#34 You are doing it. This is the It.

It's already started, you just didn't know

I spent last week back east getting all the dangerous trees removed from the land I live on; they keep falling down. Here’s my favorite Hemlock being murdered. RIP.

Last week an author using some of my words in her next book sent me a legal release, where you review a quote and agree you said it or that it can be published at all, or something like that. Here’s the quote.

'“We are always, forever doing the things we imagine in our hearts. We have always started long before we even realized we started. The gestation periods can be long and un-notable; the blocks are the path. If you are feeling like you aren't doing it, or like you're waiting for the real work to begin, please remember in this moment, you are doing it. There is no other way through to it then the way you have gone, are going…You are doing it. This is it.”

I was impressed. (With myself.) I replied "Damn that's good. Yes. Approved." As if it were someone else's wisdom and clarity and sentence structure I admired. Which in a way, it was.

It was Wednesday when I got that email and I was in Brooklyn, and I was in Brooklyn because I didn't know what else to do or where else to go. Joan Didion once wrote she was in Hawaii with her husband because it was either that or divorce, and I was in Bed-Stuy sleeping on Sarah's memory foam pull out because it was either that or I'm not sure what. A nunnery. A cave. A breakdown.

In this prolonged period of grief, of reformulation, of whatever I'll one day understand this odd period of my life to be within this even odder period of history: There are weeks when it makes sense and I make sense and I understand the last few years could never have gone any differently than they did. There are weeks when I think “well that was dark lols” and I’m light as a Cheeto with my whole life and its endless possibility in front of me and I’m just vomiting tears of gratitude for every terrible minute that came before to make all this depth possible. And then there are weeks like the last few, where I fall right back into the same damn hole I just clawed myself out of and I cannot fucking believe I am back here again dealing with the same bullshit I was only moments ago grateful for happening because it was, by all appearances, done.

I used to work with clients one-to-one as a sobriety coach, which is exactly what it sounds like. I was a person hired by another person to help them renegotiate their relationship with drinking, and we did this through hour-long phone calls once a week and detailed plans of action and intermittent texts when they were struggling or celebrating. It was maybe 2015 when one of my clients, who had gone from drinking most nights to drinking only on the weekends to not drinking at all, texted me that she'd either had a drink or maybe missed drinking or had done something that made her feel like a failure. She asked me this: When am I going to start doing it?

At the time of the text we'd been working together for a few months. She’d made all these wild and profound changes in a very short period of time, changes most people don’t enact over the entire duration of their lives. And she wanted to know when the actual, real, qualifying work of recovery would begin because in her reality, it hadn’t. Hers was this messy, stalling, erratic process, and some days were great, and some days were awful, and sometimes progress looked like regress. Most of it didn’t look like what she thought it would or should, and she believed she was making unserious attempts, just fucking around waiting for the real work to start. I said something like: This is it. THIS right here—the drinking and the fear and the questioning and the shame and the regret and the feeling like you are totally fucking up—is what IT actually looks like. You are doing it. This is the it.

You are doing it/ THIS is the IT: is a pretty easy thing to point out when it’s someone else’s process, including a past version of yourself. When it’s objective or far enough away for you to see the symphony of it all, the way it couldn’t have happened any other way than it did. At some point it becomes clear that what we think of as a wrong turn, a mistake, a backslide or a period of inertia was not some kind of departure from the path but actually an indispensable part of it, and sometimes the most important one. But it’s never that way when you’re all smooshed up against it. We never live through the hell fires of an astonishing transition and think it’s supposed to be happening—we only think that about pleasant, wanted things.

John O’Donohue said: “There are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of; and then sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.” Freud said: “One day in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” And Nietzsche said really fucked up shit that you’ll resent me for quoting. All of them knew that our struggle and our suffering was also our grace; that within the experience of that which we do not want is everything we actually do.

I doubt I’ll ever arrive at some point in this lifetime where, when engulfed in a period of interminable struggle, I’ll naturally consider “I’m doing it/this is what it looks like (!!)”. But I will say, over the years I have gotten a lot gentler with myself when I feel like that. I’m less likely to think of periods like the last few weeks as departures from or preludes to the ‘real work’, where the ‘real work’ always looks like some kind of linear, tidy process I’ve yet to actually experience. I think it’s actually IN the feeling like we are absolutely fucking up and doing it all wrong, or that nothing is happening at all, etc. etc. etc., that we can know with some kind of certainty that we’re really on to something.

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Ten Things Right Now

The perfect writing playlist; the war on drugs and the Adderall shortage; is it writer’s block or is it sobriety?; a very healthy take on social media; the alt-right gets into psychedelics; a few Really Good Podcasts; Sleepy Girl Winter; sober dating apps.

1. The perfect post-punk writing playlist. I typically (not always) use the Pomodoro Method to write in 55/10 splits (55 focus, 10 off). This mix has the exact right emotional arc for an unheard of 80-minute burst of focus

2. “There’s actually no settled place of fulfillment” George Saunders, an author I’ve never read but plan to, on the ‘samsara-esque’ cycle of writing in some way matched my mood this week. Related: The author of Silver Lining’s Playbook discusses the intersection of sobriety and writer’s block.

3. Very, very into this podcast right now. Especially vibing episodes 155 & 156 on Emil Cioran

4. The Adderall shortage is not a supply chain issue it’s a Schedule II issue

5. Loosely related: The global addictions therapeutic market (drug interventions or could mean digital therapeutics like Pear) is expected to grow by $10 billion over the next four years. This is a striking number, especially if you consider not long ago the entire recovery market was $35 billion and therapeutics were limited to a few drugs like methadone and Suboxone and buprenorphine. What we know: The most successful interventions are dynamic and require a personalized, holistic and long-term approach, which can or cannot include therapeutics. What’s effective doesn’t generally require a ton of money, but it does require patience. What’s effective is not always leading edge but often basic, boring even. I’m hopeful about the level of investment, I’m sad that we spend so much money on shiny partial fixes instead of what’s been proven to actually work.

6. Even more loosely related: People in recovery make more engaged (and thus theoretically significantly cheaper) patients in the long run

7. I have not watched Love Is Blind but I have read almost every article about the implosion of Twitter 🍿. Jaron Lanier, the author of 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (I’ve read it, soft recommend), wrote this piece for the NYT which has so far been my favorite

8. A guide to therapists for POC and the queer community

9. This is part of a whole thing. Also: I absolutely love Psymposia and if you haven’t listened to their joint podcast series with The Cut on the darker side of the psychedelics renaissance it’s really, really good. If you’re new here, I’m team legalization and decrim, and I think any conversation about psychedelics requires pretty severe nuance

10. Last week I told my friend I thought her four year old daughter was gaslighting her lols

11. It’s sleepy girl winter but I’ve had sleepy girl spring, summer and fall

12. The end of DUIs

13. n+1 is running a fundraiser—donate, answer a personality quiz, get a customized reading list which is mostly just a brilliant move

14. I don’t know how I feel about this. I mean I know this sounds terrible but as a sober person, I tend to avoid dating sober people. Anyone else?

15. Finally: In Quit Like a Woman I wrote briefly about Morley Safer’s 60 Minute segment, The French Paradox, which suggested French people don’t have heart problems or gain weight or whatever because they drink an ass ton of red wine and became one of the largest influences on American wine consumption. This Maintenance Phase podcast about it was RIVETING. Also thank you to the dozen of you that forwarded this to me. If you ever have hot tips, you can email them to contact@hollywhitaker.com

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