Learning to ride
An antidote to pseudo-spiritual "recovery"
For a stronger piece covering my thoughts on “Recovery,” please check out Against Recovery, which I wrote as a follow up a few months after this post.
This piece is part of the second writing series on “recovery” by a group of men writing on Substack that includes myself,, ,, , and .
The three-mile circuit around the docks where my floating home is tied up takes about an hour. I make my way up to the end of each one and wheel around to the next, sucking in the salt air and the winter light that slants in over the headlands, checking the minus tide, the mud exposed in the flats, listening to the birds out searching for grub, giving each neighbor a nod and a smile as I march along.
Passing though the shed at the entrance of Issaquah, I eye the giveaway shelf and snag a secondhand issue of The New Yorker, the front-cover illustration of a family gathered around the holiday table, every face turned screenwards, scrolling.
It’s easy to call up a picture of the pile of New Yorkers in my parents’ bathroom when I was a kid, the stack dense with growth like tree rings. I knew that there was something valuable in that pile, but there were just too many words. My parents must have been reluctant to give up the last link to their east coast roots, and so the magazines kept coming, week after week, and the gathered weight of unread material threatened to topple into the crusty, derelict space behind the toilet.
Finished with my evening loop, I tromp down the ramp to meet the hull where it sits on the mud, open the door, climb the stairs, and take a seat in the living room to flip through the cartoons. Two olives, one standing and wearing a lab coat, the other sitting on an exam table. The second olive has a toothpick through his middle and a red pimento sticking out of his topside. The doctor olive deadpans, “We can remove the toothpick, but we’d better leave the pimento where it is.”
Aside from the cartoons, I’ve rarely read anything in The New Yorker beyond the restaurant reviews—the easiest part of the magazine to digest, of course. For some reason the rundown on the wonders of New Haven-style pizza has been moved from the usual spot at the front of the book though, and so before I come to that, I land on a profile of the writer Joyce Carol Oates. It’s the subhead that catches my eye, about her “relentless search for a self.” I figure maybe she found something I could use—and I’m curious, just how relentless was it?—because my own search sure felt that way too.
In the fall of 1971, feeling helpless and trapped, she took a leave from teaching… “I had the idea of ‘suicide’ with me the way the dial tone on the telephone is there—always—just lift it up, there it is.” One day, she was sitting outside her rented flat after sunset, wondering how long she had to live. Suddenly, she felt as if whatever mysterious substance held her together as a single individual was gone. It was as if “the ‘field’ of perceptions and memories that constitutes ‘Joyce Carol Oates’—was funneled most violently into a point,” she wrote in her journal. “Another second and I would have been destroyed. But another second—and it was over.”
In the weeks afterward, she felt calm and optimistic. When she was cooking spinach and the water boiled over, she smiled and thought, How interesting, this scene of a woman mopping up green water. Her depression was gone. … “I felt as if my sojourn as ‘Joyce’ was through,” she wrote.
Oates was only thirty-three when her depression evaporated, along with her sense of identity. I’ve made some progress with both myself, and I also know that feeling of this can’t go on, that it can’t be possible to live so desperately, for all the years to come.
The feeling that things will get worse unless you do something soon.
The feeling that you’re on your own here, and that things are gonna get worse unless you do something, son.
The thing is, I’ve been doing all the things—and that depressive feeling still sometimes reappears. It diminished first with therapy and exercise—and then, nearly six years ago, after realizing how much my lifelong relationship with alcohol was continuing to contribute to that hopeless feeling, I stopped drinking.
The feeling further dimmed… and then it seemed to wink out. I’d finally done enough.
Or so it seemed—because that feeling has returned.
I’ve never quite gotten to the point of seeing myself from the outside in the way that Oates was suddenly able to—at least not on an ongoing basis—but I do have enough perspective to follow the lead-weighted line down to the depths of what plagues me, and it’s that this desperate feeling is evidence that I’m fucking it up, and the fear that if I’m already fucking it up, then how can I have confidence in whatever choice I make about what to do next?
No surprise that this leads to still more of the desperate feeling—and, for me, to the conclusion that the only solution is to escape. Not by suicide, but by going out, running, leaving, moving away. Abandon ship! Cut the lines and cast off, over the horizon, a clean break for distant shores.
My place does float, but it’s not a boat. I’m not going anywhere in this thing.
* * *
I’m still sitting on the sofa with The New Yorker folded in my hand when I get a text from an old friend asking me to dinner. When he arrives, I give him my seat with the view, and arrange myself on the floor with a pillow against the wall. Especially with the low ceilings in this place, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to get rid of all the furniture and set things up Japanese style, living down low, in a squat. On the floor, I feel heavier and more attached, instead of perched on a chair, my legs lumpy and tight, searching for the right fold.
