guest post: goblins fighting in a tar pit
writer Alex Brook Lynn shares what it was like and what happened
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this week on newly sober, i am excited to share writing by Alex Brook Lynn/ ARBL Murray
the first time i met Alex Brook Lynn, i was intimidated. even over Zoom, she has an exacting stare and a clear way of speaking that very much demonstrates that she is from New York City and does not suffer fools gladly. we are in a sober writing group together, and i quickly became acquainted with her quick wit and her depth of feeling. she has grown to become a friend, a colleague, a trusted eye. and i am excited to share her writing with you all. she is a seasoned professional, a brilliant writer, and a world-wide adventurer.
without further ado!
ARBL MURRAY: goblins fighting in a tarp it
In 2014 my mind was a minefield; my body felt like a broken robot covered in picked over leather, animated by a series of jerks and tics. I woke up every day by nibbling on an adderall, the plump orange ones with the high dosage, then I dropped the moist remainder into a shirt pocket to be pecked at throughout the day. Inevitably the pill would turn into a tiny lint covered nub dissolving at the touch. There was white wine or a beer for lunch, a long workday, a healthy dinner, maybe some yoga, and then I would embark on a night of well liquor and Diet Coke until inevitably someone, usually me, would call the 20 year old with garbage cocaine at one a.m. to come and deliver a few grams to whichever dive bar I was at. I had a job, a place to live, friends, and I wasn't in jail or a mental hospital, so by my family's estimation I was doing quite well.
My childhood was a fabulous shit-show. My dad was a drug trafficker and my mom was an eccentric artist who had to take the occasional respite in a psychiatric ward. My parents appeared to me as iconic gods of culture and excitement. Periods of intense joy and adventure often came with a hefty charge: years in prison, tears, depression, delusion, creditors, and bills. I was raised with the notion that happiness had a steep cost, but the alternative was to not be happy at all.
As a teenager I did every drug I can think of except the ones that weren't invented until after I got sober, and in my twenties, I worked hard to play hard, as they say. I traveled the US working as an art director for various indie films and tv shows. I would plan camping trips, hikes, a weekend to New Orleans to hear the music, or a trip to Juarez to find cheap pills. I had a commercial job in California once, followed by a night in Malibu where my friends and I bought cocaine from teenagers and we all sat in a hot tub clenching our jaws and talking about our trauma. I remember I woke up from that party with half my face covered in coagulated blood and snot. My nose had started dripping throughout the night and bleeding too. The liquid formed a kind of marbled gelatin around my face. I had to meet my grandparents for lunch and I was so hungover and tired. I was peeling the strange bodily-fluid-fruit-roll up off of my face when it occurred to me that there was probably a decent amount of coke in there, and that if I ate this gelatinous mass, it would give me the jump start I needed to dress and make the appointment looking normal. So I did. An adventure wasn't really an adventure to me unless there was some extreme mind altering chemical coursing through my veins, and a gritty story to tell about it afterward. I often tried to recreate the natural euphoria I saw in my mother's manic states. It looked so fun and so very merry. This is how I spent the majority of my twenties.
Outwardly I was still holding it together, but it was all starting to come apart at the seams. I had a string of boyfriends and had the same problems of manic joy and vicious arguments with all of them. I was spending more and more time at a dingy afterparty, watching my contemporaries descend into the mundane trappings of alcohol and coke-fueled anxiety. Our day jobs, even the ones in industries that we longed to be a part of, like film or journalism– became drudgery. Our nights were spent talking about everything we were going to do when we "had the time," but we never had the time. On Saturdays I was oft curled up on the bathroom floor purging out my Friday. Sundays were for recovering from Saturday night.
When I was 29, a friend's brother died of an overdose in my apartment. He had been staying with me as a favor after he got out of rehab. I had got him a job working at a restaurant for my dad. I had haughtily suggested he simply try to go to NA. He had been addicted to Oxy, he was a "junkie," and I was a hard working professional who played hard and drank like a sailor. In my mind, we were not the same. I only took opiates recreationally, I thought. Just enough to come down from a weekend of uppers and only when I really needed some help getting to sleep or, as I thought of it, “putting myself down.” This man's death marked the end of even pretending that I was still just a carefree party professional. From that point on, I could recognize a dismal pattern to my days, my nights, and most devastatingly, my hopes and ambitions.
The truth was clear to me. I was in a cycle I would never get out of, and all the beautiful things I wanted, all the curiosities I longed to explore, all the adventure I dreamed of, I knew they were never going to happen but I kept talking about them from the same barstool in Brooklyn, followed by the same rotating set of sofas at a handful of afterparty venues. My brain was all quick starts and paranoia. With everything I did there was a little voice telling me what a stupid piece of shit I was, that I was too old to be worth anything in the film world, that everyone thought I was a mess, that I was stupid, untalented, and that I was ugly. Sometimes I would visualize the inside of my brain populated by goblins fighting each other in a tar pit, screeching and laughing at me. There was no more pretense of adventure or beauty, or hope for a future. I had seen the man behind the curtain, but I still stuck around for another three years, blinking to make sure it was real.
I would occasionally spend some time with a friend from high school named Chris. We would have lunch, or a walk and he would chuckle as I told him of my latest anxieties or about how I thought I was really going crazy this time. One day after a particularly rough month, we were walking on the High Line and he said: “Have you ever thought of maybe trying to just put down the substances for a while? Clear out?”
“Sure,” I said, “but when? I’m broke and I need to work.”
“You can do it while you work. Like maybe try ninety days, or something like that,” he said. A quick calculation put that number into perspective. THREE MONTHS!? My mind was horrified. I had not spent more than a few days without at least a little something since I was…. Since I was… SINCE I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD!? My friend and I parted and I thought, “I better go have a glass of wine and think this over.” I wanted to smoke a cigarette and get drunk. I dreamed of being the kind of person that could be without chemical aid for that long.
A few blocks away from my house was a room I knew about that held AA meetings. I knew about this room because occasionally, when I was drunk I would google things like, “How to get sober,” and then glaze over at the search results.
As I walked over to this address, I thought about a movie I had seen a few years prior called On The Bowery, and how the thought had crossed my mind [after I watched it/after it ended?] that I should stop drinking. I thought about the handful of friends I had that just casually didn’t drink anymore, and how good they looked, and how at ease they seemed. I opened a creaky metal door next to a rowdy bar on Houston Street and walked up a flight of stairs. Along the way, I saw the graffiti tag of a friend of mine - a strangely comforting signal that I was in the right place. I walked in and sat down. I leaned my head against a wall and dozed off. My entire body felt relief, like I could breathe out for the first time… maybe ever.
My first year of sobriety was like my first year drinking and doing drugs. I was 12 when I started and 32 when I stopped. I heard a lot of people talk about how life slowed down for them, but that they were ultimately happier; that isn’t my story.
Life sped up. Little Alex had been waiting for me to leave the party for twenty years so we could finally have an adventure - A REAL ADVENTURE! My life changed almost instantly on August 13th 2014. I was at either a cafe or a diner until 2am every night, laughing and talking with people who weren’t drunk or on coke. All the fear I had about whether or not I would still be truly “me,” seemed irrelevant. I was definitely still me. I traveled more, worked harder, adventured with more abandon than I was ever able to understand previously. I got married and divorced within the first two years. I became a muay thai fighter and traveled to Thailand to train. I worked in newsrooms making documentaries. I truly believed that I could do whatever I wanted to as long as I gave myself to it. Of course the brain goblins were still there and in some ways louder than before. There was no immediate solution to turn the volume down on the screeches, but I built up a mental strength with which to cull them.
I met a guy that likes to adventure the way I do. We had a kid. We live in Paris. I make art and I write. We work hard, we argue, we love, we show up to be truly present for the good and the bad and the ugly. I still suit up and battle in the goblin pit. I tell my story.
Alex, thank you for writing for newly sober and sharing your journey with us. i know that i am better for having read your words.
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