Drinking fascinated me long before I took my first drink. As proof, I collected Absolut Vodka ads and draped them on my bedroom wall—I had covered up every corner by the time I took my first sip of vodka. I can’t say where the obsession to collect them came from, I just thought they were cool. I thought they were cool because drinking was cool. And if drinking was cool then drinkers were cool too.
My school building housed kindergarten through 12th grade together with one cafeteria serving the young and the old. I eavesdropped on the high schooler’s conversations and heard the words “keg,” “joint” and “brew,” and phrases like “party at so-and-so’s house tonight” or “passed out in the bushes” and I conjured up my own visions of drunken debauchery. Before I took a drink, the debauchery was inextricably tied to fascination, intrigue and an air of coolness and classiness.
The Absolut ads were creative. They were funny and intelligent. One in particular read “absolut cummings” in lower-case. I used our Encyclopedia Britannica to look up the name Cummings and discover poet Edward Estlin Cummings who eschewed the rules of capitalization and punctuation. It’s the only time I recall opening that bulky set of brown-leather encyclopedias, likely given to all of us kids by our mother to better our education. And suddenly poets were “cool” because Absolut said they were.
One of my first drunken experiences was with some friends at a sleepover. I was in sixth grade and we replaced his parent’s gin with water after we poured the liquor into our solo cups. The gin sparked an emotive explosion as it soaked into our young minds: draping scrawny arms over bony shoulders, wallowing in prepubescent tears, professing brotherly love to affirm our deep friendships. We wrote down a pact, meditating over the words we found to summarize the tenderness between us. The words, we agreed, were so profound that we would keep them with us always.
In the haze of the morning, waking with dry mouths, tongues smacking the sour taste of stale gin, we returned to the pact expecting to bask in the masterpiece we wrote the night before. On a torn sheet of paper, crooked lines formed, “Bros before hos. That’s why the left hand was invented.” We stared at each other in confusion before bursting into laughter.
The words of the pact summarize my delusions about alcohol. What I thought was cool or brilliant drunk could be more reasonably classified as obnoxious at first and life-threatening in the end.
In my pre-sobriety writing career, I idolized the drunken loners and the druggy experimenters of literature. I couldn’t touch the script I was writing unless I was good and drunk, nice and stoned or rip-roaring high. I think I was afraid to look at it sober, worrying it would read something like “bros before hos, that’s why the left hand was invented” extrapolated over dozens of pages of incoherent dribble. (Which it was. A fact I would discover reading it three years sober.)
What I thought was a cool, romantic and deeply creative process was really just a selfish exploit—one addict’s journey to insanity. Claire Rudy Foster, an AfterParty Magazine contributor, wrote about her similar experiences in the introduction of her short story collection, I’ve Never Done This Before: “my muse ran out around the same time my tolerance leveled up.” I was happiest when alone with a vial of cocaine, bag of grass and bottle of whiskey. I told myself it was the trusted process, but the only process I trusted was the effect of chemicals in the blood stream. It wasn’t about the writing then, it was about the fix. I wasn’t at the threshold of creative breakthroughs; I was knocking on the psych-ward door to ask for a new pair of blue felt slippers.
In recovery, I learned that my journey wasn’t special or unique. Addicts and alcoholics tend to glamorize drinking and glorify drug use. We all self-medicate for creative or emotional purposes and believe in whatever delusion we must as an excuse to keep up our habits.
I’ve just begun to hit my stride as a writer here in my ninth year of sobriety, but the act and process of writing was my necessary medicine in my first year. I filled up journals with bad poetry and wrote a mad novella about the psych-ward inhabitants I befriended. I just wrote, and wrote and wrote some more. It felt great—like the release I was looking for in the drink and drugs.
Writing is my breathing exercise—it’s how I calm down and find balance. Somehow, the kind of creative mind I always wanted to synthesize into existence as an addict was waiting for me all along in the sober light of day. I only had to remove the habits of self-destruction I was practicing to find it.
Creativity has been a crucial key to my recovery. I have a theory (likely proven or debunked in some medical journal somewhere), that my sober creativity gives me the same freedom from inhibition that alcohol manufactured for me. Only the change is more permanent and doesn’t leave me dry-mouthed in the morning.
It was never about the pill pop or line snort—it was about escaping self. I wanted out of my skin, which felt like a complex straightjacket, locked with incompatible keys all around me. Drugs and alcohol made me feel like Houdini, able to escape from the paralyzing entrapment of my identity crises.
The creative process is a similar escape. I go to places outside of myself and get to journey beyond what I know. I produce the words but their origin is often a mystery. It is as baffling to me as my actions were after a blackout.
My process today is much more thrilling than the monotonous suffering of addiction. In sobriety, when I rush the next morning to read what I wrote in such a fever the night before, I’m not wholly disappointed. I get to continue the story and thread together my creative bursts into something bigger. The biggest difference between my creative endeavors before sobriety and now in recovery is that today I build instead of destroy.
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