The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Next to that, Wallace wrote just three words: “How I Feel.”

  It’s easy to feel good about resonance. It’s actually quite addictive, the nodding rhythm of communion—Yes, I know how you feel. This presumed empathy tastes righteous and expansive on the tongue. During my early days of sobriety, I started seeing resonance everywhere, like a primary color I’d never noticed. One afternoon I sat at an oak desk tucked in the silent hallways of the library, and noticed what a stranger had carved in the wood: I am a virgin. Then others had written around that: Me too. So am I. So am I! So am I!

  But the flip side of communion’s humility, being willing to say I’m not the only one, is the danger of assumption or conflation: I’ve felt what you’ve felt. It’s so satisfying to acknowledge what’s shared that it can become its own temptation—to insist on commonality everywhere.

  Partway through his book about working with skid-row addicts, clinician Gabor Maté brings himself into the frame: “Hello, my name is Gabor, and I am a compulsive classical music shopper.” After the portraits that have come before—crack and heroin addicts who are homeless or turning tricks, losing limbs to infections at their injection sites—Maté’s confession reads at first like a joke, then like a provocation, asking us to accept a continuity he suspects we will initially resist. Describing the thousands of dollars he has compulsively spent on classical music, the way he plays it loud to drown out his family, Maté acknowledges that his addiction wears “dainty white gloves,” but he also insists on a single “addiction process” that manifests across a continuum of behaviors: “the frantic self-soothing of overeaters or shopaholics; the obsessions of gamblers, sexaholics, and compulsive Internet users; or the socially acceptable and even admired behaviors of the workaholic.” It’s what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “addiction attribution,” the ways we try to understand everything as addiction: shopping, email, even exercise, the mascot of willpower. Addiction attribution can become an addiction in its own right. The satisfaction of an expansive rubric offers its own intoxication: We’re all in this together! If addiction is a continuum, then we all get to live on its axis somewhere, blasting Beethoven to drown out the voices of our children, or gorging on chocolate after we get fired.

  But I’m wary of attributing addiction so broadly it ceases to mean anything besides compulsively desiring something capable of causing harm. I don’t want to ignore the particular physical mechanisms of addiction by mining it too easily for universal truths: We all crave. We all compensate. We all seek relief. Because we don’t all seek in the same ways, and the seeking doesn’t always punish the seeker. It’s important to acknowledge the specific damage wrought by certain cravings: what they can do to a brain, what they can do to a life.

  When the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 2013, and officially changed its definition of “substance use disorder” from a category to a spectrum, many scientists were afraid that its broadened criteria for addiction would effectively produce too many addicts—that it would, in essence, make everyone who had ever drunk recklessly an addict, and destroy a vital distinction between dysfunction and disease.

  What do I think? That it’s important not to lose our grip on the notion of disease or its physical mechanisms by defining it too broadly, but it’s also true that everyone has longed for something that harms her. I wish we could invoke that universality not to render the boundaries of addiction utterly porous, but to humanize those under its thrall.

  When I asked my own diary, drunk, Am I an alcoholic? I was trying to answer a question about desire: When does ordinary craving become pathology? Now I think: When it becomes tyrannical enough to summon shame. When it stops constituting the self, and begins to construe it as lack. When you want to stop, and can’t; and try again, and can’t; and try again, and can’t. “It is not till many fixes pass that your desire is need,” George Cain wrote. “It was what I’d been born for, waiting for all my life.”

  When I asked my own diary, drunk, Am I an alcoholic? I was looking for a category that might tell me whether my pain was real—as if drinking more would make it incontestable. Of course my pain was real, just like everyone’s. Of course it wasn’t quite like anyone’s, just like everyone’s.

