The Hockey Stick Graph of Early Recovery

In the business world, there is something called a “Hockey Stick Graph” that tracks the typical income stream when a successful new business starts up. First, the business goes in the hole due to start-up expenses, then slowly begins to see money coming in, a process that can be discouraging.

A hockey stick has a “blade” that slowly slants down from the tip and then turns sharply upwards at the “elbow.” If the numbers along the bottom represent time and the numbers along the side represent profits for a new business, the graph line will come to resemble a hockey stick, if the business has a good idea, a good plan and the owner puts forth a good effort.

Initially, the owners have to rent or buy a space, renovate it to meet the needs of their product, buy inventory, stock the shelves and advertise. Time and money have been spent, but no income has yet been generated. Opening the door on Monday morning and yelling “ta-da!” won’t pack the interior with eager customers reaching for their wallet. The owners might be tempted to take a long coffee break and a longer lunch, since the odds are no one will show up while they’re gone anyway. That would be a mistake.

If they remain on the premises, ready to smile and be helpful without being pushy, offer to special-order what has not been stocked and tidy up the shelves after a “looker” has riffled through them, the first customers that stop in and buy or look around will leave with a good impression of the store.

If the product meets their expectations, they will tell a few friends. Weeks and months go by, income growing so slowly the profit line floating just above the zero mark barely moves. It may be tempting to just give up, close the doors and “bag the coffee! Let’s get a drink to cry in.”

Remembering the conviction behind the decision to spend the time and money to open the doors and knowing that “time takes time,” the successful entrepreneurs stick it out, continuing to “do the next right thing.” In the community, word of mouth starts to spread. “What you need is one of those Jezgadoes that the new shop on Main is selling. They ain’t no counter-monkeys like up at the Big Box. They know what you need and how to use it.” Satisfied customers return, some of their friends come in, each of them tell another prospective buyer and suddenly the profits take a steep rise, taking off from the blade, like a Space X rocket heading for orbit.

The business has just gone "viral.”

My own recovery began in just such a fashion. 

I left treatment at the tip-end of the hockey stick blade. What was left of my brain, after I had scattered cells on tavern floors all across this great land of ours, was enveloped in a fog worthy of San Francisco Bay, remaining tissue soaked in THC, short-term memory unreliable to absent. The mind that operated out of that brain filtered every bit of information that did penetrate the haze through a web of lies that snared any incoming thought that threatened the justifications I had constructed to shield the results of my using from reality. Denial, “Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying,” made it possible to believe the unbelievable. I had to slice my way through the strands of that web, peering through the fog of a malfunctioning brain as I did so. 

I had the good idea: “Alcohol has to go.” I had a good plan: “This time you need to use recovery groups, daily readings and reminders to ‘keep the matter at the top of your mind’ (Wolfe, N) and exercise and nutrition to feel good.” I also had a strong intention to make an honest effort and make it for at least a year and 24 hours, before deciding whether this new life was right for me. Why the “and 24 hours?” If I ever decide to drink again, I have to wait 24 hours to ensure it wasn’t a passing chemical imbalance. I had my cravings, but they seldom lasted two hours, let alone 24, although some were pretty powerful for a while. 

When I returned home, anyone observing me from a distance would wonder if I had even quit using, as my life remained in the blade and appeared unchanged. I had been advised to keep my stress level down and not make any big changes. “Get a job, not a career,” for instance. I began losing some weight and I was a more cheerful and productive employee and coworker. I started driving to a small city, forty miles away, for Aftercare and recovery group meetings, stocking up on library or used books dealing with addiction issues and avoiding the bars completely. That was about it for observable change.

I had an “as-needed” gig or two in construction and on my cousins’ farms, as in when they needed me. Internally, walking over the leg-wearying plowed ground of grain fields “picking rock,” was a remarkably pleasant task with my headphones on and without a hangover.