My friend picks up a pocket edition of This Is It that’s been sitting on my coffee table.
“Have you read this?” he asks, flipping it open.
The book was hidden in a box for years, then found its way back out when I moved, to live with Bukowski, Thurston Moore’s noise memoir Sonic Life, and the self-published books of writer friends, Shot By Kern and Glen E. Friedman’s Fuck You Heroes, books of maps.
“Not yet, no.”
“It’s right here!” he says. “Zen and the Problem of Control. Exactly what we’ve been talking about.”
We step out into the night, heading for a nearby taco joint. My vision is clear for a change, my eyes bright and awake. We eat and laugh, recalling our conversations over the years, an ongoing thread about how these up-and-down cycles are part of our interior geography; how they recur no matter how well things are going at the time. Hungry for salt, I scrape up the last of the tortilla chip fragments with my fingertips as he drains his beer.
Back home again later, I open Watt’s little book, its black cover adorned with a photo of a leaf in a calm mirror of dark water, and sure enough, there it is—the same trap that Oates felt, and the double-bind that my friend and I chewed on over dinner:
All attempts to solve this problem seem to end in a snarl…[of] acute self-consciousness…self-control becomes a form of paralysis—as if I wanted simultaneously to throw a ball and hold it to its course with my hand.
Despite the desperate feeling that’s recently recurred, I’ve been though this before, and the evidence shows that actually, I’m not fucking it up all that badly—perhaps even not at all. Too much steering and not enough sailing may get you where you think you want to go, but that probably won’t be where you ought to be.
What I’ve learned along with that is that as much as I may wish for other possibilities, there isn’t any other life to escape to anyhow—and even if there was, I’d still be me, with my same neuroses. I also know by now that much of what feels like desperation is just a groove worn deep by damage done long ago, an earworm that will play itself until someone finally lifts the needle. Not a glitch—an echo. Not untrue, but something of the past.
Just as true though is that some part of this desperate feeling is a real message that deserves my attention. The unconscious self speaks through symbols and emotions, through downrushing dreams and feeling-states that wash over me in waves. Intuition may well speak more through the dread of warning than any joyful call. My belief is that some of what feels like depression is always a version of I can’t work like this. It’s a retreat that encodes a plea for change, and I’m forced to admit that I already know what some of those changes need to be. I’ve kicked so many addictions that I know a fair bit about how they work. My teenage habits of Marlboros and Hustler magazine that gave way to drinking, danger sex, dumb shopping, and stock-market gambling left still others.
There were computers in our house long before there were enough of them to call them screens, and I developed an early attachment to their endless inner workings. My systems are always clean and well tuned; the downside is that I spend far too much time fiddling with settings, preferences and updates, searching for little things to tweak. Not necessarily worse than the guy who spends his spare time wrenching on some hotrod out back, but when I catch the image of myself curled on my same couch like a sick child, matching colored blocks in the endless pit of an iPhone game, I know that’s part of the problem.
I deleted that game. Again.
I wish there was a way to block myself from downloading any games at all. It also helps to shut off the network while I’m writing, so that I can’t interrupt myself in the middle of every sentence to look up a reference or chase down some other distraction.
Even though they’re fantastic tools for writing and research, the conclusion that’s coming to the surface about computers is that, after all these years, there’s nothing in there for me.
* * *
Digesting my tacos that evening, I read from Watts’ Zen manifesto into the small hours, and it helped to be reminded of the contradictory nature of intelligence, how it “builds up a body of information too complex to be grasped by its own method,” the price of which is “chronic anxiety” and “systemic doubt.”
Watts wrote this in 1958. Oates was just twenty, and her “sojourn as ‘Joyce’” was not yet over, but he had already experienced the same sort of flash, in which he ’threw himself away,’ and “the ‘problem of life’ simply ceased to exist.” What he described as a “moving stillness,” was her as “a neutral or a transparent medium,” with “almost no personality.” The flow of living, beyond the snarl of attempts at self-control.
My specific addictions only matter in that I know from experience that I’ll feel better breaking the cycle. At this point I love giving things up that I’ve developed a habit of doing because they felt good in the past, or felt good for a short period of time, but that I know don’t actually feel good now. Just about anything can be addictive, and abstinence isn’t anywhere near as important as recognizing the pattern of clutching at things as opposed to “learning to ride.”
