The Future Is a Canvas - Part 2
The fundamentally creative magic inherent in getting sober
Offscripting is my weekly email about the power of creativity to shape and change our lives. If you no longer want my email, then crush that unsubscribe button!
You can read part I of this 3-part essay, posted last Friday, here.
“Talk to any psychologist who’s worth his name and he’ll confirm that [t]he last thing a client wants is a cure. He doesn’t want to get cured, he wants relief.”
- Anthony De Mello, from Rediscovering Life
"How’s it been going?”
I knew what Rob was asking between drags on his cigarette outside the AA meeting we’d just walked out of. Rob was an interesting man—Jewish and from Alabama, a lawyer with a graying ponytail and goatee fit for a Grateful Dead show. He had washed up and dried out on Guam several years prior and had a reputation for sharing his opinions openly both during meetings and, as I was about to discover, outside of meetings.
It was January 2010, and I hadn’t had a drink in the 6 weeks since my arrest by Guam’s finest. I told Rob something to the effect that I felt good about my progress, yada yada. He sprayed questions.
How many meetings a week?
Did I have a sponsor?
Was I working the Steps?
My answers: one…ish per week, not really, and not yet.
“Give me a call when you’re ready to get serious,” he said.
My impulse was to tell him to go f*ck off.
But when, a few months later, I was ready to get serious about getting sober, I called Rob.
Since I don’t expect you to have even read, much less memorized, the first part of this essay, I’ll recap the thesis:
1) A failure to cultivate creativity led me to land in a Guamanian jail cell;
2) The fundamentally creative act of getting sober transformed my life from the disaster it had become to an adventure I’m grateful for; and
3) My improved circumstances have grown out of embracing creativity as a way of life.
Getting sober is a tricky business. It’s nearly impossible to predict whether or when a particular alcoholic might get sober. And for a blossoming alcoholic like my 2010 self, identifying where exactly I was on the path to sobriety was totally impossible.
A lot of people fail to get (and stay) sober in the rooms of AA, and the efficacy of AA has been called into question as being as low as 2%. That makes sense. AA does not have addiction professionals. The program has no monitored treatment program. It doesn’t even have a way of tracking an individual’s progress.
And oh yeah, it’s full of alcoholics.
At its core, AA is nothing more than a group of drunks helping one another try to stop drinking and improve their lives. That is because AA began in 1935 with a couple hopeless drunks in Akron, OH. Eventually, others started joining their “meetings”, those meetings spread, and here we are.
Why do I tell you all that in an essay purportedly about creativity?
Every drunk, booze bag, and wino who has sincerely stumbled into their first AA meeting did so because, for whatever reason, they were attempting to stop a story in progress but could not figure out how to do it on their own.
Most people think that alcoholism is about a person’s inability to drink in moderation, leading to a physical dependence on alcohol and various problems. My opinion has evolved.
Alcoholism is a person’s dependence on alcohol as a crutch to avoid facing the demons of the past and the pressures of today.
The reality for so many boozehounds—nothing terrifies us more than the possibility that we might be responsible for creating a non-dysfunctional future.
I talked about my paint-by-numbers life last week. My problem with the feeling that my life’s path laid out for me wasn’t that it was a bad life, but that it was a boring life.
Alcoholics tend to have great stories but boring demises, in that we get into all sorts of trouble, but when it comes down to it, not that many different kinds of trouble. And there are only so many types of consequences we can suffer. You can lose jobs, lose spouses, get diseases, get ruined financially, lose your life, and so on. Once you’ve heard 100 people talk about their drinking problems, you’ve heard 97% of the boozebag stories you’ll ever run across. Repetition is boring.
That said, even pausing an alcoholic’s slide is not easy. That person needs to keep the plug in the jug for some time; actually want to change; be willing to read, write, and talk about not just drinking, but the past, at great length and in excruciating detail; and still keep the plug in the jug despite airing out all the filthy laundry, an event that would normally call for a truckload of drinks.