I was still broke most of the time, as neither my hours nor my wages amounted to much at that point, but about six months into recovery, I got a job driving a spud truck for the potato harvest. Seven 12-hour days a week, and the money was coming in better than it had for years. Since I wasn’t spending my hard-earned cash acting as a middleman between the brewer and the sewer or burning it up in my bong, I actually saved some money, but, in six weeks, the harvest was over.

I had begun to cough up blood and jumped to the obvious conclusion: lung cancer from years of sheetrock dust and lung-busting hits of marijuana. I drove down to St. Paul where the doctor informed me that I had picked up a minor lung infection and gave me an antibiotic. As they often do, the pills knocked out the bad microbes and cleared up the infection, but the "friendly fire" also wiped out all the good microbes that inhabit our guts, help us process our food and create beneficial byproducts. The diarrhea resulting from the "collateral damage" had me more fatigued than I was from the lung issue. Ten months sober and I was still “tired,” albeit no longer suffering from the “sick through and through,” feeling that had dominated my mornings for years.  

I was staying with my youngest brother, a companion on many using adventures. His apartment was the point of departure for frequent expeditions for his crowd, who were still living the “highlife” I had formerly advocated for myself and them. It would have been easy to get discouraged and call ten months “close enough. This isn’t working.” That would have been a major, possibly terminal, mistake.

I began eating yogurt to restore the friendly bacteria. The health of my “innards”  recovered and my physical “hockey stick graph” took off like a rocket. I didn’t have to wait two more months to come down on the side of hanging up my drinking shoes. I had kind of known that I was going to like it by the time I left the hangovers behind in treatment, but now, at ten months, it was a dead-bang, no-brainer, “this-is-the-feeling-I-want!” decision. I’d had that before, of course, in my many short experiences with abstinence, but l had lacked the key piece of information that I was not a candidate for the occasional glass of beer and had to founder on that shoal again and again, unable to solve the simple equation: Me plus any alcohol equals a ping-pong of drunk to sick and tired, over and over again.

That didn’t mean I was assuring anyone, “I’ll never drink again.” Thirty years later, I still don’t do that. Overconfidence has caused more than one unnecessary setback in life, as well as in sports. But I did declare my intention to abstain from alcohol to myself and others.

At that point, I still retained a lingering notion that I would someday let marijuana back into my life. After all, alcohol causes all kinds of problems, but when you smoke weed, nothing happens. And that, of course, is the problem.

As I was piloting my twenty-year-old, but smoothly-running ’63 Chevy home on Christmas Day 1985, listening to two newly recorded, 90-minute mix tapes on my new personal tape player, I was pretty happy with my life. I had some money left over from the spud-truck job. Even though I had no prospects for work until spring, I wasn’t worried. I was living rent-free, had a library card, enough money for gas and food and felt younger than I did when I was 21 and hungover.

The physical hockey stick graph was now well up into the handle. I weighed 170 pounds, down from a high of 212, and was taking stairs two at a time. Gone were the days when I needed to wear striped bib overalls, so people could tell if I was rolling or walking. Given that my crippling hangovers were my only motivation for quitting and the fact that I had written off any possibility of completing the 12 hours I needed to graduate from college and having no desire for an “office job” anyway, my only goals were to abstain from alcohol, continue to lose weight and save enough money in the summer to survive another winter.

I still had not made a long-term commitment re marijuana, but given a “near miss” on Thanksgiving where an over-abundance of hash and grass at a friend’s house led to an uncomfortable feeling that nearly had me reaching for a beer, I knew that the weed had to remain sidelined for a long time.

I had no clue I was so much as “on the blade” of another hockey stick graph, but things that had already occurred or were in the works were going to lead to goals and accomplishments that I had not even dreamt of dreaming about yet. Goals that weren’t even on my radar that were going to lead to the most satisfying accomplishments of my life.  

This post has gotten too long already, so it will be continued in Hockey Stick II.