I know how it can feel impossible to change, and also how it can become possible to change nearly everything—and that change doesn’t require abandoning everything else.
At times I too have felt the release and acceptance of, if not no-self, at least less-self. I know that this is who I get to be, and that I can’t control all that much. I know that while I do have to take care of myself in the sense of not ignoring the messages that surface from below, there’s actually far less of me down there—or up here—than there is a much larger world I have no way of—or interest in—controlling.
I do want out of the trap, but I’m not here to disappear.
There’s a lot about “recovery” as it’s come to be defined by the addiction community that I don’t buy at all. My goal for recovery from any particular addiction—or disease, or whatever else—is to become recovered, better, healthy, cured—and most of all, well—not stuck in an endless state of vigilant, anxious avoidance. Reading Watts, however, got me to see that underneath the focus on addiction, capital-R Recovery has a lot in common with Zen. Come to think of it, I’ve met a lot of addicts down at Green Gulch.
Recovery and Zen come together in letting go, focusing on the present and the process, as opposed to some end state. Like the never-fulfilled version of recovery, the process of being here, now does go on forever, or at least as long as I’m alive, but the frame is different. Zen sits within the context of generative and infinite nature, while recovery has what feels to me to be an artificial, self-referential, and essentially negative frame. I’m not interested in a “recovery” that expands into a sort of pseudo-spirituality grounded in a backward-looking rejection of a past problem-state.
The recovery that I’m interested in, then, is a recovery from extremes, and a recovery of calm, balance and connection. It’s a recovery of equanimity and equilibrium, and of smallness in relation to the grand scale and complexity of the world. It’s a recovery of myself as an observer—not that woman mopping up green water, but the one that, seeing her, said “How interesting”—and moved on.
As I finished my run yesterday afternoon up on the mountain, a thick marine layer was closing in from the sea, lying low over the ridges and suffused with sunlight like golden foam. The fog followed me home, blowing at my shoulders. As I walked down the dock towards my front door, tiny droplets of moisture fell on my ears, the lights of my neighbors’ boats blurred by the mist.
I find myself lighter as I descend to my submarine bedroom, crossing through the arch into my cave of sleep.
The “Recovery” Series
For a stronger piece covering my thoughts on “Recovery,” please check out Against Recovery, which I wrote as a follow up a few months after this post.
explores how we use stories to build deeper connections and find fulfillment at , and his piece on recovery is here: is a memoirist, book coach, and journalist who writes at The Recovering Academic, and his piece is here: is a writer and freelance book editor who writes everything from memoir to personal essay to fiction to cultural-political commentary at . His piece is here: is a seasoned entrepreneur and passionate spokesman for addiction recovery who writes at . His piece is here: is a writer, disability advocate, creative coach, and a Steward for writers at Foster who writes, and here is his piece:
References and Further Reading
Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self, in The New Yorker
🎬 Joyce Carl Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind (documentary)
Alan Watts, This Is It
Ram Dass, The Practice of Being Here Now
The Quake of '89 — in which I consider other possibilities.
🎧 How I Dealt With Procrastination from Connor Beaton’s Mantalks podcast
🎧 My interviews with Latham Turner, Michael Mohr, and Lyle McKeany.
My own writing on addiction, including Against Recovery.
Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction
Johann Hari, Lost Connections
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Questions for you
What’s your own relationship with addiction, or recovery?
Have you ever had the experience of observing yourself from the outside?
What’s your relationship with your sense of self, and your identity? How much does it matter?
Read any Joyce Carol Oates? Alan Watts? Who are some of your spiritual guides?
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Really solid point here: "I do want out of the trap, but I’m not here to disappear." On a lighter note, I'm reminded of Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry," and the riff on going soft, when a character struggling with depression or anxiety would literally start to blur on the screen. When you're really depressed, it's not actually funny -- you do feel out of focus, like you're vanishing. Leslie Marmon Silko's character Tayo refers to himself in the third person, like Coates, during his time in the veterans hospital, where he claims that he has become "white smoke."
I wonder if there is ever a permanent "recovered." But I take your point that the perpetual "recovering" trope feels unnecessary and even flimsy.
Love that closing image -- evocative and unresolved. Way to let it finish in the reader.
I love this nuanced take on the word recovery and how recovered is an often fleeting state that’s not sustainable, if we ever get there to begin with. That can leave us feeling hopeless or like we need to constantly have our guard up so the thing—whatever it may be—that we’re trying to recover from doesn’t tear its ugly head again, which is also unsustainable. Instead, aiming to be present and calmly facing the challenge is a more healthy, realistic approach for the long term.