Inevitable Success

Why sobriety is a head-on collision with your best work.

In a world hellbent on crushing our dreams, a person who refuses to be beaten into submission, a person who operates on the assumption that nothing is out of her reach, that it’s only a matter of time, not if but when, is by all accounts-a miracle. Even when I was still muddying the waters with booze and other vices, that resilient spirit remained lit, if only as a flicker. I credit that tiny flame with saving me in many ways, a small, ever present reminder that there was something left in the tank. Getting sober was the ultimate declaration of unfinished business. I’m not done motherfuckers, in fact, I just cracked the code.

Here’s the thing about drinking everyday, or even every weekend, it makes you a little less good at everything you do. Nights are spent fumbling around dark rooms with friends equally sloshed or strangers keen to waste our time. Mornings pass while we nurse nasty headaches and embarrassing memories, exhausted from the restless sleep we barely got. The days are a chore, void of much glimmering hope beyond the promise of our next happy hour buzz. Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, the sludge of those blurry endeavors blankets everything we do. Our quickness is flattened, our creativity filtered through a tangled mess, like an unwashed paintbrush, stiff and useless. Nothing bright can grow there.

I look back at my early attempts at writing a novel. I spent nearly two years in LA, just before the pandemic, trudging away at a manuscript that I deeply loved, while deeply depressed and half-drunk. The pages reflect a desperate state of mind, my female protagonist worshipping wine culture and unable to finish her own book. The irony is not lost on me. I reached a pivotal point in the story, the place where the ending needed to start taking shape, and I just couldn’t find it. Had I written myself into a hole or was it that my character’s lifestyle was literally taking her nowhere? Well, nowhere exciting or original. I put it aside and blew up my life.

Sobriety started as a quiet revolution. I spent the first three months in lockdown, reading like a banshee, starved for new ideas and information. I took online writing courses and read the entirety of Emily Dickinson’s work. I went on walks in the afternoon and made dinner every night. I relished in the solitude. I gathered up all of my blank and half-filled notebooks and journals and set them in a stack by my bed. Slowly but surely my words came back to me. By the end of the summer I had hundreds of pages of notes and poems and musings and fresh ideas. My brain had done this incredible rebound and not only were the lightbulb moments happening again, but I had a newfound optimism, a knowing actually, that I could write a book.

I think a lot of us are afraid of certainty. We’ve grown accustomed to the booby traps and bad luck and unfortunate pitfalls lying in wait to steal our hope of becoming what we wanted to be before the world started handing down reality checks. It’s scary to believe, hope is a terrifying concept, but that is exactly what is required of artists and creators. To make a thing, to pull an idea out of thin air and put it down on a canvas or a page, to spend days working away on something only you can see, to nurture and grow a make-believe character as you would a newborn baby, to pick up an instrument and will yourself to conjure an original note-radical, magical, impractical, nonsensical, wild hope.

“Ok,” you say, “hope is not certainty.” Let me bridge that gap for you. What if I told you that sobriety was the key to your inevitable success?

This is going to require you to buy into a couple of different notions, so only read on if you can muster the kahunas to suspend reality for a moment.

First, you’ll need to accept as fact that sobriety will make you better at everything you do. No matter your medium, no mind your craft, getting off the toxic train ride that is booze and drugs will make you a more effective, productive artist. This is going to ask you to let go of any historically held belief that drugs make you more creative. Drugs remove us from our visceral present, and water down the brutal honesty needed to make art. Not to mention, after the high wears off we are left with a sense of loss, a feeling that in order to touch the magic again we’ll need to return to the fuzzy place. This is unsustainable for lifelong work, longterm success, this is putting your art into the hands of a fleeting feeling. The artist has more agency than she knows.

Secondly, you’ll need to agree that sobriety is the first domino to fall, triggering fortunate events and happenstance. This decision affects everything. The snowball effect of sobriety cannot be denied. The body heals, eyesight sharpens, memory recovers, endurance returns, sleep normalizes, anxiety lessens, focus regenerates, hope prevails. Our external world starts to reflect the peaceful state we’ve cultivated within. Chaos may serve as material but it is no place to work.

The last ask, and perhaps the most exasperating task, is that you agree that you are enough and that this idea that keeps you up at night only does so because it absolutely must be realized and you are the only one who can do it. I’m not sure if the artist chooses her work or if the work chooses her. I think it’s a bit of both, a strange alchemy of life experience and natural affinity stirred around with some sort of mystical, divine, secret spirit-sauce. Nevertheless, you must buy into the certainty of the thing.

A person whose conviction cannot be swayed is quite dangerous, yet essential when it comes to matters of creative ambition. It’s hard enough to muster up the courage to start a project that literally no one has asked for, you might as well double down and refuse to quit. I see sobriety as this inevitable head-on collision with success. The desire was there all along but the mechanisms and methods were flawed. The negative effects of drugs (alcohol is a drug) were repelling any solid progress. The very nature of a cycle is stagnancy. Drinking and using kept me stuck, going round and round, a nightmare for a writer trying to move on to the next chapter of her book. The plot twist was a sober version of myself, the version of myself who could rely on her mind in its natural, pliable state to pull ideas from the ether and shape them into something beautiful.

What would it hurt if you chose to believe that each dream you had wasn’t yours by accident? Why not see what’s behind those cobwebs covering the corners of your mind? Sweep it all out from under the sofa. Throw away old narratives about when and where you’re creative. Take control of your talent. Stop letting doubt and insecurity write your masterpiece. Adopt my mantra of inevitable success. Start believing that while you may have taken a detour, and tried your dummy human best to muck it up, there is no escaping it. Maybe it only belongs to those wild enough to hope.