Soft Light. Wide Horizons.
I have written journals for many years, and now I’ve been blogging since the end of 2008. Almost all of my writing in these venues is characterized by questioning, and struggling. Especially blogging, I have written mostly about my journey in sobriety, and then as I have become more settled, my journey in my professional life. Sobriety will always be the cornerstone of this space. I have reaped incredible benefits from the effort I’ve put into this long-rambling catalog. Several times a week, I wrestle another barrowful of words to the lip of this digital canyon and dump them in. Hoping they fall in some useful order.
When I began, my questions were existential. How do I live as a sober person? Can I contribute to the world? And through living and writing, I answered them. Deliberately. Most days.
Now, my questions have less urgency. I know how to live as a sober person now. I take the days from morning to night essentially as they come. I do today what I can do today to make my life better. Most days. And today, contributing to the world feels like something I do both personally and professionally. My life’s labor is useful. I am a part of larger things. I give back to communities I care about.
Today I have a new love in my life. A flock of birds at sunrise. Vast surfaces in constant flux, vibrating unpredictably, but along smooth, familiar patterns. Exciting and sudden, spontaneous. Ancient in the same moment; a thing that’s happened unchanging for eons. The undulations of the natural world flung suddenly into startling presence. This is the respiration of nature: the long breath that sustains the palpitation of thriving life.
It is the first time in my life that I am going into a relationship fully present. This is the best time in my life. When everything is warmly lit. While I face east into a limitless dawn.
Here’s a New One.
Well, friends, here’s a new one. My first research paper for MECMC was rejected by the first two journals I sent it to. Not surprising in either case. It was well reviewed both times, but at glam journals where the reviews need to be spectacular to have a chance. So I resubmitted to a well-respected second tier journal, in a field appropriate for the work. I settled on this journal after emailing a bunch of EICs asking if the topic was relevant to their journals. Most never responded, or responded saying that they don’t respond to such questions.
But this journal sent me back a nice reply from the EIC’s personal email address (stamped with that guarantee of authenticity “Sent from my iPhone”), saying that he would like to review the paper and to please submit it through the website. So I did. Fast forward a month, and today I got the review. Drumroll…
“Accept after Major Revisions.”
Um. I’ve never seen that before. I’ve seen “Accept with minor revisions.” I’ve seen “Revise and resubmit.” I’ve seen “Reject and resubmit.” I’ve seen “Major revisions.” I’ve seen “Reject.” (I’ve seen a lot of “Reject.”) But I’ve never seen any “Accept after Major Revisions.” I’ve never heard of it.
Now, the letter from the editor seems to suggest that this is a standard revise and resubmit. Please make the following revisions and we’ll reconsider it, you have one month. Comments from two reviewers, who had some thoughtful and serious things to say. So, I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that the “Accept” part comes true, anyway. I think I can respond to the review.
Does anyone have any experience with this editorial decision?
My Favorite Advice.
I think often, the best advice comes from people who have struggled in the deepest dark. In AA, we say that if you want to recover, go find someone who has what you want, and then do what they did. We’re all rising from the same dungeon. When I look around the room at my men’s meeting, I see drunks and junkies who are judges, and IT professionals, and business owners. I see criminals who are tradesmen. I see addicts: well, sober, sane, and productive. And I see people new to the program, a needle practically still hanging from their arms, breath rank with liquor, who will soon be these same productive men.
I belong there. A bloated, useless drunk, six years ago, I am a useful and helpful man today. I contribute. I found someone who had what I wanted, and I did what he told me he’d done. In the process, I lost my wife and my step-child. But I also lost my indignity. I lost my shame. I lost my uselessness and my indolence. Addiction robbed me first and most of all of my dignity. Of my sense that I was worth something to anyone. Least of all was I worth anything to myself.
I still struggle with value. The company I wrote about a couple of days ago has decided, it looks like, to forgo my input rather than pay my fee. Their prerogative, of course, but bruising. I regularly feel useless at work even while everyone tells me that I am making major contributions, and planning for my ascendance to higher positions. I feel false and uncertain; the rice paper wrapped around a bit of sweet: do you eat this? Is this edible? Or is this the garbage that something edible arrives in?
Sobriety’s journey is a peculiar blend of selfishness and self-effacement. I am sober for me and no one else. No one can claim my sobriety for their own. I poisoned myself to insensibility – to the rim of the abyss. And then, somehow, I rolled away. Some will say I was caught back by the finger of God. I don’t know about God. I know that when I was too sick to persist in my life, and when all those around me were too sick to persevere my sicknesses, change found me. And I hung from that change, first as a noose, then as a branch, finally as a ladder.
