What Remains

I like doing difficult things, but I didn’t always.

As a kid, riding a bike meant freedom. We lived behind an old, mostly out-of-use industrial neighborhood deep in the San Fernando Valley, empty streets on either side of some rusty train tracks. I’d head out there and ride for hours. I could go pretty much anywhere I imagined. But when I came to a hill, I would walk it.

Once I got a car, my idea of ‘anywhere’ broadened dramatically, and the bike was abandoned.

In 2009, a television show that I had been doing for five years called, My Name Is Earl, ended, and I found that between the first season and the last, I’d regained almost a hundred pounds. I tightened up my diet, but I was too ashamed to go back to the gym, so I found a desolate stretch of the LA River in Studio City and tried running. It was awful. Imagine your least favorite thing, like maybe a root canal, applied to your entire lower half. I hated it. But I kept going back, day after day, subjecting myself to this torture session called running, then hobbling around like an old man for the rest of the day.

One morning I was putting on my shoes and I just kept thinking, there’s gotta be a better way. My feet are so flat they’re nearly concave. There’s this motif in my mind, almost cartoon like, decades of my ballooned weight pressing down on what must’ve begun as the arches of my feet, eventually inverting them, ankles folding inward. Occasionally, though, I’ll try on the idea that I was born structurally deformed, and my feet’s lessened function is what led to me being so heavy in the first place. My lower back hurt, and not in a hurts-so-good way. It was getting hard to stand up straight. My nipples bled. Every run, they dripped. I wanted the effort, the exertion, but I suspected running wasn’t going to make it as part of my long-term life plan. I imagined some benefit might eventually come once my nipples had fallen off and I’d taken to running in hard casts, but it seemed unrealistic.

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Since I’d already put on my shoes, and didn’t want to waste the effort, I went for a bike ride instead. I pulled out my old, very heavy, three-speed beach cruiser from our storage shed and rode it from our house in Studio City to the top of Mulholland. That was about 700 feet of elevation gain over two miles. I was shocked that I made it, I’d never ridden a bike up a hill before, but what surprised me more was wanting to do it again. I started riding that bike up that hill every day. Sometimes I’d ride up, coast down, turn around, and do it all over.

My riding evolved slowly. I bought a bike with no corrosion and more gears, and eventually a proper road bike and lycra kit. By 2012, I was riding 3-400 miles a week. I found community in riding bikes, and a deep admiration for suffering.

Suffering was the aim, the goal, the thing that told me I’d had a good day on the bike. Suffering was the thing I began to understand I wanted to be present for.

From 1999 to 2001, I’d given up drugs many times. I endured those long slow stretches of kicking. Knees bouncing. Stomach in knots, churning with acid, guts gone liquid and refusing food and water. Skin crawling, and when not crawling, foreign, like wearing sticky leather. Shivering and sweating at once, a constant bargaining with a blanket. I could white knuckle what I thought of as the hardest part. My reasoning was that once the drugs were out of my system, I would then be a sober person, a normie, someone who didn’t struggle.

What I was never ready for was being present with myself. Unencumbered by the distraction of withdrawal or the numbness of intoxication, I found that what I most needed to escape from was myself.

In 2001, I’d made it through my third try at rehab, but back home, sobriety was still tenuous. There were relapses, short ones. And I’d find myself sitting in AA meetings, still clinging to the seat of my cheap folding chair. The guy that learned my name on day one and greeted me with a smile every time after, “Hi Ethan S!” The woman who always seemed to have saved me a seat. They showed me such compassion. Welcomed me in, offered help. And I judged them, but I judged myself most of all. I didn’t want the burden of myself, I wanted my addiction to evaporate with time served. And it didn’t.

And then Brandy loved me. It was inexplicable, but she did. I found my own forgiveness in her love. I found acceptance.

My condition has no cure, but it can be managed.

Management can be as simple as curiosity about how and why I feel the need to escape myself. The thought of numbing the anxiety turns the feeling up, curiosity about it turns it down, gives me back some control.

Management can be as simple as going for a walk or riding a bike. Not to outrun the feeling, I bring it with me. Movement has proven to be a good way to sit with something.

Simple things are not always easy. The first time I rode a bike up Latigo Canyon, 2,500 feet of elevation gain over eight miles, my heart was thundering and my legs were shaking. I was suffering. And what kept me going was knowing that at the top, when the suffering ended, I’d be just a tiny bit more satisfied with the version of myself I was left with. That’s the gift of chosen suffering: it ends, but the accomplishment doesn’t.

I’ve never been truly comfortable. Not physically, not with my own thoughts, not with the way I think of myself. I accept that now. I have grown to enjoy the suffering.