Thoughts On a Sobriety Birthday

The first rule of fight club is, don’t talk about fight club.

The second rule of fight club is, DON’T TALK about fight club.

The twelfth tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous is, maintain anonymity, especially at the level of press, media, and film.

So how is it that recovery memoirs are big business in the self-help section of your local bookstore? Who are all these people breaking anonymity and attaching their face, name, and public persona to the 90-year-old recovery movement known as Alcoholics Anonymous? The word “anonymous” is right there in the name.

Clearly there is no consensus on how best to navigate this dilemma: to honor the traditions of the recovery movement while also honoring our sacred duty to serve as lighthouses to those still lost at sea. When does our longing to help heal the suffering of others cross over into self-aggrandizement?

I quit drinking and drugging twenty-five years ago this week—June 24, 2001—so it seemed like a good time to share some of that story, while also making it clear that I do not represent Alcoholics Anonymous in any way, shape or form. I am not a member, I haven’t been to meeting in twelve years, and I’ve lost touch with nearly all of the friends I made there. I don’t speak for anyone but myself. But the profound transformations I underwent there gave my life new shape. That’s what I want to think about in this essay. Because whether you consider yourself an addict or not, there are skills I learned in those church basements that have little to do with booze or drugs. The substances were the symptoms. It was the underlying dysfunction that needed healing, dysfunctions that plague all of us.

What I don’t want to do in this essay: turn my mistakes into a kind of misery-porn by divulging every lurid detail about the damage I did to myself and others for purely entertainment value. If I’ve learned anything in recovery it’s this—that it’s not about me, and it never was. There is absolutely nothing special or noteworthy about my neurotic compulsive disorders. In fact, it’s all quite banal and tedious. I’d rather focus on the growth, not the grotesque.

I’m just some guy trying to live my life. I’m muddling through. I have no expertise in how to be a human being. I do not have any advice to offer. My blunders and triumphs have not seduced me into thinking there’s something universal in them that I simply must share. I suspect there might be. But I’m not sure.

And yet here I am writing this piece.

There are a lot of reasons AA strongly recommends that members maintain their anonymity, the main one being that sucking all the air out of the room by spotlighting your story—your suffering and your journey toward healing—counteracts the cultivation of spiritual humility which is the glue that holds sobriety together. Sure, breaking anonymity could damage AA’s reputation too, but the main damage lands right on the shoulders of the anonymity-breaker. It’s a razor’s edge, and many have fallen off one side or the other.

Driving home from a gig on June 23, 2001—twenty-five years ago—I got arrested by the California Highway Patrol on a rural stretch of Highway 76 near Bonsall, California. It was 1:45 in the morning—more evidence for the claim that nothing good ever happens after midnight. In those days I played lead guitar in a rock and roll band and we’d just wrapped up a four-hour gig in some bar I don’t remember. I didn’t feel drunk, but I’d had a few beers. Rock and roll is thirsty work. There might’ve been a shot or two of Jim Beam thrown in because it was my birthday eve. I was turning 43 at midnight.

All alone on a winding country road. Then headlights behind me. Then red lights.

The CHP officer said my Ford F-150 had been weaving a little so he pulled me over for a chat. He shined his pen light into my eyes, checking my dilation rate, and asked me to step out of the truck. I was bone weary from the load-in and the load-out and four hours on stage playing rock and roll. I just wanted to go home and go to bed. He seemed to have other plans.

I’d been drunk before. This wasn’t that. But he saw what he saw, and did what he did. I was in no position to argue. So I didn’t. The officer was an older fellow, a veteran, maybe in the last year of his career. He’d seen some things. He seemed tired too. I was quiet. Resigned. There was a kindness about him, almost a softness, as he led me through the process with an oddly reassuring fatherly compassion. I had no hard feelings. In fact, quite the opposite. I felt apologetic that I had put him into this position. This isn’t what he wanted to be doing in the middle of the night either.

