Author: Josh Philip Ross

I have been struggling of late with the question of purpose in life.

This is not a new question, or unique to me, but sobriety has thrown it into a new light. I am making an effort to live a life of rigorous honesty, which is a pretty radical departure from what I’ve done up to now. I am no longer masking reality with drugs, and I am faced with accepting — deeply accepting — that certain long-cherished fantasies are nothing more than that.

I think most of us carry around an idea of Eden. Mine is a sort of amalgam of Weetzie Bat and the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in the Northern California redwoods, with a Noe Venable soundtrack, and populated with beautiful mysterious girls who fall in love with me and lead my on psychedelic adventures.

This is, of course, not a place I have ever actually experienced, but I have touched at its tantalizing edge often enough to cherish the dream and even half believe in it. I think of certain warm summer nights with Amber and Kim and Ashley-Jayne, drinking borgias on the back porch of Caffé Nuvo in San Anselmo and taking over poetry night for ourselves. I was very young then, but old enough to have confidence and sexual experience, and there was so much money and so much time.

And yet this memory is a lie, or at least a highly edited version of what really happened. Yes, those nights were beautiful, but much of that summer was spent in Amber’s apartment, wallowing in the stench of her mother’s chinchillas and arguing over how to fill our empty days and waiting, always waiting, for Amber to relent and let me fuck her. I did finally manage to find sex later in the season, with others. First there was that one night with Ashley-Jayne, which was not enough and left me lonely. Later there was my week-long adventure with Olga the Russian scientist, which felt naughty and daring, and was the first time I had the now familiar experience of simultaneously wanting sex and wanting to escape from the person I’m having it with. These were not terrible experiences, but I have given them the rosy glow of romantic narrative — indeed, I gave them that romantic narrative as they were happening — and that is a deep dishonesty that has colored my whole life since.

There are other moments that I cling to in my past, often involving some kind of erotic or drug-related adventure, that are similarly falsified and glorified in my memory: the summer I was a counselor-in-training at camp and fell in love with the beautiful girl from Israel, and better yet, was somehow suddenly attractive enough that she fell in love with me; the night in New Orleans on my Green Tortoise trip (that’s all you get to know); the evening on the Green Tortoise farm in Oregon on my first trip with them, in the company of the most beautiful woman who’s ever talked to me; the trip to Covelo with Robert and Ashley, when we spent the whole weekend stoned out of our gourds; taking ecstasy with Ashley at raves; going to certain concerts by bands we loved.

These were all mixed experiences, with all the wash of positive and negative that usually goes on in reality. That great summer at camp was also the only time I ever really hit someone. The night in New Orleans was exciting but also weird and tedious and uncomfortable. The dusk in Oregon triggered my old fear that I’m not helping enough, which back then was probably still true, as we prepped for dinner and later scraped and washed dishes. The weekend in Covelo involved a great deal of heat and boredom. The raves were crowded and noisy and felt great and were exhausting. The concerts were fun and crowded and sweaty and too loud and full of boring breaks and pushing and shoving and distraction.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t remember these episodes positively. They were positive. But I have never been willing to tell myself the truth, which is that nearly every moment in my life has been mixed. Eden is a false dream. Even when I’ve been there, I’ve simultaneously been elsewhere, and only told myself that what felt at the time like boredom and mosquitoes was actually Paradise.

But now here I am, 32 years old, wearing a suit, sitting at a desk in a Manhattan office building, staying sober and trying to accept that I will never fall in love with a beautiful girl in the deep dark woods. This is surprisingly hard to do. I don’t know what to dream instead. I don’t know what to hope for. I don’t know what my goals are, except to stay sober and try to hold my marriage together. There has to be something more than that.

Each day I have been praying to my Higher Power to reveal its will and give me the courage to carry it out. I will keep praying, and I will keep looking, and I will try to live in the present moment. Because ultimately that’s all Paradise has ever been: it’s the moments when I have felt alive and present and connected to the world.

I just sent my mom an email asking her to send me my Legos, as well as my favorite bear from childhood, Bear Elver, and his wife, Mistress Mouse. Somehow these had also seemed like impossible requests before. Strange how that works.

I feel like I’ve been running from myself since around 12 years old, and I have only stopped running in the last week. It turns out I’m not such an awful person to spend time with. Maybe I can stop running now. Maybe I can get to know me again without the world collapsing.

Came to believe a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

That’s the Second Step, and it carries the obvious implication that in our active addictions, we were insane. In my case, there are plenty of things I am looking back on and recognizing as pretty distinctly nuts, but two stand out.

