Seven Years Drug and Alcohol Free

Recovery is as individual as it is collective

Flesh and Spirit by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982

Last month, I spoke at a fundraiser for our addiction and psychedelic non-profit. When my colleague introduced me, he told the audience that I was about to celebrate seven years of continuous sobriety. The small room erupted with cheers.

It’d been ages since I attended a proper recovery meeting, at least one that I was not facilitating, where this sort of reception is the norm. But this was a fundraiser, not a proper recovery meeting, so I was filled with a strange mixture of emotions. For a moment before I spoke, my throat swelled with embarrassment: something akin to how I felt when a daycare teacher once congratulated me for not peeing all over the edges of the toilet seat. Sometimes, as ungrateful as this might sound, when people who are not in recovery praise me for “staying on track,” I feel a similar sense of infantilization. Don’t you know that losing my shit at the peak of my twenties was the best thing that ever happened to me; that our cultural tracks are not ones worth following?

On my first recovery anniversary, the counselors in my outpatient treatment clinic gave me a gift bag. Inside was a congratulatory card signed by the entire staff, a small candle, and one of those polished rocks with the word Gratitude engraved on its front.

I cried when I received this. Not because the gifts were noteworthy. But because people were paying enough attention to know that I had reached what once was an inconceivable milestone. Several members of this staff had witnessed me, in quite the hotheaded drama, get kicked out of the same program twice before. In both cases, I relapsed, then attempted to hide it. Even the most ingenious dope fiends run out of ways to hack urine analysis tests.

Six years prior to my first recovery milestone, when I was twenty-three, I started waking up with cold sweats, leg tremors, and an unquenchable hunger in my chest. I knew then, as David Foster Wallace says, that I was not just in serious trouble, but very serious trouble, deadly serious trouble. For as much as part of me wanted to get better, to free myself from the talons of addiction, another part of me couldn’t stop running the same laps around the Tenderloin, being a Bad Boy, baby. These excursions were my secret kink. They felt like venturing eons away from my company-supplied MacBook Air and Aeron chair, my perfectly nice colleagues, and my devastatingly beautiful wife. I was running to a place where I could simply be me in the dark, as false as that refuge may have been.

It’s remarkable just how severely a man’s psyche can split into two. It’s even more remarkable how hard you’ll hustle to stay on those tracks, to pretend your alter-ego doesn’t exist, to implore that some adults will notice and celebrate your accomplishments nonetheless.

Outside of the treatment staff, only my family and closest friends knew I had made it to the one-year mark without relapsing—that I had finally tapered off Suboxone, benzos, amphetamines, and the antipsychotics to sleep at night. By then, my celebratory Gratitude rock had found a home at the center of my work desk, just in front of my monitor: a daily mantra that reminded me to keep going and never look back.  

But this damn little rock also haunted me. Because I had another one just like it at my apartment. The one at home, ironically, had the word Serenity engraved on it. Years before, I’d stolen it from a gift shop in Bar Harbor, Maine, because that was the type of thing I’d do when I was high. Thus the 9^th Step of Alcoholics Anonymous encourages you to make amends to the people, places, and institutions you have harmed. In that first year of my recovery, I told myself I’d mail the rock back to the shop anonymously with a $20 bill to account for any ensuing ills. But naturally, I couldn’t remember what store I had burglarized for a petty thrill, nor could I retrace my steps with Google Maps. So that relic stayed adorned on the dresser in my Oakland apartment, next to the cheerily fake flowers. 

All that goes to say: the Serenity rock was just the tip of the atonement iceberg. I was terrified of confronting all the people and places over the years. The ones that felt the scariest, at least the ones I’m comfortable writing about here, revolved around returning money to friends. Or, in the worst cases, not even friends of mine, but friends of my ex-wife. Money that I stole when innocent people visited us because I had spent all my own and I was a man who’d do anything to score my next quick fix and shield my naked and bare chest from the tortuous claws of withdrawal for just a few hours. Please. I’m begging you. Anything but that.

Following my sponsor’s instructions, I began my reparations by sending those I’d wronged an elusive text: Hey, I’m committing myself to recovery. Maybe you didn’t even notice, but I’m going to Venmo you some money that’s yours right now. I’m so sorry.

To my surprise, none of these folks chastised me. No, in fact, they welcomed me back with open arms. Many were quick to remind me that life was full of its ups and downs. Others told me not to worry about it, Al, that they were just so happy for me to be on this new path.

Throughout some of the darkest years of my addiction, trapped in my own personal nightmare, I flirted with three different choices for making things better.

