction strategy actually.

Cisco:
Is it? That’s awesome.

Suzie Sherman:
I mean maybe not literally walking, but yeah, I mean, basically giving yourself a ritual, something to do during your prime time of when you would normally be using, that’s one of the things that you did. Or prolonging use, you know? A strategy might be, I’m going to get home and make dinner for myself and eat dinner before I have a drink, instead of, get home, crack open a bottle immediately, right? So giving yourself more space and time to make the decision about whether you’re going to drink, that’s a strategy, increasing the spaciousness for making a different choice.

Cisco:
It’s so interesting, because I think a part of why I was really drawn to AA was that I needed, what Cisco needed, was to have the choice, be outside of myself. It doesn’t make me a bad person, that’s how I interpret AA, right? So at first, I kicked and screamed at the first step, which is about acknowledging your powerlessness. And I kicked and screamed, I was like, “I am not motherfucking powerless. I’m in my body. I have power.” And I debated, tried to debate my way out of it, but the more that I listened and the more that I looked at what was happening, I was like, “May as well be powerless. You may as well.”

Cisco:
And what I noticed slowly over time was that if I was left with the choice, the negotiation and the subtlety of having it or not having it in my life, that was too much for me. For other people, it’s the thing they want. They want that choice and they want the ability to negotiate that gray area more. I could not have handled that, I don’t think it works for me. For me, I think it’s easier to just be like, “No.” Do you know what I mean? It’s almost like, and I don’t know if it’s my-

Suzie Sherman:
Do you mean to have an abstinence rule for yourself specifically? Just like, it’s an on, off switch. The switch is off, there’s no wiggle room.

Cisco:
I think-

Suzie Sherman:
I can’t make this choice for myself on a daily basis, it’s not something that works for me.

Cisco:
Yes. And what I like is just knowing that about myself and just being like, “It’s fine. Just go set yourself up to be successful.”

Suzie Sherman:
As you started talking about this, you said something like, “I don’t think it makes me a bad person that this is true about me.” So is there some little shadow being in your existence telling you that it’s bad or that it’s lesser that that has to be true for you, or is that a cultural message that you think you’re …

Cisco:
I think I’m maybe saying it-

Suzie Sherman:
You’re processing or …

Cisco:
Maybe I’m saying it to someone who might be listening, who might be inclined to ask themselves whether they judge others who have a dependency on a substance, or who have a habit around a substance. Because I still, one of the things that really strikes me the more and more that I’m on this path of sobriety or soberish-ness, whatever the path is, having a healthy relationship with myself and with the world and with substances, the more that I am on this path, the more that I realize that other people are on this path too, it’s something we all have to negotiate at a certain point in time, whether it’s with food or booze or sex, it doesn’t matter, to be human is fundamentally to experience and negotiate excess or intake. You know what I mean?

Suzie Sherman:
Or is it just to mediate the intensity and stress of living our lives. How do we cope with it? What mechanisms do we have in place and are those mechanisms actually working for us or are they numbing us out to our lives, right?

Cisco:
Yes. Well said. And I think for me, the process of getting there has been eye-opening because even it’s what makes us most human, I don’t feel that we have a lot of collective compassion for something that we all experience. I think that we’re in deep denial about the fact that this negotiation between ourselves and our care of ourselves, that space that we’re talking about, that we’re all doing it, so why don’t we just give ourselves a little more room to not judge while we find our path there? The number of people when I talk about being an alcoholic or whatever, I can tell that they’re still, there’s a little part of them that is like, “Really? You? You can’t control your booze?” And I’m just like, “Wow.” I’m always struck by it, I think is what I’m getting at. I would think we would have come further, I think we still have a long way to go.

Suzie Sherman:
For sure. I mean, I think that we talked about it a little bit earlier, but it has so much to do with people’s disavowal of their own out of balance relationship with alcohol and substances. I mean, we haven’t even scratched the surface on the queer subculture that we’re both a part of and the fact that in the Bay Area in general, the general population in the Bay Area is a drinky population relative to the rest of the country, let’s just say, and the LGBTQ plus community is more drinky, right, because societal acceptance issues and trauma, and moving through the world as a queer or trans person is fundamentally mentally harder and more challenging than moving through the world as a straight or cis person.

Suzie Sherman:
I mean, I don’t have a handy statistic to back this up, but we know this. I mean, we know that addiction and substance and alcohol use is higher in the queer community than in the general population. And we all do it recreationally and it’s how we party and it’s how we have fun and it presents an awkward social situation when your friend is sober and doesn’t want to go to the bar. How do you connect with your friend then if all you do when you socialize is go out to the bar and drink?

Cisco:
I mean, it’s interesting for sure, because I mean, one of the things that I often think about is that we’re star children, we’re born into this world and I feel like a part of my birth right as a queer person, is to not fit in exactly into these prescribed roles or ways of being and that it’s my right, it’s part of my birthright to be as fucking weird as I want to be, right? That’s how I grew up, that’s how I interpreted my own queerness. And it was at least what I should get if I was going to be persecuted, you know what I mean?

Cisco:
It was something that I held really dear, but what’s interesting is that the way that that weaves in with booze and with using is, and this is my way to celebrate that and you’re not going to be able to tell me anything about it. That was my own experience of it, is that it blended in with a form of rebellion or with being cool. It was almost counter-cultural to be queer and high. And I know that sounds, now that I’m saying it I’m like, “That sounds really unhealthy and really dumb.”

Suzie Sherman:
Well, and historically the place, the only places for LGBT folks to go to find other queer and trans folks, were the gay bars, right? That’s just historical, it’s interwoven into the culture. And of course in the 70s and 80s and 90s when recovery culture became a lot more popular, a lot of gay bars closed, especially lesbian bars. And this happened, the cultural relevance of drinking and doing drugs and the connection between being queer and using substances and alcohol, that can’t be understated, I don’t think.

Cisco:
Agreed, which is why the antithesis of that, for me, being sober is going to a gay men’s stag meeting of sober individuals and really learning to look at other gay men in the eye and to feel that discomfort and not medicate it away. I’m now, only at 46 years old, learning how to relate to other men, not as an object of their attention, or as someone who is seeking objects of attention, but simply as someone who showed up to try to do the best that I can do today, by being of service and trying to see if anyone needs anything and trying to participate in a community that is not based on alcohol. And that feels so healing, standing there and praying with other dudes, doing that has changed my life and it’s something that I cherish. I look forward to it, I’ll get to do it tomorrow, it’s every Sunday.

Cisco:
I joke that it’s like the gay church lady kind of thing because I show up to do it, but that’s a part of what keeps me sober is knowing that I get that connection. Who knew that all I ever really wanted was to feel that intimacy? I didn’t know, but I know now.

Suzie Sherman:
That leads me to ask you, if you were to describe your life now, three years into sobriety, what are the ways that it looks different than it looked three or four years ago or 10 years ago, with the lens of sobriety, what has it brought to you?

Cisco:
A part of what being sober, and specifically going through the steps has done for me, is to help me acknowledge what my part is in resentments, conflicts, misunderstandings. A lot of life, I find in my life anyway, is about accepting life on life’s terms. Whether it be because someone I’m close to is not well, whether it’s because I’ve had a misunderstanding at work, I’m not meeting expectations, someone’s not meeting my expectations, there’s shit, there’s just constant stuff happening. And I think the biggest thing that has happened for me is that I’m not creating extra melodrama on top of that, I’m not writing a narrative in which I need to play either a victim or to be an aggressor who then craves and needs medication in order to make the world tolerable. And I try to keep my side of the street clean so if something happens on a daily basis, I can go through the day and be like, “Do a fearless inventory of what you did today and what happened today.”

