When do you know it’s time to stop drinking? (classic)

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30:16so what was it like when you became sober like what was new sobriety like for you um you know there were so many great days right there really were in rehab what's a great day in rehab? Man, beach volleyball and rehab is probably one of the most fun activities I've ever been able to participate. Really? Are you being sarcastic? No, I loved it. It was amazing. Why is beach volleyball and rehab so nice? I think it's just because you have all these people who are there and their lives have been decimated in some capacity, are just shipwrecked at this place. And then all of a sudden, you're forced to play this kid's game that most people haven't done since they were in elementary school gym class.

31:03And just enjoying it in ways that, I mean, were completely unthinkable to me. And I think that was just it for me. It was just like, oh, you know, the beach in this shitty part of Florida is actually kind of nice. I mean, I'm having fun. I'm laughing genuinely. And this is just like filling me with a lot of good vibes that I had been absent in my life for such a long time. But the minute I got back on the plane to Brooklyn, it was December when I finally got back into town. So it was like Christmas time. And I remember just feeling the weight of, God, what do I do now? Who are my friends that I can hang out with?

31:51How am I supposed to interact with people? And it was like holiday party season at that point. And I was just like, can I even go to these? And they sort of, no, of course not. I can't. But it was just like, that's when the loneliness started to sink in. All of those good feelings of kind of being inside an institution were gone. Now I was back out in the world and the world has gone on without me. It was really sad when my phone was in like a plastic bag that when you check in at rehab. and I remember this is how seriously I'm going to take this. I'm going to give the man my phone, right? And I remember coming out and being very excited at like day 47 or whatever like that to finally check my phone.

32:40And all of the emails, like nothing happened, right? Yeah. Like I missed nothing. Nobody missed me. You know, everyone is kind of moving on with their lives. and I was just absent from it for two to three months. That was really it. And then kind of just to come back and figure out how to build a social life and figure out who my friends are and who I want to have meaningful relationships with, that's a lot to process. Yeah. No more beach volleyball days anymore. So things were just different for me and I didn't know where to start. And I think that that is just the feeling that most people go into this with.

33:25If you're trying to get sober, and there's a difference between stopping drinking and trying to get sober. What do you see the difference as? The difference is the changes that I needed to make about myself that I always wanted to make, I was absolutely incapable of doing while I was drunk or on drugs. But now I was absolutely forced into kind of actually confronting those things and given the choice of basically, okay, I have to change or I'm probably going to have to go back to living the way that I was living before. And that wasn't, I wouldn't say I was going to die, but I would have been completely unhappy and nothing good would have ever happened.

34:05I would have just been sinking further and further down into a morass of self-pity and substances. Yeah. I remember, I mean, I haven't been sober, but I had like a year where I didn't drink, I didn't use substances. And I remember one of the surprising things was when you sort of describe Christmas being hard, like just realizing how much, like the two things I realized very quickly, one was so much of social life revolves around alcohol. And like at first you think everyone's paying attention to whether you drink or not. You very quickly learn for the most part they're not. Not at all. But you just kind of have to make this affirmative choice all the time.

34:46Like, I remember learning about seltzer and bitters. That at a bar, you could order seltzer and bitters, and, like, the bartender would know that that meant you weren't drinking, which just feels good, that they're, like, a comrade. You will have a drink that looks alcoholic, so if you have one friend who's just very rude, they're not going to know to be rude. And it was kind of just, like, a code that let people around who were also not drinking, like, it kind of put a signal out. But, like, seltzer and bitters took me, like, I don't know, a month and a half to figure out. And there was all sorts of things like that.

35:15And I also noticed that there were friendships I had with buddies who, like, we'd go to the bar and drink and catch up where I could replace that with coffee and it'd be fine. And there were friendships I had where once you took substances out, the friendships just didn't work. Whether it was the person didn't want to see me or we had less to talk about. And it was really surprising. Well, I wrote about it in one essay where I describe a lot of those sort of attempts at reconnecting with people as a sober person. And some of the people I said, it was kind of just like, instead of a catching up period, it was like an exit interview.