In light of all this, Rob’s advice to me was clear, simple, and trackable. If I seriously wanted to get sober, I would:
Go to 90 AA meetings in every day.
Contact my sponsor every day.
Work the steps (all 12 of them).
During that first phone call, he told me to be at his house at 5:30 on Thursday, after work. I told him that was when I played pickup soccer.
“Do you want to get sober or not?”
I pulled up to his house for our first session at 5:30 on Thursday.
Can you define creativity?
Here’s what www.dictionary.com has to say about it.
Clear as mud, right? At least 2 of those 3 definitions suggest that they don’t know how to define creativity either.
I’ve come to understand creativity in clearer terms.
Creativity is the process of:
Imagining an idea; and then
Taking some action to transform the idea into an actual thing.
Imagine, then execute. Those are the flip sides to the coin of creativity.
It’s about having an idea for a book, a business, a blog, a painting, a trip, a party, or even a life, and then using whatever medium you choose to start working on making your idea a reality.
There are 12 steps, but I’ve come to believe that a person’s ability to achieve sustainable sobriety depends primarily on 3 of them. Two of the 3 steps I’m referring to read:
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, ourselves, and another human the exact nature of our wrongs.
In order to begin writing a new story for my life, I had to reckon with the story I’d written so far. That’s what step 4 is about, writing out my story. Rob told me to get a legal pad and, over the course of a couple weeks in June, write down everything.
Every person I had wronged (and how).
Every resentment I carried.
Every destructive event my drinking had induced.
When I finished, my inventory occupied three pages of scribblings, the thickness of the lines indicating that I was holding that pen a little too tightly.
Then, I did step 5. I read the inventory aloud to Rob during one of our sessions in his house. If step 4 was about writing the story, step 5 was about performing the story.
When I had finished, he looked at me for a long moment:
“Is that all you got? I thought you said it was going to be bad.”
The story that had me in a stranglehold for years suddenly became only that—a story. Not a very happy one. Not a very interesting one. And not one that I wanted to continue living out.
I was also beginning to imagine what my life after alcohol might look like. What would I do about baseball games, weddings, dates, and every Friday? But as I began to feel better physically and emotionally, that life began to look less objectionable (although at one point I concocted a scheme whereby I could be sober 364 days a year but would allow myself one day to imbibe with gusto). The possibility of a sober life took on texture, a richness that I could start to taste.
Whether the flavor of sobriety could ever compare to a Laphroaig 10-year scotch, however, I remained skeptical.
During that summer with Rob, I did the work to get sober. I worked the 12 steps. I contacted Rob every day. I made it to 75 meetings in 70 days (not quite 90 in 90) before returning to St. Louis in August to take a job at a downtown law firm. Turned out 75 was enough meetings to get my head on straight.
On a Thursday evening in July, knowing I’d be leaving Guam soon, I sat in the back row of metal folding chairs in a concrete schoolroom painted pale yellow. It was yet another AA meeting. I was thinking about one line from the Big Book:
We are granted a daily reprieve from our disease contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.
At the time, I had no tattoos and had never considered getting one. Walking out of the meeting, I had decided to get a tattoo. Since that line was a little long, I instead got the date of my last drink, 52910, tattooed on my wrist. Eleven years on, I can conjure the mantra without hesitation.
My seventh tattoo I got in 2016. I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, sitting in the chair of a gregarious, stringy American named Ricky, a fellow alcoholic in recovery. As we talked, he etched an open book laid out across my other wrist. The pages are blank.
The reminder: My future is unwritten.
If I continue to maintain my spiritual condition, then I’ve got a shot at keeping my imagination out of the gutter. If I can do that, then I can continue writing this different, much more beautiful story that began when I let go of that alcoholic’s story.
Thank you for reading part 2 of this sprawling essay. The thrilling climax will slam your inbox next Friday.
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