Daily Gratitude List 9.22.22

Dateline Copenhagen

I’m grateful to be in Copenhagen. I’m grateful for the chance to reflect. I’m grateful for a sense of adventure. I’m grateful for the life I’m building and I’m grateful to the people helping me. I’m grateful for how things are. I’m grateful to be sober today.

If it’s Thursday, this must be Copenhagen! As you know, I’ve been writing these from a succession of Scandinavian coffee shops—and today I found the best place so far! The Coffee Collective is what it’s called. Very modern and spare, Danish design and all of that, Bill Evans playing when I walked in. I thought to myself, this is perfect spot to hole up and write this morning. Everything was going according to plan, I had a delicious smelling coffee in front of me and one of these Cardamom buns that I’ve been eating a lot of, I reached into my backpack and realized I had left my laptop in the room. So, if this seems less inspired, well maybe terroir matters after all.

Jane wrote something really great yesterday and if you missed it, I have you covered:

Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition

Reading Jane’s piece yesterday, thinking about the podcast (Episode 22) with Paulina Pinsky and editing Episode 23 (!!), I realized the common thread is the relationship between sobriety and creativity. I wonder about the flip-side, too—is there some kind of connection between creativity, artistic impulses, whatever you want to call them and addiction? I know for me, the path out has been through writing and expressing myself, but it’s much harder to figure out the path in.

We know the Program works on the principle of attraction, the power of example. Growing up in Iowa City, home of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, I saw lots of examples of alcoholic writers. World class, super famous writers riding bikes around campus and to the Robert Ray stores because they didn’t have driver’s licenses anymore.¹ I’m not saying this is why, just saying I definitely had the idea that maybe you needed to be an alcoholic to be a great writer.

I have some visceral reactions to some of the stuff that is said to people as they try to recover. One of the things I hated was when people would say that you could be “too smart” for AA and “you can’t think your way out of alcoholism.” I think this stems from misunderstanding the Big Book’s admonition that real alcoholics can’t get sober on the basis of self-knowledge alone, it is the spiritual awakening that is necessary to accomplish that. But for people who thought their way into this mess, thinking their way out is pretty important.

One of the fundamental challenges in my recovery has been changing my thinking patterns. Learning how to interrupt certain thoughts, applying facts to some of my more insane musings—these are thinking skills that have been essential to my sobriety. Writing has been a way for me to express myself, get things out and then integrate my experiences and thinking. Writing has been critically important to my sobriety and taking it out of my notebooks and my head and sharing it like this has been literally transforming my life, a page at a time.

I don’t mean to suggest that writing is the only way out. For sure, writing is an important tool in recovery, but the point of this is, I think, much bigger:

The purpose of this is not to simply stop drinking, it is to recover ourselves.

That’s what we lost to addiction—ourselves-- and every time we find a way to express ourselves honestly and authentically, I think we get a little piece back. Whether that’s drawing, painting, cooking or writing, whatever it is that helps us unearth those lost pieces of us and then proudly display them for others to see. If we were to give credit where credit is due, I stole this idea from a really eloquent comment Holly Rabalais made the other day:²

Putting our wreckage in a museum for others to gawk at is hard, but necessary. But they don’t gawk. They learn. And they say how beautiful the wreckage is now that it’s been exhumed.

I used to think that being a writer required drinking. For me, the task of reaching down inside and showing what I found used to require a certain amount of anaesthetic. That’s how I thought it worked. Of course, I had it wrong. It turns out that reaching down inside and honestly sharing what I dredge up is how I got sober. It’s how I stay sober. That’s how it works.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. The liquor stores in Iowa in the 1970’s were state-owned and operated. Robert Ray was the Governor of Iowa then—hence, “Robert Ray Stores.”

2. Credit where credit is due: