slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2008
- Messages
- 6,483
I had no idea how to fill the day when I got sober. Writing about it at least gave me something to do with my hands
When I was a kid, one of my many phobias was that somebody would read my diary. Not because I revealed anything particularly secret beyond run-of-the-mill complaints about my brother’s greasy metallic aroma or the lack of buying power afforded by my pittance of an allowance. It’s just that I’d written this journal only for me; it wasn’t polite enough or interesting enough or funny enough for anyone else to read.
Dry began as nothing more ambitious than a journal I started the day I returned to New York City from rehab in Minnesota.
I was feeling nearly electrified with the discomfort of existing with a blood alcohol level at zero. And I had no idea what to do with my sober self.
What did normal people do when they weren’t drinking?
I supposed they did things like clean, speak to friends on the phone and drop their kids off at gymnastics practice. In the past, periods of sobriety would be spent making apologies to people for various things I did to them while under the influence. So I sprayed Windex on things and rubbed paper towels over them, and with my free hand I clutched my phone and spoke to my cousins and my grandmother. I stacked the mail that had collected into two neat piles: bills to throw in the trash and pretend never arrived and mail-order catalogues for later, bedtime reading. Then I sat on the custom-made couch I’d purchased several years earlier and had only used as a sort of open-format clothes dresser. It was possibly the first time I’d actually used the couch for sitting. I felt like I’d been accidentally locked inside a psychotherapist’s waiting room after hours. Couches were ridiculously pointless unless you had an actual receptionist and maintained office hours. And while it was satisfying to have the debris picked up and air that smelled pleasingly like freshly wiped car windows, the fact remained that four in the afternoon was simply too early for bed.
Which left me with a throbbing and inflamed corpuscle of an issue I had to face immediately: Now what?
Across from where I sat was a round wooden table and a plastic patio chair. My computer was on this table, anchored to it by its sheer size and weight.
I walked over and sat, opened a new text document and started to type. Those first few lines simply announced my return from rehab to nobody in particular. I wrote about not knowing what to do with myself, my hands especially. It was like I was writing to a friend, only I didn’t know which friend.
I didn’t even think of it as writing, really, just typing. Something to do with my hands, because I have always needed something to do with my hands or else they will flutter about and twitch; I’m liable to smack them against something or cut into them by accident and require stitches. So it’s good to have them right in front of me at all times where I can watch them.
I found quickly that the mechanics of writing, of my fingertips jabbing at the letters, served to somehow focus me by funneling my attention, backspacing and typing my way into my thoughts. The soft and steady percussion of hitting the keys was a metronome of sorts, allowing the amorphous anxiety or confusion or discomfort or misery or excitement short-circuiting inside my brain to form into actual sentences, detailed thoughts and emotions with definite form.
This was incredibly helpful. So helpful and instructive to me that on that first day I began writing, I continued writing for the next six or seven hours.
And I kept on writing, day after day, month after month.
Dry was written largely in real time. Which is to say, if I went downstairs to the bodega three floors below for a bottle of ginger ale or cigarettes, I would go right back upstairs to my apartment and spend the next hour writing about going downstairs to the bodega for ginger ale or cigarettes.
In the years since Dry was first published, many people have told me they are amazed by the details within the book; how it’s the little things I do or say that really make them relate to the story of my own recovery. I am frequently asked, “How could you possibly remember so much?”
But I didn’t have to remember much of anything at all because I wrote Dry as it happened. Much of what I did or said during the drunken stupor that was my twenties was lost forever, but I could get down what was going on right now in this, my sober stupor.
As the length of my sobriety increased, so, too, did the length of the document. I still felt like I was writing a letter; albeit an insanely long one, to a friend. But now I felt like this friend would never have a face or a name.
It was, by far, the largest collection of words I had ever assembled, and I began to wonder, Why?
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/aug...drinking/singleton/?google_editors_picks=true
When I was a kid, one of my many phobias was that somebody would read my diary. Not because I revealed anything particularly secret beyond run-of-the-mill complaints about my brother’s greasy metallic aroma or the lack of buying power afforded by my pittance of an allowance. It’s just that I’d written this journal only for me; it wasn’t polite enough or interesting enough or funny enough for anyone else to read.
Dry began as nothing more ambitious than a journal I started the day I returned to New York City from rehab in Minnesota.
I was feeling nearly electrified with the discomfort of existing with a blood alcohol level at zero. And I had no idea what to do with my sober self.
What did normal people do when they weren’t drinking?
I supposed they did things like clean, speak to friends on the phone and drop their kids off at gymnastics practice. In the past, periods of sobriety would be spent making apologies to people for various things I did to them while under the influence. So I sprayed Windex on things and rubbed paper towels over them, and with my free hand I clutched my phone and spoke to my cousins and my grandmother. I stacked the mail that had collected into two neat piles: bills to throw in the trash and pretend never arrived and mail-order catalogues for later, bedtime reading. Then I sat on the custom-made couch I’d purchased several years earlier and had only used as a sort of open-format clothes dresser. It was possibly the first time I’d actually used the couch for sitting. I felt like I’d been accidentally locked inside a psychotherapist’s waiting room after hours. Couches were ridiculously pointless unless you had an actual receptionist and maintained office hours. And while it was satisfying to have the debris picked up and air that smelled pleasingly like freshly wiped car windows, the fact remained that four in the afternoon was simply too early for bed.
Which left me with a throbbing and inflamed corpuscle of an issue I had to face immediately: Now what?
Across from where I sat was a round wooden table and a plastic patio chair. My computer was on this table, anchored to it by its sheer size and weight.
I walked over and sat, opened a new text document and started to type. Those first few lines simply announced my return from rehab to nobody in particular. I wrote about not knowing what to do with myself, my hands especially. It was like I was writing to a friend, only I didn’t know which friend.
I didn’t even think of it as writing, really, just typing. Something to do with my hands, because I have always needed something to do with my hands or else they will flutter about and twitch; I’m liable to smack them against something or cut into them by accident and require stitches. So it’s good to have them right in front of me at all times where I can watch them.
I found quickly that the mechanics of writing, of my fingertips jabbing at the letters, served to somehow focus me by funneling my attention, backspacing and typing my way into my thoughts. The soft and steady percussion of hitting the keys was a metronome of sorts, allowing the amorphous anxiety or confusion or discomfort or misery or excitement short-circuiting inside my brain to form into actual sentences, detailed thoughts and emotions with definite form.
This was incredibly helpful. So helpful and instructive to me that on that first day I began writing, I continued writing for the next six or seven hours.
And I kept on writing, day after day, month after month.
Dry was written largely in real time. Which is to say, if I went downstairs to the bodega three floors below for a bottle of ginger ale or cigarettes, I would go right back upstairs to my apartment and spend the next hour writing about going downstairs to the bodega for ginger ale or cigarettes.
In the years since Dry was first published, many people have told me they are amazed by the details within the book; how it’s the little things I do or say that really make them relate to the story of my own recovery. I am frequently asked, “How could you possibly remember so much?”
But I didn’t have to remember much of anything at all because I wrote Dry as it happened. Much of what I did or said during the drunken stupor that was my twenties was lost forever, but I could get down what was going on right now in this, my sober stupor.
As the length of my sobriety increased, so, too, did the length of the document. I still felt like I was writing a letter; albeit an insanely long one, to a friend. But now I felt like this friend would never have a face or a name.
It was, by far, the largest collection of words I had ever assembled, and I began to wonder, Why?
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/23/aug...drinking/singleton/?google_editors_picks=true