The first: start DJ’ing and selling drugs again as a side hustle to maintain both my expensive habit and my tech career. Thus my garage doubled as a 10-plant home-grow operation with clones of AK47 sourced from Humboldt County, next to my CDJ 2000 turntables.

The second choice: ingest a strong enough cocktail of narcotics to, once and for all, put an end to this meaningless existence (before entering the bardo).

And the third, most elusive choice: stop running and scheming and face the inevitable pain, the very serious trouble I couldn’t run from forever, the withdrawal I knew would make me puke my brains out and shit my pants for weeks, the ravening maw set to destroy me.  

When people think about addiction, they typically think about a physical dependency that cannot be properly managed rather than the entire, singular worldview embedded in that dependency. A worldview that deludes the addict from seeing anything past the object of desire. Recovery, then, requires rehabilitation of the mind, body, and spirit in the proper sense of the word. How, you might be wondering, was I able to pursue that Third Choice? To get past the physical side of withdrawal to do the deep work of reconstructing my worldview and entire orientation to life? The answer is with a ton of support, which speaks to how infinitely complicated the web of addiction is. I could use the word privilege here, despite how politicized it’s become. But more often than not, the difference between the third choice and the first two boils down to privilege, to politics.

I swear, today I hoped to write something less intense, perhaps even inspirational. Maybe a cheesy list of seven pieces of wisdom I’ve earned throughout this journey, as I’ve done in the past.

But the truth is, this stuff—addiction—is intense, serious business. Graves are filled with guys like me who sailed past the edge or took their own life. Half a dozen of my close friends lay at rest. I also recently learned that the RoxyContin 30mg Blues I used to snort, my “drug of choice” that took me on a disastrous love affair around the California coast, are now commonly sold on the Block as fakes laced with Fentanyl. What I am trying to tell you is that I’ve done enough of the Dance Fever to know that if I was still running the same laps I used to, I’d be in a grave, too.

Our brothers and sisters are dying. Not just on the streets, but in fancy apartments in Manhattan and South Beach, in the suburbs of Appalachia and Arizona. The Amazon rainforest is reaching a tipping point from which there is no return. The West Coast is running out of water. We have the Library of Alexandria—all civilization’s knowledge—at our fingertips. But we aren’t getting smarter. We are getting stupider, more disconnected, more dependent on shit ideas we don’t need. We all must burden the cognitive dissonance that comes from living on a planet we are destroying as a result of our deluded, addictive thinking.

In the past, I would’ve likely bypassed this into the gratitude I live with every single day for continuing to exist. Unlike so many of the men who have not had the good fortune I have, not to be locked away or canceled or publicly shamed past repair, I have been given a second chance at life. I have been rehabilitated, dare I say, redeemed. And yet, for as grateful as I am, I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I am still haunted by my past life, wondering if a rupture so severe can ever be completely stitched back together. I’d also be lying if I didn’t tell you that, despite all my spiritual practices around dissolving into the Eternal Now, I feel tremendous urgency around our collective addictions. Especially against the backdrop of a world that becomes more unforgiving of misfortune, more urgent and dire, with each passing day—the very serious trouble we’re all in.

Sometimes, the burdens we were born to carry are not the ones we wanted. 

Five years into my recovery, in the early days of the pandemic, I said a prayer and left the Serenity rock on the front doorstep of my Oakland apartment when I moved out. It’s now been seven laps around the sun since I drank alcohol, smoked a joint of cannabis, snorted Oxy and cocaine, taken amphetamines, swallowed several illicit narcotics I hope you haven’t heard of, stolen anything, cheated anyone, eaten Nerds rope with Dr. Pepper, or told a perniciously harmful lie for my own temporary gain. In these recent Substack years, I’ve made a habit of celebrating each recovery milestone publicly, instead of just privately. I’ve done many things in my life that I am not proud of, and despite what Brené Brown says, I think it is healthy to harbor some remorse, even shame, about the past for the sole purpose of confronting truth.

What I am trying to say is that recovery, not as an objective end, but as an ongoing process, is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me. Nothing would be possible without the work it has required of me. Everything I do today—everything I write about, the therapeutic work I do with individuals and groups around the world—all of this is shaped by the darkness I was forced to confront.

In this way, I believe recovery is as individual as it is collective: something meant to be shared, something meant to be celebrated. Every single person alive is worthy of redemption, and I mean that with zero exceptions. Do not be afraid to speak to your loved ones about addiction past or present, no matter how afraid you might be of judgment or rejection. Have faith that your willingness to confront the truth will surprise you, for dialogues will be opened out of this bravery. Do not be afraid to celebrate even the smallest evidence of recovery in your life, even as you feel yourself slipping backward into the void—for, with every step forward, there are two backward, but there is always a path forward waiting for you again.