As my life was collapsing all around me, a new feeling poked through the wreckage—a sense of something fresh, something overdue, something hopeful. All these years later I often think of those flashing red lights in the rear-view mirror as a rescue.

Underneath the shame and fear was something puzzling, something out of place: relief. It was finally over.

The ratchet of hand cuffs. The hard plastic of the back seat of a patrol car. The way you have to turn sideways because there’s nowhere for your hands, handcuffed behind your back, to be. The strange ride through dark unknown streets. The reality of it all sinking in—you’re going to jail. Getting booked into the Vista Detention Facility. The nurse stabbing your arm and taking a vial of blood for the blood alcohol content (BAC) test. Emptying your pockets into a bin. Walking into a large holding cell and hearing the cage door shut behind me and the turn of the lock and the jangle of keys. The five other guys in there, some glancing up, others lost in their own dejection. The metal toilet bolted to the wall. The despair.

They gave me one phone call. I called my wife from the phone mounted on the wall of the holding cell. It rang and rang. It was 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning. She was asleep in our quiet, peaceful home forty miles away. I would not be with her tonight. Finally she picked up. It was the hardest phone call I’ve ever made. Something broke that night. Broke open.

My wife Lori had to call everyone later that morning to cancel my birthday party, scheduled for that afternoon, June 24. Then she called a lawyer, who, because my BAC was low, plead my case down from DUI to wet reckless driving, reducing the length and severity of my probation. We paid the fines and I met with my probation officer. I answered all of his questions honestly. I was done with the lying, done with the hiding.

I felt a new compulsion—to be brutally honest about the hole I’d fallen in. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, as the saying goes. I was curious to find out what true accountability would look like, unaccustomed to it as I was. I was fascinated to see what new shape my life would take now, and in order to do that all the masks had to fall.

He put me on six months probation. He took my driver’s license for six months. And the most momentous condition of my probation? Court-ordered twice-a-week attendance at AA meetings for six months. He handed me a pamphlet. I found a meeting a few miles from my house—something I could bike to—and settled into my new routine.

A lot of big changes happened in the summer of 2001. After ten years of teaching philosophy as an adjunct instructor at community colleges throughout San Diego County, I was finally hired as a full-time, tenure-track assistant professor at Southwestern College in May, a few weeks before my arrest. It was supposed to be the happiest time of my life, and then I went and did this. I was scared to death my school would find out about my conviction and rescind their offer. (Shame is an enormous part of early recovery.) But that didn’t happen. Instead, my first semester as a full-time professor—with an office, a pension, healthcare, and a significant salary bump—was tempered by the knowing that, according to the State of California, I was a dangerous, dysfunctional citizen that could not be trusted behind the wheel of an automobile.

The cognitive dissonance between that narrative and the self-serving narrative I had been living under for years was, to say the least, terribly jarring.

For the next six months I had to get up at 4:30 A.M. every morning, walk to the bus stop, catch a bus downtown to the trolley station, ride the trolley south to Chula Vista, then catch another bus to the campus of Southwestern College—a nearly two hour odyssey. Then the same thing coming home. A lot of time to think.

What began as humiliation slowly grew into humility—two very different things.

Two weeks into the fall semester 9/11 happened—more horror than anyone could comprehend or manage. We all just took it and muddled through. What choice did we have? And nothing was ever the same.

When you know—really know—that life is fundamentally unmanageable, and you let go, something beautiful starts to happen. As I settled into my two weekly meetings I overcame my initial “I don’t belong here” resistance and started listening—really listening—to the men and women in the room with me. Their stories. Their suffering. Their emergence from the belly of the whale. Homeless people, people who lived in mansions, illiterate people, highly educated people—scholars, writers, scientists, and artists. People who’d killed people, who’d done time. And the prosecutors and judges who’d sentenced them. Tales of wreckage and redemption that would curdle your blood and set your soul soaring.

Where else can you sit in deep, meaningful conversations with such a truly diverse collection of folks—from Yale to jail as one of my friends put it. And it slowly becomes real for you, not as a platitude, but as a metaphysical foundation—we’re more alike than different. And that’s when you feel the shape of your ego shifting.

