I’m grateful for Thanksgiving with my parents. I’m grateful for a cloudy, quiet morning. I’m grateful for really excellent coffee. I’m grateful for calm, peace and right now. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I was trying to decide what to read the other day and had a used copy of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” staring at me from the ottoman. I cracked it open, and decided to read, “On Keeping a Notebook.” My pen got a workout:
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently with some presentiment of loss.
I began keeping a journal in the Fourth Grade. I remember feeling very serious and mature as I wrote my first entries and then carefully hid it in the closet. The entries were about feelings of love for a girl named Rebecca who lived over by Melrose Avenue. I’m not sure what happened to her, I do know that there was never any kind of romance, probably not even a conversation. I don’t remember any other entries, but I definitely was writing with an eye towards someone reading it. I felt kind of silly making things up for my own journal.
At least that’s what I thought, and then I read this:
So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.
On Keeping a Notebook, p. 133
Didion proceeds to illustrate how often what was written in her journal did not come close to reflecting reality. But weirdly, the made-up details got associated with the things that actually happened and became triggers for the memories:
…it is that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again
The point of keeping a journal is not necessarily about recounting factual details about the days happenings, the thoughts that get scribbled out don’t always reflect what my actual, final point of view was, but they show the kinds of things I was thinking about, trying to figure out. Keeping a journal is a little like time-travel, that is, if you’re brave enough to go crack open that old black Moleskine notebook and glance at the horrors inside. If you love journals like I do, here’s the a place to spend some time:
A brief digression. I’ve spoken of my basketball friend, Joe. He’s over at the park most every playable day, always wearing the same ensemble. We do our respective versions of shooting baskets and chat a bit. It turns out Joe is a writer, a poet even. He’s also a self-proclaimed hermit and I have witnessed, on more than one occasion, fashionably dressed women in Joe’s demographic vicinity, approach him as he plays basketball. He’s very courtly, a bit of septugenarian dash to him for sure. He smiles, stops to chat, shows affection to their always adoring dogs. Then he returns to the court and confides,
“She wanted to have coffee, but I explained that other than for this (gestures to basketball court), I don’t prefer to leave my apartment.”
Broken hearts aplenty out there by the Carl Schurz Park basketball courts. Joe recently gave me a book with some of his poetry. Like Joe, I’m wary of offers received on the basketball court, like the ball-hogging optometrist who keeps inviting me to stop by his office for new glasses.1 I cracked open Joe’s book:
O Lord! Here I stand… No fame, no fortune, no child. Just this box: my deeds. Please, Bid me not open it yet. Just give me some time, Some hope and a smile, And let me try again.
“Please, bid me not open it yet.” Whether that’s coming to terms with a life’s entire output, or what happened in the recent past, it’s a powerful prayer. I thought of it as I started to peruse some of my old notebooks. But I opened them anyway.
I have lots and lots of old notebooks. I favored the classic black Moleskine for a long time. I always carried one for work and another as my journal. The journal-keeping isn’t always so faithful, there are big gaps that usually coincide with traumatic reckonings, or the drunken, hopeless spirals that preceded them. But sooner or later, there’s that scratchy handwriting again and I’m back trying to explain my absence to myself. More broadly, it seems like I’m always trying to explain myself to myself.
I decided to take a look at my notebook from my first trip to sleepaway rehab, way back in the early Fall of 2016. I went to Caron in Pennsylvania.
The TFLMS Rehab Collection
Caron is a great place, founded by Dick Caron and originally called Chit Chat Farms, owing to the fact that alcoholics would flock there, work on the farm and get sober around the Caron’s dinner table at night. They do good work at Caron, the counselors and the staff really, really care. It’s top notch in just about every respect, but I can see now it was never going to be enough to keep me sober. That’s not an accusation or an angry assertion. I went back to Caron in early 2017, that’s how much I liked it.
So nice, I went to rehab twice.