35:52Oh, my God. Kind of realizing that we weren't going to be part of each other's lives in any significant way anymore. Yeah. Those are the sort of things that, I mean, year after year, I tend to have those sort of relationships kind of fade away in some capacity. And a lot of it is just like, you know, absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I was drinking or sober or whatever. I mean, I think this is the important part of that I'm learning in sobriety is that I have to remember that I'm a bad memory for a lot of people. like the interactions that I had had with them kind of left a mark that isn't great.

36:34And I mean, that is part of this life, I think, that there's this natural auditing that kind of happens that I have to kind of get used to. Before the small bow, I didn't really read AJ's writing on the internet. When he talks about how he's a bad memory for a lot of people, I know he partly means in his real life, but I think he also partly means his online one. During his Gawker days, a lot of his work lived up to the site's name. Gawking, making entertainment out of strangers' mistakes. The site often functioned by creating the worst day of someone's life so that bored office workers had something to read and comment on.

37:13To be fair, Gawker was not alone in this. Commenting wryly on someone else's public humiliation was something many people working on the content production internet treadmill of 2010 to 2020 did. Few of us have clean hands here, myself included. A couple years after coming out of rehab in 2018, AJ starts his recovery newsletter, The Small Bow. And it's this newsletter which I would find a year later. The site has a very simple description. Quote, we send out essays and illustrations about long-term recovery every Tuesday and Friday. End quote. The newsletter has these drawings from Edith Zimmerman, one of the internet's great voices.

37:52In this newsletter, AJ's still AJ. You remember why he was always good at making people pay attention to him online. He's very funny. He has a perfect eye for detail. In the first edition I read in 2019, there's a story about a guy who inexplicably keeps showing up to recovery meetings dressed as the Joker, like from the Batman movies in a purple suit. And then a while later, another guy who also doesn't seem to be doing very well, keeps showing up dressed in a Superman costume. And there's a fateful day when the Joker and Superman both show up at a meeting together. I promise, whatever you're imagining is not how the story ends.

38:29At the small bow, what's sort of, not funny, but maybe surprising, ironic, is that AJ's still interested in the worst days of other people's lives. It's just, now he's there to help. Or at least to help understand. So you come out of addiction, you're at peak, if not peak, you're feeling deep amounts of self-loathing. Yes. Why did you decide to start The Small Bow? That feels like a really scary, hard thing to do to start writing about recovery from a deep hole. You know, when I was talking about that time when I came out of rehab in like early December, and I remember sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, and I don't know if I was kind of just lonely or desperate or whatever, but I remember Googling, I'm 50-something days sober, and I want to run into traffic.

39:32and I don't know what I was looking for, but I was hoping that something would come up. But I mean, I was just like, I just got out of rehab and I feel really bad about myself still. And I don't know what to do exactly. I don't want to go to an AA meeting right now. You know, I don't want to, like, you know, I call a friend. Like, it was just, you know, kind of being adrift. And, you know, the only things that came up, and I remember this specifically, were the suicide hotline number or advertisements for more rehabs, right? And I guess that was the first sort of kernel that was there where it was just like, oh, if I can figure out a way to actually just get back into publishing again, maybe there's something there that I could actually get into.

40:22Was it scary? Like, was it scary sort of stepping out on the internet and saying, like, not like, my name's AJ and I'm a recovery guru but like to talk earnestly about something that's hard to publicly say I'm a person who is trying to I think sometimes it's hard to say you're trying to figure out how to be a good person because it can sound like you're saying you are a good person which is one of the most dangerous things you could say on the internet. Dangerous, yes. Did you feel afraid to be working this stuff out publicly? 100 % yeah. So it was 2018 when I started The Small Bow. So I was about two years sober, right?

41:01Yeah. And that is way too early to start a recovery site. I am just letting people know that I'm 100 % aware of that now, but that's like five years ago now. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of comical that I thought that was a great idea. Yeah. I think that one of the parts that I was so paranoid about was that what I was doing was kind of a form of penance that I was asking for. And trying to kind of pretend that I was being a better person than I actually was. Trying to kind of pander to people. And that was something that I was so paranoid about. And it was always constantly, you know, would write an essay and be like, oh, I can't write this.

41:47I have to have someone else do it first. Or just like, I have to make people aware that I know that you think I'm a piece of shit. I'm right there with you sometimes. But it's tricky. I know I have so many friends in recovery, and I know, and some of them are public people. And they don't talk about sobriety in public. And I understand that that is one of the sort of, if not rules, at least strong piece of advice from recovery communities. is that if you talk about that stuff in public, you can set yourself up for a relapse. And I also appreciate, it's hard to learn from people who have figured something out.

42:25It's easier to learn from people who are figuring things out, for me at least. And so I appreciate, even though maybe you shouldn't have done it, as someone who really, really cherishes a small bow, just selfishly, I'm glad that you did do it. Yeah. I mean, they were all positive sort of feedback. And a lot of people that were interested in participating and helping out and wanted to write for it. And I thought that was really great. And I was very, very much of the mindset that I have to handpick every single person that writes for this in this first year in order for this to go right. Why? Because I was so concerned about having someone else's voice come in, like there were a lot, I'll put it this way, there were a lot of people who had 10 years of sobriety who were basically going to come in and speak from an AA perspective, right?

43:22Yeah. And I try to just not publish those sort of essays where people are kind of parroting the big book and along those lines. Because it just felt like - That wasn't what I was looking for that night. I was looking for something that would actually just like, I think come from a place of really, I still needed things to be wounded. I still needed everyone that wrote for it to publish there. I still needed them to be wounded in some way. So anyone that was coming with the solution, so to speak, is what they call it, I didn't think that was appropriate. Well, my theory for why you find it, or for why you might find it helpful to talk to people in tough situations and why you tell people in tough situations that one day they will be consoling someone in a tough situation.

44:04The reason I think that that helps, I mean, one, it suggests that there's an after the moment that someone's in, but also any kind of real crisis, whether it's a public blowup or the premature death of someone you love or a horrible accident, the thing it does is you feel pulled out of the world and into this darker other place. And the world is happening above you, and you are in this very lonely and personal hell. Yeah. And the thing that that hell tells you is your experience is too bad to be understood in the rest of human experience, and you will not connect with other people. Yes. And if you meet other people, you do not want to connect with them because they're in other hells that are even worse than yours.

44:53And I think what I hear in that story and what I hear in you talking about this is like, the real truth is that like, most people's lives go off the rails they've imagined for them at some point. And when you leave the community of people who are perfectly happy and who everything has worked out for, you enter the community of human beings. Yes. And your ability to understand and connect with those human beings is like, really strengthened once you can heal. One of the really important conversations for me to hear was I interviewed Jason Blair. And I don't know if you remember Jason Blair and what the context is with him.

45:34And he was the New York Times - New York Times plagiarism scandal, right? Yes, exactly. So I think that was 2003-ish, 2004-ish, right? He wrote a memoir about that soon after everything had happened, but has gone on to basically be a life coach. and he and I started talking and I asked him, you know, would he have written a memoir knowing what he knew now? And he said, absolutely not. It was the worst decision they'd ever made because he was writing it like out of desperation and fear. And, you know, that was the only way he thought he could make money. But the other thing that he said was that while everything was really hit a lot of heat on him from the Times scandal at that point, and he was going to recovery meetings.

46:20And he was afraid to kind of go into some of the Upper West Side sort of meetings because he thought he would be recognized. And he said he had this conversation with this one woman there where he was kind of sharing that like a little bit kind of sheepishly, a little bit ashamed of it, and just like a little bit sort of like ecocentrically too. And she said to him, there are murderers here. i'm sure you're going to be okay right and it was just like this wonderful level setting sort of thing where it's just like oh yeah i mean just like you know there are people who kind of just like you know live these absolutely just you know had these horrific sort of situations in their lives and may have been murderers and i am not one of those and you know just to kind of remember that okay well they have a life that they can kind of be proud of now too right and yeah so So it was really important for me to hear that.