Cisco:
I feel that I’m more at peace with how I live my life, but I’m also, I don’t know, it’s not a flashy life. Go to a meeting, go to work, it’s a quiet life, but I’m content. I don’t find that I’m searching, I don’t feel like I have a big hole in the middle of my chest that needs booze, weed, poppers, sex, whatever it is. I’m not trying to shove shit in there and if I am, then I can be like, “Oh look, it’s that scared, hungry little boy who wants to cram stuff in that hole.” But I guess it’s just a clean … honestly, the biggest gift of sobriety for me is liking myself. I heard in a meeting once and it made me cry when I heard it because it was so powerful and it’s something that gets thrown around a lot, but it means a lot to me, this person said, “Self-esteem comes from performing esteemable acts.”

Cisco:
And I suddenly felt naked because I was like, “Do you perform esteemable acts?” And I was like, “No, not really.” I mean, I came from the do no harm school, I didn’t know I needed to … and then I started doing stuff for other people and I realized and I reconnected with that little boy who was taught to be of service and to do things for other people and realizing that I had moved all of my self esteem away from being like, “What can I do for you and how can I help you?” To, “What can I get out of the world and how do I strategically position myself to be in power and to have money and to get my way?” The return to that way of being that I was taught, but maybe without the scary God thing, that’s awesome. It feels good. I feel great every day because I have that and I love that I don’t have to attach it to a scary God, honestly, because that part never felt right.

Suzie Sherman:
It’s more something that you’ve come to through organic process.

Cisco:
And then I don’t have to convince others of, or be afraid of talking about, I can just let it be its own thing.

Suzie Sherman:
Have you, in this three years, because you’re doing AA model, I ask this, I mean, I would ask this if you were doing harm reduction model as well, I suppose, but I think I would use different language, has there been a relapse during this three years and do you start your count over when that happens? Do you start your accounting of your sober time over when that happens?

Cisco:
First of all, I use the word relapse, it’s not my favorite word, and the reason I don’t like that word is that it sounds like you’re falling backwards.

Suzie Sherman:
Right.

Cisco:
I think a more empowering word like prolapse. I’m kidding.

Suzie Sherman:
Prolapse. You do not want to prolapse, either.

Cisco:
I had to, sorry. I couldn’t not. But the way-

Suzie Sherman:
But yeah, have you … I mean, that speaks to, how I normally would phrase it would be, have you had periods of use during this period of time that you’ve been working on sobriety?

Cisco:
So I have not had a drink since December 21st of 2016. So December 22nd is my sobriety, it’s my booze free day. But a few months into, after I quit drinking, so this was in February and I quit in December, so I basically didn’t drink January and part of February, in the middle of that second month in there, I went to a sex club, and this dude. standing right next to me, hands me a bottle of poppers and without thinking, I just took it and I used it. And the reason that I talked about not liking the word relapse, even though I get it, people use it and it’s currency in AA, right, to refer to that moment as a relapse, but I think of it like, you know when you’re walking and you trip on your own foot and you fall forward a little bit, that’s how that moment felt for me, because I feel like I gained a better understanding of how I was going to need to manage my relationship to substances if I was going to stay sober.

Cisco:
So said differently, I can’t go into a sex club and not already have played that moment in my head. If I go to a sex club, I need to be prepared to say no, but I was not prepared for that.

Suzie Sherman:
Right, right, you fell into the hole.

Cisco:
I fell into the hole-

Suzie Sherman:
Without being aware of the hole.

Cisco:
Without being aware of the whole. Because I didn’t go into the program to not use poppers, is what my brain was telling me, when in reality it’s like medicating with anything. It’s the desire to be in a state other than the one that you are in. So basically what happened is that happened sometime in March, I don’t know exactly when, which is why just set April 1st as my new sobriety date.

