Caterpillar Goo

Today we have an interview with Amy, talking about what she learned about herself, life, and love from marriage, divorce, and dating. She has style, charm, and humor, and it was a lot of fun hanging out and talking with her. Thanks, Amy!

This is probably the last interview for a little bit of awhile, until we can find more people willing to share their stories of transformation. If you're one of those people, drop me a line at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you!

Also, if you're willing, please send me a recording of yourself, your friends, family, and pets saying, "Caterpillar Goo!" I want to use them in intros and other fun with audio.

Thanks! Here's the transcript of Amy's story:

Got divorced in, that was the spring of, or summer actually, of 2003. It’s odd. It seems like a lifetime ago in a way. I was married for 4 years, and we were together/shacked up for 4 years before that. I was living in Houston, and he was living in Austin at the time, and one night I was headed out with my friend Jennifer, and of course what precipitated my meeting him was me and my friend saying things to each other like, “Ah, forget guys!” You know? “We’re just a couple of single gals!” The plan was just for us to go and play a game of pool together. Well, we go out to play pool, and who’s at the table next to us but 3 guys who we started talking to and then playing a pool game with.

I met Jeff that night, but he and I didn’t actually date until almost a year later because I started dating another guy in the group for about 9 or 10 months, and during that time, Jeff would come travel to Houston quite a bit, so I got to know Jeff a little bit. Kelly and I were, long story short, definitely not a good match, and not too long after he and I broke up, I had Jeff’s number, and I was like, “Ringy dingy! Hey, this is Amy! Kelly and I broke up. And how you doing? And did I mention I’m single?” And so, we went on a date, and that was that. And we had a long-distance relationship for about 9 or 10 months. And I had lived in Austin before and was just itching to move back, and this was, “Wow, what a great excuse to move back to Austin.” And so we, I moved back to Austin, and we moved in together. Mistake!

I had dated a little bit in college but didn’t really take a deep dive anywhere there. So I was quite inexperienced in dating even though at the time I thought that I had plenty under my belt. I thought that I was well-equipped to wisely select a compatible mate. So I would have been in my mid-20s at that point, and oh, I was so mistaken. 

My parents divorced when I was 11, and their divorce was pretty awful. The only way it could have been worse is if either one of them had had any money. And the fallout of it was just so huge and extreme for the family that through that experience alone, I thought that that alone was going to provide me good lessons in terms of what to do and what not to do. How to pick a mate. What to look for, what not to look for. And of course that’s not what happened.

There were a number of reasons why I selected Jeff as a mate, and I didn’t figure it out until afterward, but one of those reasons was envy. I was fairly isolated as a kid. I was a loner. In high school. I mean I had 1 or 2 friends but was very low-key. Jeff at the time, I idealized these characteristics that I felt like he had in terms of, he had been very happy throughout school and had a lot of friends and had maintained a lot of friendships, even from when he was a very small child. And then his family also, I met them, close to San Antonio where his parents lived in this lovely cabin, and they were just lovely people, and went there and had just this great time with his family that seemed at the time to me almost like a family that you might encounter, you might see in the movies. And I didn’t feel like the black sheep or the ugly duckling like I had even with my own family. With my immediate family, I definitely felt that way. And so in dating him, my world was opening up, and it was opening up to this entire area and this potential new family where I felt very welcomed and appreciated for who I was and what I brought to the table. I grew up in Louisiana, so I of course was a great cook, and his family really appreciated my cooking, and they loved to cook, and so that was something that we had a lot of fun kind of bonding over in their respective kitchens.

I think I had ideas about feeling like I was a likeable person, and almost felt like, Oh! I’m in this relationship with this guy who is very well-liked, well-loved, and if he loves me, and especially once he proposed, if he wants to marry me, then that must say something about me. I must’ve turned a corner, and I must be more likeable, and maybe I’m taking on some of these characteristics or traits. So, envy was a big old part of it, that I failed to see or acknowledge at the time.

He was raised Jewish. I hadn’t been raised Jewish, but I was born Jewish, and I found out when I was in high school and started to take an interest in that. And then when Jeff and I met, and, oh, you’re Jewish? Wait, I am too. That to me provided an additional opportunity to really become a part of something. And so that was definitely part of the appeal too. And Judaism, the more I learned about it, those were things that made sense to me. I had gotten kicked out of Sunday school in third grade because I asked a question that the teacher didn’t like, and I got kicked out. And so when I started to learn about Judaism later and how philosophically it embraces the idea of asking questions, that really appealed to me. And so I loved that we were both of the same religion, and it seemed to me that we appreciated the same things about the religion.

My vision was blurred by envy, idealism, and admiration of traits that I thought were there. Not to say that they weren’t, I mean, he was a funny guy, great sense of humor, and we could always find things to laugh about together. I overestimated humor’s role and its ability to carry a relationship. That only takes you so far. I would definitely advise anybody, don’t get married in your 20s. Don’t do it. My mom and dad, they got married when they were 19 and 20, so by the time I got married at 29, I thought oh yeah, I did such a great job in biding my time, and I thought that I was just all prepared for it.

And I mean, Caterpillar Goo. Talk about gooey, you know? I mean, come on, you know? You’re getting married, and you haven’t even pupated yet, you know? It’s just, how is this going to fly? I do remember the night before the wedding, having the cold feet and thinking, part of, like, feeling conflicted about it. Part of it was, oh, this is just cold feet, and everybody has that. But there really was another part of me that thought this, I don’t, you know, I haven’t been married before, but this does not feel, it doesn’t feel right to me. It doesn’t feel like something that is sustainable. I definitely played down the red flags, which I think is probably number one mistake, right?

It took a couple of years. It might have happened faster if not for events that cropped up that I think probably were distracting in a way. We had started work on building a house. And building a house is one of those things that unless you’ve talked to someone else, you’re really in no way prepared for what an involved and high maintenance process, and frustrating process, it truly can be. And our house was supposed to built in 6 months; it took 3 times that. Also, a month after we got married, I lost my job. And I got a new job quickly, but between that and the fear about losing a job again, that created a whole focus on my work and my career. It probably kind of distracted away from things that later on got more of my attention. We were living in this house, very close to the lake, and had made friends in the neighborhood, and were leading a lifestyle that was, you know, really happy and adventurous and comfortable at the same time. We didn’t have a boat, but we had friends who did. And so, it was really a comfortable and pleasant time despite little things in, what seemed like at that point, little things in our relationship that started to kind of creep up.

