page 6 - Out in the Mountains

30°], Rm" Out From Under, An. insightful look at the road to sobriety

Out From Under: Sober Dykcs and Our
Friends, edited by Jean

Swallow, San Francisco: Spinsters, Ink,
I983, 256 pp. $8.95, paper.

by Marianne Milton

When I first read Out From Under, I
was barely two months into sobriety and
beginning to learn that living sober
demanded more than not drinking. I had
read nothing prior to that point that
described the difficult and long process of
recovery, particularly as it related to being a
lesbian, except the chapter on ‘Sex and
Sobriety in .loAnn Loulan's Lesbian Sex ---a
good start, but short and limited to
sexuality. I had heard that lesbians and
gays may be especially susceptible to
alcoholism because our socializing often
revolves around bars, but I had been
drinking much longer than I had identified
myself as a lesbian and only occasionally
had spent much time in bars. Besides, that
kind of information only explains why we
may start or continue drinking; it may be
useful to someone trying to analyze us, but
it does not help much in learning how tc
cope with stopping.

My friends were as supportive as they
could manage---often telling me warmly how
wonderful they thought it was that I had
stopped drinking; when I frequently woulc
only respond with a discouraged anc
desultory ‘uh huh,‘ some of my friends
would probe and ask if I was finding
sobriety hard. I was. But, as is the case
with many newly sober alcoholics, I did not
know what I was feeling. My friends
seemed neatly divided into two groups: thost
who had never drunk much and those wht
were still drinking. Neither group coult
help me learn what I was feeling or offer
guidance about where to go next.

My first reading of Out From Unde
opened up a new world for me. Rccover_
was a real and identifiable process, and
other lesbians could tell me what they had

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felt during this time.

"No, this is not about drinking. And
it's not about dying. This is a book about
living and recovery. It is about how we do
that and what happens when we try to do

that. This book is for those times we are
alone in our recovery; we can pull it out
and say, for once in our lives: oh yes, yes,
I am in the right place, this is what is
supposed to happen."

‘Recovery from alcoholism and drug
abuse is about recovering memory and reality
and vision. It is about recovering the
balance we always should have been able to
have. It is about discovering emotions. And
then it is about what you do with those
emotions once you know what they are. In
some sense, recovery isn't just getting
something back so much as it is beginnings;
it is about learning how to grow up. It is
about learning how to love each other and
ourselves. Recovery is about making
community and so is this book." Introduction,
p. xi

This is not a book of statistics,
although the statistics are there. This is not
a book that separates emotional recovery
from physical recovery from the political
forces that want to keep us drugged and
drunk. This is a book that wraps the
reader in a complex and vivid cloth woven
of the experiences of over thirty lesbians in
different relationships to recovery from
alcohol and drug abuse. Included are
contributions by alcoholics, drug addicts,
para-alcoholics, ACOAs (adult children of
alcoholics), co—alcoholics, and healers of the
above. All the pieces are engaging. None
are removed or abstract —-- as is much other
literature on alcoholism. The contributions
take the forms of narrative, poetry, journal
excerpt, song, interview, essay, letter, novel
chapter, and script. The contributors could
have been more diverse: the majority of
women included live in California, and
women of color seem to be under
represented, as do working class women; most
of the contributors’ biographies are
frustratingly unspecific on these points, so I
am unable to get an accurate sense of
representation. There is bibliography of
references "gathered during a year's worth of
unguided, informal and unscientific reading,‘
which seems useful despite the disclaimer. I
was annoyed, however, that only the initials
of the first names of authors and editors
were given instead of their full names, thus
obscuring gender.

On reading this book a second time in
order to write this review --- six months into

This issue of Out in the Mountain: is,

as you may notice, a combined July
and August issue. We will be going
back to a regular publication schedule
beginning in September, but we needed
to take a bit of a summer break.
many production

Unfortunately,
problems (both technical and human)

delayed publication. Our apologies for
any problems it may have caused.
(Subscriptions are still for a full twelve
issues.)

 

recovery --- I focused on different common
threads running through many of the articles
than I did when I first read the book. I
notice now, with mixed relief and
frustration, how many authors discuss
recovery in terms of 2 to 3 years. I read
those statements the first time around, but I
had not really believed that it would take
me that long to begin to feel balanced again.

An important aspect of this book is
that women have written from all different
stages of recovery. Consequently, this book
is a resource for lesbians at any‘ stage of
sobriety and will remain a resource to be
consulted again and again as recovery
progresses. I suppose that when I have
reread this book again --- perhaps a few
years into sobriety --- the pieces that discuss
recovery as a life-long process will have
more meaning for me and I may heed more
angrily those articles that discuss the politics
of our addictions.

There are many specific, helpful
suggestions in this book that I really only
attended to on my second reading. Now
that I am more certain of my desire to stay
sober, I notice the articles that address
rebuilding the parts of me that atrophied
while I was drinking, and the articles in
Part 2: The Healers Among Us - offer
specific and detailed advice tbout how to
begin this renewal of my emotional, physical,
intellectual, and sexual selves. Celinda Cantu,
a Chicana, discusses how cultural imperialism
can get in the way of this renewal for
women of color:

"The family, self-identity, cultural
celebration, how we dance, what we eat,
some very basic kinds of things are all
things that in recovery can be stepped upon
or dismissed or listed as taboo, like you
shouldn't have those kinds of connections
because everybody is drinking in your
culture or whatever. That's bullshit. So
how I dealt with it was that I basically
began to question the need for alcohol, as
opposed to what's wrong with my culture."
In Sobriety, You Get Life, p.88

And Margot Oliver, an Australian
women, writes about the very deadly way
that our "friends" can deny our addictions

and thus short circuit our path to renewal:

"[They often deny] that the addicted
woman has in fact got an addiction problem
at all, often becoming quite literally unable
to 'see‘ the addiction. After all, if you can't
see someone else's behavior, you don't have
to look too closely at your own: ‘Yeah sure
she drinks (etc.), sometimes too much, but
then so do I/so docs everybody else/it's not
really her problem‘ and you can go on to
provide her with the same sort of rationale
you provide yourself: need to unwind/just
feel like it/go crazy if I don't/I had a
horrible life/under a lot of stress, etc, etc,
etc. Denying another woman's addiction is
potentially fatal to her (denying your own
may be potentially fatal to you, but at least
that's your responsibility)." Killing Us Softly,
pp,I39—l-10

This book creates the possibility for all
women in the lesbian community to become
more aware of the dynamics of addiction
and recovery so that the kinds of fatal
dcnial described by Margot Oliver need never
occur again. If we are sincere about
creating community and not just interested
in mimicking the communities around us, we
all need to become more sensitive to the
ways that the “normalcy” of our substance
use may be killing us and depleting our
strength as a community.