I’m grateful for hanging on. I’m grateful for pennies and what I know they mean. I’m grateful for a cloudy day and very good coffee. I’m grateful for raingear. I’m grateful to be sober today.
One thing about the rain here in New York, it is restricted pretty much to the days that end in “-y.” Like everyone else, I think the long siege of gray weather has been, well, a bit long. However, like everything else, I think it serves a purpose. Weather like this makes me more productive, for sure. If you think of us as vibrational entities, tuned to slightly different frequencies, well, that famous “middle C” for me is this: Sitting at my desk on a rainy morning, music in the background, the keyboard clacking away and my coffee just over there.1 That really is pretty close to a perfect thing in my world.2
So seriously, I have this thing about desks and writing and music and coffee. And I have for a long time. As a kid, I loved reading in libraries, doing homework in that setting just elevated the work, made it seem more important. College and law school were also about libraries and desks and writing. Other stuff, too, but whenI think back, to be really honest, the things that pop to the forefront are being in the reading room in the law library with the semi-smuggled in coffee from the coffee shop across the alley where they poured the cup when they saw me walk in.
Or the very jail-like “carrel,” I seized at the Memorial Library when I was in college. I loved going up into the stacks, down the darkened rows of books and opening the door to that little carrel, turning on the small built-in fluorescent light over the desk, getting to work. Also, I liked the pirate-y fact that I had just seized this carrel and was also pretty confident no one could find me there. See, there’s a hidden theme. There was and is a part of me that needs to get away sometimes. Maybe it’s hiding, whatever, let’s just call it a need to be alone. As between hiding in a study carrel and hiding in black-booth studded dive bar, well, one of those is slightly less damaging than the other.
But back to the desk and library thing. This is going somewhere, I promise, it’s just going to take a bit. So, I got myself in this jam in college. I realized I could graduate a semester early if I took a pretty aggressive load of classes that Fall. I also was working on my Senior Honors thesis and somehow labored under the misapprehension that I would have until May to submit my thesis. No, I was told, it would need to be done when I graduated. I had not planned for this eventuality. I had a job as a research assistant helping to write a book on education law, had just signed up for like 18 or 19 credits of classes (including Ballroom Dance because there was a PE requirement…) and now I had to write the whole f***** thesis in like 90 days.
When those pieces finally assembled in my head, I had that familiar and hateful icy realization and thought, “there is no way.” I’m sure I spent a dejected day or four brooding and drinking and not doing any of the work. I’m not armed with a specific recollection, it’s just that’s how I rolled back then. I also don’t know when the next part happened exactly either, but at some point that Fall, I was sitting at my desk and listening to classical music on the radio and wondering how I was going to do all of this. I had just brewed myself a cup of coffee,3 and the first strains of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) come over the radio. I don’t think I’d heard it before and I was mesmerized. Those two sharp notes at the beginning just grabbed me. I was listening, just gliding along with the music, and then I just remember writing pretty furiously until the song ended.
At some point, I managed to get a version recorded on a cassette tape and I listened to it when I was out walking, too. I listened to a lot of other music—I was mostly financially limited to music playing on the radio so that forced my horizons to expand. But that was the secret sauce for me, the combination of an aesthetically-pleasing desk, the right music, the right light and the right cup of coffee and I was cooking. I don’t remember too much else about that semester, I think I got a C in ballroom dancing, but I got everything else done and I graduated.
I think the point I want to make with that story is not about how to get a lot of stuff done in a short time, it is that my brain is kind of a machine and figuring out how to optimize operations takes some doing. We all have these habits and I think from a neurological perspective, they serve a real purpose. It’s like those are the buttons I need to push to set the system for optimal production. Why am I taking you through this in such elaborate detail? It’s because I realize that in the same way I have to set my brain to turn crazy, disorganized thoughts into sentences, I had to set my brain to learn how to live without drinking.
I get carried away with the magic talk sometimes. I think the whole, “just believe a little harder and the obsession will be lifted” thing can be kind of obnoxious. And as much as I say that this is not about stopping drinking, in early sobriety, it is very definitely about learning to live without drinking. And, judging by the recovery and mortality rates associated with alcoholism and addiction, that is a very, very difficult task.
The middle and long-term answer for me was studying the Big Book and working the Steps. The short-term answer was finding a cocktail of virtuous sources of dopamine, things I could do to facilitate a recovery-seeking life. I had to find the things that put my brain into a productive, positive gear. I knew that when I was unable to do that, drinking became way too necessary and there weren’t enough meetings in the world to keep me from falling back on the thing that had always worked. May I say again, while going to meetings is an important part of a Program, going to meetings is not the Program.
My obsession with notebooks and note-taking and organization eventually took the shape of a table I would sketch out every Sunday. The first column listed the activities that I thought promoted my recovery. They were things like yoga, exercise, walking, AA meetings, writing gratitude lists, practicing the piano, etc. It looked something like this:
This was from way back in 2021 and you can see my list of activities: “MP’s refer to “Morning Pages,” a practice drawn from “The Artist’s Way,” which I highly recommend. I established what I thought the frequency of each activity should be and that’ s how I calculated the denominator. The numerator is just how many times I did the things that I thought promoted my sobriety during the week.
I did this every week and kept track. I did change activities and frequencies, so it would take some doing to get apples to apples scores, but that’s not really the point.4 I realized that when I felt “off,” a look at the scoresheet often provided clues. It helped me organize my recovery and keep focused on the doing the pieces that were important every day, rather than just waiting for another day to fall off the calendar.
Here’s the last point, everyone’s recovery has to be their own. The activities on the left-hand side were the things that helped me build a recovery-promoting structure for my life. That’s the challenge each of us faces, not just with addiction, but with life. The principles are pretty much the same. I think it’s easy to get obsessed with down and dark feelings in recovery; I think that usually indicates a lot of fear and uncertainty about moving away from what was known. It doesn’t matter that what was known was also demonstrably shitty, it was what was known and we revert back to that until something new is established.
I don’t know if there is science behind my charts, but they helped me organize the life I live these days. I think the real key, though, is finding the thing, or the combination of things, that makes the whole thing vibrate just the right way. The Eroica Symphony or the Jupiter Symphony are just astonishing collections of coordinated vibrations, but when I combine them with a few other things, there is magic in those vibrations and they somehow slip my brain into passing gear and you simply can’t get to the drinking gear from there.
Figuring out those very pleasing combinations of notes were when I could see the beauty, and sometimes, the purpose of those swiftly passing moments. It’s definitely when I was most connected and most productive and most focused—and when all of that is done and the last movement has come to it’s very, very stirring conclusion, there is a deep, deep sense of satisfaction. That’s the thing that was missing from my life, and it was what I was trying to substitute alcohol for.
Like everything else, the right answer was always right in front of me and all around me—it’s always just been finding the right frequency. My frequency. My recovery. My sobriety. My life.
Having written Footnote 2 first, I realized that if I’m going to describe a moment as nearly perfect and part of that is the music, I should tell you what I’m listening to. This morning, it’s Mozart’s Symphony No. 28, performed by the Academy of Ancient Music under the direction of Christopher Hogswood. This was one of the first things I splurged on as a young lawyer, a zillion cd set all of the symphonies performed on period instruments. Sorry, you didn’t even ask.
It turns out that some of those college philosophy classes were pretty useful. I think I was accidentally just talking about Platonic ideals.
Don’t judge me, back then I really liked the Nescafe French Vanilla instant coffee.
Although it could be and I definitely encourage anyone who wants to come up with sobriety scores. Not for competitive or betting purposes, please.