Addiction and Recovery

Facing Our True and False Selves

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Today’s essay is part of a new series on recovery that includes me,

Latham Turner

Bowen Dwelle

,

Dee Rambeau

Joshua Doležal

and

Lyle McKeany

. Each of us will wrestle this week with what recovery means to us and how our life experiences shape that definition. After the essay you’ll see a short biography of each writer in the group.

*

I think I’ve always been an addict of one sort or another. As a kid it was reading sci-fi books such as Lord of the Rings and The Redwall Series (Brian Jacques), or else trying my hand (at age 10, 11) at classics from my author-mother’s bookshelf such as Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak) and The Last Tycoon (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Later, in grade school, it became girls and kissing, not to mention Magic the Gathering, Baseball cards, swimming, playing pool, and surfing.

Between the ages roughly of 12-14 I went through a brief but intense love affair with Christianity. I might add that I come from atheist stock; my father, a former chemistry and math professor and later computer scientist, was not, to say the least, a religious man. I attended church in these two years with my best friend James every Sunday, zealously. I met up one-on-one at age 13 with the pastor and told him I wanted to get baptized, which I did. (My father was horrified, yet attended the ceremony.)

Starting roughly around 13/14 and extending into my early twenties I was also, I’d argue, addicted to punk rock. Discovering The Ramones and The Sex Pistols circa 1995 blew my world wide open. Surfing remained an obsession—an aquatic addiction—roughly from age 10 to age 25. For a while I was even a sponsored competitive surfer. (I never did well; I was a good natural surfer; competition ruined the art of surfing for me).

I suppose you could also add in my addiction to videogames as a pre-teen, particularly N-64. (Golden-Eye 007 and Mario Kart being my favorite.)

But at age 17, I discovered The Magic Potion. Alcohol.

I was a blond-haired, brown-eyed, short, thin, innocent kid at a college-prep Catholic high school in Ojai, California, an hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles, where I was raised. In seventh grade I’d smoked some pot given to me and my surfer buddies by an older local longboarder.

But I’d never had a drink. The first time I did drink—a pint of Peppermint Schnapps passed around between me and two misfit chicks from school in the old woodshed in a backyard which reeked of muddy dirt, freshly mowed grass and was filled with hoes, rakes, shovels, etc—it changed my life instantly. I’ll never forget that first sip: Warmth radiated through my body like some sort of cosmic spiritual reawakening. I felt, for the very first time, as if I’d lost my spiritual virginity, as if I’d finally located the missing psychological puzzle piece in my soul. This elixir. This heavenly poison. This booze.

I blacked out that night. I don’t remember much. All I know is, despite the nasty, wretched hangover the following morning, I craved another drink.

All of this drinking interweaved perfectly with my other grotesque love: Punk rock. Anarchy prevailed. My punker friends and I drove far too fast, drank forties of Steel Reserve and Old English like fiends, went to punk shows multiple times per week, ditched class, got into fights, obsessively watched meta-movies like Fight Club and SLC Punk, and generally caused as much havoc as we possibly could.

I barely made it out of high school. Three weeks prior to senior graduation I got caught at a school event with a backpack brimming with pot and forties. I’d been with two girls. We all got suspended. Only I got expelled. They said I’d have to redo senior year at another school. My parents—understandably—were devastated. It wasn’t just the exorbitant yearly tuition, it was also the ghastly shame of it all, so public.

But, thankfully, due to my English Lit teacher who I cherished (and who recently officiated my wedding!) and a few other kind adults who stepped in—not to mention the pleading of my parents—the school gave me my diploma quietly after the end of summer once I’d completed a drug and alcohol outpatient rehab program.

After high school most of my friends and classmates moved on, going to prestigious colleges around the country like Berkeley, Stanford, Vassar, Cornell, etc. I took some basic community college classes, moved out of the house, got a dead-end job working the front desk at a fancy hotel in nearby Ventura, and kept drinking.

By age 23 I was a wreck. I was then living in San Diego. It was 2006. I’d already moved around quite a bit, living in Ojai, Ventura, Santa Cruz, San Diego. I’d started journaling regularly and had finally read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which changed my life just like alcohol and made me sell everything (not much) and, summer of 2006, hitchhike for the first time around the Pacific Northwest.

