By Lesley Logan
Around the recovery campus, we refer to it as “switching seats on the Titanic.” It’s the delusion that if you change your drink of choice from, say, rum to beer, or switch from powders to pills, you can slow down the death spiral to a rocky bottom and everything will be okey-dokey again.
Of course it doesn’t work, so you hit your bottom, you give up the substances, and then… what?
Alas, the tendency toward self-delusion doesn’t just vanish. Otherwise clean and sober people often simply exchange one form of compulsive self-destruction for another. Drug addicts and alcoholics in early recovery might add something new to their resumes, becoming workaholics, porno fiends, on-line gamblers, philanderers, shopaholics, sex addicts—escape artists and adrenaline junkies of every stripe and degree.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
FREEDOM TO CHASE YOUR BLISS
No, we’re talking about something more benign. It’s the nerd who covers up his weirdness with the juvenile delinquent’s pseudo-psycho bravado. It’s the boy scout’s stick-to-itiveness hiding behind the damn-the-torpedoes recklessness that fuels the hard work of abusing psychotropic substances and getting into trouble. We’re talking about activities, sports, hobbies that come in for the full-metal-jacket addict treatment.
Call it the “galloping hobbyhorse.” The word hobby comes from hobbyhorse, a toy horse set on a rocker. The other definition is an all-consuming subject or activity; it’s like an obsession but without the swelling background music.
Sobriety buys our freedom from the rapacious creditor of addiction, and we start to stockpile the resources that we had once squandered so recklessly. There we are, stark raving sober, money in our pockets and time on our hands. Then, out of nowhere appears the mad scientist in us or the wannabe Olympian or the arts and crafts demon or the Good Witch of creative and spiritual transformation.
Unfortunately, the gift of recovery doesn’t come with instructions about balance. You now have the freedom to chase your bliss like a demented bounty hunter.
It starts out innocently enough. No one expects or even wants to be utterly consumed by, let’s say, embroidery, an activity that you probably didn’t spend your time idly bragging about in the bar: “I could kick some ass with a needle and thread if it weren’t for them no-good bastards…” (Wistful sigh, long pull on drink.) No, bar boasts aim high; they’re about all the trophies, best-sellers, off-shore bank accounts that coulda-shoulda-woulda been yours.
A houseful of fish tanks would definitely not have been on the menu of drunken what-ifs. For Clara, it started with one small fish, a Siamese fighting fish that she could keep in a small tank without all the gear. Perfect for an empty-nester who had recently woken up refreshed after decades of drunken stupors.
Soon she bought a bigger tank and another fish. You can guess the rest. By the time Clara picked up her one-year coin, her living room was more water than air. Tanks of all sizes lined the walls; her local pet store was on speed dial.
It takes a lot of energy to keep Clara’s Sea World ticking along. But the benefits include getting her out of bed each morning, and she starts each day in a meditative state. “When I’m cleaning the tanks or watching the fish, time vanishes,” Clara says. “I’m completely in the ‘now.’ Thoughts, time, the world—it all just disappears.”
SELF-EXPRESSION AND PLAY
The irresistible pull towards something that wakes us up and kick-starts our passions is universal. Clean and sober folks are particularly good at identifying the substance-free buzz, any kind of activity that can fill up those serotonin receptors.
Escape from the unpleasant reality of life is the same thing. But it differs in motivation: Rather than being surprised by joy, you strap on the old night-vision goggles and stalk that mother to the ground.
In terms of life enhancement, the difference between the locomotion is unimportant. You get there on either train. But the next stop isn’t necessarily fame and fortune, so put that out of your mind. This is about self-expression and play; ambitious expectation can warp the whole shape of your enterprise. Just have fun and feel good for a change.
Sports are rich in the feel-good factor: Running and biking produce endorphins that tickle the same spot in the brain as certain drugs. Group sports alleviate the common problem of isolation. No one is going to give you any crap for being sports-crazy.
Weirder hobbies may, however, come in for a bashing from normally helpful friends.
Clara is defensive about her aqua-obsession. She insists that it isn’t an escape from reality: “It’s an education about a different species’ reality.” But Ry, her 24-year-old son, thinks that she’s lost the plot and isn’t shy about calling her on it.”
It’s tricky to deal with family, work, and meetings when caught in the magnetic force field of your muse. People won’t be shy about judging your new all-consuming interest, as Clara well knew, and as James discovered when he got sober almost three decades ago.
“Everyone thought the way I’d go whole hog into my projects was proof that I was still out of my mind,” James recalls. “And these were people who really knew how insane I was before I got clean.”
James got sober when he was 24. When he came out of rehab, he went to a lot of meetings, which confounded some of his intimates, who had imagined a different scenario, something along the lines of “Problem solved.”
James laughs: “They’d” say, ‘James is addicted to meetings. Isn’t it terrible? He’s just exchanged one addiction for another.’ People pounce on that as if all addictions are equal, or that the program is bullshit. Thank god I was addicted to meetings.”
Nor were his friends and family keen on his headlong flights into innumerable fancies. “I was young, so I tried everything,” says James, who, in rapid succession, took up woodwork, scuba diving and horseback riding. “If I was curious about it, forget it, I was gone. I would stay up for days sometimes playing with some new idea I had.”
When a person stays up for days—sans stimulants—attacking a project, the M word is unavoidable. James’ therapist believed that such episodes were manic phases, and that James had a form of bi-polar mood disorder. “I don’t buy it,” James says. “When you’re a recovering alcoholic and addict, the professionals pathologize your behavior. But if I didn’t have the label of addict alcoholic, that same therapist would have called me a Renaissance man.”
FILLING THE EMPTY SPACE
The threads of psychiatric disorders shimmer through the tapestry of great human achievement with startling consistency. Behaviorists have studied the link, detecting that the filament dividing insanity and genius is often microscopic; hence your mad scientist and tortured artist.
We may be tempted to diagnose our hobby binges as acts of mad genius, but don’t expect the world to agree. Thomas Edison’s famous definition of genius as “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” is fitting to sober hobbyhorsing as far as the sweating goes. A sober person who helps a friend put together a dollhouse and a month later has a collection of miniature shops and houses that she built in a fever had that 1% inspiration. But it didn’t produce the light bulb. The world wants the light bulb, not a mini-town.
But the world needs the mini-towns — it’s gotta have the full-out energy of the creative orgy. It isn’t unusual in the rooms of recovery to see people strike—or be struck by—some kind of spark and run with it.
Which begs the question: Are the galloping hobbyhorses of early recovery—the sports, crafts, art, spiritual practices and major outbursts of education—simply re-harnessed addiction?
Maybe. Probably. But does it matter? People whose primary activities included nodding out, falling down and covering up get off their drug of choice and come back to life. Suddenly, all the bollocks they talked in the bar or over the pipe are good ideas that they’re ready to try out.
In the early months of sobriety there’s a great empty space where the active addiction used to be. That space can look like a black hole of hunger. Fear will fill it with some dark intoxication, a new seat on the Titanic.
But that space can also be a new canvas or empty stage, a seductive invitation, and sobriety gives you the r.s.v.p. to say Yes. And who can say what is too much? Everything is changed. The ordinary feels uncanny. Just waking up in one’s own bed without a hangover feels like being on the cusp of a great adventure.
Go on then, nothing’s stopping you. Jump out of bed, run a marathon, buy a fish, harness up a horse. Now, gallop.
Lesley Logan is the author of The Unofficial Guide to London and Frommer’s Day by Day Guide to London. She has been a ghostwriter, editor, copywriter, and more in her years in publishing.