  As culprit and cause, drinking offered a convenient vessel for certain difficulties I found harder to pin down precisely. When I was first getting sober, I wrote myself a story about my relationship with Dave in which I was the source of our troubles, my insecurity and distrust, and booze was the source of my troubles—and so, by getting rid of the booze, I’d start to fix them. But we were less broken than that, or more broken than that, and back in New Haven an odd, eerie quiet settled over our joint life: days in libraries; stew bubbling in the slow cooker; old coffee grounds in the French press, then the trash can. This calm didn’t feel like relief from fighting; it was more distant than that. In some strange, corrosive way, our fights had been intimate and binding: toxic but saturating, impossible to turn away from. Fighting meant we were both fully present. Back in New Haven we were kinder with each other, gentler, but also robotic somehow; when we came back home to each other at the end of the day, it was as if we were both reaching for bodies that weren’t quite there.

  That fall we went to another wedding—our tenth or twelfth or hundredth, who could count—and pitched our tent in a meadow. The wedding was full of people who had been in various a cappella groups with the groom, and every so often a cluster of strangers would break into song beside me, like a spontaneous brush fire. “I promise to enjoy spirituality with you,” the bride told the groom during their vows. “I promise to enjoy nature with you,” he replied. That night it rained until dawn and I woke up tangled in a corner of our tent, muddy ground slippery beneath the thin vinyl floor—my body fully out of our sleeping bag, as if I’d been trying to roll as far away from Dave as possible. He took a photo of me that morning, standing in my long underwear outside the tent, with the meadow and hills behind, and once the photo had been glossed with the right cell phone filter, it made our campsite look like a magical elfin land. “Gorgeous!” said everyone on Facebook. But I knew I’d actually been irritated and tired, dispirited by the happiness of others.

  The night before, the reception had been a supra, a traditional Georgian feast that revolved around an elaborate and dizzyingly comprehensive series of toasts—to God, to the dead, to the living, to our tents—with the bride and groom drinking red wine from a silver-lipped, animal-furred drinking horn. With each new round of toasts, a different stranger looked at me and frowned.

  “Don’t you know?” one finally said. “It’s horrible luck to toast with water.”

  Back home, I’d started to smell something strange in our bedroom: a barn smell, like soggy hay or damp fur, something wet and animal. The prior tenants had told us they’d had a squirrel infestation, and I wondered if they were still nesting behind our brick walls, their little burrows soaked with urine and packed with nuts, squirming with hairless babies—helpless, grotesque creatures wriggling all around us.

  When we started spotting mice, it was almost a relief. There was something wrong, and we would get rid of it. We set up snap traps under our cupboards and smeared them carefully with gobs of peanut butter. At first the mice managed to steal the peanut butter without setting them off, licking the yellow plastic paddles absolutely clean, like tiny superheroes with one specially honed skill. I sat on the couch and watched one mouse move so gracefully—with so little weight on its claws, and such a barely present tongue—that it managed to get everything it wanted without dying.

  We set up glue traps next, and woke in the night to hear one mouse squealing as he struggled: still horribly, painfully alive. We lay beside each other, listening. It was impossible to sleep. Finally, Dave got up and smacked the mouse against the floor. A mercy kill. The apartment grew quiet again.

  When I confessed to Susan that I’d begun to fantasize about br
eaking up with Dave, just imagining what it might be like, she reminded me that the program suggested against making any major changes in the first year of sobriety, and that included ending a relationship. I wanted to say, You ended yours. She had an apartment of her own, a life alone that seemed—somehow—deeply generative.

  In recovery meetings, I was surrounded by the stories of people who were living in the clean, empty aftermaths of new beginnings: leaving old relationships, old homes, old cities, and beginning again at rehab, in meetings, with the steps. In truth, plenty of people were simply getting sober inside the lives they’d always lived—with the same jobs, the same marriages, the same children—but I kept seeing the story of rebirth because it was the story I wanted to see: people who were starting again, who were lonely and free. When I looked at Dave, I felt exhausted, as if our relationship was a messy room I had to clean up. Part of me craved the relief of a clean beginning—a pure loss, then rebuilding on my own.