It was almost like if you imagine a pool of water, and you’ve put your hand in that little pool, and it’s just muddy. You don’t see through. But then, when you keep your hand still, eventually, the dust settles, and then you see clear through. Once we started to kind of get settled in as a couple, like ok, this is what our path actually looks like, that’s when things started to unravel. And I’ll bet you now, there were things that were going on that I wasn’t paying attention to. I was selling myself short by not acknowledging that and pulling some threads that needed to be pulled. I let it go. Of course communication issues come up for everybody, but I was not, I wasn’t doing the due diligence. I wasn’t being fair to myself. And the issue in the end wasn’t not trusting him. The issue was me not trusting myself.

I’m a lifelong student, and there are lots of things that I always wanted to learn, like while I was in college for example, that I never really had an opportunity to because I put myself through school, and I just reached a point where, yeah, I would love to do this forever, but I’m broke, and I gotta get a job and gotta do these other things called life. But wherever I could take like a drawing class, or a painting class, or a sculpture class. I got into gardening and set up a garden, and then before you know it, I was astonished to find that, would you believe it, deer were eating, and so figuring out, well how do we set this up so that we can actually have the vegetables that we’re trying to grow here? But we found little things here and there to jump in on together.

We had a lot of areas of agreement. We even agreed in areas where we were more vague or noncommittal, like with kids. We both felt like, well we don’t know. We don’t know if we’re going to have kids or not, but we both felt confident in our relationship that we would agree on if and when that would happen, but we felt like we would be on the same page about having kids. Physically, yeah. I mean, our, we always had had a good sex life, so that wasn’t an area of tension or issue. That only started to deteriorate after other areas started to.

He started to get interested in these TV shows that were on cable access in Austin. I don’t remember the names of them, but they were, the hosts were conspiracy theorists.So I remember he would watch them, and at first he would laugh about them, and I mean, there were some that were, there’s no other way to slice it. They were absurd. I mean there was one guy who wore a toilet lid around his neck when he was delivering his monologue. I don’t know what that was supposed to symbolize, but yeah, take him seriously. But at first, you know, he’d watch these like, “Oh, this is kind of a freak show. Check this out.” And then that changed. That changed to, “You know, I think this guy might have a point.” I mean, his interest in conspiracy theories built up quite a bit. His interest in that to the point where that became very much a second job. He made some friends who were producers with Austin Cable Access, and before you know it, he was producing his own show. And I wanted to be supportive of that because that was in many ways a creative effort, and it was interesting to him, and you always want to support, you know, your mate’s interests. The subject matter was really troubling to me.

About 2 ½ years in, that’s when things started to come apart, and it was a confluence or merger of several things at one time. The, his interest in conspiracy theories had, that had fully matured and developed. And I didn’t at all mind the amount of time that it took. Like have all the time that you want for the things that you want to pursue. It was that he was bringing those things home with him, those topics home with him. And so our interactions and what we really could talk about, that was narrowing in a way that was unfulfilling for me. And at the same time also, there are things that you must do as a married couple that aren’t necessarily demanded of you when you’re living together, when you’re dating, and so for example with the filing taxes, you know, filing taxes jointly, that kind of deal. And that called for a greater level of communication between us that we just clearly weren’t equipped for, and there were things, there were other areas where the trust was being eroded. I was keeping to myself a whole lot. I started to shut down. And I started to not be at home so much. Not going out and partying or anything like that, just kind of going to a neighbor’s or staying at work a little later.

And so, Jeff and I got to the point where our everyday interactions were very kind of vanilla and garden variety. Like he would call me at pretty much the same time every day to ask me what was for dinner. Yeah, things got boring for us just because we weren’t finding new things together to enrich and inform that relationship, and so our interactions with each other got pretty anemic. And I wasn’t sharing, and my feelings of trust, I was starting to tap into that as a need, that I need honesty.It’s not just that we love one another, but we are friends to each other, and we are supportive of each other, yes, but we are also protective of each other. And I was feeling more and more like my best interests were not being regarded or protected. And in my head what I saw, the analogy that I draw is almost like, you see footage of when a space shuttle goes into orbit, and it detaches, it just kind of unlocks from I guess it’s the booster, it just detaches, and the 2 units are never to be united again. They’re just off into their own spaces on their own paths. 

And we had gone to counseling once. We went to a counselor, and we talked about things, and then afterward, you know, we walked out, and Jeff was like, alright, well that was cool. Glad we got that taken care of, like it was something to mark off the checklist, and yeah. We talked about it a little bit more after that, but I don’t remember making like a big, concerted push for joint counseling after that. I went for my own, just for my own individual counseling after that point. I think probably just talking things out and processing things out loud rather than having them just hamster-wheeling, pent up in my own headspace, getting them out and really exchanging with someone probably helped me to process things a little bit more clearly.

So, things got a little bit more clear for me in working with a therapist, but I didn’t know when or how or if divorce was going to happen. I was afraid to pull the trigger, not really sure how to go about that, or what that would look like, and we had this whole life created and built and were set, you know, like we were just going to keep on as we had been and probably could have in some ways. And I knew that Jeff was unhappy, because I mean, sex is a part of how you communicate together as a couple, and we just weren’t communicating obviously through sex or through anything. I mean, we’d really and truly shut down in a lot of ways. And I had shut down. I wasn’t opening up about things that were frustrating me, and I was letting it build up and up and up and up and up. Just letting it build up, but not even perceiving it that way. And my uncertainty about the future and my feelings of investment into our life and our lifestyle just kind of kept me in a holding pattern for quite some time. It was just kind of this murky gray area where I felt like this doesn’t feel at all good, and I don’t see it improving in any way, because I don’t see a path toward things getting better. But I wasn’t ready to take action in any way. And then it just snapped.

