The best thing that ever happened to me was terrible. It was that things got so bad, so unbearable, that I had no choice but to change. This has happened to me a number of times.
When I was 22 years old, I destroyed my life so badly that I was faced with either prison or sobriety. I had to pick one or the other; “No thanks” wasn’t an option that the court was offering.
When I was 30, I was so tired of the stifling, empty corporate grind that I quit my job to trade stocks. I traded security, which I needed, for an adventure, which I needed more.
When I was 32, I had lost $40,000 trading and I had no choice but to try to use my writing to get a job. Because I had nothing left. And I also had no marketable skills other than my writing. I had tried the thing I wanted to try, and I had failed at it.
I sat down on the couch one day, exasperated and desperate, and sighed out loud, fuck. I did it again. I let my life get so unbearable that I have to change. Again.
It has also happened with some of my relationships. And each time this happens, it’s so laden with pain and doubt that I see no way forward. I mean, how do you move forward from destroying your life and body so badly that no one trusts you anymore and you don’t trust yourself? How do you move forward from risking every penny you’ve ever saved chasing a dream, and losing all of it? How do you move forward from losing a relationship that your entire life was based on? What plan is there that can rescue you from that? Whose advice do you ask?
That’s a dark place to be. But I know something that’s worse. What’s worse than reaching the point of maximum pain, is never reaching the point of maximum pain.
An alcoholic who never hits rock bottom, who never gets smacked in the face by concrete as he falls from the life he once had, never has a good enough reason to get sober. A person who never despises the corporate grind enough will do it until he dies. The person who never gets sick and tired of being sick and tired, will never acquire the gall to do something. He'll just remain sick and tired.
The most tragic thing in the world is not the pain of change — the sharp, sudden, unwanted pain of having to adjust your sails or even build a new boat by hand. It’s the chronic, latent, festering pain of never changing at all. Because what that pain feels like is never waking up from a nightmare. You enter a nightmare and you just stay there. Because you never quite reach the point of shaking yourself awake. You never quite reach the point where the shadow trying to kill you actually reaches out and touches you. You just keep cycling through the nightmare over and over, from the beginning each time.
One thing that I’ve learned from years and years observing addicts and alcoholics is that you must not stand between a person and his rock bottom. You must not protect the addict from the consequences of his own actions.
Why not?
Because you can’t love an addict into sobriety. You can’t just want the best for him, and expect that best to manifest itself upon him. You cannot unconditionally support an addict for long enough that he finally “gets it” and gets sober for his family. Or his health, or his career, or his kids. He can’t do it for love, or his girlfriend, or the dream job that he spent 7 years working towards and that a friend of the family trusted him with and now regrets doing so. No matter how much an addict loses, he can always lose more. Until… he can’t anymore. And you don’t get to decide when or where that point is.
My parents and brothers tried to love me into sobriety for years. They showed me how much better my life could be, if only. They talked about how much I have to live for, if only I’d choose to wake up from my nightmare.
But I couldn’t, because I hadn’t had enough yet. I wasn’t done. I hadn’t suffered enough yet in the filth of my own mistakes.
Until I had.
I had to reach the point where I was standing agape at my own life, in awe of how profoundly wrecked it was. I had to reach the point where I collapsed on the couch, tears welling up in my eyes, and sighed the word fuck to myself. I had to reach that point, and no one could reach it for me.
This is why you don’t enable an addict. The hardest thing in the world to do is to allow a loved one to suffer his own consequences. To allow him, before your own eyes, to reap what he sowed. All you want to do is protect him from it. To engage in damage control; to wrestle with the authorities for him; to get him out of his latest bind. Especially because, in the case of addiction, the alternative is not just losing one’s dream job or losing a girlfriend. It’s death. It’s permanent.
And yet… if you allow him to continue down this path, by hacking away at those consequences, are you rescuing him from death? Or rushing him towards it? You don’t know. Maybe if you keep him from facing the results of this decision, the next one will be the last one.
And it’s not fair that you should be placed in such a position. No one should be in that position. That’s why addiction is such a cruel phenomenon. Because you, the mother or father or brother or friend, are faced with two options that both risk death. One could be a slow death, and the other could be a quick death. Both are hideous and both feel like your fault.
But I have spent long enough watching people like myself that I know you can’t stand between someone and the consequences of his own actions. Not forever. You cannot stand between a person and the pain that person must feel. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone is to keep your hands off and back away: to let him hurry up and hurt himself badly enough to change. To allow someone to feel the pain that is rightfully his.
Because that's often what life requires of us: that you feel the pain that is being delivered to you. Whether you sign for it or not, it's yours. And if you tell life to try delivering it again tomorrow, it's probably going to be worse. Pain, like a savings account, accrues compound interest.
Doing damage control is, very often in life, the worst thing you can do to yourself. Because it keeps you from arriving at the point of reflection and change.
If you’re suffering with something gut-wrenching and soul-draining in your life, try thinking two or five or ten years into the future. If I allow this [job, relationship, situation] to go on, how miserable could I become? How will I feel if I continue to forsake myself to this drudgery, knowing that I wish for something else anyway? Is there a prize to be earned? Who am I doing this for? Am I lying to myself by protecting this thing even though it’s not what I want anyway? Am I just terrified of losing all I have, even though there are things out there that I want more?
Would I go after what I want, if this became bad enough that I had to walk away?
What would it take for me to have to walk away?
I was in a relationship a few years ago that revolved entirely around fighting and misunderstanding. It was as if someone had written a script for the least cooperative relationship you could possibly have with someone.
Needless to say, I looked into my future and I saw divorce. I didn't have to actually arrive at rock bottom; I conjured it into the present with the information I had. And knowing what was before me, I had to walk away. We simply were not right for each other, and I was certain that wasn't going to change.
It’s possible that you’re already at rock bottom, and you didn’t even know it. Because you didn’t ask. And, unlike with an addict, there’s usually not concrete involved with the standard miseries of everyday adult life. There are just decisions about what you can and can’t tolerate. What you will or won’t regret. Sometimes the only end to a negative feedback loop is the one you put there yourself.
We spend our whole lives whispering to ourselves, subconsciously, “I really can't do anything about this. And if I could, it would be too risky.”
If you spend your whole life doing damage control, you might never reach the point of fuck. Most people never have the good fortune of absolutely hating their lives. And this isn’t about ambition. I’m not an ambitious person. This is about being viscerally terrified of waking up ten years from now, thinking, “I could have done something.”
Most people get just good enough at damage control to avoid ever getting to maximum pain. Because we have trained ourselves to avert disaster, thinking that disaster is the real tragedy. But it isn’t. People spend their years duct taping their relationships, repairing just enough personal bad habits to be viable citizens, and skating past their own inadequacies with the help of enabling friends. And they never reach the point where they’re actually desperate enough to go after what they want. Or to wake up from what they don’t.
If I wasn’t such a fuck up, my life would be worse. Much, much worse. When I do something wrong, I speed-run it all the way to the worst available consequences. That’s probably my most useful habit. Because it puts me regularly in a state of enough pain to know, “I don’t want to keep doing that.”
And that’s an encouraging thought. Sometimes the only way to be sure of what you want is to be absolutely certain of what you don’t. And if you were less terrified of losing what you don’t even want, you’d free yourself to go after what you do.
Drink some water, then speed-run to rock bottom.
JR
“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” - Edward Abbey
Leard the lesson the hard way. Friend had drained me to such level that i had to choose between them and my own health.
After the friendship ended, they had texted me 6 months later and had told me that they went to a psychologist (which i have been telling them to do for years).
We continued the friendship. But text only, like pen pals. It was their idea and i agreed, because:
1. Feels like they deserve a second chance after finally going to a psychologist.
2. It's a sort of "training" for me to be more comfortable in saying "no" or displeasing someone. The "scars" that i have remind be to not take their discomfort into me and be a bit more stern/callous instead of enabling or people pleasing.
3. I still care about them.
4. Through interacting with them i stumble upon new stuff from time to time.
I’ve observed this to be true time and again. Rock bottom is where people can push off from. And countries. And societies. In the end, if things are bad, they have to get worse before they can transform.