But to persist in sobriety, from only shortly after the outset, we need to turn our eyes away from ourselves. My experience is my experience, it is the life I’ve lived. But it is not only mine. I could not be sober without the broad profundity of all of the lives lived sober before me. Now, my experience is part of that sea of life. Now, I have become one of the people, who has what another might want. Who can tell that person, “This is what I did. This is what you can do.”
My favorite advice comes from a person who is not an addict. But she knows the world of addiction as intimately as I do, I think. She knows the mindscape of illness. She’s a writer, and like most great writers, she can distill great complexity into tiny crystals of words. In two words, she summarized the entire second half of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous for me. In two words, she told me how to participate in relationships. How to find contentment, and peace, in all this strange madness.
Focus outward.
Self Value.
I got my job at MECMC because a contact at a software company I’ve done business with and use for my work knew that MECMC was looking for a guy like me. And so he set it up and I got an interview and poof, I moved to ECC and now I have this awesome new job. He helped me out in part, no doubt, because I have arranged for various institutions to spend something like $50,000 on the company’s products. Maybe more.
Now, he’s asked me to sit in on a software development meeting and help them discuss how to make improvements for a future version of the software. This feels like consulting. So I told him that when I consult, I charge. It feels very strange to ask for money in this situation. But they’re a corporation, asking for my professional expertise.People get paid for that, right? It’s very uncomfortable.
Now, this does of course open up the very real possibility of a conflict of interest. I wouldn’t be being paid to endorse their product, merely to help them make it better. But taking corporate money for consulting might suddenly be seen as a conflict of interest when I do academic work with their products (Although, I also use other commercial products for the same purpose, and I don’t specifically endorse this company’s product.). I’m not sure precisely how this could represent a true conflict of interest, as they produce a decent tool to do the job, and in any case, no one is asking me which product they should buy.
But what matters in conflict of interest training is not necessarily an actual conflict of interest, but a perceived conflict of interest. And disclosing income sources like this is how we ameliorate the conflict. So if I’m taking money from this corporation (even though they are not sponsoring my research, which would be more obviously a conflict to me) I need to tell everyone that they’re paying me so that people can judge for themselves if my conclusions need to have that conflict taken into account.
Of course, all this is very preliminary. Most COI forms don’t require disclosure unless you’re making a decent chunk of change, and so far all they’ve asked for is a one-hour phone call. I can’t charge enough for that to warrant a COI disclosure. And who knows. they might decide that they were willing to take my input for free, but not for cash.
But fundamentally, I feel peculiar and unsettled that I’m of any value at all. Someone asked me to do a thing, and instead of saying “yes” or “no”, I said, “You have to pay me.” That requires that I value myself. That I place a value on myself. That I decide that I have worthwhile enough things to say and contribute that someone should have to give me money to get me to do it. That’s hard. It feels arrogant.
But, of course, I’d never expect anyone to contribute to my work without being paid. I’m even paying student interns who have made it clear that they’d work for free. Why does it feel so different when the tables are turned? Is this part of Impostor Syndrome? “My contributions are valueless and unimportant. Take them for nothing, that’s what they’re worth.” That’s how I feel, a lot of the time. Most of the time.
Home Buying Update – Sobriety Helps.
It’s kind of amazing how you can tell five different people the same thing and the sixth (who ostensibly has all the information you’ve given to the previous five) can tell you you forgot to provide them with the information you told the other five doesn’t exist. In this case, documentation of income from last year that I didn’t have last year. But I think it’s sorted now. Everybody seems to know the situation.
The house appraised for 106% of the selling price, which means that the bank is theoretically willing to give a loan for it, because if the loan wasn’t repaid they could seize the house and get their money back. Now I just have to convince them that I’m someone worth giving that loan to. I’m hopeful, and the people I’ve spoken to seem hopeful, but the loan needs to go to something called “underwriting”, which sounds far too much like “undertaking” for my comfort level. As if the loan approval might involve some kind of witchcraft with coffins and chicken blood and virgin sacrifice.
But I’m reasonably confident that it’ll go through. One of the great blessings of sobriety is that I have learned to live within my means, control my debt, pay my bills on time. It still stresses me out to do all those things, but I recognize their value, and apply myself to managing my life. Step one, the big part of step one for me, says that my life had become unmanageable. And that was very true for me. But now, now I have the skills and discipline to manage my life so long as I remain sober, and working an active program of accountability.