The decision to divorce was another off-and-on switch that all of a sudden got activated. That day at work, I had gotten news that my job was more likely than not on the chopping block. So there were rumors about that going around, so it was like, oh, ok, so I’m on the precipice of needing to find another job again, and I don’t know what or how that’s going to look like or how long it’s going to take. So I had a whole lot going on in my head about that and was pretty troubled about it. And so he called me on his way to the studio to check in with me, and I said, I have a request, and it’s important. And I told him what had gone on that day, and I said, when you get home tonight, I just want a peaceful, tranquil night. Maybe we’ll watch a DVD or something, but I need you to not talk at all about this stuff, conspiracy theories, how the show went, anything like that. I don’t want to hear a thing about it. Please, no. I need recess from that tonight. He agreed.

He gets home, comes through the door, sits down on the couch. I’m sitting in the easy chair. He sits down and goes right into regaling me with all of the details about the show’s production that night, and the topic du jour, and I just sat there, and I looked at him. I just stared at him. And finally he sees the look on my face, or recognizes it, and says, what? And I said, I want a divorce. It just switched off. And it was like my mind and my body just went into autopilot at that point. I was no longer troubled about an uncertain future. I wasn’t troubled about anything at all. I just knew what I needed to do. You can’t unring a bell. You said it. Now you have to follow through. 

So Monday night we split up. Tuesday night I was in a hotel 2 nights, and then the night after that, I was in my new apartment. I had barely been able to pick up anything from the house, so I just had sheets, my pillow, just a couple of other things, and I slept on the floor of my new apartment and cried. I remember like bursting into tears at certain times where it was very unpredictable. It just came on all of a sudden, like when I was signing the lease papers of the apartment complex. I burst into tears, and I remember the apartment manager, of course I bet she’s seen many separated people in her time, and she was consoling me. And it felt very disorienting. Just all of a sudden, like what’s my path now? Everything was different. I mean, I got set up with my new apartment, in pretty short order, and on the outside things looked just fine, and they were shaping up. But on the inside, I felt very, that was a very gooey time.

The whole process of marriage and the dissolution of it, it took a long time, and even now, I still have revelations about it. I definitely question things a lot more. I question things about myself, but I also know to trust myself and to consider myself. Hopefully I understand a lot more about what the necessary ingredients are in order for a relationship to make the long haul. I don’t think longevity is, that in and of itself does not necessarily, it doesn’t reflect success. But the quality of the relationship, how are you with each other over time, how will your lives naturally and also through effort mesh well together? You know, what are the components of compatibility that really serve people the best? Humor is still definitely a part of it, a shared sense of humor, but shit, it’s certainly far from the only thing. You know, it’s a matter of figuring out like what areas, like, there should be compatibility, like in terms of things that you have in common and areas that you complement each other, but there can also be areas where you’re too much alike. It’s a matter of how do you identify and figure out that sense of balance where your differences and your similarities fit together well.

I see the early part of a relationship, all those feelings, like the butterflies in the stomach, kind of seeing like, oh, you’re feeling this way. Well, you know that your body is being bathed in all of these chemicals that are supposed to kind of goad you into or kind of lead you down this path. There’s the giddiness and all that that’s, you know, really fun and enjoyable. But I also know your vision gets blurry because of things like that.

So after I separated, I got into dating, and I felt like there’s still a lot I need to understand about who I am. But I jumped into it. God, online dating was really weird and still pretty new I guess at the time. So I got into online dating for a little bit and thought, oh, I’m backing out of this because I was getting into these very short-lived kind of things where I would meet someone and we’d feel this kind of giddiness, and then I would get ghosted before ghosting was even a thing, you know? Hey, I’m a trendsetter. Or, you know, things would just come an abrupt halt, or all of a sudden I’d realize, oh no. I took a big old break.

It was 6 years before I dated anyone. I was strictly on my own and just determined, you know what, I’m going to focus on living like the kind of person that I would want to date. And so I did acting classes and just anything that I got a lark for, that I wanted to learn about, I did. I took acting classes. I went to ACC and started on a second degree in graphic design because that’s, you know, I had things, things in that area that I’d always wanted to know how to do even if I didn’t make that into a career. I just went about fulfilling my intellectual curiosity as I went on the exercise of making friends.

There’s a part of me that would like a relationship. There’s part of me that would like a relationship right now. I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted to have kids or not, but it wasn’t like I had any biological clock ticking or anything like that, but I didn’t want to put myself in the position of not dating at all until it was too late.  But I’m glad I allowed myself some time there just to be on my own in the world, and focus on making friends, making and sustaining friendships because I didn’t see that Jeff and I had done a good job of being friends to each other. And I really wanted to come at it from the standpoint of, if I date someone that’s wonderful, but I want to be sure that we are friends first.

I always had an independent streak, but I’m not sure that I ever gave myself a chance to really explore everything that truly being independent had to offer in terms of benefit, but also growth through challenge. I had lived by myself throughout college, but this was my chance as a fully-fledged adult, to work on something resembling a career, buying a house. I wanted to pursue goals, and this was an opportunity to do those things without needing to partner or compromise or negotiate with someone.

When I re-entered online dating years later, I tried out a couple of sites concurrently. But Jesus. Like I was on OKCupid for less than 5 minutes before I got propositioned by a couple. It was like, uh huh. Wow. Is this what this whole scene is like? And Match, it’s almost like for each of these sites, like each one seems to have its own brand or characteristic or group of people that it tends to attract. Match was like the playing ground for married men from Houston who wanted to make it seem as though they were single and just in Austin for the weekend. And yeah, there was a lot of that. There was, like on OKCupid, there were propositions from couples, or I remember getting a message from this one woman who posted pictures of herself in various states of dress. And I indicated that I was only interested in boys, so I’m not sure why she thought this would be something I’d go for, but she sent me pictures of her in various states of undress, down to lingerie, covering herself in chocolate syrup. And I was on eHarmony for 24 hours, and I was like, no no no no, I’m crawfish-tailing my way out of this one. That one was strange. It was like a whole lot of questions, and then it offered you up your matches, and I had no idea how my answers lead to the profiles that I got. And so I left that. But yeah, lots of nice people. A few jerks in the mix there. I remember a lot of just online chats, online conversations, and then just never getting to the point where I was meeting someone initially in real life, at least not at first. I tried a couple of dates, and it was like this initial giddiness and fun, and then crash. 

