All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Today marks 90 days of continuous sobriety for me.
Recovery from my various addictions has not been easy — for one thing, quitting has meant rediscovering all the reasons I was using in the first place — but I am glad to be on this path of recovery. I am learning about myself and learning how to reengage with the world in important ways. I am facing old fears. I am hopeful for the future. I am grateful for the last 90 days of sobriety, and looking forward to another sober day today.
I’m walking down Sixth Avenue on a Friday evening after work, hurrying to my therapist, a blue-green headache crawling over from the back of my skull towards my right eye. I’m hungry. I want meat. The Halal Foods truck isn’t open yet, and the cart in front of the Best Buy on 23rd has nothing but pretzels. Time is running short. I duck into the CVS on 25th and browse the snacks. Jerky is ridiculously expensive. I settle for a cannister of Slim Jims. They’re greasy in a queasy way, but they have the mix of salt, fat, protein and umami that I’m craving. They get me through.
I stuff the cannister in my bag, and when I get home, I slip it into a dresser drawer. I don’t want Jenny to see. I’m ashamed of having bought such down-market junk food. I’m afraid she’ll think I’m disgusting for eating it, for wanting to eat it. There’s no reason she needs to know.
This is the insanity from which I am working to recover. I confessed to Jenny last night about the Slim Jims, though it hardly counts as a confession considering that I hadn’t done anything wrong. It made her laugh. What’s especially ridiculous about the whole thing is that I went with Jenny to McDonald’s on Saturday to indulge her particular junk food craving. Why would she have a problem with mine? But I had to confess because the mechanism of this secret-keeping — the shame, the hiding, the justification — was exactly the same as the mechanism for much bigger, more serious secrets.
This incident has got me thinking now about my relationship with food. I don’t think of myself as someone with an eating disorder, though I tend to overeat from time to time (like most Americans) and to treat emotional distress with tasty treats (also like most Americans). But my psychological relationship with food is nevertheless tangled.
I grew up in Northern California in the late 1970s and 1980s, an era when food virtue replaced religion for many people. Terms like “macrobiotic” and “Pritikin” and “organic” were in the air, and food allergies were just coming into fashion. For children, the complex restrictions, and the earnest moral tone that went with them, was often bewildering, especially in group settings. (I still harbor a bitterness about efforts to convince me that carob was just like chocolate. It is not, and any idiot could taste the difference. It was insulting.)
My parents were pretty chill on the health food front, but beginning in my early childhood, a strange, isolating, ever-tightening net of restrictions began to enclose me, one intimately tied to morality and virtue: the laws of kashrus. At first we just kept kosher style, which was easy and kind of fun, offering a whiff of superiority without demanding much. We didn’t eat pork and we kept our milk and meat separate. No big. It meant we were better people.
But gradually the rules became stricter, and eventually we went wholly kosher: separate dishes for milk and meat, eating only products that were labeled with a hechsher, subscribing to newsletters that detailed the ongoing debates about even hechshered foods, waiting an hour (then three, then six) after eating meat before eating anything with milk in it. There were no kosher restaurants in Northern California, so that was out too. Chinese food was gone from my life. Around friends, I was expected to keep track of a vast library of unacceptable treats and shun them when offered. No more Oreos. No more Starbursts. And there was always the danger that a beloved product would slip into doubt. Worse, my parents would make an exception for something they loved, and then one day decide — arbitrarily, as far as I could tell, and certainly without consulting me first — that the exception had to end.
Holidays brought other restrictions. Every couple of months, fast days came around, and from age 13 I was supposed to go either from sunset to sunset or from dawn to sunset, depending on the particular fast, with neither food nor drink of any kind. Before fast days, including the highly sacred Yom Kippur, I would sneak extra snack food into my room, but I was always careful tokeep myself hungry enough to eat a lot when the fast ended. Passover was a week of confusion and despair, as the available foods were limited to the flavorless and the difficult; I lived primarily on macaroons, leftover roast from the Seder, and a sort of matzah-based breakfast cereal my mother concocted, and which was always under threat from a potential restriction on gebruchts, or matzah that has become wet.
Added to those food issues was my father’s ongoing hectoring of my mother about her weight. She wasn’t ever obese or even very chubby, but neither was she the hot-bodied 19-year-old he married and painted in a bikini, and I don’t think my father accepted easily that my mother’s body was simply never going to return to the state it was in when she was getting catcalls across Europe in 1966. And none of us could help but be aware of my maternal grandmother’s long struggle with serious obesity, punctuated by crash diets and involvements in OA.
