Captain Kirk Doesn’t Care That I’m Sober

My last drink was on January 10, 1990. I don’t celebrate my “sober date.” I’ll always be aware of my old life, but as it grows more distant it has less power over me. I know alcoholics are supposed to think that our disorder (I don’t call it a disease) is still raging every day, but that’s not true. The demon gets cast out even if you still carry the scars.

One of the greatest moments in American history and in spiritual history was the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. Not due to any fault of its own, AA spawned a lot of other “recovery” groups and a wide recovery culture. Everyone these days seems to be in recovery from their families, their depressions, their post-nasal drip.

The founders of AA emphasized action and service, not being owned by the past. They preached “principles before personalities” and that we should be anonymous lest our egos get the best of us. In my case I ignored that last part, and as mistakes go it was a whopper. Still, an AA promise is that “we will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” This line sometimes reminds me of Captain James T. Kirk. In this one Star Trek movie the crew of the Enterprise are hoodwinked by a religious charlatan who claims he can “take away your pain” and bring them to God. Even Bones falls for it! Kirk, however, sees the truth. "I want my pain,” Kirk says, “I need my pain. My pain makes me who I am.” Captain Kirk doesn’t care about your recovery. He’s too busy exploring the stars.

In his great book Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore observes that the soul can have things in store for us that are difficult and unpleasant: “As I see it, this other being in us, the soul, is vaster than our small minds can contain. It’s strong and mysterious, and at times a true adversary.” The soul can tell us that our destiny and responsibility is to care for an aging parent, take a hard manual labor job or go to war. Moore addresses the rise of “family therapy” by noting that while therapy exists in order to “get to the root” of problems and “hopes to find a cure, “Care of the soul doesn't require fixing the family.” Moore argues that the Bible says that Adam was “formed from the mud,” and that the family is “a veritable web patch of human foibles.” We should avoid “hygienic notations of what a family should be—a sometimes comforting sometimes devastating house of life and memory.”

Alcoholism in my young life caused some damage. It also made me cunning, street-smart, and able to read people instantly. Being drunk all the time does, however, get boring, and my life jumped into WARP drive when I put down my last drink 34 years ago. I learned to swing dance, fell in love, wrote books. I always found it fascinating that  AA co-founder Bill Wilson knew Aldous Huxley and experimented with LSD. Wilson was always moving forward.

One of the reasons I got into trouble with booze was I was self-medicating for ADHD. In sobriety I have to tame that monkey mind with skateboarding and dancing. A couple of years ago I attempted surfing, an exhilarating and terrifying experience. In his book The Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery, Thad Ziolkowski explores surfing and its relationship to addiction.

Ziolkowski argues that surfing, drugs and alcohol offer an escape into a “liminal state.” It’s kind of a place in between heaven and earth. The beach is a spot between the everyday world and something grander, both primal and dreamlike. Drugs and the intoxicates also offer an escape to an in-between place. On top of that, there’s something in the brain chemistry of a lot of the best surfers that lures them into drug and alcohol abuse. The same hyper, quick-scanning brain that can negotiate split-second decisions while catching a wave often craves a similar rush on shore.

At one climatic moment of self-realization, Ziolkowski has to renounce the drug culture that was a part of surfing, as well as the idea that great writers like him all had to have addiction problems as part of their story. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter Thompson—Ziolkowski bought the story that to be creative was to be addicted. His recount of how he freed himself from that dangerous myth is beautiful:

I metabolized this moral so completely that many years later, when I finally and decisively quit, it was like psychic surgery: I had to plunge into and seize myself, drag me out of the underground steam of this story about the drunken, visionary poet into which I had waded blind, becoming a votary of it, someone in whose veins flowed intoxicants. I rested on the bank beside myself, watched as I opened my eyes and sat up.

Ziolkowski has escaped the dead pool of addiction for the stream of life. I go to a meditation meeting once a week, and in it we read the 11th Step of AA. This is my favorite part:

When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others, of what we could pack into the stream of life? But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review we ask God’s forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken.