Advice to a Prospective PhD Student.
Yesterday, I was contacted by a former mentee who is applying to PhD programs. She wanted to ask me about my career path and know about her prospects as a PhD engineer in the world of health care delivery. This got me thinking about the project I learned about by reading BabyAttachMode and Scicurious writing about what they wish they’d known “back then”. It was a really great conversation, in which I hope I was able to tell her some basic truths which will help her make the best possible decision regarding career paths.
1. There is only one valid reason for getting a PhD: you really want a PhD. I didn’t make this up. I heard it on twitter. But it is absolutely true. Yes, some jobs require one. But it will also exclude you from some jobs. It would be very difficult for me to get a job as a basic engineer, or even in engineering management. A PhD “overqualifies” me. There will be excellent candidates that don’t have the PhD and that employers will assume are more equipped to the tasks of basic engineering than someone with a theoretical degree. The only real reason to get a PhD is the crushing sense that without one you’ll have disgraced your family name and failed to live up to the perfectly reasonable expectations of a mother who only wants what’s best for you. I mean, the pride you get from major accomplishments. You won’t get rich. You won’t be guaranteed employment.
2. In Engineering, with a PhD, there really are two career paths, at least, that remain available to you. Academia, and Industry. There are benefits and drawbacks to each. Academia is very satisfying and prestigious, and you get to develop your own ideas and push back the enveloping darkness that surrounds human knowledge. You know, the 3 hours a week you aren’t dealing with administrative bullshit factorial, writing for funding, arguing with reviewers who don’t understand your work, or praying that diamonds fall from space into the NIH budget. In Industry, you will work on other people’s problems and get much better paid for it (though, still not as much as a doofus who managed to graduate from West Tennessee Mining and Medical College).
3. Join twitter. Seriously. Immediately. You will find kindred spirits and better information there than anyone at a university will tell you in person. You will be given inside information that is available nowhere else.
4. In Academia, being good is not good enough. Everyone is good. You have to be lucky too. No matter how valiantly new investigators try to dismantle old-boys-networks, who you know will always matter at least as much as what you know. So, good, lucky, connected. You must be all three things to succeed. In Industry, who you know is extremely important. But being good matters more than being lucky. Not everyone is good. You can shine by being on-time, competent, and diligent. The point: no matter which path you prefer, prepare for both.
5. Study what you love, everyone says. Follow your dreams! Bullshit. Find something you enjoy, yes, but work hard on what’s relevant. Your pie-in-the-sky goal may be of no interest to corporations or to funding agencies. As a grown up, we all have to work on what we can sell, not necessarily what makes us excited. Those people who say that they wake up and go to work doing exactly what they love every day? They’re either phenomenally lucky that they love something marketable, or they’re liars, or a little of both.
That’s it. And if I’d been told all that, I’d still have gone on to do my PhD. And I’d be right where I am now. Very lucky to do something I trained for, I enjoy, and that’s relevant. But Jebus is it a lot of work. It’s not play, and it never will be. Work is work. Work hard. You’ll be successful by planning knowing that you will fail sometimes. Good plans account for false starts. Move forward through failure.
Interview! Huzzah!
Now the terror begins. In fact, I have a bone to pick with the twitter science community. Prior to joining twitter and learning all of the things that go into a good academic job-talk, I was too stupid to be afraid. I just went out there, gave my talks, and was given positions. I was like five for six. I talked to people, showed them what I can do, and they offered me jobs or graduate fellowships or consulting gigs. It wasn’t until after talking to twitter and learning that I was supposed to stress and panic about these things that I started stressing and panicking about these things. Of course, they’ve also cranked my game up to a whole new level. Because before, I was given all this stuff on potential. Now, I need to base it on results.