  Seneca House compelled me because it had been the threshold of a new beginning, for thousands of addicts, or at least its promise. I wanted to see the place for myself. But by the time I visited Seneca Creek in 2015, the house itself was just a ghost: a bare patch of grassy land tucked between the water and the woods. The building had been torn down after the rehab shut its doors in 1992, after an unsuccessful merger with a larger treatment center. I’d driven out with Sawyer the Lawyer, who now suffered from a degenerative muscle disease that kept him largely immobilized; so we’d taken a special van outfitted to accommodate his wheelchair.

  Over the phone, Sawyer had referred to the disease as his “affliction” in a wry tone that suggested scare quotes. After decades spent in a community whose currency was shared pain, Sawyer knew the various tones in which suffering could be articulated. He knew what it sounded like when people milked their lives for drama, and he was choosing another tone of voice: matter-of-fact, calling out the temptation to dramatize rather than indulging it. He also had cancer in his prostate, and in one of his ribs. These maladies were mentioned as afterthoughts.

  When I visited Sawyer at his home in Maryland, just a half hour from Seneca Creek, it was a July day so hot and bright it threatened to close his morning glories by noon. His fridge was cluttered with the faces of his grandkids, a granddaughter’s carefully typed babysitting ad: I am serious and dependable. Getting Sawyer settled in his van required two motorized wheelchairs, a walker, and one motorized chairlift. I secured his motorized wheelchair to the interior of his van with four straps, harnessed to latches on the floor, and—terrified he’d come unstuck—drove at a steady twenty miles per hour, my sweaty palms locked on the steering wheel. From the back of the van, Sawyer pointed out the old clapboard general store down the road from Seneca, built and opened in 1901, where Seneca guests had walked to buy the cigarettes they weren’t supposed to smoke indoors. He pointed out the golf course that the guests had walked across during Hurricane Agnes, to stay in a cheap hotel when the house itself flooded.

  Back at home, Sawyer hadn’t wanted to give me his drunkalog: the stories of Chinatown rotgut and his kids eating by candlelight. He’d wanted to talk instead about self-improvement and his success in sobriety: as an attorney, as a real estate developer in Delaware, as a recovery diplomat in his parents’ homeland, where he’d once been called, he said, the Bill Wilson of Lithuania. He’d visited alcohol wards all over the country in 1991, just after it declared its independence from the Soviet Union, and left behind a copy of the Big Book translated into Lithuanian.

  This work in Lithuania was a crucial part of the story Sawyer wanted to tell about himself—in which the upward mobility of his sobriety had been the culmination of a life committed to self-supporting labor: guarding produce stands overnight, as a boy, or working in a steel mill where molten steel poured like quicksilver over the flames. Sobriety allowed Sawyer to keep following the narrative arc he knew he’d been destined for: the story of a maid’s son who’d done right by his mother’s dreams, a story that began when his mother took him to the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and he saw the highways of the future, their impossible swirl and swoop. That day he felt awe—wanted to become someone who built things, someone with power, someone who changed the world.

  The sobriety story Sawyer told me was the story he’d constructed for himself to live inside of, like a house by the banks of a creek: a story in which he’d worked hard and been rewarded for that hard work, in which that work functioned as penance for drinking away the money his mother had saved for his education, or the money his family had needed for the gas bill. In his narrative, industry was the theater of his recovery. Good intentions turned into profit, and sobriety made the alchemy possible.

  It wasn’t until we were parked by the old Seneca site, with the engine killed, that Sawyer told me about the arrests, or the girl he’d fallen for in Baltimore (“the one who got away”) before he was married, and how he ruined his chances by getting drunk before their first date. It was as if the creek itself—or the memory of the house—had opened something in him, as if we were having our own meeting, right there by the water, surrounded by the ghost walls of a home he’d helped build. We faced the lock house on the canal, with its whitewashed bricks. Summer campers in life jackets gathered by the water in pockets of rustling neon orange.