That this way of life led to secrecy and dualism is hardly surprising. I wanted to be a good son and a good Jew. I also wanted to eat things that tasted good. What alcohol or cigarettes or pornography are for some kids, bacon and Nabisco products were for me. Except that in other people’s homes, these things were completely normal. When Dan down the street got his Easter basket full of Starbursts and offered to share, I didn’t say no. By the time I reached adolescence, when constant hunger and rebellion are pretty much the norm anyway, I was willing to break food rules whenever I could. In high school, I would drive down to the mall and eat a big plate of Chinese food for lunch, savoring the pork dishes. It wasn’t that I went out of my way to eat pork specifically, but that I wanted to eat what I wanted to eat, without restrictions from my parents.
And I wanted to eat in restaurants. I wanted to be normal. When Joey got into Thai food — his parents were much slower to adopt the full religious regimen — I wanted to know what he was excited about. My parents actually mocked the food freaks with their semi-imaginary health fragilities, somehow never realizing that they’d turned me into the nerdy kid with the milk allergy. (Later, in my pot-smoking years, when I shunned tobacco-mixed spliffs because tobacco gives me headaches and tastes lousy, I usually felt it necessary to make some comment like, “I hate to be the kid who says, ‘I cannot have milk because I have a lactose intolerance,’ but I really don’t like tobacco.”) It was one more of the many, many ways that Orthodox Judaism isolated me and kept me alienated.
In my teen years, I would disappear into my room with a box of cookies and not return it to the kitchen. Did it take me a week to finish, or two days, or did I finish it that night? I kept the pace of my indulging secret from my parents so that they couldn’t scold me for overeating, or for the cost of my eating.
It was also in this period that I learned from my peers to feel moral and political shame around eating. My high school had militant vegans. Eating meat was bad. Eating environmentally damaging foods was bad. Mostly I made a mockery of this sort of thinking, but it affected me. And perhaps because of my own upbringing, I have found myself attracted to or in relationships with food moralizers quite often. Berit was a vegetarian who thought seasoning was creepy; T had complex ethics and aesthetics around food that kept me nervous and uncertain. To an extent, I think I hid the Slim Jims from Jenny because T might have scolded me for eating them. And I have sometimes waited for Jenny to go to bed so that I can snack without incurring her fear that I’ll get diabetes like her father.
But I like Slim Jims from time to time. I like Hormel chili. And more importantly, I have a right to like whatever I like. Food shame and food secrecy are habits that I need to break. They are part of my systems of indulging my own desires through secrecy rather than being open about what I want and need. And that has to change.
I need 12-step meetings.
Last night was my first in a week, and that’s the longest I’ve gone between meetings since I began my recovery 51 days ago. I missed my usual Sunday and Tuesday meetings to spend time with Jenny and her parents, who were visiting from Los Angeles, and I had a lovely time with them. On Sunday we did a walking tour over the Brooklyn Bridge, and Tuesday night we went to the New York City Ballet for opening night of the spring season, an exquisite performance of modern classics by Balanchine.
This was all good, but by Wednesday and Thursday I was getting mawkish. Jenny had spent a lot of the time with her parents exploring her own past and theirs, and this led me into sentimental considerations of my own situation, especially as it pertains to my recovery from addiction. I was falling into the addict’s trap of looking back on the active addiction through rose-colored glasses, seeing it as sexy and adventurous and romantic. I was also feeling deeply lonely, and all of this was very much a self-absorbed mooning.
Last night’s meeting was a powerful corrective. There were several newcomers, all feeling the raw hurt and despair and terror and shame that I felt when I came in less than two months ago. There was nothing pretty about the pain they were feeling or the damage they felt so much shame for having done to their lives and to the people closest to them.
But there was hope, and I was not alone. We were in this together, and for 90 minutes I was pulled out of myself. I listened well last night and identified with much of what I heard. I was present for others, and they were present for me. And in those moments of being present for others, the whole question of life’s purpose simply disappeared.
Amazingly, what I experienced briefly last night is exactly what is described in the Ninth Step Promises (pp. 83-84 of the AA Big Book), which are read at every meeting:
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.
I’m not saying that I was fully conscious of every one of these promises being fulfilled in the moment, and I’m definitely not saying that these promises have come true in my life overall. I haven’t earned them yet, for one thing; there’s still a long journey for me before I take on Step Nine.
What last night taught me, though, is that the Ninth Step Promises are a wordy way of describing a state of Zen. Notice that they’re not promises about the world beyond the self, but about one’s own perception and understanding. In a Zen state, there is no self-seeking, no worry, no fear, only freedom and happiness and serenity and peace. We enter into these states when we are fully engaged in what we are doing, fully present in the most profound sense. That kind of engagement is what I need to bring into my life, and I believe that the Twelve Step tradition is right to suggest that service to others is a powerful way to achieve it.
Looks like something I will need to explore further.
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.