I felt so good. Chalk it up to the coffee or a good night’s sleep or just the contentment from sitting alone in the dark by the radio with a candle and a blanket in the morning in fall. Messaging with Lily about her European plans with her boyfriend (she’s taking the train from Strasbourg to Besigheim this weekend), giving her directions to the Himmelsleiter and telling her to take her boyfriend there. Making plans for a morning coffee date with Charlotte to nearby Fall City, a proper neighborhood coffee shop in a cozy, two-story bungalow, a scenic country drive to get there past the pumpkin patches and foothills. Some state of repose and dreamlike, though I am not dreaming. Thinking about chopping kindling for that first fire of autumn.

When you go sober it’s not something anyone else is ever going to think about (why would they) but whenever I do it just makes me feel good. No more hangovers! The fact I rescued myself! All the accolades I get! No more self-loathing! The sense that if I can do that, I can do anything. So mostly I just give myself a pat on the back because if I don’t, no one else will and that helps me protect myself from my addiction. (The addiction never goes away, it just gets interrupted.)

I was on a business video call this week with a small group of professionals, an intimate workshop thing including my client and her VP, and as an ice breaker they asked “what’s your favorite autumn beverage,” and while some said tea and hot cocoa it fast went to booze, and I was the last one to go and said NA, fresh hop beer. I felt so virtuous! But I think it was confusing too. There’s something not altogether right about people who don’t drink (why don’t you?). And that’s just fine because I’m not altogether right. But I feel so good.

And it’s nice to see there’s an actual trend toward sobriety with Lily and Charlotte’s generation, that it’s an acceptable option.

Dawn recently had major surgery and they gave her a narcotic pain killer. In the past I might have snuck one or two for myself with a couple glasses of wine. It’s sick, but it’s the way I think. Slipping off into that delicious sea of sensation that’s not sensation but more a lack of. And what is it that’s so addictive about narcotics and pain killers, that singular feeling of euphoria? A dreamlike, drifting away.

Addiction is a major theme in David Foster Wallace’s book Infinite Jest, the psychological depths of it, and one of his protagonists is an opiates addict who finds himself in the hospital with a bullet wound. For a hundred pages or so he’s grappling with the knowledge that if they give him opioids he’ll relapse and die. So he’s trying to manage the pain mentally, through his free will. Anyone who’s struggled with addiction will identify. The pain is in the choice.

That inkling to abuse things sticks with me. Maybe walking in the early morning helps me clean out the gunk in my brain the way deep REM sleep does, like emptying a filter.

Fooling yourself into thinking you don’t have a choice when you do and knowing that, you’re fooling the part of yourself that would kill yourself, it’s a funny snake-with-its-tail-in-the-mouth logic. There’s a dreamlike quality to clean living too—let it swallow me.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Infinite Jest, sober October, sobriety, spirituality