It’s amazing how little of the world I understood when I got sober. I had traveled to dozens of countries, had a doctorate, was married. And I knew nothing. I knew a great many things about theory and none of the practical aspects of life. And in only a few years of sobriety, working my way, guided by men in the program who figured it out before me, I have learned to do the things that normal human people learn by, you know, 25 or so. I had to lose a great many things. Family, wealth, time. I’m late. But I’m here. And I’m building castles in the wreckage.
Career Plans.
Thursday my boss sprung a little talk on me, asking me to present at the departmental meeting this morning. I did, talking about my current projects for about 20 minutes, and outlining how simulation works for some of the new staff who hadn’t seen it before. It was fun. And decent practice thinking on my feet, considering I’m giving a couple of important (to me) lectures this month, one to MECMC’s senior leadership and one on the web about the research I was doing prior to moving here. I’m excited about both. I’m trying to build something here, and buy-in from senior leadership will make it far likelier that I succeed. And lecturing for my old work will help get my name out there as a potential collaborator.
A couple of times recently, and today explicitly in front of the department, my boss said that he wants to basically have me set up my own sub-department. If I were a professor, at a university, instead of a hard-money quality improvement asset/researcher, this would be like a lab. Here, we’d probably call it something else. Even though MECMC is a major teaching hospital, I’m not faculty, and my department isn’t an academic department. We’re still figuring out exactly how to fit me into the framework.
It’s peculiar. I’m not faculty. But I am an academic. I don’t need to support myself. But I want to write grants. I am trying to figure out how to behave like faculty while being paid like hospital staff. When I talk about hard/soft money, my department doesn’t even know what I mean. They’re all hard money, and unfamiliar with the concept of soft. I’m not really judged on my ability to produce academically. Papers and grants are a bonus, not a requirement. I’m here to improve my own hospital. And that’s my goal, too. but I care a lot about getting the work out there and published so that other people can use and improve upon what we do here.
Our associate chief of surgery and my boss (who isn’t too highly placed) are both on the record as saying that they need to get me more assets so that I can have a larger footprint on the organization. They recognize that there’s too much for me to do on my own, and they’d like me to be able to make regular and lasting impacts on the systems we rely on to treat patients. It’s exciting. I’m envisioning a semi-research, semi-quality improvement type structure, where we get buy-in from the medical practices, they might combine to support a statistician, my department hires an associate-developer for me, and then get post-docs and other staff from grant money (you know, cause that’s pretty easy to get…).
I get scared about my long-term prospects and my life and plans. But the fact is, I couldn’t possibly be in a better position. I’m very excited. And now I need to go write my damned lectures or I’m going to be in real trouble.
November.
It is, somehow, November. I don’t remember this happening. So very much is going on that it’s a little mad here. My house buying is coming along nicely. I have selected a house, and the limited partnership that owns it and I have agreed on a price for its sale. Tomorrow I am having the inspection. I am expecting it to go well for two reasons: first, the house is fairly young (built in the 1970’s), and second, I let the real estate agent choose the inspector. Which probably means it’s a shady back-deal of some kind, preordained to give a good inspection. Which is why I will be walking through, asking questions, and just generally putting my ancient civil engineering training to use.
The house is, objectively, bigger than I need. But I think beyond its utility, it’s an excellent investment. I hope. Decent and improving part of town. New investment in jobs in the area. Lots of housing being put in. An upscale restaurant across the street. I’m told that only 10 years ago it was a fairly dicey area, but that since the big real-estate bubble it’s dramatically improved. Sadly, of course, what a lot of people mean when they say “improved” is “got whiter”. But the neighborhood is still very multicultural.
My relationship is flourishing is wonderful and exciting ways. We’ve been together more than six months now. It is real and exciting. I don’t have the right words for it. Not here. But life has gotten brighter and softer at the same time, clearer and more hopeful. There is a deep ease juxtaposed with a kind of blinding cardiac voltage; intimacy, adrenaline, discovery. Convalescence for a heart deeply scarred, but if I may say, resilient.
My sobriety is being nourished. My working life is going well. I am about to go on a brief, international vacation. I have several days off planned upcoming (vacation, house closing, holiday time off). And I’m planning a two-week vacation in March far, far away. All of these are very, very good things. What a world this is, when I am sober to participate in it.