  When he wrote poems, Sawyer said, they weren’t about his drinking. They were about his sober awe. He was still a boy wondering at the impossible highways of the future, still a man who was shown a bend in a creek, a dirty old fishing hostel, and thought, Sure, a bunch of drunks could stay here for a while. Decades after it got torn down, he found himself buckled into a motorized wheelchair by the same creek, telling a stranger what it was like—a stranger fifty-five years younger, who fifty-five years after Sawyer got sober gave her own version of the same moist-eyed apologies for the same stubborn thirst.

  We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote, and at first I took her words as gospel: Stories help us survive! But eventually I realized they were more like an admonition—a suggestion that there was something compromised and shameful about our dependence on their false coherence. When Didion wrote, “I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself,” understood her skepticism as an accusation: trusting stories was naive, a refusal to confront actuality in all its senselessness.

  But in recovery, I started to believe again that stories could do all the things Didion had taught me to distrust, that they could lend meaningful arcs of cohesion; that they could save us from our lives by letting us construct ourselves. I’d always had faith in doubt—in questioning and undermining, looking for fissures, splitting the seams of tidy resolution to find the complexity teeming underneath—but I started to wonder if sometimes doubt was just an easy alibi, a way to avoid the more precarious state of affirmation, making yourself vulnerable by standing behind something that could be criticized, disproven, or ridiculed. Maybe it was just as much a crutch to doubt stories as to stand behind them. It was so easy to point out gaps without filling them, to duck into the foxhole of ambivalence. Maybe sometimes you just had to accept that the story of your life was a crafted thing—selected, curated, skewed in service of things you could name and probably other things you couldn’t. Maybe you could accept all that, and still believe it might do you, or someone else, some good.

  Recovery reminded me that storytelling was ultimately about community, not self-deception. Recovery didn’t say: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. It said: We tell others our stories in order to help them live, too.

  When I went looking for the tales of Seneca House, I found that every sobriety story had its own particular veins of redemption. Sawyer crafted the story of his sobriety as a story of accountability—learning to be a responsible father—and manifest destiny. That’s why he needed to tell me about how much money he made. Gwen told her story as a tale of necessary humbling; Marcus told his story as a myth of hubris punished; and Shir
ley narrated sobriety as self-reclamation, finally putting herself first.

  If Sawyer told a sobriety story about upward mobility, then Gwen—the mother who’d driven her kids over the Potomac River in a blackout—told one whose first chapter hinged on failure. For the first sixteen months after she started going to meetings, Gwen kept getting nostalgic and picking up again. She saw a Schlitz ad with a woman at the prow of a sailboat, in a long flowing white dress—“You only go around once in life,” the voice-over said; “go for all the gusto you can”—and kept trying to figure out if there was a way she could still live on that sailboat, with her white dress billowing in the wind.

  Eventually, Gwen got so fed up with AA that she drafted a letter of resignation. The only problem was, she didn’t know where to send it. She asked her sponsor, who had been around for a while, and she said: “Why don’t you just give it to me?”

  Not long afterward, Gwen heard at a meeting that the old wooden fishing hostel—the one across the creek from her house—was getting turned into a rehab. She could see its creaky old sign from her living room window. She thought, Holy Toledo! She had to stay sober now, or else she’d be reminded of her failure every time she watched TV. Her last drink was a single shot of warm vodka at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. She and her husband had been entertaining all weekend and she’d been so good, hadn’t drunk a thing, and then once everyone left she went down to the basement bar and poured herself what she’d been denying herself for forty-eight hours straight.

  Forty-four years after her last shot, on March 7, 1971, I spent the day with Gwen at her retirement community in Maryland, where she told me about hitting bottom while we stood in the cafeteria line for Tuscan flounder: disappointing her kids, filling the vinegar bottle. When she finally showed up at Seneca, it was to offer her services as a counselor—she was a trained social worker, after all—but Craig the manager wasn’t having it. He knew her from AA, and knew she kept relapsing. He said she couldn’t be a counselor until she’d been on Antabuse for a year. But she could volunteer if she wanted. So that’s how Gwen became the Hobby Lady: teaching residents how to make moccasins, belts, wallets. She came across the bridge every morning with her Gordon setter, Misty.