And the more you let go the more you receive.

Soon swaths of my new life began, by an unseen hand, to stitch themselves together into a beautiful tapestry that would wrap me like swaddling cloth. I felt my life beginning again, like everything up to now had been a rehearsal, but now the curtains were going up. I was starting to understand what it meant to feel reborn. As if the life I had been living was a partial life, a pretense, a charade, an awkward shuffle choreographed to slip past unnoticed, to fit in, to get by, all the while feeling more important than anyone else. What a strange, untenable paradox—that I was everything and nothing—and exhausting to maintain. The lie of it was being revealed. And some part of me, way down deep, was glad it was being revealed. Finally the inner voice whispered, finally.

Then a new unfamiliar feeling began to join in with the others—joy.

As I’ve written about many times in this Substack series, I didn’t grow up in church. Attending regular meetings of any kind simply wasn’t a part of my childhood. Except of course school.

And I always liked school. A place where people quietly talked together, and listened to each other. A place where curiosity was a virtue, and truth-telling a moral obligation. A place where you shared the time, and learned how to read the room, and how to moderate your voice, while still finding the courage to speak. A place where you learned to live into the fact that you didn’t know anything—not really—until you learned to see it through the lenses of different experiences. Other people’s lives became your most important textbook.

So here I was in a church basement, paper cup of coffee in hand, on a nodding basis with a couple dozen people, and on a conversational basis with eight or ten others, knowing their names, them knowing my name, seeing and being seen, and soon being invited by the group’s rotating leaders to read a passage, or share a story, or stretch into sitting up front to run a meeting or two.

This was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. No school classroom is like this. No family dinner is like this. No gathering of friends is like this. People told the truth in here—no matter how hard that truth was to tell, or hear. And because no one used last names, or flashed their careers like badges, and because we were all bound to keep each other’s secrets, a profound level of honesty and intimacy began to emerge. It was all so…elemental. I had never experienced anything like it before or since. There’s something profoundly transformative about being that vulnerable with people, and they don’t run away, or judge, or offer advice. They. Just. Listen. And love you anyway.

I had rarely felt more seen or known. And something inside of me started slowly healing.

I stayed in those rooms for thirteen years. Toward the end I just kind of faded away—nothing dramatic. I had internalized so much of their loving healing kindness. I had grown stronger, more confident, more at ease. I wasn’t the same person anymore. I fell in love with my life again. I had been trained in a new way of navigating my own emotional landscape and I had embodied new tools with which to repair my relationship with my joy and resentment. Working through the steps—with a sponsor, and as a sponsor to others—grounded me in a skill set that has served me well ever since.

The fruit of the work was the new shape my life was taking. No, I didn’t become a saint—far from it. In fact, with the fog of daily alcohol and cannabis use lifted, new jagged dysfunctions loomed into view. Even though I was sober, I made some bad decisions and did some damage. There was more wreckage to clear, and more work to do. Those first few years of sobriety were a minefield. And sometimes I stepped on one.

But good things started happening too. After getting sober in 2001, my first album “Frame” came out in 2002. My band The Coyote Problem was born, and we started playing out a lot and getting noticed, getting radio play, landing better gigs, playing bigger stages, and winning awards. The songwriting got better. The stage presence improved. Then new albums started happening: “Wire” in 2005, “California” in 2007, and “Two Pines” in 2014. Side projects and recording session work rolled in. It’s amazing the energy and follow-through you find when you clean up.

I threw myself into my work as a philosophy professor with a newly discovered fire. All of the ideas I’d been teaching my students for ten years (1991-2001) took on a new urgency and validity, especially Buddhism, Stoicism, and Existentialism, which I had always loved, but now seemed like drops of ambrosia sweet enough to raise the dead. I began to practice what I had for so long preached.