So. Here’s the deal. Prestigious East Coast Medical Center (PECMC) is flying me out next Wednesday the 28th for a 5-hour-long set of interviews, including an hour-long scheduled presentation by me. The Job Talk. As usual, over on the Tenure Track Job Search Advice Aggregator, Doc Becca has linked to many people writing about how to give a good academic talk. I’ll be scrutinizing it carefully. But this is not a Tenure Track job talk. It’s a position that the interview agenda calls “Improvement Specialist: Discrete Event Simulation Developer”. Which is good, because that’s what I do when I do direct, field-work-style engineering.
But it also means that the TT job talk advice may not apply directly to me. They will be less interested in how I am planning to develop any research aims or pursuing extra-mural funding. In fact, they may never want me to submit another paper or grant. As for the former, that’s fine with me for the forseeable future. I’d be perfectly happy not to submit another grant for a decade, it feels like. Papers, on the other hand, are a near deal-breaker. I want to be able to continue to write manuscripts and contribute to the literature as well as to my local hospital.
Because they matter to me in terms of how I think of myself now. I am a professional science-engineer. One of the things that has become a part of my identity in the past four years is that I do research, and contribute to the public record of health care engineering, and medical science. I want to be able to continue to do that. I want to build a bibliography I can be proud of. I want to leave something behind that people in my field will consider to have been a meaningful contribution. So, not simply the contribution to a particular medical center, but to the science of health care delivery and health care engineering.
So. PECMC has invited me out to meet their patient quality and safety team. This is precisely what I trained for as a graduate student, and what I was doing for the first two years of my job here. But then the administration changed and I was shifted over to research. I like research. I don’t like spending all my time chasing funding for a soft-money position. I want to have a job where the most important criterion for whether I stay employed is how good I am at my job. This seems like that sort of a position. When I spoke to them on the phone, I told them that this sort of work is also publishable in the quality and medical literature, and that I would like to be able to continue to publish. They seemed very receptive.
So now I find myself thinking about what I want from them. But they haven’t made me an offer yet. They have only asked me to come interview. I have to give a great job talk. And walk a line: direct impact on my local environment; improvement of patient quality and safety; publishable results; development of my own ambitions with respect to health delivery systems. Here’s what I’ve done. Here’s what I can do. Here’s what I’d like to do in the future. Get on my shoulders, and I’ll carry your hospital into the future.
Why I’m “Out”, Anonymously, Online.
Coming out as an alcoholic on twitter was, in retrospect, one of the best decisions I ever made with regard to my sobriety, and my science. The reasons are several-fold. And they also range from self-serving to magnanimous. One of my primary character defects is a need for approval and admiration. I am not confident enough in myself to have a permanent and stable sense of self-worth based on my own estimation of my own contributions, either to science, or to society in general. Being out as an alcoholic has helped with that.
The part that’s self-serving is simple. People regularly praise me for my “courage” in being out as an alcoholic. I don’t think it’s particularly brave. I think it’s a means of keeping myself accountable to a large number of people. Knowledge that relapse would disappoint my friends and loved ones is one thing that helps me stay sober. I didn’t get sober for other people, and I don’t stay sober for other people. But the idea of having to confess that I’d gotten drunk to all these people I know and care about is a powerful disincentive. And even though I don’t think it’s particularly courageous to be out as an alcoholic, boy do I love it when people tell me that it is. Because I like having my ego stroked.
The more magnanimous part of being out as an alcoholic on twitter, and here at Infactorium, is that it enables me to carry the message of recovery to the scientific and online community. And it has amazed me how many people have contacted me about their personal consumption, or that of their loved ones. Within the scientific community I’m a part of online, probably two dozen people have asked me for help, or confessed that they are uncomfortable with their own drinking or substance use, or that they have loved ones who they think are in trouble with substances. I follow about 400 scientists. That would seem, anecdotally, to suggest the rate of issues with substance use in that community is probably not different from the rest of the world at large.