Cisco:
So my clean and sober date is April 1st, but December 22nd is still really special to me because something really, for me, really magical happened and I think back to how sad and bummed out and lonely and broken I felt, and then how great I felt and I’ll tell you when it was because it was a powerful moment. But I was sitting out on my landing and I had the last beer that I had up until now and I had it in my hand and I remember looking at the bottle and there was a little swill of beer at the bottom and I remember looking at the bottle and in that moment I felt sadness that the bottle was nearly empty. And I thought that was really telling, I could feel myself noticing that and I thought, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” And then what I realized was that I felt that sense of sadness every time that I open a bottle, because I actually know that it’s going to get to the point where it’s empty.

Suzie Sherman:
You’re anticipating the grief that you’re going to feel when the bottle is done.

Cisco:
Yes. And so then I let myself feel that a little bit more and then I realized that if I could be drunk all the time, if I could feel medicated and protected from the world all the time, I would do it. I don’t morally judge it, I would totally do it. And in that moment I heard something, it was a voice, it was my wanting to live basically, because keep in mind, I’ve got this pain in my side, my liver is screaming, being like, “Don’t do this to me anymore.” I heard something say, “Cisco, this is bigger than you.” Those exact words, I’m not fucking making it up. I was literally sitting there and suddenly I came to the realization that whatever I was in, I was not going to be able to get out of by myself. And that was the last drink that I had up until now. And so for me, it’s always going to be special because I remember that feeling, it was a form of defeat, it was a form of the jig is up. Where do you go from there? Do you go have another drink? It’s an empty victory. At this point having a beer was like, sure, it would taste fine, but if I can’t be drunk all the time, why have that beer?

Suzie Sherman:
Is it meaningful to you that that sobriety date is winter solstice, is the moment that we start turning back toward the light?

Cisco:
That is so funny, I had not made that connection. That is really funny. I had never made that connection, if you can believe that. Hm!

Suzie Sherman:
I’m still in such a warm, fuzzy place about this conversation with Cisco, even though it happened a few months ago. I hope you found some stuff in there that resonated with you and was helpful. Even though this conversation happened before the shelter in place orders and everyone’s lives changed drastically because of the COVID crisis, a lot of what we talked about really hits home now, isolation, lack of connection and lack of structure, not to mention the intense cultural anxiety we’re all experiencing, can exacerbate unhealthful patterns for a lot of us. I’m trying to, and I want to encourage you to notice with gentle curiosity, the coping mechanisms that we fall back on in these times. Let’s try to be kind to ourselves, let’s ask for help if we need it, let’s remember that we can and do make good choices for ourselves sometimes and sometimes we make less good choices, but we can always work toward being kinder and more loving to ourselves and to the people that we care about.

Suzie Sherman:
I’m still looking for your stories about how life has evolved during these long months of shelter in place. If you would like to let me know how these strange times are treating you, record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at, nextthingpod@gmail.com. We might use your story on the show. Ditto, if you’d like to pitch a story about a non-COVID event in your life that has profoundly changed you. I want to hear your stories, your voices, help you witness the powerful moments, both tiny and grand, that crystallized change for you.

Suzie Sherman:
We are And The Next Thing You Know. Subscribe in your podcast app, tell your friends about the show on your social media with the hashtag #nextthingpod. You can also rate or review us at iTunes or sponsor the show at patreon.com/nextthingpod. Patrons help make this show happen, and I’m so grateful to all my supporters. A special shout out to my Serendipity level sponsors, Emily, Brittany, and Dorian, who don’t do it for the name recognition, but I give it lovingly, If you support the show at the $10 a month level or more, you get access to audio production notes and episode outtakes. So check it out, patreon.com/nextthingpod.

Suzie Sherman:
Join the conversation at nextthingpod on Facebook. Find me at soozenextthing on Instagram and Twitter, and make sure to check out our beautiful website where you can find all the episodes, transcripts and all the ways to participate in the #nextthingpod community. The banana peel is by Max Ronnersjö. Music is by Jon Schwartz. Thanks everybody, we’ll talk soon…unless I get waylaid by that river and a sack o’ rocks, which I probably will.