Cookie Seeking.
Approval matters to me. External validation of my worth is important to me. Being social and fitting in matter to me. Contributing in a constructive way; participating in generally-making-things-better matters to me. It stems from insecurity (Do people really like me?), and it stems from conceit (I have valuable ideas people should pay attention to!).
I was told recently that my post about What we Teach Men was cookie-seeking. It’s not actually a term I had heard before, but I take it to mean that I was shallowly trying to gain the approval of people. Well, guilty as charged. I don’t pose at any special insight or profundity. And I freely admit: I seek the approval of people whom I respect. Having thoughtful people tell me that they agree with me or that I have done well is important to me. It’s how I know that I’m contributing meaningfully. If the people I respect tell me I’m getting it wrong, I have to reevaluate and think more carefully.
There was (at least one) something I got wrong in that post. Michael Tomasson pointed it out to me (and I may still get his point wrong…). When I wrote, “It’s not about rules”, I over-simplified. Of course there need to be rules for acceptable conduct. And of course people need to be held accountable to them. I hadn’t intended to suggest otherwise, but I also didn’t make it explicit. My aspiration, in writing the post, was to describe what I believe is a much-needed mentorship relationship between established and younger men, which allows us to use our strengths to help improve the working environment. But it also needs to be clear – regardless of intent – there are acceptable and unacceptable types of interactions, and those rules should exist and be enforced, with mechanisms for addressing transgressions.
I am at peace with my cookie-seeking. Some describe the lofty path of railing against all, ruggedly lonesome, as an ideal. The pioneers, who don’t care what anyone thinks and are going to cut their own path regardless of obstacles, are held up as a noble imago. And surely, we need people like that. But that is not the role I’ve chosen for myself. I desire social approval. Camaraderie. Social networks are crucial in my life.
Social networks of varying types are utterly necessary for me. The social network of AA has saved my life. The social network on twitter has inspired my academic pursuits, and my career ambitions. Family, university, community. These things support me in ways that I frequently don’t have the strength to muster on my own. And I try, often failing, to contribute back to those social systems. By helping others to find sobriety. By sharing ideas that I hope find purchase in the academic world, and the meta-academic world.
Yes, dear reader, I am seeking your approval. Because I value the opinions of the people I respect. I am conceited, absolutely. But I am not so conceited as to think that my ideas cannot be refined by the application of the fire of peer-review. I do hope that people find something of value here. And I hope that if what they find here is wrong, that they’ll tell me why they think so. Because thoughtful engagement and collaborative debate helps me feel like I contribute better. And that makes me feel useful. And I like me when I’m useful.
So. Cookies please. I’m not too proud to admit I like them.
The Kinds of Problems I Have Today.
When we’re drunk, we have lots of problems. We are sick. All the time. Hungover, yes, but also sick. Heartsick and sore and miserable. We don’t take care of ourselves. I have no actual evidence, of course, but I feel like I caught every flu and cold that went around when I was a drunk. I certainly never got flu vaccines. And maybe drinking a bottle of vodka a day isn’t good for the immune system in addition to all the other things it’s not good for. I don’t know. And of course, we destroy our livers and hearts and other systems. And I smoked, too. My lungs will never be the same.
We tend to not have jobs when we’re drunks. We get fired or simply don’t look for work. After I graduated, I spent two years half-heartedly looking for consulting gigs. I got one. I overpriced myself embarrassingly and lost another that was a sure-thing. So after my graduation, I was unemployed for more than two years, and I wasn’t even looking for work in any meaningful way. I felt like I deserved to have people come find me and offer me jobs. I was unfathomably arrogant and self-aggrandizing at the same time as I felt constantly worthless.
We go to jail, when we’re drunks. I was arrested for drunk driving shortly before my graduation. I only spent about 3 hours in jail. I was polite and contrite and appropriately ashamed of myself. Of course, it didn’t stop me from driving drunk again many times over the next two years. If I’d been caught, I’d have had very serious legal consequences. To say nothing of the damage I could easily have done by, you know, killing people. It was a risk I took hundreds of times. And I mean that. Even though I was drunk, it was a considered risk. I would think: “I’m way too drunk to drive. But I’m out of cigarettes. Fuck it.”