Multiple people have begun programs of abstinence after talking with me about their use. People that I met online. That fills me with joy. It fills me with a sense of utility. That’s the kind of thing that helps to buoy my inherent sense of self-worth. People reclaiming their lives, people who didn’t need to lose everything prior to beginning their programs. People who can keep families, and jobs, and careers, and go on to do science and other important work. People who will (and have) become ambassadors in their own lives and communities for recovery.
Why am I out? Because it serves me. It bolsters my own sobriety, and my own ability to value myself in the world, to talk openly about my addiction issues. And because others have benefitted. And that’s the principal thing that drives recovery, for all of us. The opportunity to be of service to our fellows. To have a life of value that contributes. To hopefully leave this place better than I found it, in my own tiny way. To help spread something meaningful. Life is worth living, even for us, the addicts. We can have everything, everything, this world has to offer, except drugs. Or, we can have drugs and misery and isolation and death.
I’ve made my choice, today. I think I’ll make the same one tomorrow. And no matter how hopelessly you’ve struggled, if you’re in the grip of those coils, you can too. Just reach out. So many of us are here. Waiting.
“This is a Closed Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.”
Alcoholics Anonymous is intentionally disorganized. There are no rules from some central authority telling us how we have to run our meetings, what literature has to be read, etc.. Any two drunks who’d like to stay sober who meet up may call themselves a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Anywhere, anytime. It’s good that way. AA’s twelve traditions, (AA does everything in twelves, it’s a little silly.) explicitly state that each group is autonomous except in manners that relate to other groups or AA as a whole. And since very, very little fits those qualifications, each group is essentially its own master. And basically, groups are kept from going off the rails by the consciences of the members. Most groups read some basic AA literature every time, and follow a format that has stood the test of time.
My Wednesday night men’s meeting is a bit of a maverick meeting. We don’t read any literature. We do say the Serenity Prayer. Then, one person talks, and we all comment. That’s the whole meeting. There’s a lot of cross-talk. We give each other advice, and comment on each other’s decisions and programs. We admonish each other when we’re straying from the path. We hold each other accountable. We’re honest, blunt, and unabashed. We do this because it binds us together in a fraternity of men each faced with a disease that kills us – invariably – when we face it alone.
There are essentially two different sets of attributes that AA meetings can have that are meaningful in this context: {men’s, mixed, women’s} and {open, closed}. There are others relating to how a meeting is structured once it gets going (is there a speaker? discussion? do we talk about step-work? do we read from the book? etc.), but the two attributes above define who is welcome at the meeting. The gender attribute should be self-explanatory. The open/closed may not be.
Open meetings are open to all. Anyone – including you, dear reader – is welcome at an open meeting. You may show up, watch, and even participate in most cases (some open meetings do restrict sharing to alcoholics, but that’s uncommon). Many people who are not alcoholics come to open meetings for various reasons. They like to support an alcoholic in their lives. They want to make sure the alcoholic they know is actually going to the meeting (these people need their own kind of help). They appreciate the program and want to adopt some of the principles in their own lives. They are court ordered to attend and do not identify as alcoholic. I’ve seen all of these.
Closed meetings are for members of AA only. There is only one requirement to be a member of AA. You must have a desire to stop drinking. You don’t have to identify as an alcoholic. You don’t have to pay any money. You don’t have to get a sponsor or do the steps. You must have a desire to stop drinking. That’s it. But that matters. As far as most of us are concerned, if you do not have a desire to stop drinking, that is, if you can drink normally or you are content drinking alcoholically, you are not welcome. You are specifically, vehemently, not welcome to attend closed meetings.
Last night, at my men’s meeting, there was a man who was invited by one of our members, who does not have a desire to stop drinking. Specifically, he’s a gambling addict. He drinks normally but cannot control his gambling. He goes to gambler’s meetings and works the twelve steps as they apply to that program. He was invited to our meeting by his brother, who is an alcoholic. I didn’t know this when the meeting began. The gambler spoke a few people before it was my turn. When it was my turn, I said:
“Sir, I welcome you, and you seem like a fine gentleman. I respect your brother, who is an important member of this group. I hope you understand that what I am about to say isn’t personal. This is a closed meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Attendance is restricted to those who have a desire to stop drinking. I am passionate about this because I love this group. AA is explicit that those who can drink normally should attend open meetings. I had other things I was planning on saying tonight – ” (at this point, the gentleman stood and offered to leave) ” – I am not asking you to leave. I am saying that if we are going to change this to an open meeting, we need to have a group conscience before hand. Thank you.”
