As an active drug addict and alcoholic, I knew two extreme states of emotion.
The first was loneliness and despair. I felt as though I wanted to shut everyone out of my life. Lock the door. Throw away the key. Order in, smoke blunts, watch movies—alone. It’s how I rang in the new year in 2007. I bailed on friends, opting for a bottle of Knob Creek alone in bed to watch the ball drop. Other people, even trusted friends, made me anxious. I was afraid in every breath that I would never climb out of the despair I was in.
The other state turned me into an exuberant extrovert. I felt I could do no wrong, say no wrong. I went out every night and I showed up to work the next day on only a few hours sleep. I fueled these sprees with heavy doses of cocaine. I never wanted the party to end. I was anxious still, sure, but with the aid of drugs, I could cut through the anxiety like a warm knife through butter. I was afraid in every breath that I would wake up the next day carried back to the low road of despair.
No matter the road I traveled, high or low, fear was the engine driving me. Fear and a copious regiment of drugs and alcohol. I lived to either seek the next thrill or shudder in the aftermath of thrill-seeking. I believed either extreme was preferable to that dull, predictable, show-up-when-you’re-expected-to middle ground, where careerists pay their mortgage and raise their children in little boxes on the suburban hillside.
Then I hit bottom.
In my bottom, the drugs stopped working like they used to. I couldn’t self-prescribe my way through each day. My wheels kept spinning but I was going nowhere. I had lost my will to live. I entered one final spree knowing it would be my last. While I assumed I would die, I didn’t. A friend delivered me from Mexico and dropped me off at a San Diego hospital where my recovery began.
My sobriety required the middle ground. I had to show up, keep appointments and share my mind. My day didn’t have to be the best I’d ever had or the worst in order to find a thrill. In fact, I found the sober day-to-day living I imagined would be boring to be the most exhilarating experience I’d ever known. Chasing the neon lights of clubs and bars, jumping into bed with women I’d just met and exploring the back-alleys of city streets were the same experience on repeat. Like the movie Groundhog Day, where depending upon my actions, people and circumstances change but the calendar date never does, I lived through the same hellish existence night in and night out.
The truth is, life is exhilarating. Showing up for it is like buying a ticket for the amusement park. Handling its difficulty is an adventure. Persevering through its hardship is a brilliant endeavor.
I call my blog “The Miracle of the Mundane” because all the ordinary things—work, wife, children—fill me with an insatiable craving for more. More of the regular. More of the routine. More of the stuff that makes me happy to be alive. It’s kind of like going without electricity for two days to help you realize, when the power’s back on, how much you love the comfort it brings. I took my life for granted and it nearly killed me. It should have killed me—but it didn’t. By some measure of grace beyond my understanding, I am alive. And I refuse to take it for granted today.
My son turned four years old on Thanksgiving. We went to the library recently and picked up E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web which I remember my mother reading to me when I was a child. I read to my son the other night the scene when Wilbur the pig tried to imitate Charlotte the spider. With a rope attached to his tail, Wilbur flung himself down off a pile of hay in an attempt to hang suspended like Charlotte does.
My son laughed the only way a four-year-old can. It was a genuine belly laugh. He covered his face with his hands and leaned back into me, shaking his head, “silly Wilbur.” I started laughing too. Before I knew it, we were in the midst of a giggle fest. My son ended up rolling around on the floor, incapacitated with laughter. I lay on the couch unable to stop myself. “Like this, Daddy?” He grabbed a piece of string and wrapped it around his torso, leaped off the couch and barrel-rolled onto the ground.
I’ve never laughed harder in my life. I could feel the joy. It was free of the fear that the joy might end. There was nothing to be anxious or worried about. I was free to laugh from deep in the core of my soul. To me, in my life, with what I’ve been through, it was nothing short of miraculous.
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