Also, amazingly, at 23—just over halfway through my drinking career—I’d quit all drugs (minus a few minor slips in the year following) and quit drinking hard liquor. I’d done every drug in the book: Heroin (intravenously), coke, LSD, Mushrooms, Ecstasy, speed, pot, etc. You name it I’d just about tried it. I knew I’d eventually get HIV or Hep-C or something else if I didn’t stop the drugs. Or I’d go crazy. And the hard liquor was obvious: I drank it like water and then went straight to blackout. It was like demented time travel. I’d come to behind the wheel, driving, shocked. I knew I had to stop.

But I kept drinking beer and cheap wine, alcoholically.

By 25 I’d fallen in love, traveled Europe a few times, and moved with my girlfriend to San Francisco. She was perfect: She drank like me. Our roommates whispered that we were alcoholics. We resented the implication. I got drunk one night and, in front of my girlfriend’s entire family, yelled at her and shoved her to the ground; after that I literally passed out in her aunt’s lap. I was a disaster. A whirling, chaotic machine made of deadness and fear.

Around this time—2008—I started to realize that I had a drinking problem. The awareness came to me slowly, in quarter inches at a time. Every few months I’d wake from a wild, drunken night and I’d start vomiting into the toilet and I’d suddenly realize, Holy shit, something is really, seriously wrong with me. I think it’s the alcohol. But then, inevitably, I’d eat some food, drink some hot coffee, smoke a cigarette, drink a few cold beers, and be fine again. Ready for another night of boozing.

Age 26—2009—I spent four months driving and hitchhiking back and forth across America. There are many stories from these days, as I’m sure you can imagine. I still drank like a ludicrous fish. I was estranged from my family on and off. I only cared about their money, which went down my gullet in the form of cold golden hops. I read too much Bukowski, slept with too many women, blacked-out far too often, and felt more and more like I was dying symbolically; I was dying an inner death, feeling totally lost and totally negated as a human being. I was alone, like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

By 27—2010—I was done. I knew it was over that summer. But I wouldn’t get sober until September 24^th. At last I understood that I was not choosing to drink; the drink was choosing me. It always had chosen me. I was a slave, in fact, to the booze. The alcohol owned me. It directed my life, told me where to go, what to do, how to act, what to think. For the first time I felt betrayed by alcohol; I felt angry at it. Alcohol had become my very best friend, really my only true friend. But it had been two-faced all along. It hoped only to destroy my sense of self, my sense of sanity. It wanted me dead, figuratively and physically.

And so I got sober. I moved to Portland from the Bay Area—by then I’d been living in Oakland—and started going to AA meetings. Those first six months I sat in the very back, didn’t talk to anyone, judged the hell out of the meeting and everyone in it, and was more or less convinced that AA was a religious cult; I kept waiting for someone to tell me about the blood rituals. Or for someone to inform me that there was a yearly membership fee. But neither happened. It was free, and the people there were 100% genuine. They were just like I’d been. But they’d changed. They’d done the 12 steps. They’d become better versions of their real selves.

I grasped then that all my life I’d been living a lie. I’d been so angry at my parents for my perceived slights and for what I felt was their emotional abandonment that I’d forgotten that there was a “me” deep down underneath all the layers of rage, self-hatred, resentment and fear. The little boy who’d read Lord of the Rings, who’d played Magic the Gathering, who’d craved surfing with his best friends and who’d cherished listening to The Ramones. What had happened to that precious kid? Where had he gone? I felt then that he was still there, inside of me, stuffed deep down inside the farthest reaches of myself, huddled into the fetal position, eyes clamped shut, afraid, waiting to once more get kicked by the false Michael.

And so, about a year into sobriety, I finally let go. I got a sponsor and did all 12 steps. My life began to change. I started going to therapy, meditating, and exercising. I ate healthier. I was in contact with my parents again. I moved back to the Bay Area and finished college at last, over a decade after high school finally getting my BA in English Literature with a Concentration in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. I joined a writing workshop. I started getting my stories published in little magazines. I finished my first novel. I submitted to agents. I interned for nine months with a literary agent. I started a blog and became a developmental book editor. I began attending writers’ conferences.

So here I am, 2023, age 40, sober 13.2 years, married. I’m close with my mom. My father passed six months ago but we got to know each other on a level I never thought possible. I got to live in my dream city, Manhattan. I’ve written 13 novels. I write on Substack. I have a wonderful wife, three cats and a dog. Things are good. I get to write and edit and travel. I live in central coastal California.