The meeting went on, and we closed. I asked some of the old-timers if I was out of line. The general consensus was that I was not, I had every right to say what was on my mind. I said that I’m happy to be bound by the group conscience, but that AA is explicit that you cannot be a member of AA if you do not have a desire to stop drinking, and that if we’re going to welcome others, we need to have a group conscience opening the meeting. Which is problematical, because the club it’s held in only accepts closed meetings. We agreed in principle that there would be a group conscience on the matter at some point in the near future.
Then we all went to dinner, including the gambler, whose hand I shook and I told him that I was personally quite happy to make his acquaintance.
There’s a men’s meeting on Saturday mornings that I went to a few times. They open the meeting by saying: “This is a closed men’s meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. That means that if you’re not willing to identify yourself as an alcoholic, get the fuck out.” Our community matters. We save each other’s lives. This matters for all of us, it protects newcomers, who might otherwise be afraid to share their stories, their alcoholism. Closed meetings exist because they allow us to share freely, fearlessly, and honestly among those, and only those, who understand our condition.
I am a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I care about my community. I will defend it, in order to protect you, out there, considering your relationship with alcohol, unsure if you need to come into the rooms, unsure if you have a desire to stop drinking. Come. Come to an open meeting. See who we are. What we’re here for. If you’ve decided you want to stop drinking, and you need help, you need a community, if you want what we have, and are willing to go to any length to get it, come to my closed meetings. I defend that space, to defend your best hope to attain what I have.
And, it’s not personal, but if it’s a closed meeting, and you don’t have a desire to stop drinking, get the fuck out.
Measuring Success in Sobriety.
One of the most vexing problems in treating alcoholism is that it is extremely difficult to find reasonable measures of success. Once again, when writing this post I need to point out that I am not an alcoholism researcher. My interest in the subject is as a concerned laymen, and an alcoholic. I am an engineer who does health care research, not a physician, psychologist, or biologist. I’m reasonably educated and informed on the subject matter, but not an expert. Please consider this entirely opinion, not expert testimony.
I am regularly disparaging towards the state of alcoholism research and treatment in the scientific and medical community. This is not because I think that the scientists and physicians who do this work are ill-intentioned, or incompetent. It is because I think that for the most part, people continue to misunderstand the disease of alcoholism, and that non-sufferers may be largely incapable of understanding it. That is not to say that all alcoholics understand it (we don’t), or that we have perfected alcoholism treatment in AA (we haven’t). This disease continues to vex all of us.
The problem with measuring sobriety is that it’s open-ended. For alcoholics, the only way for us to live as successful members of society is in total abstinence. So, the common measures of “duration of sobriety”, “time to relapse”, etc., are utterly useless to us. If I drink again, I will descend immediately to my previous state of desolation and uselessness. We all do. Certainly, there are people who are problem drinkers when young and later learn to moderate. However, once the disease has progressed to dependence, to alcoholic misery, there is no going back, at all.
So, a drug that increases mean time to relapse from 10 days to 20 days is not helpful. And in general, I think methods which attempt to address alcoholism through medical treatment (beyond the acute phase of detoxification), are generally doomed to fail. Because nothing can make us want sobriety. Nothing except reduction to the last, worst place where our souls, our psyches, can no longer tolerate active addiction. And the fact is, many, many, many of us will choose to die rather than recover. All that engaging with the medical apparatus does for those alcoholics is chew up resources that could be spent aiding people with hope.
