Four Years

The ticketing agent at JFK looked at my boarding pass and said, exit row, are you willing and able to assist fellow passengers in an emergency?

I didn’t hesitate. Absolutely, I said.

And meant it in a way that surprised me.

For most of my life I was the person who needed the oxygen mask put on first. I knew, in theory, that you secure your own before helping anyone else. I also suspected, quietly and persistently, that wearing one of those yellow masks would make me look like an idiot.

Four years sober this week.

I've been on the road for three weeks. Business, spring break, kids in tow. Idaho. Mexico. Mountains, ocean, one daughter skiing for the first time, another having her first real sleepover with friends. I was there for all of it.

The Starlink was also strong.

—

Something I didn’t expect about the fourth year is that the work gets quieter and therefore harder to locate.

In the early years sobriety was legible. You could point to the before and after. Now the changes are interior, which means the ego has fewer wins to announce, so it finds subtler arrangements. Desire doesn’t leave. It reorganizes.

I still want to be seen as something rarer than the obvious categories. Not actor. Not internet figure. Not co-founder. Something with more range. More access. Something that doesn’t need an introduction.

That want is real.

It is also, I know, status seeking with better lighting.

Last year I spent eight months thinking about a watch before buying it. I told myself that this was patience. Restraint. Taste. And there was truth in that. But underneath it was the pleasure of wanting something just at the edge of reach. I’m not sure I wanted the watch as much as I wanted the wanting of it.

Sobriety gave me back my attention. What I do with that attention is still mine to account for.

What I’m less certain about is whether the want itself is the problem, or the speed. The impatience underneath it. The low-grade conviction that what I have right now is not yet enough to count as arrival.

Someone said recently, half joking, that we've all been diagnosed with a terminal disease. It's called life. The line landed harder than it should have for a joke.

I have maybe ten years left with my daughters under this roof. Maybe five while Clara still thinks cuddles aren't embarrassing and Lily still wants to show me things. I know, in the part of myself I can still access clearly, that I have already won. Healthy kids. A marriage more real in its twelfth year than it was in its second, or fifth, or eighth. Real friends. Work that is at least partly mine.

And still. When I go off grid, the Starlink signal has to be strong.

—

This is what sobriety has not fixed. The impatience. The grandiosity that arrives dressed as vision. The self-promotion that hides inside authenticity. I am writing a Substack, after all. The way I can be standing on a mountain in Idaho watching my daughter find her legs on skis for the first time, genuinely moved, and also…somewhere else. Not drunk. Just elsewhere. Monitoring. Calculating surface area. Thinking about the next thing in the very moment the present thing is asking to be received.

The program calls these character defects. I’ve made my list. Fear of financial insecurity. Impatience. Judgment turned inward. Grandiosity. The belief, never quite extinguished, that fame might still work as a shortcut to self-acceptance.

I know the list.

Knowing the list is not the same as being free of it.

What sobriety has actually given me, the thing I didn’t see coming, is not serenity. It is authorship.

Not in the grand sense. Nothing so complete. Just the ability to notice what is happening and remain in contact with my own values long enough to choose. Before, the gap between what I did and what I valued was anesthetized. Now it is just there. Every time. The exit row question. The internet connection. The Substack. I see myself performing. I see myself wanting. I see myself mid-mountain, already composing the caption.

Authenticity would have me accept all of that as simply who I am.

Authorship asks what I’m going to do about it.

—

Lily fell asleep on the plane home, her head against my arm. I didn’t move for two hours. Didn’t check the phone. Didn’t need to.

Whatever I’m still chasing, it wasn’t on that plane.

Or it was, and I just couldn’t feel it over the weight of her head, the particular way she breathes when she’s fully out.

I don’t know what to do with that except not explain it.

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