I know now that I had to go through everything I did as a teen and for the whole decade of my decadent drinking years. My own tortured trail of tears. Our wounds eventually heal us. We go full circle. We discover the answer—self-love; self-forgiveness; acceptance of What Is—when it’s our time. In 2010 it was just my time.

Addiction is a terrifying phenomenon. I think American (and global) society is at a spiritual bottom right now in terms of this. Social media—especially TikTok—has become a brain-capturing and time-consuming addiction which seems to produce almost nothing of any lasting value. The internet as a whole seems to have captured young people’s critical thinking skills, what’s left of them anyway. Cognitive capture. Tribalism. Lack of real human connection. This is the name of the game in our contemporary times.

It reminds me of my obsession with drinking during my wild years. Wherever I went, whatever I did, in the back of my mind I was always scheming about how I could get my hands on a bottle. Always. I didn’t want it; I needed it. Isn’t that exactly how it is with Gen-Z and their iPhones? They’re glued to the devices, and if you try to remove them from it all hell breaks loose. The iPhone is the new alcoholism. But there’s always been and always will be things to be addicted to: Work; sex; anger; booze; drugs; devices; social media; coffee; cigarettes; tribalism; hatred; etc. The list is long and lugubrious.

Probably we can’t totally avoid addiction. The answer—the solution—to addiction seems to be human connection, being in the present moment, letting go of thinking we know what’s right or what we need; accepting life on life’s dogged, complex terms. Meditation helps because it grants you some emotional distance from your thoughts, wants, needs, fears, obsessions. From this vantage point you can observe the rising and falling thoughts instead of being instantly sucked in by them. This allows you new power.

If you’re struggling with any kind of addiction—whatever it may be—don’t lose hope. You’re probably, as they say in AA, “right where you need to be.” Your time will come, just like mine did. It took me a decade to see the light, to grasp that I had fallen into the bear trap of sordid addiction, and to finally accept defeat and climb my way up and out. Awareness comes when it comes; it can’t be forced or taught. It bubbles up from the deepest core of our minds. Usually it hits in thunderous flashes here and there until at last breaking free from the bottom and rising to the surface.

Then you can make different choices. You can save your own life.

*

Biographies of writers in the group:

Joshua Doležal

Writes The Recovering Academic. He’s also a memoirist, book coach, and journalist. Follow him for interviews with academics pivoting to industry, thought pieces on higher ed, and literary work. As a writing coach, he specializes in memoir but also accepts clients for short projects such as op-eds, college essays, or graduate school applications.

Bowen Dwelle

Is a former paperboy, D&D player, skateboarder, teenage boozehound, geographer, programmer, conference producer, and entrepreneur who recently completed the manuscript for his memoir about learning to listen to and act upon the voice of self. His writing, which includes the serialized memoir as well as essays and other work, appears at An Ordinary Disaster

Lyle McKeany

Is a writer, husband, father, disability advocate, creative coach, and Steward for writers at Foster. In his writing, he hangs out at the intersection between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. You can find Lyle’s writing at Just Enough to Get Me in Trouble

Michael Mohr

Is a writer and freelance book editor. Michael’s fiction has been published in: The New Guard; Concho River Review; Adelaide Literary Magazine; and much more. His articles have been included in Writers’ Digest, Writer Unboxed, Creative Penn, MASH, Books & Buzz; and more. At Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing he writes everything from memoir to personal essay to fiction to cultural-political commentary and much more.

Dee Rambeau

Dee Rambeau is a recovering businessman and entrepreneur turned writer. Host of a weekly talk radio show on KWVH 94.3 Community Radio in Wimberley, TX, about which he's currently writing the musical history of. Dee spends his free time away from the craft volunteering, riding his motorcycle, and raising rescue dogs. He writes Of a Sober Mind on Substack, a newsletter about the world through the eyes of a man in long-term recovery. He writes Of a Sober Mind

Latham Turner

Is a writer and storyteller. His writing explores how we use stories to build deeper connections and find fulfillment. In the past he was a Navy pilot, business leader, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur. Latham's Substack Get Real, Man

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The Addiction/Recovery Series is an exploration of how men can continue to mature through their spirituality, philosophy, work, and families, and the culmination of a lifelong search for fulfillment and truth.