Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  But when I remembered the dark ages of my addiction, I felt disgusted and ashamed. Images of my cokehead liar self getting high in my room in the wee hours while Miriam was pregnant would flash into my mind’s eye with a rush of revulsion. What the hell was I doing? What was I even thinking? It was time I looked back again, to follow the trail from the stable ground I’d found back through the fog of addiction, to the hospital, to all my years of running away.

  I had heard Jim speak in meetings for about six months before I asked him to be my sponsor. He had a laid-back and honest quality that I found very appealing. He was born poor and orphaned in his early teens, he told me later. He joined a violent gang. Years passed. He remembered the rage and suffering of his frightened boyhood through an amnesiac screen of booze and drugs and denial. A day of reckoning arrived. He stood at the threshold of either redemption or annihilation. He chose to acknowledge the reality of his past. He did not do so alone. He followed the steps that others had trod before him: his sponsor, his sponsor’s sponsor, back through the generations, to the origin of the fellowship.

  “I have two questions you need to answer if you want me to sponsor you,” said Jim, when we met for the first time in his apartment.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Number one: Are you willing to do anything to stay sober?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Number two: Are you going to waste my time?”

  “No,” I said.

  How different this interaction with Jim felt compared to my experiences with Dr. Jensen and Dr. Browning. His directness communicated a message I had not absorbed before. It was as if I were sleepwalking, and about to stumble off a balcony, and he shook me awake. Three parts of what he said stood out. Willing: it was up to me. Nobody else was going to do it. Anything: I had to put my sobriety first. It might be hard. Waste my time: He was a person too. This wasn’t just about me. It was about us. I commit to you; you commit to me.

  I was okay with steps one and two, the bit about powerlessness and needing a higher power. But after that, the twelve steps got gnarly. There was the suggestion to “make a searching and fearless moral inventory.” I had a hard time with the word moral. It felt like something I might have heard in church, before everything fell apart. As for searching, I thought I knew how to do that. I had searched through memories. Searched for answers to unfathomable mysteries of the past. But was I engaged in the wrong kind of search? I realized that the search I needed to do involved some basic issues about how I lived my life in the present. Was I good for my word? Did I tell the truth? Did I treat others the way I wanted to be treated? No, no, and no.

  Step seven suggested that I “humbly” ask God to remove my shortcomings. The word humble comes from the Latin humus, which means ground—to me that sounded perilously close to humiliation. The chaotic structure of my memory at the time had a way of running things together—past and present, humility and humiliation. The directive to be humble took me back to times when my mother slapped me in the face or exploded in rage; it was inconceivable to imagine that positive forward motion in life could depend on feeling that sort of low. But there are healthy ways of being in touch with the ground.

  I reflected on my shortcomings. I realized how much rage and resentment I had felt, as long as I could remember. I realized how I used my pain to justify all manner of shoddy behavior through a kind of schoolyard moral calculus. I realized that if I resented someone, it was because I feared they didn’t value me. But I came to recognize that I didn’t have direct access to other people’s minds or know what they were thinking or why they did what they did. And in any case, the inconsiderate or hurtful actions of others didn’t mean I couldn’t value myself. I could and should. I did not need to take the actions of others personally; their hurtful actions were the consequences of their own suffering . . . If possible, I could even attempt to seize the opportunity of witnessing these hurtful actions as a means of developing greater equanimity and compassion. However, if this was not possible, at least I could act with restraint, and only seek to regulate my own thoughts, feelings, and actions. If I felt resentful, I would have to ask what part I had played in creating the situation.