I began in earnest to meditate and practice yoga. The deeper I went the more my spiritual hunger grew. Lori and I looked around for a community with whom to gather—gather around the great questions and encourage each other by our mere presence to deepen into more authentic living. I wanted to see if what I had experienced in those recovery meetings was happening in any of the progressive spiritual centers around town. I didn’t want to be saved because I wasn’t damned. I didn’t want to worship anything because I was already experiencing everything. I just wanted to experience it with other people.

Lori and I started attending Sunday services at The Unity Center in May, 2005. We stayed there ten years, gaining so many treasures, including dear friends we still see often. But after a decade we faded away, for a lot of reasons. It was a good run, and I’ll always be grateful for the changes those ten years engendered.

Somewhere in there I began writing features for local and national magazines. Then I wrangled a monthly column in two of them. I began to take my writing more seriously. My editors liked my work, and I was getting paid. My self-doubt was receding.

I began leading guided meditation sessions in various places. I hung my shingle, so to speak, as a spiritual teacher, a label I’ve never claimed for myself. But I’ve been described as such by others. I still don’t call myself a spiritual teacher, but the things I teach often help people move deeper into their own spiritual practice. That’s fine—these insights and practices do the same thing for me. Leading Sanghas and Satsangs with guided meditation at the center created waves of beauty, wisdom, and elevation that are not possessions but experiences without ownership or attachment. In group meditation, whether in person or online, we open ourselves to deeper realization of the infinite depth that we are. No one owns that, no one controls that. The only thing you can do is get a little better at allowing it to rise up to the surface.

Then in 2009 I took the leap and began writing a book called The Seven Stone Path: An Everyday Journey to Wisdom, a kind of summation of everything I’d been learning and teaching during my long immersion in the world’s wisdom traditions. Fourteen years later it came out.

None of these accomplishments could have happened while I was using. I simply lacked the confidence or energy to give birth to these aspects of myself. I was too afraid, too self-conscious, too numb.

The Seven Stone Path is not about sobriety—not directly—although a lot of things I learned in my sobriety are. It’s really just a book about wisdom—what is it, why do we want it, and how do we get it? The book is my love letter to the world’s wisdom traditions, and an attempt to translate those life-changing insights into practical guidance we can use here and now to heal the woundedness of our own lives.

If I had to sum it all up, the most important thing I learned in recovery was to leave room in my life for mystery, for not-knowing, for humility, and for good faith open mindedness. Getting arrested rattled apart my old self-image. I always thought I was a nice guy, and here I was in jail for being a danger to my fellow human beings. What else had I been wrong about? And that question opened a floodgate. In poured the possibility that my lifelong love of religious studies and philosophy was not just intellectual curiosity, but a different longing—a longing for honest and authentic connection to the divine, by any name or creed. A religion without doctrine, a theology without words. Instead, a lived realization that God—whatever we mean by that word—was the name of the ground of being itself, the very ground out of which our lives emerge and take shape.

So I find myself in an Episcopal Cathedral every Sunday now, singing, praying, and breathing it all in, alongside the good people gathering around me, each with their own meandering journey, their own painful struggle, their own joyful longing. And I’m used to that now—being around other people, people serious about loving, and showing up, and being vulnerable. Maybe AA taught me how to sit still, shut up, and let go. And by letting go, we receive everything we need. We are not healed by our cleverness. We are not healed by finding the answers to our questions. It is by the Presence that we are healed.

Love leavened the bread, and it is finally starting to rise.

I’m sharing all of this because I simply want to mark an important anniversary in my life—my 25th sobriety anniversary. I’m an old man now—sixty-eight years old—so what am I hiding from? I’m not trying to make any grand statements about the role alcohol or drugs should play in your life or anyone else’s. Take it or leave it. I’m just happier than I’ve ever been, and wanted to share a little about all of that here in my Substack newsletter.

Thanks for reading this. Let’s raise a glass of whatever you’re drinking for a toast—to our amazing lives, and to the eventual liberation of the treasures locked away behind the wall of every unfaced fear.

To life!

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.” ~ Martin Buber