Recovery is disruptive, and "Sobriety Mountain"
Our precision tool for 2025
Last week I had a boy home from school with an infected salivary gland. He’s experienced the swelling a few times in his short life but not quite like this. His pain was as specific and strange as the week was for me and perhaps for you, whether you’re celebrating and wondering who your safe people are — or in grief wondering who your safe people are.
I feel fatigued with the particularity of the topic of sobriety. I think this is partly due to my conviction that recovery is for all of us. Certain sobrieties aren’t for all of us but recovery is.
It’s the conscious daily work of facing ourselves, of telling someone about the thing no one else knows that’s been eating us alive.
It’s the labor of real listening, to others’ benign-to-us pain but opening up something scarier, curiosity about other’ pain we ourselves have inflicted — directly via our anger or indirectly via our absence.
It’s breathing through the present moment and deciding what is or isn’t a true emergency. It’s risking making the wrong move.
This isn’t a call for preemptive apologies or moral scrupulosity. It’s just willingness and curiosity as a first step.
It sounds so elemental, so ground level…but these things alone are a disruption and an affront to the year that’s coming, the year that’s already here.
What is the payoff of opening up to someone else about our stresses and pain, turning toward healing and the Healer, choosing recovery in one of its many forms, choosing to be born again (again?), choosing growth —
when it’s clear the world isn’t,
when it feels like no one in our circles gives a hoot,
when it seems like everything’s on fire anyway?
2025 is asking us if we’re ready to “sweep off our side of the street.”
It’s easy to write off recovery as reserved for those other people. Our insides are working overtime to ensure we’re not like them. At our worst, we “need” the worse ones to continue in their ways — so our ways look “not as bad,” so we have license to continue. “I’m not being harsh—my parents’ generation was even worse” or “Yeah I have issues—but I don’t have that addiction” We’re telling on ourselves a little, AND we’re so overdue for accepting “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:18-19) and accepting the invitation to become like a little child.
2025 will ask us again and again if we’re willing to face ourselves, becoming both joyfully detached and ready for the moment to speak. Any readiness depends on our doing our own work first. This might be as simple as deleting an app for a few weeks or finally having that difficult conversation (maybe with yourself).
Could recovery be interchangeable with the “daily dread”1 of sanctification, being born again — and again, and again?
Last summer I pitched an idea to Plough Quarterly and thanks to their hospitality, it turned into “Sobriety Mountain.” I’d love for you to give it a read here. The idea initially came in the form of memories of Billy Blanks’ VHS workout tapes and weight loss “plateaus” and whatever connection I could find to the touch-and-go of recovery. I wanted to laugh and make you laugh with me. I guess, mercifully, it became more refined.
I met alcohol in my early twenties and fell in love soon after, not with the objective magic of elderflower gin dancing with tonic water, a crisp Pinot lightening the moody roux of gumbo, spiced cordial strained from wild blackberries, or a fireside stout with friends. I fell in love with the feeling of the first sip of the first drink, electric warmth coating my insides on its way down, quieting the internal chatter and making inconsequential the habits and noise of everyone and everything. Over a decade I chased those first twenty minutes over and over and over, reaching to recreate it: the nap in clean sheets after a life of insomnia, my weighted blanket muffling my feral mind and a more feral world. After all, I was the first human in history to complete this circuit, a stroke of genius – must repeat.
I heard this term in Andy Squyres’ song “Death Defying Joy” and couldn’t shake it.