Daily Gratitude List 12.14.22
He's Good at Math
I’m grateful to be up early. I’m grateful for another chance to get things right. I’m grateful for willingness and for putting my own pen down sometimes. I’m grateful for faith and seeing that believing is what makes things change. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I would consider myself a math-ish person. This means I’m pretty conversant with a lot of mathematical concepts, actually frame a fair amount of life that way, but my actual performance in actual math classes? I think it was generally considered a disappointment.1 One of the people who expressed a considerable amount of disappointment and exasperation was my Dad. He has a fairly significant math background and taught statistics and such, so to have a son who brings home an F in calculus, I’m sure it seemed deliberate.2
We had a series of cold war-style, non-battles over math over the years. When I sought help with math homework, he often provided a very comprehensive introduction to whatever topic was under consideration, followed by a series of exercises designed to make sure I ingested the important concepts. My approach was more minimal. The answers to the odd-numbered problems were in the back of the book, I just needed help with the even-numbered ones. I correctly predicted the eventual rise of the Internet, in that I knew one day there would instantly be a way to determine where the north and south-bound trains were going to meet that didn’t involve me putting pen to paper. Investing in tools that were soon to be obsolete made no sense to this 8th Grader.3
On the flip side of the coin, I definitely see the world through a math-ish lens. I do understand a lot about statistics and have some kind of wacky ideas about things like the multiverse and probabilities spawning branches everywhere and maybe God residing in those probabilities. But anyway, one of the things that helped me in sobriety was looking at my life as an equation.
Equations are just mathematical descriptions of things or events and you can describe some pretty complicated things with some of those mathematical sentences and paragraphs. I started to think about my life being an equation, a lot of complicated variables and inputs and many items left to suppositions and assumptions, but that’s what it was. An equation that described my life. One thing about equations is that they need to produce a meaningful result; they have to work.
I built a life that was about achieving or acquiring X, Y and Z, a lot of other letters too, and, in turn, that required a whole set of other related inputs and sub-routines and it all got very complicated. One of the outputs of the life I engineered was it seemed to produce discontent and despair in pretty large quantities. Also, I just didn’t seem capable of pulling off some of what was going to be necessary to secure terms like X, Y and Z unless drinking was going to be involved.
Enter alcohol. When applied liberally to one side of equation, it produced really magical effects on the output side. Making alcohol one of the foundational terms in the equation that described my life was one of the things that made it all work. For a pretty long time. I don’t say that triumphantly, it just means I was able to hold the shitty collapse at bay for a long time by making sure I was drunk most of the time. But the equation of my life was dynamic, it required more and more drinking to sustain the relationships between the terms. This isn’t a cute, math-y reference to relationships with other people; those were mostly ruined by then. It meant the dismal march to the end was going to require a lot more Sauvignon Blanc.
At some point, the efficiency of the alcohol (however that is expressed in your equation) declines enough that the whole thing just produces an error, an unintelligible result. That’s the “jumping-off place,” the dark underworld where alcoholics who can’t drink away what they need to anymore, last as long as they can. The alcohol doesn’t work, the equation doesn’t work. It is still possible though to calculate just how empty and meaningless life has become. The answer is somehow less than zero.
The real problem is that pulling the alcohol-related terms out of the equation won’t help. The equation will definitely not work if you do that. If you take a term out of one side, you have to reduce the other side the same way and in the same amount. It was mathematically impossible for me to simply stop drinking.4 I needed to change the entire equation.
That realization was pretty significant to me. It helped explain why I had such a hard time coming in, why doing what I had been doing, wasn’t ever going to be enough. It made it possible for me to see that it wasn’t me that was defective. I mean, I have some pretty appalling character defects, but it was my approach to getting sober that was defective. Until I re-evaluated the entire equation, I wasn’t going to have the foundation I needed to be able to get and stay sober.
This meant some other terms in my life, things that maybe didn’t seem directly connected to the drinking, also had to be changed. That’s when it gets harder, but that’s also when it gets better. Realizing that change was not just possible, but necessary, helped me to start re-framing my narrative, re-framing not just the equation of my life, but my actual life.
I don’t mean to suggest that my life is the sterile product of some unapproachable, undecipherable equation. It’s rich and full of weird coincidences and kindness and love. I’m not the one writing the equation anymore. Being “math-ish” was not quite enough to get the job done right, so I’ve decided to leave that to someone who doesn’t mind being described as “good at math.”
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Speaking of disappointments, at events that required blind dates in college, my “friends” often thought it was funny to describe me as “tall and really good at math.” ha ha ha.
To be fair, if completely declining to study for a course that you already don’t understand is “deliberate,” then fine. Also, what really enraged him was that I seemed surprised to have flunked the class.
I therefore spent a lot of my time in Miss Stephens’ Algebra class carefully plotting out my course to becoming the youngest President in American history. This plan did not survive contact with high school.
This may not be true in the strictly mathematical sense.