47:16And I always remember that when I go into any sort of meeting, we're just like, oh yeah, there are murderers here. It's funny. It's probably the only context where there are murderers here is something someone says to calm down and feel good. Right, yeah. But it was so great because it was instant humility, right? And I think I got that early on too in recovery, especially when I was in Florida and I'm in the thick of the Hogan trial and going to these meetings and thinking everyone in the room knew about this trial and all eyes are on me. And just like, you know, here I was being brave and raising my hand at these meetings and boy, are I important.

47:57And yeah, and it's hearing like these people with real problems who had like lost loved ones and lost jobs and houses and all those things. And just like being like, yeah, I'm not really that interesting in this situation. I have never been to an AA meeting. I've never been to rehab. But I have spent time in a psychiatric unit, which, as far as I can tell, seems a bit similar. I still think about my time there. I remember what it was like to be trapped in a place where the only thing I was really allowed to do was the thing I at least wanted to. Where all I could do was think. I will say, I feel gratitude for these rooms in America that most people hope to never wind up in.

48:36Rooms where you can talk to other people who have made real mistakes. rooms where no one really judges, where your problems, however big, are always dwarfed by someone else's. I want to acknowledge that dry January, my slight and questionable news peg this week, is a pretty silly reason to talk about any of this. Dry January is the time of year when many people stop drinking because they'd like to lose a little weight or challenge themselves or just to see. But I do think some of those people are actually up to something else. I think they're finding a way to ask themselves questions that can just be too scary to face head on.

49:13Am I really okay? Is this all still working for me? The reason I wanted to talk to you at this time of year is that for many years around New Year's, you've sent out this newsletter called It's Okay If You're Not Ready. Can you just tell me the story that you tell in that essay? Like what's in that newsletter? Sure. I mean, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about in those early days of me coming home from rehab. So this is 2015, December. And like I said, I was very much afraid in a lot of ways about what I was supposed to be as a person now and what the holidays were going to look like, right?

49:58And again, I remember feeling like so sad sad and desperate to be someplace else, right? And wanting to kind of just like, you know, not be in my apartment, not be in my body, not be like, you know, in whatever sort of, you know, friend group I was in. I just didn't want to be there. But I also didn't want to be sober. But I also knew that I was staring down kind of this very important date, right? Which which is January 1st. And I remember being so sad that I was never going to potentially have another New Year's that was fun again. Right. Like, I mean, that kind of just, you know, hit me square in the jaw in that moment.

50:46And I was just like, God, I don't want to drink soda right now. You know, I know. I don't want to just go home and watch a movie or watch the Godfather or whatever. I don't know. I mean, And there was just so much stuff that I felt like completely on the sidelines about. And I was just like, this is not the life I want. And I was like, yeah, I'm not ready to be sober. And, you know, I didn't like relapse the next day, but I couldn't 100 % kind of commit to something that I really wasn't ready for at that point. And that was just like this moment where I was just like, I think most people that have come upon January 1st and thinking that their lives need to change in this sort of fashion and feel like failures if it doesn't happen.

51:33And that's a tough conversation to have with people. This is my attempt to basically have that conversation with people and say, yeah, you're fine, right? That's it, you know? Like if you're not, if it's not working yet, that's okay. That's okay. It's 100 % okay. Yeah, I mean, it's just like, you know, good job, good effort. I think the greatest thing about AA, more than anything, is that you can be a part of it and you could have two years of sobriety. And then one night, you can absolutely just get completely blasted and just have your car and run into a building. And then the next day, you can go there and everyone will clap.

52:11And it's an amazing thing. So this is my way of at least extending that hand out to people to say to them, just like, yeah, I'm going to kind of run this essay every single year. And the off chance that someone is Googling like I was that very lonely night in early December when I thought that no one else can understand me or understand exactly what I needed at that point and not knowing myself what I needed, that like, okay, maybe this essay will connect to them. I feel like what you're describing when you say you can crash a car and come in the next day and people applaud, it's like, you're talking about grace.

52:49Yes. And it's just like a very hard thing to find in a reliable way, maybe outside of your own family. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think, I never grew up with that. My family was punishing. Yeah. It's like, you know. But yeah, I mean, just learning how to have that. And I mean, I try to kind of provide that as much as I possibly can, both with my children, with myself and with my wife and, you know, with anybody that's kind of part of this little community that has kind of built up due to this newsletter.