Recovery begins when we reach out for it ourselves. Legal consequences, health consequences, those things help bring some of us there. But not all of us. Some of us reach out after we lose our families, or our jobs. Most of us require more dire consequences that those. But we all reach the same emotional/spiritual space: intolerable demoralization. And the only emergence from that is total abstinence combined with a wholesale investigation of our selves, abandonment to something greater than ourselves, and commitment to a lifelong program of daily maintenance of our spiritual/emotional/psychiatric condition. Any relapse is death.
Part of the reason that medical/psychiatric treatment of addiction is so ineffective is that the very act of engaging with medical care can thwart progress in sobriety. We alcoholics will seek out any excuse to keep drinking. Any excuse to blame our problems on anything other than our own drinking. Any toehold we can find that allows us to blame someone else for our failures, our feelings, our shortcomings. Frequently, this means the physicians and other mental health professionals who are trying to treat us.
There is no cure for alcoholism. And so, when alcoholics engage with medical care seeking a cure, seeking a way out of alcoholic misery that allows us to either drink normally, or to give up alcohol without effort, without pain, we then use the “failure” of medicine to cure us as an excuse to continue to drink. “It’s not my fault,” we say, “the doctors failed me.” When what has happened is that we tried to find the easier, softer way, of letting someone else relieve us of our own internal burden. We expected a magic cure from a doctor. There isn’t one.
So, even if we achieve some small measure of abstinence by engaging with treatment, or medicine, we end up resentful and embittered, and still wanting alcohol. Because we entered into the treatment not wanting sobriety, but wanting an easy way out. Medicine is capable of allowing us to detox from addiction without dying. But it cannot make us want to be sober people. And it cannot make us take responsibility for our own recovery, and for the damage we did while drunk. But it can enable us, by assuming the responsibility for our failures (in our minds, not in reality, of course.).
Here’s the irony: If we do not want sobriety, medicine will only help us fail. If we truly want sobriety, if we are willing to go to any length to get it, then medical interventions are certainly helpful in detox, and possibly in reducing acute craving in the early stage, in helping to reduce the burden of alcohol dependence. But if we are in that state, then medical interventions are unnecessary, for what we need is willingness to understand that alcohol is not our problem. We are.
Home again from Rome.
I am home again. A tragically short trip. I wish I’d had longer. There is much to see in Rome, as it turns out. It’s this whole amazing city. In three days of wandering, I did manage to see all of the sights that I’d intended to see ahead of time, and a few I’d never heard of. So, a general accounting of the trip, after arrival, which I’ve described in previous posts:
The Colosseum: Perhaps the most iconic of all of Rome’s great landmarks, I cannot begin to do justice with mere words the awesome impact of seeing the Colosseum. Perhaps it was in part because I was so tired, so I’d love to hear from people who’ve also done Rome. But when you walk out of the metro station, the Colosseum is just there. It’s enormously, impossibly, present. Huge. Shocking. Blinding. It was 9 am and the sun was shining through the arches, with high cirrus drifting in a field of Parrish blue. The sensation is as shocking and fixating as having ice water thrown in your face. Inside the Colosseum is incredible; very well preserved. You can feel the ancient combat on the floor below. I wandered around an hour or so before heading up the Via Sacra and seeing the Roman Forum. The Colosseum is surrounded by arches and ruins, and the old Roman Senate. If you’ve any pull toward the ancient western world, you simply must see this place.
The Vatican Museum: Next up on Friday, I went to see the Sistine Chapel. It’s in the Vatican Museum, which is opulent to the point of excrescence. Part of me was deeply disturbed by the incredible wealth of the Vatican, which might as well be dipped in gold. So many places Catholics languish in vile squalor, and the Vatican has diamonds overflowing their pockets. It’s a bit unseemly. Nevertheless, the Sistine Chapel is amazing. I have learned that Michaelangelo was essentially the PI of the project to paint the ceiling, which took about four years and for which he was paid about 2 million dollars in today’s money. He did the crucial work himself, but a lot of “post-docs” worked on it too. And a priest yells at you to be quiet about every forty seconds. It was awesome to see the original great work of art, but the experience wasn’t mystical or transporting.
