You're Not Bored, You're Empty

Why cultivating your inner life is the best defense against boredom.

I realized recently that I hear something on repeat from a lot of my friends and online community that seems to hinder their sobriety journey or sometimes just their general sense of well being. I’m just SO bored. This is a bit of a foreign concept to me, a hermit introvert, who relishes days on end with no agenda or place to be and has no problem being on my own for long periods of time. I prefer solitude to most company, I will generally always choose a night in over a night out, and my idea of an adventure is getting lost in the words of Annie Dillard or Emily Dickinson. On a Friday night you’re most likely to find me flipping through Women Who Run With The Wolves for the 900th time or puttering away on this thing.

I don’t understand the psyche of a person who wants to be going places all the time. Actually, that’s not true. I used to be that person, in a way, when I was still holding onto my “booze is a fun thing to do,” mentality. I don’t think it was so much that I was having a great time being out and about all the time, but being out and about all the time was an easy way to keep a drink in my hand and the horrors in my mind at bay. For me, and please know that I sincerely understand that everyone is different and some people really do love to be adventuring at all times, I realized that my most authentic, honest self just wanted to be alone with the thoughts in her head, with the space to flush them out. I do sometimes envy those who have inexhaustible social batteries, the idea of thriving in constant motion is exciting but the reality of it leaves me feeling like my insides might explode all over some lady’s expensive shoes.

So how can you defeat the “boredom” that comes with a newly sober existence, a reduction of social outings, and too much time suddenly on your itchy little hands? Well, allow me to drop some hermit expertise on you my friends, this is that shit I love.

Let’s break down the definition of boredom first. According to a quick Google search, boredom is most often defined as a “feeling of being unoccupied,” but I also found an article in Psychology Today that describes it as “a state of failing to find meaning,” which of course piqued my wordy little nerd brain. Unoccupied. Devoid of meaning. I jump to words like empty and lacking. It seems like the solution to boredom by this definition would be to simply fill in the space with something, add more, but then there’s that other pesky requirement, must also be meaningful. Well, hellfire! Where are we supposed to find something that’s just the right fit for the emptiness? The boredom? Well, in the past, and might I add that this did not work out very well for us, maybe we reached for booze or drugs or a hottie with a body or a triple bacon doozy woozy bobber-we reached for the external salve, the “give it to me because I don’t have it,” special. The truth is we were outsourcing a little too much instead of building up the reserves within and the cost was killing us. That’s OK, we can start now.

It’s pretty impossible to control what’s happening externally, that goes for good things, exciting things too. The world around us, our friends, our jobs, our daily happenings-aren’t always going to be fulfilling and fun. Some days they’re just going to be things that we simply have to do to pay our bills or keep our job. We need a reliable source of excitement, something we can tap into when that restlessness hits after a long day and we can’t imagine not scratching our eyes out or pouring a double vodka on the rocks. We need an active inner life. When we find ourselves disillusioned by what’s going on around us, we need to be able to pull from what’s within us. This means we’ve got to fill ourselves up, or else, stay empty.

Developing the inner life will look very different for different folks, much like sobriety. For me, this begins with creativity, which usually begins with consuming the creative work of another, i.e. reading, watching films, listening to music, mostly reading though. The words sort of take hold somewhere in my brain and then I’m able to use them as fuel to power the alchemic process necessary to write things, say things, or imagine things. Reading is by far the easiest way to simultaneously travel through time and remain shrouded in fuzzy blankets with a teapot nearby, so this is my choice. Some of you may prefer Mozart or Julia Childs or God. Spirituality is another one of my inner life hacks, there’s no quicker way to find meaning than to start looking for it in everything. I have a slight advantage seeing as I have a dead mom, one whom, while she was alive, insisted on noticing every coincidence and synchronicity around us. Now, it seems she’s made it her heavenly duty to send my sisters and I a barrage of repeating numbers, ladybugs, inexplicable light flares, orbs, frog stuff, and other phenomena. How predictable.

The inner life needs to be a good time, free from judgement when at all possible, and protected from any outside voices or personalities that can’t help but misunderstand. This place is just for you. Even before I quit drinking, this world within is what carried me through otherwise unbearable moments in my life. During a tumultuous three year relationship with an abusive alcoholic boy that began when I was eighteen years old, I’d travel almost every night to the only place he couldn’t reach me, the walls of my soul. Inside that place I’d continue weaving my dreams and create a future for myself that was peaceful and safe, I built that life before I could actually see it. I remember sometimes smirking as he’d go off the rails, knowing there were parts of me he’d never get the chance to tarnish, never get the chance to know. When things felt particularly hopeless, which was often much of that time, I’d steal any little moment I could to journey inward, find a brief respite, and remind myself that as long as that place existed-there was more to my story.

Of course, the situation doesn’t have to be so dire, I’m only trying to show the range and power of this inner development. It can save your life, it can also save you picking up a drink when you’re sick of twiddling your thumbs. So many of our creative ideas begin here, in the desperate attempt to entertain ourselves in a quiet room. I read and wrote a lot of poetry in early sobriety. Just me in a silent stare, stuffing words into my mouth and attempting to spit them back out in a new way. Some of those poems were really good, most were shit. It didn’t matter. I was building up some kind of personal arsenal of interesting phrasing and old world vocabulary that would reappear, like tiny lightning bolts, sometimes a couple years later and land on the perfect page at the perfect time. The inner development is unseen, but it’s always building, compounding on itself, as long as we are feeding it.

You are not bored, but you might be running on empty. You might need to put some energy into filling yourself up with some inspiring ideas or take some time to acknowledge that you aren’t incorporating enough passion into your current routine. Passion isn’t always fiery red or burning hot either. Sometimes passion is a cool yellow, a joyful flicker, a tiny spark of interest that leads us to look at something a little closer. Follow your nose. Not the one that had you sniffing out the local drug dealer after your third drink at a Cancun all-inclusive joint, but the one you used when you were a kid. That kid nose of yours probably led you to all sorts of unknown delights. Deep in the woods, dirt on your hands, fairytales and fables running through your head, you had to be called home for supper three times before you’d listen. You could have stayed out there all night, playing, imagining, dreaming and learning. All of that magic still exists, buried under decades of taxes and heartbreaks and grief and rent payments-dig back in.

I’ll wrap this up with Swiftie speak, “I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind people need a key to get to-the only one is mine.” For me, and maybe anyone else who’s suffered through a bout of boredom or a year-long situationship with a finance guy, the most relatable lyric she’s ever written.