Maybe more than that, depending on how you count. Not the point. The notion that a 30-day stay, even at the very best rehab, can accomplish everything that needs to change, well, that’s just not a reasonable expectation. I learned a ton in rehab, there is no chance I’d be sober today without the things I learned there. But like the Big Book says, “Self-Knowledge is never enough.” I don’t think even the 12-Step based institutions take that into account in developing their curriculum. My notes indicate that we were covering the 8th and 9th Step on the 8th day of rehab. Some people think the Big Guy created all the firmaments and such in just six days, so I guess the timeline is possible.
This is fundamentally the problem with rehab: The false notion there is a 30-day cure. That expectation is crushing when the alcoholic relapses. The amount of shame generated by post-rehab relapse? After you’ve spent all of that time, effort, money and invested your hopes, your family’s hopes that this will work? It looks to me like most of the treatment centers focus on things like staying sober for only the 30 or 90 days following treatment? A recent NIH study concluded that, on average, it took people a little more than 5 tries at rehab/treatment to get sober.
If you were to tell me that at the beginning and gear the teaching to how to develop a program and work the steps that make sense in early sobriety, instead of trying to whip through the whole thing and declare folks sober on the 28th day. I left rehab with the idea that I was desperately trying to protect this super-fragile thing that had been painstakingly developed in the hothouse of rehab.2 Wouldn’t it be better to send me out there with a workplan for building a program and the understanding that what had just happened wasn’t sobriety, it was a training session for getting sober?
I think sobriety has to happen in the real world.
That quibble aside, my journal show just how thorough and professional everything was, there were even flickers that I was latching on to some of the stuff that they were teaching:
I even came up with a list, maybe not entirely Big Book-sanctioned, of the differing attributes of addiction vs. spirituality.3 I’ve added what I think the secret ingredients are—I know gratitude is there twice, that’s because it’s important.4 Looking at it now, it’s not bad for someone who was going to hit the Chili’s on I-83 for a few pops of Pinot Grigio on the way home from rehab. Hint, spirituality is much better:
Joan Didion moves through a series of unconnected and somewhat cryptic (especially to her) journal entries and finally elucidates their purpose:
My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
That is the point. It’s not that there are overlooked truths in my journals, it’s that there are overlooked versions of me trying to find truths in there. I’m pretty sure a lot of what goes into my journals is nonsense and not factually correct, but it does often pretty accurately reflect the version of me writing that nonsense in those dusty pages. The random notes and reflections are less about accurately recording the world around me, and more about about discovering me:
But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’
Yes, it’s always me, but it’s recording the different versions that helped me make sense of my previous incarnations and the journey they reflect. Those separate versions of me had lots of common attributes, they mostly reflect circumstances and situations and my own misguided efforts at self-locomotion. But putting the obvious criticisms aside, they are all me and deserving of love. If one of the goals of sobriety is personal integration—that is, living a life based on what is and the principles I establish and who I actually am—then notebooks and writing it down are essential tools. If recovery is the process of finding the version of myself that got lost, then my journal entries are clues, maybe even ransom notes:
It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
It’s hard to look back and see the struggles and the pain, the doubt and the fear, the failures. It’s not easy to look back and remember how I felt and what happened to the people who loved me. It’s hard to look back on all of that pain and dislocation. But that’s where the present day peace, calm, joy and happiness proceed from, and that’s what’s important to remember. When I read my journals, it brings to mind an account of a series of military campaigns that ultimately failed to reach or hold the objective. Reading my journals might give you the idea that this is the story of a lost war.
But that can’t be true, because I’m still writing…
I don’t think it’s a comment on my shooting.
It’s easy to stay sober in rehab.
We mostly talked about the Big Book, we didn’t really read it together or talk about the details.
Didn’t the Colonel’s secret recipe involve seven herbs and spices?
Nice article, us notebook keepers certainly are a different breed, especially with the rise of screens replacing pens. Thank you!
I thoroughly enjoyed this post, TBD. Thank you so much.