The Spanish Steps: I hadn’t heard much about these prior. Knew the name. Went there on Saturday morning. They’re a lovely set of steps, built in the 1700s, overlooking a small piazza with a fountain in it. Pretty. Hard to say much more. They’re a major landmark, and well-regarded. I thought they were nice. The view from the top of the steps is down a long alley like avenue, which looks for all the world like a movie set backdrop.
Galleria Borghese: My friend Chicago Joe recommended that I see the Galleria Borghese, a tiny museum which only allows a few people in each day and them only for two hours each. You have to book tickets in advance. Inside they have the greatest sculpture ever wrought by the hand of man. Paolina, by Canova, is there. Which is stunning. The marble couch looks soft. But the true masterworks, which I was utterly unprepared for the mastery of, were the Bernini works. Bernini’s David. Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. Bernini’s Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius. Unfathomably amazing. It is impossible to believe that they do not walk, quickened, at night. I believe that I could now immediately tell any Bernini from any not-Bernini. He is unequaled. There is no one in his class that I’ve ever seen.
Fontana Trevi: I went from the Galleria Borghese to Fontana Trevi, at the advice of Doc Becca. I’d actually never heard of it, or perhaps only in a Dan Brown book. It’s a huge and impressive fountain, and I got gelato and tossed a coin into the fountain. A coin in Fontana Trevi is supposed to assure your return to Rome. I sat there as dusk descended. A wonderful place to let the sun go down.
Saint Peter’s Square: The last thing I did Saturday was to go to see the huge basilica in the Vatican. There’s an enormous obelisk, in a collonaded square, topped by statues of.. saints? I think? dozens of them. I didn’t go in to the basilica. Long line and exhaustion, and I didn’t feel the need to spend any more money there. Though, I’m not sure it costs anything. But seeing the square was decidedly worthwhile. It’s one of those central landmarks of western civilization that’s been burned into our collective consciousness for generations.
The Pantheon: Sunday morning I went to the Pantheon, a hall that predates Christianity, but which is now a church. It’s a stone rotunda with an enormous hole at the top, a feat of engineering which would be troublesome today, but which was accomplished prior to the invention of the zero. Astonishing. Like Fontana Trevi and the Spanish Steps, it’s in a tiny space. Rome does not have much in the way of huge, wide open plazas the way Paris or Berlin does. Everything is close and stacked together, and hard to see.
I walked tens of miles through Rome, also seeing Pont- and Castel Sant’Angelo, and Piazza Navona. I’m running out of my ability to describe things. It was far, far too much to see in three and a half days. There are winged angels on chariots at the tops of a bunch of buildings in Rome. No idea what that’s all about. Very much worth figuring out at some point. But I put a coin in Fontana Trevi. I’ll be back.
My flight home was awful. It was meant to be ten and a half hours. It ended up being fifteen because a woman had a heart attack and we had to divert to Dublin to let her off. Then, she didn’t want to get off, and the Captain had to tell her: “Whether you go to the hospital or not is up to you. But you will get off my plane. I won’t take off again just to have you die over the Atlantic.” The plane was packed with rude, elderly American women who were on a spiritual high and couldn’t seem to get around the fact that I didn’t like having them rub their giant asses in my face while they chatted in the aisles. I eventually had to tell one of them: “You are seriously violating my personal space, and it’s making me very uncomfortable.” in a voice only just shy of homicidal. It took every ounce of civility I had not to murder everyone.
So now I’m home. There’s a grant to write. PECMC is going to bring me out for a job talk and interviews. I have shit to do. But I’m glad I went impulsively to Rome. It was worth all the trouble and expense.
A Day in Rome.
I have wandered about Rome for about seven hours. Ancient Rome and the Vatican Museum.
