The Subversive Message of Recovery

On being ok.

In 2011, I was working at an ad agency in Boston, my daughter was two years old, and things were a real goddamn mess. I was drinking at least a bottle of wine every night, my husband and I were screeching toward the end of our marriage, we had no money and piles of debt, and we were working through filing bankruptcy.

As heavy drinking as I was then, I still gravitated toward the one sober person in the agency. Grant was the Creative Director and one of the partners. He’d done the whole New York City advertising thing, bottomed out, and sobered up many years before making his way to Boston. We had an easy rapport and kinship with from the go.

One day, Grant walked by my desk and saw Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser sitting there. I’d been reading it on my commute.

He picked it up and read the subtitle out loud, “How difficult times can help us grow.” Any good?”

"Oh my God, yes, you have to read it," I said, following him into his office. I told him how it was helping me, what I was learning, how Lesser founded the Omega Institute in New York, this renowned center for spirituality and holistic health, and how I wanted to go there and try to meet her.

I told him I'd give him the book when I’d finished it.

"Sounds good, kiddo," he said, chuckling. "But I haven't been in existential pain for quite a while."

I thought, What?

Being in pain and constantly searching for ways to make sense of or get out of that pain felt endemic to who I was. I’d hated my body since I was fourteen. But I could draw a line even further back: to the loneliness, to feeling unseen, to feeling unchosen, and other states that colored my childhood. Then there was the drinking. For at least ten years, my brain had been fed an increasing dose of depressant on a regular basis, not to mention the spiritual indignities I’d accumulated. And most recently I’d wanted to explode my marriage. Not being in pain felt foreign, unreachable, maybe bizarrely even…boring?

---

I've thought about this exchange many times over the years, and I brought it up to my boyfriend earlier this week as we walked through the North End of Boston before a concert. We'd just passed by the agency where I worked with Grant, and I told him about the conversation with Grant and my reaction to it. I laughed about the fact that some part of me thought not struggling against life would be boring.

Some of that was age, to be sure. You're supposed to fuck around and make messes and try things out and burn hot when you're younger, while you still have plenty of do-overs and an endless runway of time and choices. You're supposed to chase the wrong things and then feel lost and disenchanted when they don't provide what you were told they would.

But it was more than youth for me, this constant struggle, this existential pain. The truth was I needed chaos. It was what I knew and where I thrived, so I created it, consciously and subconsciously, because it kept me distracted, vacillating between excitement and despair, construction and deconstruction. In that need grew an addiction, and addiction is guaranteed chaos if nothing else. Like a never-ending game of 52-card pickup.

---

I've been thinking about this constantly for the past few days, trying to pull it apart. It's not that I don't have any problems or painful experiences anymore, obviously. I worry about my daughter all the time. There are some things going on in my family that aren't great. My anxiety has been pretty bad since September, and I feel like I'm grinding my teeth down to nothing at night. I worry about the world, about my friends, about what feels like a surefire recession coming. The last two years left a hell of a mark on all of us, and I still feel that. I know there are things that could annihilate me: if something happened to Alma, for example. Many things. There is pain, and there is sure to be pain down the line, but I don't live in pain. I don't feel like inner turmoil is a part of my identity.

Why does it feel subversive to say this? Why does it feel risky, or like a betrayal, to say I'm genuinely, and deeply, ok? 

I asked one of my friends yesterday, someone with twenty years of sobriety. She said it's because people don't want to hear that we recover.

I find that fascinating, but it does feel somewhat true.

I know professionally that so much of my work has been built on documenting the struggle of sobriety and relating to people in that way. I often feel like I have less to say these days because I'm not in that space like I was (or that whatever I have to say isn't what people want to hear?). I sure as hell don't want to sound like I have the answers.

But still. The truth is that my life, specifically my inner life, is night and day from what it was in 2011. I'm not consumed by my own pain and suffering to the point that it's all I can deal with, day in and day out. Instead, I get to simply live, to enjoy the miracle of gloriously normal days. I'm pretty damn joyful most of the time, even when shit goes sideways. And I want that to be good, hopeful news. Because what is the promise of recovery, if not that? What's it all for, if not to become more solid, more ok, more peaceful inside no matter what? (I'm not talking about recovery from addiction; I'm talking about learning how to work with the human state of suffering.) Why bother at all if it doesn't get better?

Photo by Lynn Kintziger on Unsplash