I know a little bit about missed opportunities. To be more specific: alcohol-related missed opportunities. The day I graduated from high school, my family went out to dinner to celebrate. Unfortunately, I was too sick to come along. I’d somehow managed to drink so much at the series of parties building up to the big day that I could barely keep it together for the graduation ceremony, much less dinner afterwards.
At college, my philosophy professor once invited me to take part in a colloquium between students and faculty that only a few students were invited to. Quite an honor! Unfortunately, I had a bit too much to drink the night before and rolled in an hour late.
So it went. It wasn’t that I missed out on everything because I drank. In fact, alcohol gave me the courage and self-confidence I needed to do a good number of things – some of them actually worthwhile -- that I otherwise wouldn’t have done. Drinking created problems, sure. But it was still my Secret to Successful Living – the tool that allowed me to negotiate life. So if things went a little wrong sometimes because of it, well… that was just the way it had to be.
But by the time I washed up on the shores of a rehab at age 33, there was no getting around the fact that this precarious balance between the benefits and the drawbacks of alcohol had shifted decidedly over to the drawback side. Something larger-than-usual had gone wrong, and it had created a larger-than-usual feeling of remorse. This time, the Big Event that I’d slept through wasn’t some early-morning graduation ceremony or brunch. It was my actual life. Being in rehab was like finding oneself in one of those dreams in which you’re back in your second grade classroom, squeezed into a kiddy desk. “Your best thinking got you here,” our counselors constantly told us, and the cruel irony of the statement wasn’t hard to appreciate. My Secret to Successful Living had landed me in some pretty unsuccessful-looking situations before, but never one as bad as this.
The counselors soon started adding further nuances to this ugly picture. “Drunks and addicts don’t grow emotionally while they’re using,” they told us. That meant that in addition to failing to become exterior successes in the world, we were inner failures as well. Time spent drunk or high was like time thrown out the window, pure and simple.
Though nobody – least of all the counselors – was particularly interested in hearing it, I soon started developing my own opinion on this question of all the time we had wasted on drink and drugs. Somehow or other, I just couldn’t get my head around the notion that all my long years of drug and alcohol abuse had simply amounted to nothing. There was more – there had to be more – to it than that.
The more convinced I became of the importance of not condemning oneself for one’s years of using, the more I noticed how sharply defined were the views that people held on this subject. Some of the men I talked to seemed to agree with me. Others absolutely didn’t. Recovering addicts, I began to notice, can be classified as either Vilifiers or Ecstatics. For the Vilifiers, alcohol is the enemy, pure and simple. Drugs and booze were poisons that ruined their lives and robbed them of their potential -- and that was all there was to it. If the Vilifiers are given to painting too one-sidedly negative a picture of their using days, the Ecstatics (of which I, needless to say, was a member) do just the opposite. For us, inebriation, whatever disasters and horrors it might have brought with it, is an irreducibly romantic subject. When we look back on our days of using, we have a tendency to focus on the good parts, and to minimize the bad (The first time at rehab that I ever heard someone say that their worst day of sobriety was better than their best day of drinking, I thought they must have been joking. I still think it’s a pretty absurd idea.).
All of this came to a head for me one day a few weeks into my stay, when – in the middle of some nostalgic reminiscence of my using days -- my counselor interrupted me.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sick of listening to all this bullsh*t from you about how great drinking and drugs were. I want you to repeat something after me: Drugs bad, sobriety good.”
No problem. “Drugs bad,” I said, “sobriety good… for me now.”
“For me now?” my counselor shouted. “What the hell is that ‘for me now’ crap? Repeat the damn sentence the way I said it.”
“Why?” I asked. “I understand that I need to leave drinking and drugs behind. You all have convinced me of that. But you’ll never convince me that the way I felt when I took them was all just bad, bad, bad. It wasn’t. So sure. Drugs bad, sobriety good. For me now.”
It went back and forth like this for a while. Finally, to make him happy, I relented and said the sentence without the “for me now” bit tacked on to the end.
But in my head, it was still attached.
Eleven years later, it still is. I still think that, though I was wrong about any number of other things back then, I was right in refusing to condemn all my years of using as simply wasted. On a certain level, I needed to embrace those years, no matter how disastrous they were, no matter how much they cost me. No matter how many laps behind, in the race of life, they might have left me.
After I got out of rehab and started going to meetings in New York, I met a guy in his sixties who’d been a disastrous drunk for years. This guy was fond of saying that he’d had exactly the right amount of drinks in his life. Not one too many, not one too few.
That’s it, I thought. That was the attitude I wanted to strive for. This guy wasn’t celebrating his drinking years, but he wasn’t condemning them either. He was seeing them as part of his life: a life that, even before he entered recovery, had been run by someone, or something, larger than himself.
A quote by the Sufi mystic Junnaiyd, that I discovered in Coleman Barks’ collection The Essential Rumi, sums up, for me, the mysterious relationship between using and abstinence (and the question of whether one’s drinking years were really a pure waste) better than any other. “There is a sobriety that contains all drunkennesses,” said Junnaiyd, “but there is no drunkenness that contains all sobriety.” In the end, the feeling of connection with the world and with myself that I got through drugs and drinking wasn’t wrong. It was… incomplete. Sobriety is bigger than using. But remembering why I enjoyed and needed substances in the first place, and not condemning myself for it, is a key part, for me, of finding my way to that bigger world, and making a home in it.