When you walk out of the Colosseo Metro stop, the stone edifice hits you like a firehose. It’s bracing, shocking, amazing. Blinding.
The Sistine Chapel is incredible as well, in a very different way. I can’t begin to describe it right now. I have no more brain left. I have melted into Rome. I am puddled.
God Bless the French.
Half an hour from Rome. Alitalia flight 333 from Paris. God damn the weather, and god bless the French. I should’ve been in repose, rested and along to see the Vatican by now. Instead I’m jousting at elbows, 30 minutes from elation and Mediterranean balm.
I charged through Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, that labyrinthine testament to galoise indifference to scheduling tautologies. Yet, I met an able, sympathetic immigration control officer, who waylaid me only as long as it took to pound a stamp into my passport and point me toward terminal F. There, the security line was short, and rapidly attended by competent, engaged staff. My poor, clipped French was graciously accepted and responded to in English. My bag was searched, my contraband diet cola binned (“it is forbidden”) and I sprinted thence to my gate, where my plane was just to begin boarding. All together, I spent less than 40 minutes, I think, from airlock to airlock.
I wasn’t supposed to see Paris on this trip. Not even a dusting of rubber on the Parisian Tarmac. But a brutal nor’easter, the second monstrous cataract of what promises to be a grim winter, blasted through New York City the same hour I was to fly through. I rerouted my itinerary, at the cost of four hours and $28, at literally the last minute, from STL-JFK-Rome to STL-Detroit-Paris-Rome. I was assisted by Delta airlines personnel who had little reason to be as helpful as they were. Ably. Promptly. Politely. Considering the last minute machinations, everything has gone as fluidly as anyone could ask. Certainly me.
I am free. I am fearless. If I drank, I would never have been able to negotiate a foreign airport with ease and confidence. I’d have done what I always did: arrive drunk and exhausted. Instead, I slept for four hours on the transatlantic leg. I am whole. Tired, but capable. Ready for the bright sun and black espresso of the Eternal City. Appropriate; according to my body, to my mind, I currently exist outside of time.
But I’ll break my elbow before I’ll surrender an inch of plastic to this rancid gourmand beside me.
Election Day; Step One with a Sponsee.
Tomorrow, regardless of who wins, I am fleeing my country. But I voted. It took about an hour in a church basement that is a serious, ominous fire hazard. One personal point of pride was to help a Hmong (I’m reasonably sure based on the name…) family get to the right line when impatient people were giving them bad instructions because they thought they were being cut. They did not speak English well, and were clearly unfamiliar with our alphabet. When I stepped up and asked for their registration cards so that I could direct them to the right place, the people who’d been sniping at them were a bit cowed. The world works better when we help each other. Or at least, voting in south St. Louis does.
My mind is totally checked out. I want to be gone already. But I have a grant to write and a paper to revise. But I’m very excited to simply get out again. It’s been nine months since I traveled, and that’s a good length of time. I do worry that if I take a new job I’ll get less vacation time. Professorship jobs of course are very flexible. But healthcare engineering jobs may be less so. But in the negotiation portion of the job I’ll work things out. If I got 15 paid days a year I’d be more than happy. And I’d be willing to take less money to have that. Having only 10 days a year feels like far too little.
I had a lovely sit down with my sponsee yesterday. I went to his home and talked to him about step one. He’s getting it, I think. I also gave him his 90 day coin. He’s engaged to be married, and his fiancée is working three jobs to pay the mortgage while he’s unemployed. I told him he needs to get a job, even just seasonal retail. He needs to start making a contribution to his little family’s finances (they don’t have children). He needs to get out of his head. I told him he can advance to step two as soon as he finished a few more pages of writing.
Writing matters, when doing the steps. I’m not sure what I’d do if I had an illiterate sponsee. Teach him to read and write, maybe. But writing is crucial because it gets us invested. When we’ve got skin in the game, when we’ve done work, it’s harder to turn our backs on sobriety. One thing that helps to keep me centered in my sobriety is knowing that I have worked so hard at it. And while my own hard work was never enough to get me sober, my hard work in a community of people dedicated to progression in sobriety together has been enough to keep me sober. And that’s an incredible thing.
