Is the longest road ahead for John Mulaney to talk about who or how he is?
I don’t know, but it doesn’t really matter, because the longest road in early sobriety for most people who identify as addicts is a day without drugs and/or alcohol.
He still wants to use? Of course he does. He’s got 140-something days clean. I’ve met people who said that they didn’t want to do drugs or drink at all at that point, but I’ll take a stab — based on seven years of observation and personal experience — that many, if not most, people do.
And he’s standing up in public and talking about it. Seven years ago, I could barely leave my neighborhood. I went to work, my recovery community, and then home, where I somehow did not drink. I also went to the bakery, because my body did not want protein, but it did want sugar, so I lived on iced coffee and cupcakes (and lost 30 pounds anyway, as the poison drained out of my system.) I hope he’s got a cupcake dealer.
Recovery feels like a buzzword now that’s faded into our neurological ether, but it means something, something like healing — saving your mind and body, and your fucking life. I didn’t realize until I gradually came to that I’d been in a brownout for years, existing on the surface of my life, losing my words and any hope. My first year of sobriety involved walking around in the world learning a version of the English language I’d never spoken, wide awake and unclear how one lived this way, because it was excruciating, and strange, and very, very loud.
It’s in the canon that comedians and other creators use pain for art, fallout that’s clear in the long list of geniuses lost to overdose and addiction. But if that armor doesn’t let up it’s harder to get beyond the simple absence of substances to the primal reasons why they were the main reason you could function in the world at all, until the chemical dependence escalated until you couldn’t even do that anymore.
The point of this recovery path is ideally not simply to exist, clutching at every minute unmedicated like it’ll blow away and take me down with it if I look at it wrong (which was what it felt like for me in the beginning.) The better point, and really the necessity, is to destroy the old way, and reconstruct an operating system that functions so the drink or the drug isn’t necessary to breathe or speak or try or love.
It’s not a fast process — certainly not the immediate change that a media outlet or a loved one or for God’s sake I often want it to be. And it’s not even an act of reclaiming an old self, for our own comfort and complacency or anyone else’s. It’s reinvention — often difficult, painful, real and valuable.
I feel all of this in my bones again when I hear of another person clawing to get out, whether famous on the internet or sitting next to me in real life. It can’t be summarized and it has no catchy lede. It‘s not easily wrapped up by the start of a random winery showtime — and certainly not in the first 140-something days.
