Challenge

This post finds me in my last hour of spring break.

Sixty minutes remain in my paid vacation. With the last Monday of the month on the horizon, I knew I needed to take this interval to create a blog post, something to keep the miracle of the mundane afloat.

Usually, in the course of the month, a topic or theme emerges. I used to write for the website with much more regularity. For a year I wrote two posts a week. Then I started writing a post a week, then two posts a month. Now I am down to one post per month. And yes, I have felt, with increasing frequency, that this whole experiment, this blog, has run its course. I had to switch the production schedule from the 1^st Monday of the month to the last. And that is where you are reading me. The last Monday of March.

How are you? Have you been keeping up okay?

It’s a bizarre relationship between writer and reader. Imagine having an in-depth conversation—which is all writing is, a conversation—and never looking the person with whom you are speaking in the eye, or being able to take a break from your own runaway thoughts to ask, “enough about me. How about you?”

I won’t lie to you. Aside from the writing, I don’t spend any time on the blog anymore.

I used to work on it in all sorts of ways: promotions, podcasts, guest posts. But even then, at the start, what I cared about was generating an audience so that I could sell some books to a publisher. I was a maniac about my site’s stats. I followed the manual on this. Blogging is like social media. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Good blogs — the sort, at least, that build a platform, not publish from atop one — play the game. I’m through with it. Like so many experiences initiated on a screen, the game never felt wholly fulfilling or satisfying. Instead, it was insatiably impossible to master. This can be tantalizing for people like me. For addicts. For those addicted to measurable outcomes.

This addiction to results is not, as I first believed, an intrinsic value in the human personality. I’ve come a long way in this line of thinking. Alcoholism isn’t genetic, in my opinion. Gabor Mate, the Canadian writer and clinician, changed my mind on this. Science seeks the alcoholism gene like it is some holy grail or fountain of youth. But the problem is not in our genes, it is in ourselves, for we are the underlings.

The reason addiction appears to run in families is because we, generally, raise our kids in the manner in which we were raised. Like-father-like-son occurs because a father is his son’s primary role model. It doesn’t matter if this relationship is agreed upon or not. Parents are, in point of fact, the very first people every human being looks up to. And those years of taking impressions and developing personality get baked into our souls.

The evidence sits in front of me every night at the dinner table. My children are keen observers. There are some evenings when my 2 year old will, like a parrot, repeat everything everyone says.

My son remains very curious. Lately, he has set his sights on language.

“Why do we have language?”

“We can get into that. You know, I took a class on the history of the English language.”

“I don’t mean English. I mean all language. Why is it there?”

“I think language exists because we have to agree on a certain set of sounds to be able to work together. It likely all began with pointing to objects and agreeing on the sound that represents them.”

How would you have answered his question?

When I thought about it, I became more and more convinced that the language building impulse all comes down to a series of agreements. Then, you might ask, why is language used to express disagreement so often? Well, I’d answer by saying most disagreements do, in fact, stem from a difference in opinion on the meaning of words. What does it mean to be happy? To be an American? What is essential to life? How do you define selfishness and altruism? All language is symbolic, after all. Every word represents something else. We create this array of sounds so that we don’t have to get burned by the fire to learn that fire is hot. Symbols rely on interpretation. Language is only effective if the words I use can be understood by you in the same way that they are understood by me.

And how rare is that nowadays?

It’s part of the reason why I love to write so much.

Like other impossible feats, writing presents the fundamental challenge that I can lay something on the page so exactly that the reader must assume my interpretation of the language and meaning. It is impossible. But it is what is impossible to the human experience that makes the experience of being human so motivating.

Maybe, as a father in long term recovery, I can give my son the tools to live his life without needing incessant validation. If addiction is genetic, there is little I can do. I prefer to understand alcoholism as a learned behavior. Now don’t get me wrong. While my son has never seen me take a drink, I can still teach him how to be an alcoholic. Alcoholism, in its essence, has very little to do with alcohol, after all. There are underlying conditions to look at. And while it can be learned, it cannot be unlearned. The pickle cannot go back to being a cucumber.

This is not the post I set out to write.

I wanted to tackle why, on my spring break, I locked in for 3 straight days (and one long night) to re-do our porch. Why, on my vacation, did I subject myself to this grueling DIY marathon?

“Why can’t you just, like, take it easy?”

My wife asks me this on just about every vacation.

I could reply, “It’s in the blood,” but I think I know better, now.

I was raised to embrace challenges. I am not comfortable sitting back and binge watching Netflix. That doesn’t make me feel good. I prefer to be trying something new or trying to master something old. And, true, my insatiable need to get results is likely what landed me an insane asylum, unable to control my drinking and drug use. But it is the same trait which helped me recover. I saw results. And I liked them.

I think it was Augustine who said that if you conquer yourself, the world lies at your feet. I can believe that. I am my own worst enemy. I am also my strongest advocate. And the longer I live in this skin, the more I’m working alongside the person God made me to be rather than against him.

And I have sobriety to thank for that.