So, my sponsee is going to have to do the work. I can’t do it for him. But I can be part of the bedrock of his community, leading him to stable ground.
Progress.
At the beginning of a lot of AA meetings, we read the opening to chapter five from Alcoholics Anonymous. Most of the critical aspects of AA are listed there, including the twelve steps. But one aspect, one which I think is responsible in large part for the success of the program, contained there is almost included as a throwaway line: “We claim spiritual progress, rather than spiritual perfection.”* I think this is utterly important for us in many respects, because life, in general, can be really discouraging.
It’s hard to see progress in the face of discouragement sometimes. This is true for me in many areas of life. My career is in total flux. I will almost certainly not have this job soon, which makes submitting the grant I am working on a matter of some difficulty. It’s very unlikely to be funded on the first try, and if it isn’t I’ll have no job from which to resubmit. And I’m actively trying to find a new job anyhow. So, hopefully, the score won’t even matter (There’s essentially no chance that I’d be able to take the funding with me if I were to go elsewhere, the rules of this funding agency don’t allow it except in special circumstances.). Hopefully, I’ll have a new job and there will no need for the grant to be considered one way or another. The job I’m hoping to get would not be interested in my receiving that grant anyway. So career progress is hard to see at the moment.
Progress in other arenas is often similarly frustrating. I’ve been very lax with respect to my fitness regimen lately. I’ve run only a few times in the past month. I have continued to see my personal trainer an hour a week, which is definitely useful, but it doesn’t substitute for 20 miles a week of running. But, even with that lapse in discipline, I’ve maintained. This weekend I went out and ran five miles, making the first 5K in thirty-two minutes, which remains a respectable time for me. And in general, the fact that I can simply go out and run for more than half an hour without stopping represents a massive achievement considering where my health was only five years ago. Only three years ago.
But where progress is usually apparent to me is in my sobriety. And in that of others. And I’m very grateful for that. I’m meeting with my new sponsee after work today. We’re going to go over his step one work. I’m hopeful it’ll be good. He’s clearly a sensitive and thoughtful guy. He’s prone to isolation and anxiety. And he’s a drunk. And these things all go together. I can imagine it might be hard for him to see progress in himself. It often is for us in the beginning. But from the outside, progression is obvious. He talks a bit longer at meetings now. He makes jokes. He came out for dinner with us after the meeting last week. I could tell he was a bit uncomfortable. That’s fine. He needs to make friends. The social system is an enormous part of what saves us.
And of course, I can easily see the progress in myself now. I haven’t had a drink in more than four and a half years. That alone is incredible progress. Time spent not-imbibing is incredibly restorative. I don’t know all the medicine, but I know that our brains and bodies don’t recover immediately from decades of abuse. It takes time, lots of time, to improve. But we do, and I have. I am, indisputably, in the best health of my adult life. And it’s pretty good. All my blood work was normal last time I had it checked, and my blood pressure hovers around 115/70. I still have a paunch to lose, but I’m in good shape and getting better.
And of course, the crucial measure of my progress is that I’m generally happy, generally healthy, and I know how to be a part of the world, to be of service, to help others to achieve sobriety. All my anger and frustration can pile up, but in the end, it’s just feelings. Feelings matter, of course, they’re critical. But how I live in the world is determined by how I act on them. These days, in sobriety, I can act responsibly and with circumspection. And that generally allows me to be content.
And it allows me to take responsibility for my own life and happiness. I’m impulsively flying away on Wednesday. Not saying where. I’ll only be gone for a few days. But I needed to do something silly and wonderful and fun and impulsive and foolish and exciting. So I am. I’ll be back Tuesday.
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*As usual, “spiritual” need not mean “magic”. This concept is perfectly compatible with humanism, for example.
Infactorium 