I tried PlentyOfFish also. PlentyOfFish was what I used that lead me to my next relationship, my next serious relationship after my marriage, and that lasted for a year and a half. What I learned from that one, though, was that I had intentionally chosen someone who I wouldn’t be able to have a long term relationship with. Sometimes the only way out of something is through it. But I recognized that about myself in that relationship, while I was in the relationship, and took some time off from that and then dove back in, and I think my approach at that point was improved. I took kind of a more playful stance about it. And I took the approach of, well, you know what? Either I’m going to have a great time, or at the very least I’m going to have an interesting story.

But I approached everything like, ok, it seems like we have a couple of things in common in this conversation, ok. Let’s meet up. Let’s have a cup of coffee, or let’s just see what happens. I knew that I would meet someone, and based on the little conversation we had, if we could find something in common, something that was interesting for both of us to talk about, it was usually like writing or art or something creative, I would learn something, or I’d have a good story about it. So I wasn’t necessarily going into it for like, is this the one? It was just a matter of, let’s just meet up in the light of day and see how it works out.

 And it worked out everywhere from I met up with a guy where about 15 minutes into the conversation, and he asked me to wax his mustache for him. Nah. To I met a guy who was operating his own, he called it a porn site, but it consisted entirely of only photos of women fully clothed smoking cigarettes. But it was just interesting, you know, like meeting different people from all walks of life. I just took it on as just a way to meet new and interesting people and just having a, just being exposed to different frames of mind.

And whenever I met someone who was creative, it was always fun to talk about and see what they were working on. I’d meet someone, I’d think oh, well this, we’re attracted to each other, and this has a real possibility, but we just ran into a failure to launch, like where things just got too accelerated too quickly. And then I hit the point where that was getting a little bit painful, I met one guy where I was really interested and really hoping that things would develop, and then he made it clear he wasn’t interested in really continuing to date or anything like that. And that was a painful experience for me, and after that I thought, you know what? I need to change.

And I felt like, ok, this is where I need to become more intentional. And if it’s a relationship that I want, if it’s a boyfriend that I want, if it’s something that really can have a chance of standing the test of time and being good for me and good for the other person, then I need to articulate exactly what that looks like. And I wrote down, these are the things that I’m looking for in a partner. This is what I would ideally like for a relationship to really look like, and these are the things that are important to me, like a shared sense of adventure and an emphasis on having that as a part of life. And even like describing like physical characteristics, not having the expectation that I was going to meet someone who would fill all those things to a T, but just as a way of kind of reflecting back to myself, well, these are the things that I have in mind. By virtue of putting those things down on paper, it helps to kind of start the path to creating it more real, like from wooden boy to Pinocchio. And I didn’t know if that would be effective in bringing it closer to me, but I thought well, what’s the harm? You know, at least I’ve got this more clarified to myself, but I mean, I wrote stuff down, and then I put it on top of my mantle, where I would see it. And just by having it in front of me where I’d see it in passing and review it and reflect on it, that helped. 

And so, I met Steven a couple of months after that, and the trajectory, the path of our early relationship I felt like there was a lot there that we got right. We were friends first and spent a lot of time talking and sharing and being, just truly being friends to each other before we were boyfriend and girlfriend. And that felt really good. We got engaged about a year and a half into the relationship, and that’s one of the ones, that was one where I really, like there wasn’t any kind of feeling of cold feet. Like when we got engaged, I thought, here we have all the ingredients that we need to last. I was wrong, but I feel like I got more right about that one. And that one, the dissolution of that relationship was emotionally a lot harder than my marriage.

The list that I put together continued to evolve, or really I would just make new lists, you know, like progressive elaboration. There were also things that I realized, like ok, so how do I feel about myself in this relationship? And so I would add things or I would write down a list of  you know, how do I want to feel? And more about what kind of adventures do I want to experience with someone?

But I’m engaged now, and it’s a leap of faith in a way, but that’s not, it’s not like a leap of blind faith. It’s figuring out the right questions to ask yourself and not taking things for granted. It’s important to have shared interests. Having shared projects that you talk about and want to work on together is great, and that’s something that Greg and I have. So he’s an entertainer and a mentalist, and I’m learning, I love, I just love being with someone that you learn from. He’s accomplished in but also, he has very much that attitude of, like learning as a lifelong experience. It’s just part of what’s exciting to be human. And we’re both big-time bookworms. And so he’s sharing a lot with me, and I’m learning a lot from him and taking advantage of all of the literature that he has around mentalism. So I’m getting into that and also doing things like card reading, and so I do readings using playing cards rather than tarot, so I’ve gotten the skills down now, and I do readings for people. In fact, if you want one, you’re, I’m happy to give you one. But I don’t have anything like marketing-wise set up yet, so I don’t have a website to plug or anything like that. I’m still coming up with my stage name, as it were. So, I identified a stage name, but then, wisely I Googled it, and it came up as the name of a popular porn star. And I was like, oh, uh, no to that. That could, yeah, confusion around that could be interesting, so I’m going to avoid that. So I’ve got to figure out another name.

I would love to get to the point where I feel very comfortable about being in the moment and extemporaneous. And like with my current job and with previous jobs, they have involved public speaking, and I’ve gotten better at it, and I’m not at the point where it leaves me feeling catatonic anymore, so that’s good, so that’s progress, but I sometimes, like I feel like I plan too much in advance or maybe lean onto that too much as a crutch, which then might result in it feeling a little bit more, seeming a little bit more stilted or scripted or something like that. And I would love for it to feel a lot more natural. Like Greg, I mean, he’s very comfortable with being on stage and in the moment. You know, he’s very well-practiced at it, and he’s great at it, and see, to me that is the healthy kind of envy, for lack of a better word. You know, like I admire this in this person, but it’s not like I’m idealizing that. The things that I admire about him are just one facet of the many reasons why I am with him.

