The Remarkable, a quest for enchantment
Can your life change completely in one night? Mine did
I ended a nearly lifelong addiction to alcohol six or seven weeks ago. I’m a writer, and it’s a strange story, so I chose to write about it, and I still am. But the writing is simply my effort to capture what the experience means, what I’m learning from it, and to put something out there that might be helpful to others.
To understand what happened, read this piece in my sister newsletter, The Grasshopper.
I’m a white male, in the US, in my sixties. I have had an eclectic but decent life as one of that privileged* class, a privilege I hope is becoming a relic, because I think a lot of us have screwed things up for a long time.
*Privileged in the sense that we were born with all the advantages. In my case only sort of, and whatever money I had I had to make, but being a white guy in society back then meant you were in.
But that is not the story here. I’m simply getting those identity basics out of the way. For better or worse my addiction was not defined by those demographics. And I am not writing this for anyone in particular because it is a kind of universal story.
I am a writer and I write about politics and climate issues for online media. I have a newsletter called The Grasshopper which views life through the prism of a writer. And until those few weeks ago, I was a heavy drinker who was very slowly and methodically killing myself.
Though I definitely did not see it that way. Suicide horrifies me because I don’t want to imagine the pain that leads a person to take their own life. I love life and I loved drinking.
I’m still working through this but I really don’t think there was some kind of underlying issue that led me to drink. No history of abuse, no PTSD, no dysfunctional family background or mental illness. Definitely no existential anger at the unfairness of life.
I just liked to drink and a lot of the time it liked me. But it was eating away at my life for a very long time. I started in my late teens so it had nearly fifty years to reduce me to a one-dimensional person. It took awhile because there were none of those underlying forces mentioned above.
I’m speaking pretty authoritatively for a guy who just stopped a few weeks ago. And that is the strange thing, the very strange thing.
Something happened that changed my life in a few hours. I’ve already written the details here and you should read it because otherwise this may not make sense.
Go ahead, read it. I’ll still be here.
The strange thing is how easy this has been, this wake up call and simply quitting with few physical aftereffects. Other than a late night ambulance ride to the ER, a lot of stitches, and spending hours cleaning spattered blood from my apartment.
And no, I did not cut myself. I simply got drunk and fell into some glass. Please read that background piece.
When I came to, sort of realized what had happened, and called 911, I surrendered to the inevitable, that I had fucked up pretty good this time.
My thirty something nephew managed to wrangle a picture of me just after I arrived at the hospital. I looked like a character in a slasher movie, right after he met the bad guy.
But here is where this story of mine deviates from just another drunk in the ER with a cut up face or some other stupid injury. I made a remarkably important decision that early morning, a decision that has meant I now find myself living an unexpected new life.
Believe me, that does not happen every day. For some reason, still half drunk, covered in blood (but, surprisingly, not in much pain) and basically hitting bottom, I had a moment of clarity and knew what was next, like it or not.
The drinking was over, that life was over, and I would be completely honest about what had happened.
And that is when this new life started. And because that is not an everyday occurrence and I am a writer, I have been writing about it.
I spent much of the first week, after getting stitched up, on my friend’s couch letting her take care of me, and that gave me lots of time to think, when I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t write because I had scratched my left eye and cut partially through a tear duct, and my vision was too blurred to read.
I was quite aware that I had come millimeters from being blind in one eye.
So I had several days of time to think about all this, something I now know was a luxury money could not buy.
Fast forward a few weeks and things have been continually changing for the better. It’s remarkable, which is why this newsletter is called The Remarkable.
Because writing is in my blood I have been documenting my experiences in a lengthy doc. And because I write for publication, I’ve been trying to figure out how my experience, and hopefully, the experiences of others, might help others.
That’s a pretty vague goal and one that did not fit into my other publishing outlets. So I’ve been waiting for a way to get this experience out there. I think I knew it would be a newsletter because my experience with my other Substack newsletter, The Grasshopper, has been such a positive thing.
But my subscribers there signed on for a newsletter about writing, not a personal growth and recovery story. So here I am. I’m still sorting out how to focus this story and this publication, much less figuring out how to reach readers.
But that is not important at this point. I just want to share my story and hear the stories of others. I feel very fortunate in how this change is unfolding for me and I hope readers will find my story useful.
This is the first issue of something I have been thinking about a lot since recent events, but like those events, it has been coming up on me fast. Typically, as a writer, I like to start thinking about an idea and let it find its own way.
And at some point that way becomes clear, or clearer. That’s the way my writing newsletter The Grasshopper evolved. I wanted to write something personal about being a writer. But this time it’s different.
First, this is far more personal, and in our society personal is best kept in check until you can make it generic, in other words until you can separate yourself from the things you are sharing.
That’s not the case here with The Remarkable. This is happening to me now and it is bewildering and interesting and frightening all at once. But as I wrote to myself about it, I thought, someone out there might be going through something equally powerful themselves and this might be useful.
The challenge was to get it out there in a form where it is still fresh but not a confessional diary-type thing. It was never going to be a ‘Day Twelve: feeling different but …’
No, I wanted to share my reactions, and the things I was seeing because this all feels like an unexpected journey, one I didn’t see coming but have chosen to embrace. The reinvention of a life.
So, here’s a dream. I somehow get this going in a useful way and it becomes the start of a conversation, an intimate conversation among strangers who find ourselves, for one reason or another, faced with rebuilding a life.
I guess that's as close to a mission statement as I’m going to get, which is good because I’ve been paid to write those things and they make me gag.
Thank you,
Martin
You can pay it forward and help me reach others with a paid subscription upgrade. I’m still working on paid subscriber benefits but the real benefit is within.
Thank you, Martin. I’m inspired.