53:34After a short break, I ask an uncomfortable question.

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57:23Welcome back to the show. So to be honest with you, by this point in the conversation, actually asking AJ the title question of this episode felt dumb. But rules are rules. We have a format. And so I asked it. If you ever hear me more uncomfortable asking a question on the show, please let me know. So the question that I came to you with, when do you know that it's time to stop drinking? Yeah. Who was asking, right? I mean, that's the thing. It's just like, I mean, that's like, in your mind, who is asking this question? I think, I mean, I think what you're saying is that it's highly personal and that rather than focusing on January 1st, what your message would be is like, if you have the inclination that this might be the right choice for you.

58:23It's probably the right choice. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it's a lot more serious than basically a resolution. I mean, it's an absolute kind of just complete, just full-scale change. I mean, it's a teardown. Yeah. So this year, I'm doing Dry January. I feel slightly uncomfortable with Dry January. How do you feel, as someone who is committed to the world of serious sobriety, and sobriety is a teardown, how do you feel about Dry January? I feel that it's fine. I mean, it's honestly like I was trying to kind of think of some way to compare it without sounding like a dick. Like a dick, right?

59:07Because I don't want to sound like a dick because I think it's great that anyone wants to kind of better themselves in whatever capacity that is. But asking an alcoholic or someone that's in active recovery every single day of their life about dry January, I think is the equivalent of having someone who runs a turkey trot every single year. I knew you were going to compare a turkey trot to a marathon. I knew that's exactly where you were going to go. It wasn't even a marathon. As someone who's just kind of like Usain Bolt. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Not on the same level, man. You know, I mean, it's just like we have different goals here.

59:47Yeah. And that's okay. But yeah, I think that the dry January has very little to do with sobriety. Sometimes you go to someone with a question, not realizing you still have basic, wrongheaded assumptions about what the words you're using even mean. Like sobriety. Depending on my mood, it can mean for me something I'm proud of the people in my life are doing, something I wonder if I should do, something I hope I don't have to do. Mainly, though, I think of it as not doing something, abstaining. Talking to AJ, I realize for him, abstinence is like the first and in some ways least interesting part of the whole deal.

1:00:28For him, real sobriety means trying to see yourself clearly, trying to evolve, and then, this sounds like the hardest part, to do this while offering yourself the kind of compassion you'd want from your parents. or from God. So when I first got sober and coming out of rehab, and I think this is part of the struggle that most people have when they kind of just, you know, try to get sober, is you're dealing with a person who absolutely hates you more than anyone on the planet Earth, and you're kind of stuck with that person, right? And trying to kind of make friends with that person is very, very difficult it was for me and i had to kind of just you know do a lot of extra work on top of just like showing up the 12-step meetings you know i had to do i had to get a therapist i had to get on medication i had to do meditation all that stuff um in order to start like maybe getting one percent more in the in the direction of basically liking myself more than i hate myself yeah i would say i'm about 50 50 now it's weird because it's also like if you come out of a crisis you're sort of like there's this person inside me who tried to kill me and he's also me and the first instinct is I gotta get as far away from that person as possible, I have to kind of destroy them and in a way I think you do I think the people who get better evolve in a way where the people they were are a little alien to them but also you have to love that person if you're trying to kill that person you're also that person and you're trying to kill yourself it's really hard Yeah, no, it is.

1:02:05And I think that there's just a lot of stuff that I work through in therapy is just actually just caring for that person, that worst version of yourself that was so broken, and then trying to kind of look at them with a little more kindness. And that's really kind of just like where I'm starting to look at that a lot more. I think saying that out loud is still hard for me to say that I'm trying to learn how to love myself. Yeah. But I am. And that is exactly just like where I have to start every single day. Because if I don't, then I'm kind of starting a little bit in the red. Right.

1:02:50AJ Delario. He's trying year-round, not just in January. He writes the Small Bow newsletter, which you can find at www.thesmallbow.substack.com. AJ, thank you. Absolutely. I hope this was helpful.

1:03:37Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Sean Merchant. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Kate Hutchison, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Court Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA.

1:04:14Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening. We will see you next week.

1:04:33Thank you.