It’s not like I could pass myself off as, you know, hey, I’ve got it all figured out. I mean, I have more figured out than what I did, and I imagine there are blind spots that I’ve got now that maybe, maybe not I’ll realize later. But I, it’s a practice, right? Relationship is a practice, and I feel like I’m getting better at that practice. I’ve had a hard time in the past with, like I’ll have an emotion, like I’ll feel frustration or I’ll feel anger, or I’ll feel just kind of a nagging feeling, but elucidating why I feel that way, feeling anger, without being able to explain why it was. Well then, my reaction would be delayed because I wouldn’t share that I was feeling an emotion much less why. And then it would take me some time to figure out the why. But by the time I figured that out, it was really too late to go back, in my mind I felt at the time it was really too late to go back and say, hey, you know, when I was seeming pissed off? Well, this is why it was, and let’s talk about. And again, that’s practice. I mean, I still have those moments when I feel upset about something, and I don’t know why, but I bring that up, even if it’s not something that I can explain, just to get it out there and even just talking through it. And being with someone who you can talk through those things with, you know. For me I think it’s just a matter of considering yourself. Be selfish in love. I don’t mean selfish as in being regardless of someone else’s needs or feelings, but I mean it’s, you gotta consider yourself as much as you’re considering the other person. Think about what you need.

I’m digging the 40s. I am totally digging them, because I feel more childlike and free than I ever did. And I feel like embracing kind of having the beginner’s mind. And I don’t know what I don’t know in some areas, and being ok with myself over that. Being among other adults, other divorced adults, talking with other adults who have been in, you know, marriages, divorces, significant relationships, and sharing all of those things, it’s like, yeah, nobody really has it figured out. And that is a tremendous relief. Tremendous relief. I don’t know what it is about being young that makes you so worried about what’s normal. Why does it feel important to feel normal? And what is that anyway? I don’t know what my hangup was about feeling normal or fitting in, or anything like that. But one of the wonderful things about getting older is that you find out nobody really fits in, but that said, we all kind of find our tribes in a way.
 

I was an introvert. My son is an introvert. And after my ex-husband sent me this article, I'm thinking about ranges and spectrums and shades of gray.

I keep coming back in my mind to WNYC's On the Media and their interview with Mohamedou Ould Slahi. I haven't read his book yet, but I will. Maybe it will answer the question I have. I don't know what he went through, or how long and how much work it took for him to get to where he is now, but I wonder: how can he not blame? How can he not hate? What was done to him was unforgivable, yet he forgives.

Rod Haden

This week I performed in my third live storytelling event. It was for Testify, one of several different Austin area storytelling groups. This was the first time I had to pitch a story and work with producers. Kate Caldwell and Angela Maldonado gave me really useful feedback and helped me make the story better. The other storytellers were kind and friendly, and the stories had a wide emotional range. I highly recommend having a hobby that makes complete strangers approach you and tell you how much they loved what you did! And one freelance writer even came up to me after and apologized on behalf of the entire profession. I told her I hold no grudges. All in all, it was a fun experience, and I can't wait to do it again!

Flora Folgar

I've been thinking about something universal to parenting in relative safety and comfort: that an easy life might not be the way that kids grow into strong, resilient, and creative people. And of course there's always the universal parenting fear that we're failing, even when we know we're not.

Where is fancy bred? In the heart, or in the head?

Wait, wrong question. I could do Wonka quotes all day. What? He was quoting Shakespeare? The hell you say!

What about "Spring time, the only pretty ring time?"

Shakespeare too? What are you saying to me right now???

Wait, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah.

How comes maturity to the searcher? Is it nature, or is it nurture?

February is a good time to throw away those New Years resolutions. Or is it?

In this episode, I sit down with Christopher Howell on squeaky chairs in a church conference room to talk about personal growth, spiritual exploration, addiction, work, cancer, and taking yoga out of the studio and onto the trail. He is doing what many people dream of doing: earning a living doing what he loves. Yoga Hike is a deeply satisfying experience. I've done it twice, and will be out on one of Austin's many trails with Christopher and his team again soon. Check it out on the web at yogahike.com or on Facebook ( you can also search Facebook for "Yoga Hike"). He's also on Instagram at @yoga_hike.

Here's the transcript:

I tried college out of high school. I wasn’t a disciplined student, but I was a good salesman. And in those days, it was still believed that you could get by in life with a good handshake and a smile. And so I went that route. I was up in College Station selling shoes at 18, 19, 20, and she would drive in on the weekends, got pregnant one weekend, and as a good Catholic boy, that’s what you did in those days.

And I wasn’t good at relationships. And I was in my 20s. I was in my 20s. I mean, that’s just it. I hope no one ever gets married before they’re 30. Wasn’t for me. And no birth control as a Catholic, and so, you know, we had 3 boys and a miscarriage. We were pregnant the whole time that we were together. I was money-driven. That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be successful. I was one of the top Chevrolet salesmen in the country, number 3 in the state of Texas. I like to, still like to brag about that 25 years later. The only path for me after that was to buy a dealership, and that wasn’t a path that was going to suit me.

I was an alcoholic in my marriage. I was just very irresponsible 20 year old, had 3 kids from 20 to 27 like that. I wasn’t actually, I’m not that kind of guy. I’m not the father of 3 children kind of guy. And so the cocaine came as a way of covering the feelings that came with all of that, all the shame around even saying, “Hey, I’m not that kind of guy.” You know, I can say that now, 27 years later, but I couldn’t say it then.

For about a year following the divorce, all I cared about was being successful. I didn’t really deal with the pain of making my first mistake. I was kind of a golden boy growing up. I didn’t make a mistake until that divorce, and it hit me pretty hard. I mean, I got in trouble as a kid, but that was part of the adventure for me. That was the first time that, because I had a pretty strong Catholic background, that was the first time I’d ever failed at anything. I really never made a mistake.  And I didn’t really deal with that.

I felt if I were successful enough, it would make up for it. I got introduced to cocaine, did coke for about 9 months and then, I think I probably had a psychotic break, a drug-induced psychotic break, quit my job one day, left my demo, walked from the dealership to my house. That was about an 8 hour walk, went to bed for about 2 months.

Then got in my car, started driving around. I drove from here to California, and then I was making my way, I was going to go to Florida, and met these hippies down in South Padre.  I was 28 at this time. I even remember the night before meeting them. I mean, I got down on my knees, and I prayed with all of my might to try and find a way out of the hell that I was in.  And that showed up for me. And they invited me to go on a meditation, and I was pretty much a confirmed atheist following my divorce and such. But the girls were hot, so I said I would join them.

