I’m grateful for the way the sky turned from orange to soft pink. I’m grateful I can watch the ferry from my desk. I’m grateful for seeing what’s really there. I’m grateful for the way it feels when I look at the world with love. I’m grateful to be sober today.
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It’s Friday morning, you know what that means? That we’re all going to listen to the greatest “Friday” song of all time, “Living it Up on Friday Night,” by Bell and James? No, that’s apparently not licensed on Spotify.1 If it’s Friday morning, that means Jane wrote something great last night:
I’ve been trying to be much more focused here and actually trying to plan some of the topics and work on them more in advance and stuff. I hope you’ve noticed. I’ve been working on a bunch of things that you’ll hopefully read/hear in the next couple of weeks. Notably, “My First Alcoholic,” which is about my grandfather and his friend, Hank, who I think was the first alcoholic I knew, “Bill W. Was Kind of an Asshole,” which is kind of self-explanatory and I’m excited and terrified about what will hopefully be a Thanksgiving Special. This is an as-yet-unnamed story I wrote years ago and completely forgot about and just re-discovered. It recounts actual Thanksgiving-related events in my life and is not about sobriety or recovery.
For me, writing has become an indispensable, integral part of my recovery. This is for a lot of different reasons. Writing is a creative outlet for me and like cooking or playing the piano, I get pleasure from the actual writing part: Sitting at my desk, peering over my glasses at the screen, kind of mouthing out the words while I type them, hearing the clack of the keys against the music in the background.2 That is just super pleasant to me.
Writing isn’t always what I want to do, however. When I write about things, I re-experience them again. I get some of the same feelings, remember new details and usually end up seeing things differently than when I started. That can help me resolve things, or at least put them in the right place, but it can also lead to some pretty strong emotions as I experience those things without a chaser.
When I wrote this gratitude list, it launched me on a course of re-examination, to re-think a painful chapter in my life, and helped me come to terms with it3:
Writing is what let me see that things are actually mutable, that I actually could change the way I thought. I’ve had a lot of professionally-trained people give me essentially the same advice for a lot of years:
You should stop drinking. You should stop thinking the way you do. You should stop being so self-destructive. You should let some of those things go.
I found this to be super-frustrating. Tell me where to find the “Self-Destruct” switch, and I’ll be sure to turn it off. Of course those things needed to happen, the advice gets a bit thinner when you ask “How?” Eventually, I realized that, like all of us, I had a narrative going in my head, it’s how I saw the world, my assumptions and experiences built-in, framing and filtering what I actually observed and experienced. It’s why two people can experience the same thing in radically different ways—that experience is part of two very different stories.
Lots of my drinking was driven by obsessive thinking patterns—thoughts and feelings that I didn’t belong, was different, that other people were always having a better time, a better, happier life, that people wouldn’t really miss me that much if I was gone, that other people didn’t value me, that I didn’t matter enough to them. Those are sad, but also highly egotistical feelings. The central tragedy in my life was that I just didn’t matter enough to other people, especially the people who said they loved me. So, I thought.
I made myself miserable imagining friends, colleagues, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends all doing better without me. They all inhabited a world where I just didn’t matter enough. I lived in that world, too—and the only way I could stay there was to drink. As long as I lived in that world, there was no way I could stop drinking.
What changed? A lot. First, that miserable world I was inhabiting was a me-centered world—that’s why it sucked so much. The thing that ended the terrible reign of me was a spiritual revolution; the old regime was overthrown and a Higher Power took charge. Second, I realized that I could re-write those narratives—in the same way that I could write a story whose ending required me to be sitting on a barstool somewhere, I could write one that didn’t. Et Voila.
Did I run a bit amuck after realizing this? Yes, I did. There was a period of time where everyone who used to be in my life all remembered at roughly the same time how much they all missed me and longed for the days when we were together. To be honest, that occurred mostly in my journals, but it showed me the power I had and raised the question, “why was I so interested in writing bad stories about myself?”
The last thing about writing and my sobriety—I think it’s what I’m supposed to do, at least it’s what I always wanted to do. One of the most profound things I’ve heard and one of the things that has helped me the most came from My Sponsor/Your Sponsor. He said:
The process of recovery was not about stopping drinking, it was about recovering the person you were meant to be, living the life you were meant to lead.
That made so much sense to me: Recovery was less about recovering from a disease, it was recovering me, the real me, the wreck at the bottom of a Sauvignon Blanc Sea.4
I knew from those days in the Bound Periodicals stacks at the University of Iowa library that I wanted to be a writer living in New York. Throughout college, I had a New Yorker cover that showed a library reading room over my desk, it may have been of the New York Society Library.
I didn’t set out to do this. I moved to New York in 2020 because I had burned most of my bridges and didn’t have any place else to go. I started writing the gratitude list because my then-Sponsor saw how much anger there still was and didn’t think I’d stay sober otherwise. I started sharing the gratitude lists on Twitter because it felt a little less lonely somehow. I didn’t really see any of these things as the keys to my recovery, until I realized that “recovery” wasn’t about stopping thinking certain ways, stopping feeling certain things, wasn’t about stopping drinking. When I realized the project was recovering myself was when things started making sense and it’s when I began writing in earnest.
I think that discovering or re-discovering creativity is an essential part of sobriety and I think this poem I saw on the subway (and wrote about here before)5 just perfectly sums it up:
The image of a a young girl folding origami cranes that “clutter the house” made me laugh, but I loved this:
My daughter makes and makes them, having heard the old story: What we create may save us
I think that’s very true.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
I actually had to track down the physical album. I think some of the tubes in the Internet may need replacing.
This morning, it’s a recording of Beethoven’s “Emperor: Piano Concerto by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler. That’s just fun to say in German.
Also to spend a week walking around Stockholm and Copenhagen listening to “If You Really Loved Me” on repeat.
Realizing now, I could have gone this direction with the whole '“Vasa” story. Also, the rhyming was completely accidental and a little mortifying, to be honest. Sorry.