  That realization laid the groundwork for step eight’s suggestion that I make a list of all persons I had harmed, and be willing to make amends to them all. It was an intimidating prospect, the idea of turning backward to face the ruin of my past. The prior decade loomed in memory as a dark mass of violence, drugs, blackout drinking, psychotic visions, and suicidal thoughts, mashed together in the nonsequential and raucous form of a death-metal music video. I had an impression of my own moral agency within this miasma as a source of either guilt I could not bear or irreconcilable confusion. But Jim was a skilled guide in the backward path to the dark places. My list encompassed seventy harms in eight handwritten pages. In writing the list I discovered that the subject of more than half of those harms was—guess who—me: marijuana-induced extreme paranoia, MDMA-induced heat exhaustion in the desert, alcohol-induced blackouts and vomiting, the long depressive aftermath of drug binges. Of the other harms, the list comprised just a handful of people, hurt in the same way, over and over again—and principally Miriam.

  When I was a boy at St. Peter’s, I would go to confession. I went into a chamber called a confessional and confessed my sins to a priest. I remember my teacher, Mrs. Mahon, alluding in class one time to “that feeling you get after confession, when you feel so good and clean inside” in a casual way that made the feeling sound like something self-evident. I liked the sound of this good, clean feeling, but I’d never had it. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I would say, but then my mind would go blank and I couldn’t remember even a single misdeed I could imagine saying out loud. One time—I must have been about nine—I remembered the overdue library books that I had been afraid to tell my parents about, and how I’d enlisted my brother to help me bury them in the nearby field, and my impression of the impossibility of confessing to such a monstrous crime. I invented something that seemed more trivial instead and said my act of contrition, thinking as I prayed to God that lying in confession was surely unforgivable, and as I left the church, I tried not to think of hell. But those days were long gone.

  One night I told Miriam I had something I wanted to tell her.

  “I lied to you to buy drugs,” I said, my voice quavering with tears. “I stole from our bank account. I yelled at you. I haven’t been present for you. I’m sorry, Miriam. I’m sorry for all the ways I’ve hurt you. I vow never to harm you again. I can’t promise I’ll be perfect. But I promise to do my best.”

  I felt the good and clean feeling that Mrs. Mahon had mentioned all those years before and that I had never imagined would be possible for me. For the first time in my life I had an emergent understanding of the difference between two kinds of chaos in life and how I was only responsible for one of them. I didn’t choose my parents. I didn’t choose the family environment in which I threw my brother down the stairs. I didn’t choose the chaos that traumatized me and created my vulnerability to addiction. I wasn’t responsible for the path that I was born on. But my path’s future direction was up to me.

  My past began to feel less chaotic. I harbored no delusions of perfection. I knew I would make mistakes again. But good, bad, or indifferent, now I would do my best to learn from experience instead of running away from it.

  I ONCE HEARD SOMEONE in an AA meeting say that addiction freezes your emotional development around the time you started drinking or using. Once you get sober, the person said, you pick up where you left off. That might mean you have the emotional mind of a teenager in a thirty-five-year-old body. This person was right. The available data suggest that most addicts and alcoholics start using drugs or drinking as a desperate measure to medicate the unbearable feelings associated with early life trauma. The first time a trauma survivor finds out that they can drown away bad feelings with booze or pills or powder, the discovery can feel like a miracle.
At last, something that helps! What a relief. But once you start coping with bad feelings like this, it can be hard to stop. You don’t learn other ways of coping.

  I finished my first fifty-mile ultramarathon in Tahoe around the same time I finished the twelve steps. What is my actual potential? I wondered. I remembered paths not taken a long time before, all the way back in England when I was a teenager. Didn’t I think about becoming a doctor back then? What happened? With a sober mind, and a stable home and family life, I could see how the chaos of my teens had derailed the opportunities I might have had at the time to contemplate different paths through life. But what about the little boy who liked to know things? I can run fifty miles in the mountains. What else might I be able to do? It was hard to decide what direction to go in. There were so many possibilities. Medical school seemed appealing. But once I got out, what sort of doctor could I imagine wanting to be? Psychiatry was the obvious option. But what a huge mountain I’d need to climb. I’d need to do all the premed science classes I never took in the English equivalent of high school, then get through four years of medical school and three years of residency and maybe even an additional year or two of some kind of specialized fellowship after that. If I got on it immediately, I was looking at ten years of school, starting in my late thirties. I figured I could do it. Nothing could ever be as hard as recovering from depression and getting sober. But at the summit of that decade-long climb, what did I imagine actually wanting to do? Help people the way Mike and Jim had helped me. Listen to people in pain. People like my mother and father. Like the Shopkeeper and La Llorona and Invisible Laserbeam. People like the person I once had been. The runaways.