We met on the beach at dawn, swam out to this sandbar, and the leader of the group gave us a mantra to use, just saying a series of words over and over again to confuse the brain. And we’re doing them silently. He also told us to visualize dolphins while we were doing these mantras. I played along. Peer pressure. About 20 minutes into the experience, there was like a simultaneous breath, and everyone opened their eyes at the same time. We all kind of looked in one direction, like satellites, you know, and there was a school of 15 dolphins that went swimming by, the same amount that was in our circle. And so, that was interesting to me. It reawakened me to the possibility of some kind of mystery beyond my understanding that I’d pursued in the Catholic church as a child. The only thing that I’ve come to is that there’s this idea that Jung has of synchronicity.

So these people that I met down in South Padre were from Austin, and so I moved to Austin to study with these guys. The excuse I gave my family was that I was going to learn how to do massage therapist. I didn’t tell them I was coming up here to study with a hippie.They were intense. They used breathwork as the therapy for cleansing the body to make that realm of possibility more accessible to the psyche. The guy that was leading the group, I sat outside of his house for half an hour bawling, trying to get the courage to walk up and ask him if he would be my teacher. He was connected to something that was, that I very much wanted to be connected to.

What I’ve done since shortly after that experience, I got introduced to The Power of the Myth. that was an interview with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. And I have chased the references of that conversation for the last 30 years. So all of my reading has been on the authors that he’s referenced.

And I added work by Stanislav Grof, who’s one of the leading technologists in brain studies, near-death experiences, and how to access that using breathing techniques. Grof’s background is that he was the leading psychology researcher of LSD research in Czechoslovakia in the ‘60s. And then when he moved to the U.S., he couldn’t use LSD, and so he found this breathing technique, which I think is more impactful than LSD. I think that breathwork is more substantive and accessible, and you get as much of it or as little of it as you want at any time.

Psychologists will work with having you exame decisions you made as a child from 1 to 6 years old, or something like that, and that’s kind of determined who you are as a human being. Well, a spinoff from the work that Stan Grof does with breathwork, he does what’s called holotropic breathing, and it’ll be deep, round, circular breathing, where you go beyond hyperventilation for 3, 4, 6 hours, and using different sounds and things like that, it creates a what he calls a non-ordinary state of consciousness which is also the way he describes near-death experiences. And so all spiritual awakenings, according to this theory, come from that edge.

A deviation from that work was there was some work in the ‘80s and ‘90s called rebirthing. And the rebirthing is using the same, similar, breathing techniques as Grof, but what you’re working on is the interpretation, what they were working with is that the decisions and the way your personality is shaped by the way that you interpreted your birth experience. And so what you’re working on doing is breathing deep, full breaths and clearing out the cellular memory of whatever decisions were made during that birth process. So when you have a thought, it creates a chemical reaction in your body, and that gets stored in your body unless you find some way to work it out, and then you get addicted to that chemical blend, and that influences your psychology. By using specific breathing techniques, they would use an affirmation process. You’d write affirmations over and over and over and over again to stir up a thought that you hadn’t fully integrated. Like it might be, “I, Christopher, am an innocent child of God. All my desires are holy and always have been.” That was the first thought that I worked with, and I probably wrote that thousands and thousands and thousands of times because just to work through the layers of where I wasn’t an innocent child because of all of the shame that I’d carried. And using these breathing techniques helped facilitate that for me. And then part of the work there was discovering what your purpose is, and helping people realize their oneness is part of what my purpose is using my charisma, my ability to learn.

I was introduced to a weekend encounter group. With the rebirthing work, there’s not a lot of emotional work done. You’re supposed to breathe through the emotion, and I think that’s one of the fallacies of the work, or one of the shortcomings of the work. I think you need both. And so I was introduced to this encounter group where we just cried and screamed and everything at 100%. The weekend was about expressing yourself at 100% through the entire weekend. And so every time I went, you found new expression, new levels of 100%. There was tons of healing that went on in those classes. I was able to do years worth of therapy in one weekend, all the time. And I went into a training to learn how to facilitate those weekends. 2 years worth of training once a month out at a corporate headquarters, a Thursday through Monday training, and then every other weekend at a local training facility, for 2 years. Only like maybe 5% of the people that went through the training ever graduated and became facilitators, because you have to go through your stuff. So I took my sales background, I became a good teacher, and I learned how to fill these courses for these folks. They didn’t have a machine that would regularly put together classes that they could count on in size that they needed, and so I helped build that machine and then helped build franchises for them and other centers around the country with that.

I didn’t get a buzz from putting people in Chevrolets any more. I really got a buzz in putting people into their lives. And so as easy as I could make that process for people to make the decision to take those steps and make those changes, and we finally found a path and you know, worked on it for 2 years.

I was teaching, I was facilitating the weekend events. And what those were was a male and a female instructor and 24 students. They paid about anywhere from $500 to $700 to be in the weekend. And then there’s 20 to 30 graduate assistants who come back to help provide the same course experience for other people. So I got trained on how to facilitate those, but in the path, along the road there, one of the things that the franchises had a problem with is they didn’t know how to put people in the classes. They were just weak at doing it. Attracting people to the class. Anyway, I found a path. I found an introductory workshop that made it easy for people to make the decision, see if it was good for them, found a way to get the graduates to make that available to their community.

So I worked in that for about 7 or 8 years, and then the facilitators starting going in another direction. I went to massage school. This was in my late 30s I guess. So through all of that work, you’re also working with the work of Louise Hay. Louise Hay’s work is that you store different thoughts, feelings, and attitudes in different parts of your body, and those can contribute to different types of illnesses. So she’s got this catalog of “here’s the illness, here’s the low quality thought that might be impacting that area, here are some high quality thoughts that you can add into it,” and that’s affirmations, and you would work to that.

So through that, I got to understand where thoughts, feelings, and attitudes are stored in the body. I can look at somebody’s posture and kind of have an idea about their psychology just from being in the work and doing it myself. And massage is a great way to work it out of people, so it was like doing the same kind of work that we were doing in these encounter groups, but instead, I could just put you on the table, have you practice specific breathing techniques while we’re doing massage, and we can work those thoughts and stuff out of your body in a massage. So it was all the same kind of work.

