The Future Is a Canvas - Part 1
How landing in a Guamanian jail cell led to my getting sober and discovering the essential nature of creativity
On the morning after Thanksgiving of 2009, I regained consciousness on a concrete slab in a jail cell on the island of Guam. The glaring fluorescents overhead did not mind the early hour. I was wearing a t-shirt, flip flops, and basketball shorts from the eighth grade.
Things weren’t going well. I was very drunk, overweight, and lonely. Given that I’d just been arrested for (allegedly) driving under the influence, my career as a lawyer, which had begun only 3 months earlier, was already in jeopardy. Plus, if I didn’t get out of that cell, I was going to be late for work.
That depressingly cinematic scene has come to represent the turning point of my life. This essay (split into 3 parts) will take a crack at showing how:
1) A failure to cultivate creativity led me to that Guamanian jail cell;
2) A fundamentally creative act (getting sober) transformed my life from a disaster to a fulfilling adventure; and
3) My improved circumstances grew from implicitly embracing creativity as a way of life.
By the time the Class of 2009 graduated from the Saint Louis University School of Law, our collective prospects were dim. The financial crisis brought on by sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps (did I say that right?) had left half of us unemployed out of the gate, an unpleasant prospect for anyone, including a 26-year-old high-functioning alcoholic with rambunctious spending habits and $100,000 in fresh student loan debt.
While studying for the bar exam that summer, I saw a position on the law school’s job board. A lawyer from Guam who’d gone to SLU Law needed an associate ASAP.
We had two phone conversations before I bought a plane ticket to move there.
Guam is an island in the North Pacific that measures approximately 30 miles in length and between 4 and 8 miles in width. It holds the dubious distinction of being the last American territory to be occupied by a foreign power. Following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese turned Guam into a concentration camp of sorts until 1944. A limestone cliff skirting the western side of the island remains pockmarked by WWII shells. Guamanians took refuge in small caves during the invasion and were worked relentlessly during the occupation.
When the Americans retook the island, Japanese soldiers retreated to the dense jungle and stayed there. The last Japanese soldier, a man named Yokoi, did not leave Guam until 1972. In what seems like an ironic twist, one of the island’s main industries now is Japanese tourism. Guam offers Japanese visitors American shopping and more affordable golf courses. You can also visit the bunker where Yokoi lived. I visited.
Guam, which was also 10,000 miles from home, offered me two specific things: employment and a fresh start. My drinking had gotten increasingly out of control through law school, and a number of people (justifiably) found me obnoxious. I’d hate to estimate just how many of my classmates, friends and family members found me obnoxious, so let’s just say it was more than 4 people and move on.
In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), what I pulled is known as a geographical cure, a move whereby an alcoholic attempts to fix problems not by addressing the drinking, but by switching cities, states, or, in this instance, continents. Geographical cures are very common despite almost never working.
Which brings me back to the night in question…
During the sobriety test administered by an officer of the Guam PD, I ended up on my back, staring blankly at the inky Pacific sky. As you might expect, that constituted failure of the test. I ended up in handcuffs.
In AA, they say you hit rock bottom the moment you stop digging.
I stopped digging in that Guamanian jail cell.
What does creativity have to do with how I ended up in that mess?
Each of us, in effect, paints a blank canvas of the future. We paint with our decisions, and the painting produced is the life we build.
For the decade leading up to that depressing night, I had been painting by numbers. I was working off a template of success provided to me and followed without much discernment or intention. Get this degree. Get this other degree. Get the job. Find the right woman. And so on and so on.
Now, this paint-by-numbers approach to life would not have presented a problem if, by some stroke of luck, the template provided to me were the same that I would have created for myself anyway. I envy people who find themselves in that position, content to follow a conventional path.
I was not such a person. I should not have gone to law school. I should not have taken on massive amounts of debt. Most of all, I should not have relied on booze as the primary coping mechanism for the fact that I had no idea what to do with my life and was petrified at the prospect of being exposed as not nearly as smart as I thought I was.
If it sounds like I’m shirking responsibility for my decisions, that’s not my intention. Much of this essay’s second segment recounts the painstaking process of taking responsibility for everything as a necessary step toward getting my head on straight. There’s nothing inherently wrong with law school, and my dysfunction was not because of law school. It was because my dumb ass went to law school.
The bigger point is that until 2009, I had not taken responsibility for painting the canvas of my future. I instead took a look at the canvas (one that already had a life mapped out), got rip-roaringly drunk, and started flinging paint.
No wonder the painting up to that point turned out a mess, a disaster that threatened not just my own health, safety, and happiness, but the safety and happiness of others.
Climbing out of the hole I’d dug over years required time, a great deal of effort, and a fundamental reordering of what had become a rather twisted way of thinking.
Thanks for reading. The second installment will be posted next Friday, 11/12.
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Our January creative sprint begins January 8, 2022.