  X

  Charon

  Desolation Wilderness

  The night is dark and cold. The sky above is black. It is early in the morning. I follow Emily down a road. The road began at the ski lodge. It was warmer back there, in the time before. It was warmer in the past. Perhaps we should have stayed there. I remember it was warm. Now the road is flat. There are pine trees on either side of us. Perhaps I should head into the trees. I could lie down on the ground. Then I would be motionless. I would like to be motionless. Then my suffering would end. I would be still among the trees. I would wait for morning. For the end of the darkness. I would see the sun again. I would sit there waiting, and then the light would come. And yet I sense this would be foolish. It is freezing here, even bundled in my coat. It is cold while I am moving. It would be colder if I stopped. I would wait and shiver. Nothing good could come of it. The darkness would last longer. The ending would not come. The ending comes to those who move toward it. Emily mentions water. Perhaps I am not drinking it. I take a sip of water. I feel it touch my lips. I swallow the cold water. It seems that she was right. I am not aware of thirst. And yet I need water. It is early and I am mourning. The night is cold and dark. The sky turns dark blue. The trail leads into the forest. Emily says eat. I listen to the doctor. I eat a GU. It hurts my mouth. My mouth has ulcers, from all the GU. I started eating them on Friday. That was days ago. Twice per hour I’ve had the GU, for three days straight now. Hundreds of them. It’s too much GU. I don’t like them. GU is nasty. Ow and yuck. Yuck and ow and yuck. I ask the doctor. I can’t eat GU, I say. My mouth is hurting. My lips are hurting. My tongue is hurting. The roof of my mouth also. From all the GU. Try this, she says. It’s buffalo. I eat the meat. I am not a meat eater. But I am eating it. It doesn’t hurt my mouth. I eat more buffalo. Perhaps I should eat a whole one. A whole buffalo, I mean. It seems that I am moving. The sky is now light blue. Yet I still see trees around me. The end is far from here. It seems that I am moving. And yet the end is far. I am moving through the trees. It seems that I have now endured enough. And yet the trail continues. Somewhere else it is Monday morning. The ordinary world is waking up again. I was once a citizen of that distant world. My eyes are open. But I am not in any ordinary sense awake. A hundred seventy miles of mountain trail does strange things to a person. The trees ahead grow closer as the ground moves underneath me and then becomes more trees, a forest that goes on forever. Besides the trees, I am conscious of the pain. My feet hurt. My shins hurt. My shoulders and back hurt. My lips and tongue and throat hurt. Along with the pain comes the knowledge that I have chosen it and could choose to make it stop, and along with this knowledge is the understanding of the pain as an unheard cry so long blocked from awareness to which I am now willing to listen and seek to understand.

  The sun rises high in the sky. I see horses in the trees. The trail leads into a clearing where there are places to sit down. “How’s it going, dude?” says the medic. I tell the story of my injuries. There are others like me, she says. I meet the man to my left. His legs, like mine, are aching. He sits with his feet raised high. The Angel was here a while ago, he says. Have I met her, says the man. Yes, I tell him. In the beginning I saw the Angel. She was with me then. In the time before. “She was with us here,” the man says. “The Angel came here. She tended to our suffering. I saw her. She sat with me. She has gone now. And yet long ago the Angel was once here with us. Perhaps she will return,” he says. “Perhaps she will appear to us again.” “We can hope for such things,” I say. “How are those shins doing?” says the medic. I put my pain into words. She wraps my legs in tape. Under normal circumstances I would be skeptical that this little patch of tape could do anything for my tendons, but whether it’s real or pure placebo, I’ll take it.