The first is dancing. For years, Jenny has wanted to take a ballroom dance class with me. I have always demurred. Dance was one of those things I just didn’t do. I had been made miserable in my youth by episodes of forced Israeli folk dance, which made me feel awkward and oafish, and I was not about to expose myself to that sort of thing again. The part of my mind that kept secrets and fed my addiction recognized dance as one of those dangerous situations that could lead to exposure of my true self, and so I steered clear.

This was insane. Since opening up, admitting my powerlessness over my own desires and revealing what I had kept secret, I have gone through a lot of pain, but I’ve also felt a new freedom that is extraordinary. I no longer have to defend my persona, to prove that I have my shit more together than everyone else. I don’t. I’m an addict and I’ve made a mess of things. So now I can dance.

For the past few weeks, Jenny have been going every Saturday to the Dance Chelsea studio for classes in ballroom, Latin and swing dancing. It’s ridiculously enjoyable. Nor am I half bad at it — which is not a big surprise considering how many half-witted, inbred Hapsburgs learned to waltz without injury. Dancing is great fun, and it turns out it’s also a great way to make amends for broken promises. Who knew?

The second insanity that stands out to me is my longstanding aversion to Legos. In my adult life, I’ve always maintained that I shouldn’t have Legos around because I have an addictive relationship with them. Sure, I smoked pot every day and broke promises to my wife, but at least I wasn’t doing Legos. Clearly, I had this whole addiction thing under perfect control.

Legos were my favorite toy as a kid. Renouncing them, at around 12 years old, was a painful step away from childhood and into what I thought I had to become in order to be popular and cool. Since then, I have only occasionally played with Legos, but I’ve found them absorbing every time.

Now that I’m no longer wasting huge chunks of time on my addictions, it has become clear that I need new hobbies. I talked to Jenny about how maybe it was time to try Legos again: it’s something healthy that I can do with my brain on idle, which is helpful when I just can’t read any longer, and that doesn’t make a lot of noise, so I can do it when she’s still sleeping (unlike practicing the guitar).

For the last week, Jenny and I have been apart. To give us the space we each needed, she went to stay with friends. I resisted this time apart, but it was a huge help to both of us; for me, it was the first time I’d spent with myself, without hiding behind drugs or addictions, in many years. During this time, Jenny made it clear that the goal was to strengthen our relationship, not to end it. She sent me playful emails, and she used her credit card points to reserve a hotel room in Philly to celebrate our anniversary with a weekend away.

And then yesterday, a huge box arrived for me at my office: Jenny had bought me a fabulous Lego set. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but I definitely will — when Jenny and I aren’t practicing our box step or our cuddle-turn.

They say that regular marijuana use suppresses dreams, and that conversely, quitting pot can lead to highly vivid dreams. It also seems to be a truism that withdrawal from any addiction, physical or psychological, will be accompanied by serious nocturnal psychodrama.

I’ve quit pot before, twice. The first time was when I arrived in India the autumn after graduating from college. For the whole ten days that I spent in Bombay, I was without supply (I quickly found some on my second day in Kathmandu), and my dreams were so intensely vivid that I quit taking my anti-malaria pills, which I blamed for the nighttime freak show, along with my jet lag and my culture shock. It never occurred to me until quite recently that the sudden withdrawal from marijuana might have played a role.

The second time I quit was when I arrived in Korea, where I could at first barely manage to procure dinner, much less find a source for pot, and where the drug is anyway spectacularly illegal. Again I was tremendously jet lagged and culture-shocked, and I was also under a great deal of stress because the employer who had rushed us to Korea was now saying we might not be needed for a month or two. I don’t remember about my dreams then.

This time around, I’ve definitely gone through some intense dreaming, and there have been distinct patterns to those dreams.

At first, I had recurrent dreams of using again, or of doing some of the other compulsive things I’ve quit. The feeling in these dreams was never pleasure in indulging my addictions. It was always shock that I had somehow thoughtlessly stumbled into doing something I had no intention of doing (in one dream, I was at lunch with a coworker in a cafeteria and somehow fell under the influence of a reggae song), along with terrible regret and shame and chagrin that I would have to tell Jenny what I had done.

After a couple of weeks, these dreams receded, replaced by dreams of abandonment. In one context or another, some group of my friends — often friends from middle school, though once or twice my current group of friends — made it clear that they had something important to do and didn’t want me around. These dreams were pretty obviously related to Jenny’s decision to spend some time apart from me. Interestingly, now that Jenny and I are in fact spending a week apart — she’s staying with friends — these dreams have stopped.

My current cycle of dreams has been harder to remember. I have woken up some mornings feeling agitated, but in a few minutes the images are gone. When I think back on these dreams now, all I can find is a vague sense of work needing to be done, along with intimations of the mechanical and transportational. This strikes me as just fine: I have a tremendous amount of psychological and spiritual work to do and a long journey ahead of me.