I am an addict, clean nine years. Which is like saying I’m some renovated house: new appliances, new siding, fresh paint, but the same clunky boiler keeps me warm at night. As an addict, I tend to still grow addicted to anything that makes me feel good, however temporary. I hear it from other addicts and alcoholics all the time: remove the drinks and the drugs and what remains is the ism. I am afflicted by the need for more.
Take exercise. I get hooked on running, lifting weights, playing basketball. Last Thanksgiving Day, while lacing up my blue Nike running shoes, my wife asked, “Why are you running now?”
She must have been hoping I’d spend all day with family as those days with family are rare.
“I have to.”
“You can take a break. It’s Thanksgiving.”
What I want to say to her is no, I can’t, but I know she won’t understand. We’ve crossed that bridge many times. She met me when I was two years clean, yet she’ll be the first to tell you what a desperate addict I am.
I say, “I’ll make it quick.” And I’m out the door, running over fallen leaves and up a series of hills in the neighborhood.
I’ve found that simply not drinking or drugging is like putting a Band Aid on a flesh wound. It is a start, but I need more cover in order to heal. Here are three other things I use to fill the void that drugs and alcohol used to occupy.
1) Creative endeavors
For me, it’s writing. In rehab I filled a journal with bad poetry. Streams of conscious, blind musings, frustrated anthems, angsty quatrains. I look back at them now and laugh. My love of poetry has grown into a love for the craft of poetry. I care about form, meter, content. In early recovery, I grew addicted to the way writing made me feel. I found that reading great poets enhanced my love of writing more poems. In this way, I began unknowingly to transfer an addiction to drugs to an addiction to words. The nice part about being hooked on words is that they don’t land me in jails and institutions—not yet at least.
2) Spiritual exploration
Prior to getting clean and sober, a spiritual adventure was contemplating the message of a fortune cookie after a drunken binge on Chinese food, or watching a cheesy flick on TCM blazed off my ass. Sober, I am a soul searcher. I’ve read a host of spiritual texts that changed the way I see the world. I grew hooked on expanding this vision, which grew so narrow in the pit of drug addiction that I couldn’t see past the next trip to the bathroom stall for a key bump at work.
The first book that fanned the spiritual flame was Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements. Ruiz explains the way we think is a never-ending tape that we play in our head. It is an inner critic that drags past failures across the mind like dead bodies. My biggest takeaway was the notion that what I think is not in control of what I do. I could throw unproductive thoughts in the trash like old greasy banana peels. It was my first step toward living an examined life and I was hooked.
I am currently reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. It is a series of thoughts the philosophizing Roman Emperor never intended to publish. I am trying on Aurelius’ brand of stoicism: not allowing transient desires and baser thoughts to rule the direction of my soul.
3) Accountability
I long to be counted on. This has been the hardest craving to develop. It involves a delayed gratification that was foreign to my quick fix lifestyle of drugs, sex, and notoriety.
I started teaching with about 18 months sober. Teaching is most gratifying, but it is not a profession that rewards you for a job well done, aside from Teacher of the Year honors or PTA raffle winnings that don’t come around frequently enough to sustain the love of the profession.
I had no idea how to teach in my first year. Arguably, I still don’t. Teachers provide constant feedback to their students but feedback is a one-way street. Students never offer their feedback to your teaching style or content, unless you ask them directly.
In the spring of my first year, student’s completed an evaluation of my class. Our school’s teaching guru, Mr. Macheski, presided over their findings. We sat in the cafeteria over lunch. He scanned through the feedback, placing crinkled sheets of paper on the table, sheened by greasy food and sloppy teenage eating habits.
He stopped sorting papers and his eyebrows raised while reading one student’s comment: “I love learning in this class.”
I felt my heart try to leap out of my chest. My students stored their praise like squirrels hoarding acorns for the winter. Amidst the proverbial-teenage-nonchalant comments—“I liked when we watched movies” or “Yeah, it was okay, I guess”—was “I love learning in this class,” a diamond in the rough.
In that moment, it was worth staying up until one in the morning, preparing the next day’s lesson. It was worth standing in front of six classes of teenage boys for 45 minutes, five days a week. It was worth every time that a student fell asleep in class or stared back at me with a glazed look of dissatisfaction.
One comment redeemed it all. Like the Emily Dickinson poem: “If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain.”
When Mr. Macheski, wise as an owl, stared at me from his round-rimmed glasses and said, “You have it,” I became transfixed by the joy of showing up. The joy of being there for the people in my life. The joy of being accountable.
Drugs and alcohol used to fill a screaming chasm in my soul. The voice that wailed for more of everything from the bottom of a pit. Remove the substance, and the void still dogs my every step, begging for me to take the plunge like a spelunker in a cave. By replacing my substance abuse with substantial endeavors, I have learned to fill the void with a lasting contentedness. I don’t like to use the word peace. The peace of Buddha eludes me. But I’ve learned a brand of peace. I rest easy at night and look forward to the morning when I can show up to those who need me all over again.
Similar posts are published on Mark Goodson’s writer page: the Miracle of the Mundane, here and here.
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