So I had a lot of clients that we did an intake on what are your dreams, what you think your purpose is, if massage could facilitate that, that kind of thing. From there I opened the Center for Health Resources on Burnet Road. We had 4 rooms there. I rented out 3 of the rooms to other therapists, helped therapists coming out of massage school learn how to build their own business, and there’s 2 people still operating in that room now, and that was started probably in around 2000. So, after having a full practice for about 7 or 8 years, I was still traveling around, teaching weekend courses every once in awhile, but it wasn’t a full-time gig. And I had been exploring this breathwork more deeply.

And so, there’s one process where you can fast for several days, a vision quest kind of process. Fast for several days, and then I would go… this is the first time I went camping, actually. That was on my 40th birthday. So I fasted, and then I got to Enchanted Rock and started a silent meditation, stayed up all night Friday night keeping a fire burning, and then hiking, started hiking at sunrise, practicing these breathing techniques in hopes that I would have some kind of vision, like, you know, Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days, and Billy Jack got in the snake pit and got bit by a bunch of snakes.

You don’t know Billy Jack? It’s a great cult movie from the ‘70s, really influenced me when I was 13 and just after my father had died. Yeah, that’s how he had gotten his transition was, they like put him in a snake pit. You gotta see it. It’s a cult classic. Yeah. “One tin soldier rides away!”

So anyway, just to produce a non-ordinary state of consciousness along that lines without using mushrooms or LSD. And I had a non-ordinary experience for about 6 hours. So what I wanted to do was I initially wanted to start taking people on those kinds of adventures. I wanted to take you, have you start fasting, get to a campsite, stay up all night in silence keeping a fire burning, teach you these specific breathing techniques. You would have to learn the breathing techniques before we go on this adventure. There would be like an advanced thing, and then bring you into this other realm.

But to do that, I felt like I needed more credentials, and so I wanted to go back to school and get a doctorate in transpersonal psychology so that I could have an academic conversation about what I was doing. My wife’s business, was quite successful at the time. We were in a position we could do that, where I could go back to school. And in that process -- this was probably 41, 42 -- after selling the Center for Health Resources, back in school at ACC, and I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Then the testicular cancer really kicked a hole in all of that. I put too much emphasis on, “Why didn’t I catch that low quality thought in order for that illness to show up in my body?” So I had a little guilt and shame and stuff around that. I used to think Louise Hay was a bible. And we don’t know what the fuck cancer is. We don’t know, really know, what disease is. I mean, when you really get honest about it. There is so much variable.

And so that started tainting me. So after I got sick, I didn’t, I wasn’t interested in going back to school right away. I went to work at a plant nursery digging holes in the winter for, I think I was working $8 or $10 an hour. I mean, really just digging holes. And so, I didn’t say much, and when spring started coming around, I had a conversation with the owner and told him that I had some other skills. We had discussed partnering and opening a second location, and I recommended instead that we build something here, build something spectacular here. And it ended up going from a 6 employee place to 30 employee place. And 2 ½ acres into 5 acres, and it’s one of the top 100 destination nurseries in the country. And it’s fantastic.

While working at the nursery, I was just kind of slipping further and further away from any metaphysic healing, oneness. I don’t care. I’m working for this guy that’s a, just a… I call him this deeply rooted Aggie, deeply rooted into family in a spiritual way, but doesn’t care anything about any of the other… I don’t think out of the 7 years that I was with him, I might have hugged him once. And I hug everybody. Yeah. But we were buddies, you know what I mean? And he was a hunter. I started just becoming a Joe Six Pack. Worked hard, drank hard, and gained about 60 pounds...

So I went to the nursery just to heal from the radiation. I was really sick after radiation, and I didn’t have any juice. I didn’t want to think. And this was a nice… It was a great hobby. We were wildly successful in what we were doing, but it just wasn’t really true to me. And so I was just kind of slowly slipped into this depression, which I didn’t really realize. I was kind of in a panic mode.

I dropped 60 pounds on P90X. While I was working at the nursery. And I got almost an elite, fit body. First time I’d been fit in my whole life. And on P90X, there’s a yoga section, and I physically hurt myself every time I did the yoga portion. And so, about a year out of the nursery, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was 51 years old and didn’t want to do massage again, and so I was kind of freaking out again. You know, I was having a spiritual crisis that I had like when I was 27.

I could’ve ridden that at the nursery until I died, and I’d have been just fine. I’d have been as happy as anybody could expect to be in their life, you know? It would’ve been just fine. And I think what it was for me was, like I said, meeting those people down in South Padre, the night before I was on my knees praying with all my might. And I had one of those nights. While losing the weight had a lot to do with it. I do believe that that weight was a result of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that I was carrying in my body, and I wasn’t carrying that anymore. So I had to take those layers off to get down to something closer to the core of whatever was going on, so it was more accessible then. Here I am, a 51-year-old guy. I don’t want to go back into car sales. The relationship business stuff is… the way that I was doing it was in the past. I didn’t have enough education or credentials to really start something new with that at the level of, there’s already work out there that’s great. There’s other programs that I send people to now for that kind of work because it’s better than anything I could’ve done. Anyway, so I was in a panic on what am I going to do, and it was a, I think, probably like a midlife crisis. It was that same kind of feeling of just getting down on my knees and praying with all my might on, I’m so fucking lost. I remember one night just really wailing and wanting it so passionately. And then it was probably within days of that that I found Sapphire’s yoga class.

And so I went to a beginner’s yoga class at Yoga Yoga with Sapphire Bell. Sapphire Bell’s parents were yoga teachers at Esalen in Big Sur. Right? So she was doing yoga in utero. But in her class, man, in addition to the asanas or postures that she was putting you in, she was getting people to breathe efficiently and deeply, and while they’re doing that, she’s just dropping in all these huge spiritual bombs that were in alignment with all the other stuff that I’d been… I was like, wow, this is really powerful.

The reason that I was hurting myself was because I didn’t have alignment. You know. P90X is an extreme workout. You’re going to get to an elite, fit body in 90 days, and that’s extreme. The yoga portion of it is extreme yoga. That’s for people who had been in yoga, they know the difference, you know, if you’re in Warrior I, you ought to be able to look down and see your big toe. I didn’t know that. My knee was bending over in the other direction. And all the modifications that were available. That’s why I was hurting myself. I didn’t know good posture, and I didn’t know modifications.