  I stand and hobble forward. “Does that feel better?” she says. “It does,” I say. The tape keeps my ankles in place. The pain in my tendons reduces by a smidgen. I must rest when I reach the end, she says. There are those who return here without resting, she says. She met such a man today. He had finished another two hundred only weeks before in Washington, she says. “Dude comes in, says his foot hurt,” the medic tells me. “‘Take off your shoe, sir,’ I said. And oh man was it gnarly. Try and run on that thing, guy, your whole heel is coming off. Degloved is the medical term. The flesh comes clean off the bone. ‘Time for the hospital,’ I told him. He went to the emergency room. Then this other guy came in, seizing. I mean full-on grand mal seizure. Some sort of electrolyte imbalance, likely. Not enough sodium or potassium. ‘Get some ice over here,’ I said. So he was number two for the hospital. Please don’t be number three, 108!” the medic says, referring to my race number. “I promise not to,” I say. “That’s your number, 108?” says the man beside me. “Yes,” I say. “I’m 109,” he says. “What are the odds?” I calculate them. Let n be 250, the set of runners. Let x be the chance of random selection of two consecutive bib numbers. Calculate x. The answer proves elusive.

  “Would you like some soda?” says Emily. “Yes,” I say. She hands me a cup. I drink from it. Yum, cold ginger ale. I stand. I hobble forward, following Emily. The sun is lower in the sky. I am hot. My shins are hurting. The end is far; the trees surround me. The trees surround me; the end is far. I am following Emily. Oh, my shins, oh my stars, what agony with every step now! The pain becomes intolerable. “Try backward,” says Emily. I try it. Going backward, my ankle flexes in the opposite direction. The pain is gone. Yet so has my velocity. I see the trail behind me, where I have been. My motions are slow and clumsy. Travel backward down the mountain and it’s hard not to trip and fall.

  The Enchanted Land

  About a hundred miles north of San Francisco there is a twenty-five-mile stretch of pristine coastline inaccessible by roads called the Lost Coast. The closest you can get to it are the little towns at either end. Miriam and I went there a couple of years after I came to California from England. We hiked most of the trail connecting the two towns. Miriam made a watercolor painting of the view. A dark green mountain rises from the ocean in the foreground. You can see other mountains behind it, diminishing in scale, until they fade into the blue. The painting hangs above the therapy couch on my office wall.

  I was twelve years sober. I had done the steps. I had made amends to the people I had hurt. I had committed to l
iving an honest life to the best of my ability. Four years sober, I decided to go back to school. The following month I sat in a classroom for my first lecture in a clinical psychology PhD program. In class discussions or paper assignments about depression, bipolar disorder, addiction, psychosis, and other mental health issues, I felt like I was reexploring territory I’d lived for decades, and like I had an intuitive understanding for some of those far reaches of the human psyche that no amount of book learning could produce. But I also became aware of the taboo in psychology circles that discouraged clinicians from talking about their own personal or family history of mental illness. In my application essay for grad school, I’d made reference to my mother’s struggles with psychosis and my own experience of depression. In my interview, I’d alluded to the letter, which I presumed the interviewer must have read. He cut me off mid-sentence, warning me that such candid disclosures would ruin my career. I was stunned. But this taboo did indeed appear to function as a central organizing principle of psychology training, reflective not so much of the institution I attended as the mental health profession as a whole: mental illness was a tragedy that happened to other people. We were the healers. The others were the sick ones. I heard students and even some faculty members talk routinely about “schizophrenics,” “addicts,” and “borderlines” like entomologists classifying insects. It made me sad. They had no idea they were talking about my parents. About La Llorona and Holst and Invisible Laserbeam and the Prisoner of Azkaban. About me. I was healthy and stable. But I had no illusions about some bright dividing line between the healthy and the sick. We are all vulnerable. In the words of Hindu guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, “There are no others.”