We destroy our families, when we’re drunks. I can’t even bring myself to recount the litany of horrors I visited upon the people I was supposed to have loved. I did love them. I just loved drinking more. Well, that’s not quite right. I hated myself more than I loved my family. And I drank to suppress that hatred of myself. And I drank because I loved being drunk. And I drank because when I didn’t drink, my skin crawled and my bones peeled and my blood itched. And so I drank. Instead of participating in the family I tried to build, I burned it all down.
Those are the kinds of problems we have when we’re drinking.
Today I have different problems. Today, I’m disappointed that I have trouble getting a paper into a journal. Or that I might get the house for 97% of the asking price instead of 94%. Today, I am unhappy that the brilliant and beautiful woman I am seeing lives in another city, and not in my city. Today, I am frustrated that I feel distracted and unproductive at the job of my dreams.
The comparison between the life I live now, and the life I lived only six years ago is astonishing. The problems I have today are essentially nonexistent. And all I did was give up. Do what I was told by people who had been where I was. Follow a simple plan of action. Find the people who had what I wanted and then do what they did. Yesterday, when I was stressing about the house offer I made, I had a long text conversation with someone I helped get into the program. She’s been sober for more than a year and a half now. And she was always wiser and smarter than me. She reminded me to look at the problems I have today. Versus the problems I had back then.
Six years ago, I was drinking as much as I could; hiding it. Bleeding in bathtubs because when I drink, I cut myself just to watch myself bleed. To watch all that inner gall leak out from within me. Today, when I bleed, it’s because of a minor accident. I apply direct pressure until it stops. And yes, I think a bit nostalgically about the release I used to feel from cutting. But that’s a problem of my past now.
Today. Today I have a great job, a wonderful relationship, and I’m buying a house in a city I love. And I got here by taking one step at a time. Working a program of accountability and action. And by going to bed each night, for five and a half years, sober. I am a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous. These are the kinds of problems I have today.
Processing Resentment.
One of the fundamental emotions that alcoholics deal with, especially before we sober up, is resentment. Resentment drives us to drink as much as any other thing in our lives. I suspect that resentment is also a source of misery for non-alcoholics; I know that al-anon deals with it extensively, and I know I see resentment splashed everywhere by lots people who externally seem to be unhappy. But of course, I can’t really speak to other people’s experiences. I can only talk about myself, and my own experience, and that of the many, many recovered alcoholics who have related their stories to me.
Resentments are particularly toxic because they, by their definition, don’t go away. We feel we are wronged, and we keep reliving the experience, like a trauma, over and over again. Nursing the anger and the frustration or the regret, until it is so present that we feel the urgent need for relief. This is where, for we alcoholics, disaster lies. We drink to assuage the negative feeling of resentment. But this doesn’t address the problem; we sober up to find the resentment still present. So we drink again, trying to forget. Trying to obliterate.
The key to understanding and processing resentments, in AA at least, is to understand four basic things (we do most of this work in our fourth step, but it is ongoing work in the tenth as well). (1) What was the event? (2) Who was involved? (3) What part of my self, or my psyche, does it impact? and (4) How did I contribute or participate? If we look fearlessly and thoroughly, we can almost always find a way in which we contributed to our own unhappiness. So people think that this means we are blaming ourselves for the wrongs that were done to us. But that isn’t true. Sometimes, yes, we have to accept blame. But sometimes our own participation is simply a fact of the circumstance, and not part of the cause.
When I deal with resentments these days, I almost always find that my part in it was not disengaging when I knew that I couldn’t make a difference. This is especially true about online arguments. The “someone is wrong on the internet” syndrome. If I want to be at peace, I need to learn to not care when other people are saying or doing things that I think are foolish or wrong, unless they directly impact me. I don’t have the power to influence, correct, or convince most people. And even if I do, it’s usually not my place to anyway. It can bruise my ego that everyone doesn’t immediately see that I’m right. Well, I often find I’m wrong. Sometimes, other people see it first. And that’s ok.
Instead of over-engaging, it’s better to have my own place (here!) where I can say my piece. And if it’s valuable to anyone other than me, than that’s nice. And if it isn’t, well, the only person I can work on is me anyway. So my resentments against others are not useful. Not to me, and certainly not to anyone else. My job is simply to keep my own side of the street clean. Other people have other opinions, other ways of engaging. If I don’t like it, it’s not my job to try to change it. It’s my job to separate from it and simply be the kind of person that I want to be.
Let the storms spin on. They are what they are. Acceptance is the key to peace, for me. The world is the way it is, and I can come to embrace the tautology.
Infactorium 