If you’ve done any reading about recovery, as I have, you begin to see certain themes appear over and over. Most recovery reading takes the protagonist or narrator through a direct confrontation with denial, followed by a rigorous embrace of the truth. The truth is an elusive life raft. But it’s the only life raft when you’re on the island of denial.
Life in recovery can seem like another world, another continent, impossible to reach. I should know. I lived in denial for many years. In some ways, I still live there. Crossing the ocean of truth is difficult. The waves are big, the sea stormy. The boat leaks tears and takes in water. The winds of emotion threaten to sink you. You look up to the stars, but find yourself under strange skies, illuminated by constellations you’ve never seen before. You notice guilt and shame sinking lower in the horizon, while constellations half obscured for years rise higher and higher, constellations like joy, peace, and hope. These are new maps, and they take time to get accustomed to. The sky is still strange, and the currents unknown. You see white terns carrying seeds and plants in their beaks, offering evidence of new land. You still feel very much alone, but if you look down into the water, the depths without end give way to a bottom much brighter and more beautiful than you imagined. You find life there: corals, and turtles, and fish. The sea becomes friendlier. You sense land.
If you’re similarly adrift, some of the best recovery reading I’ve encountered is Laura McKowen’s We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life. McKowen is no Melville of the recovery narrative. Her prose is crisp and clear. Her logic sound. She’s more like a Hemingway. Recovery might very well be an elusive fish that could also serve as an allegory for the human condition.
While few have experienced the vicious cycle of addiction, all of us know what it’s like to want something badly, so badly it interferes with other things in life. Whether it’s a relationship gone wrong, troubled eating, overwork, or internet fixation, we all have had a taste of desire turned toxic.
Addiction is a lonely island. When you’re on it, there’s nothing else, but you and the island.
McKowen offers a story about what lies beyond the island of addiction, what happens when you cross the ocean. While her memoir is specifically about alcohol addiction, it is a story that transcends the recovery narrative. It is applicable to anyone suffering from any kind of addiction. For some it’s a personal struggle with food, or phone addiction, or social media fixation, or love addiction, or sex, or alcohol, or drugs, or money, or work, or exercise, or gambling.
Every addiction obscures a fear. For me, alcohol and toxic relationships were a life preserver that protected me from the fear of being alone. And God, I was scared to be alone.
A Culture of Addiction
I truly believe that the fabric of our very culture is woven from the warp of addiction. Capitalism tells us that we should not be satisfied, and the terms of the bargain make satisfaction impossible. We will always need the new upgrade, whether that’s a better phone, a better body, a better life. There’s always a better vacation, a better job, better friends, a better city. We need to change our bodies and our minds to feel better: there’s always a better cocktail, a better workout, a better high, a better phone, a better partner to be had.
Peace, kindness, care, simple joy, and generosity aren’t commodities that can be sold and bought. They require hard work, time, and sometimes pain and discomfort. They require sacrifice.
On the other side of my abusive relationship with alcohol and other people, I saw only loneliness.
Resistance to change is the resistance to believe that more can be true.
For a long time, I couldn’t see the other truths that existed in the space beyond my addictions. Setting boundaries with alcohol and other people would likely result in abandonment, pain, and loneliness, but when you’re on the island, you can’t see that beyond the island of denial and the ocean of truth, there’s a bigger life, with continents of joy, hope, and peace.
Our culture offers many escape hatches, many ways to numb out, and succumb to the easy dopamine rush of a cocktail, Instagram scroll, Tinder fuck, all-nighter, and if none of that works, Netflix binge and chill.
Love cannot exist alongside the numbing. Joy cannot exist with the numbing. There is no hope in the numbing. There is no peace there. There is just the numbing.
Leaving behind the island of addiction and denial is hard.
McKowen writes eloquently about how difficult it is to abandon the island. Pure will alone cannot do it. Integrity is difficult. It requires self-accountability, but also accountability to other people. Leaving the island of addiction requires a kind of grace that can only come about when we reach out.
In active addiction, I lived in two worlds at once. There was the toxic life of drinking and dysfunctional relationships, and the life I was pretending to live right beside it, a life of peace, love, and hope.
Two worlds cannot exist in one place and time.
How do we allow the worlds to merge? The truth is the bridge. It’s a hard bridge to cross. As you cross it, it cuts away the veils and the softeners of experience, those numbing narcotics you’ve used to cover up shame, and guilt, and fear, and pain. But the other side is freedom and clarity. The other side is an honest life. For those of us living in the lie, the honest life is alien—we’re back in the boat under strange stars. But I’ve been there before. I know what an honest life feels like. The stars there are so bright, they light you up; they light everything up.
McKowen writes that “the truth is alchemical. It transmutes the bitterness of pain and dishonesty and shame into something else, something we can actually live and stand on… It is also difficult to do because—for many of us—it’s in conflict with how we’ve learned to get our needs met. But the first step here is to be real with yourself. You don’t have to show your guts to anyone else, not yet. Acknowledge the truth about how you feel about the thing you are going through and leave nothing unsaid. Whisper it into the dark, say it in a prayer, write it down on paper—whatever. Just get it out of your body.”
Perhaps the best kind of recovery reading isn’t other people’s stories. Perhaps the best kind of recovery reading is the story we write ourselves.
I often write about how to become a better writer. I’ve committed my life to the practice of writing. I went to Columbia University to study writing, and I earned my MFA there. I make my living as a writer. I’ve taught writing. But there’s something more important than theory or writing classes or even practice. There’s telling the truth. And maybe I’ve missed that mark recently. The beautiful thing about telling the truth, about getting in that boat and leaving the island, about crossing the bridge, is that it starts with just one step, one paddle, one sentence, and you don’t have to start by telling anyone else, no, not yet. It starts by telling yourself the truth. I was drinking again. I was in an abusive relationship. My life had become unmanageable.
Dear reader, I’m working on the truth. It’s the best I can do.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.