So I went to yoga every day for a year. There might have been a couple of 6-day weeks in there, but most of them were 7 days a week. Wow, my body’s starting to vibrate up right now just talking about it. I’d never been fit before, and so what I liked was the fitness aspect of yoga. I liked that I could still get my workout. But like I said, in that very first class, I knew what she was doing with breath. I had an understanding. I was like, wow, this is profoundly therapeutic. And they were bringing in high quality thoughts at the same time. And now, how can I maintain that same breath and state of mind while holding a posture? That was interesting to me. That added another dimension to the experience.

And rapid therapy started happening for me. You know, that depression I kind of slipped into over the 6 years started peeling away. So then I went to yoga therapy training with Genevieve Yellin at Sundara Yoga Therapy, and that was just 200 hours of training. It kind of teaches you how to learn how to be a yoga teacher, really. Then you have to find your practice and continue doing other training. I wouldn’t consider myself a yoga therapist until I’d done 1,000 hours of training with them and maybe 10,000 hours in practice with classes.

But it was incredibly therapeutic. I did a bunch of emotional release work, and it brought me back to that connection that I had before I got sick, brought me back to that mystery in a very powerful and emotional way. And in the middle of that training, I thought, “Man, if I make my way through this, I’m going to bring as many people with me as I can.”

And that’s how Yoga Hike ended up coming to be. It was after I did my year of training, now I’m a 52-year-old guy, I’ve only got 200 hours worth of training, and you know, who wants to go to that class? So I started inviting friends that I trusted to go with me to the Austin 360 bridge for sunrise, and I would just kind of practice teaching yoga with them. So then I put it up on Facebook as an event, and 4, 6,10, 12 people started showing up to the events, and I was making it donation-based classes. Then there was one event where 5,000 people on Facebook said that they were going, and so I had to build a website to filter that to something that was manageable, and something that was manageable all across the board. I didn’t know what was going to be what.

And so, but we had 100 people show up on a January in 37 degree weather, overcast, sprinkling a little bit, and we had to cross 100 feet of water ankle-high deep, and nobody turned around. That’s when I realized that there’s something larger than me that I want to try and ride with, and so the following week we had 80 people at the same location, and then 2 weeks later we had 90 people show up to clean up the Onion Creek trail that had been flooded the year before.

What I have found is that there’s something that’s informing the trees and informing the birds and the cosmos. Seems like there’s something there that has order, and the human ego seems to be the only thing in the universe that’s disrupting a natural flow with all of that. And so what I hope to do is have myself be more connected to whatever it is that it’s informing the trees and the birds and the sun and the oceans and the moons and all of that and have a heartfelt connection to that. And being on the trail seems to do it in a more profound way than being in a yoga studio where all that aliveness has been kind of manufactured out to make walls and air conditioning and all that kind of thing. So I think the reason that Yoga Hike has been so profound for people is because they’re more connected to whatever all that source is. I just open them up to specific techniques and mental games that connect them to that for themselves.

It’s because of whatever I’m synced up with, I’m sure, but I’m just amazed at how many people that I meet that, what the Austin experience has been for them is that they’ve had that transition like you speak about having, you know, 3 years ago, that this is a place that was an impetus for it. So there’s something magical here.

I think I’m a spiritual atheist. We may edit that out later. I don’t know. I’ve tried it on a few people. They don’t seem to like it. But the thing is, is that there seems to be some higher functioning in the brain that if we’ll surrender to it in a really powerful way, a higher brain functioning comes in and guides us on our path like it would a bird, you know? And I think it comes to that mental breakdown, where you’re just, “God, I can’t keep moving like this. I need something.” Where it’s a cry from deep in my soul. I think everybody gets to that. I think that’s what it is. It’s that final breakdown on, fuck, I’ve got nothing left. Help. And it feels like God comes in, so I could see why books would be written about that.

For the business of Yoga Hike, we’re hoping to expand that this year to where we can have 6 or 8 classes going every month instead of the 4 classes that are happening now. And then I’m interested in weekend adventures. I’ve tested a couple of them, camping locally, come out on a Saturday, set up camp. We do a sunset practice, or sunset hike and practice, a night hike back, have some dutch oven cooking overnight, a big campfire, have scotch and a cigar. It’s not a yoga retreat. It’s a yoga hike. And no pressure to have scotch or a cigar. I need to work on that marketing a little bit. And then a sunrise hike in the morning, and paddleboards, and a couple of kayaks, and that kind of thing. So Camp Yoga Hike is on the horizon.

Travel Yoga Hike, or Yoga Hike Travel, is also on the horizon. We’ve done a few trips where we went to Yosemite from a Thursday through Sunday and had a cabin a mile from the Yosemite park entrance. So all the food is catered by Whole Foods, a big, huge deck to do a morning practice on, go out to the hike in the park from can until can’t. And those have been great. So I’m hoping to do more of that. September this year, I feel pretty good that I’m going to take a group to Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, which has one of the best sunsets I’ve ever seen anywhere, any time. You’ve seen it in movies. It’s a cool spot. And then, you know, if I’m smart enough, and I pull the right kind of team together, I’d like for travel, for Yoga Hike Travel, to expand to being international, trips to international locations. I’m interested in that landing out in Norway, and there’s other places, and then having nationally ranked yoga teachers be part of that.

We’re starting to hire teachers now. I’m starting to get the courage to ask people that are way better at teaching yoga than me. I’ve been a little intimidated by that, so we’re going to start branching out into bringing masters in and getting #OldGuyYoga off the trail, with the exception of adventures. The weekends and the long adventures, I’m interested in facilitating those, because we can incorporate a bunch of other work.

That’s the biggest challenge that I’m having with Yoga Hike right now, is that I think that I’m trying to open people up to too large an experience at their introductory experience. Right now, the hikes that I lead, I think I’m more intense than what people are expecting to show up for. Some of these other great teachers have the finesse to ease people into that in a beginner’s class without them knowing. I think that’ll come from experience. I don’t have that right now. I think I hit people too hard on their intro experience. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in bringing in other teachers that are a little bit more gentle in that approach and haven’t had the experience of taking people as deep, so they’re not going to. I feel like I bring a whole encounter group, weekend encounter group experience, into the way that I say, “Deeply connect to your breath, your purpose, and your intention.”

How much of me are they coming to the trail for? Those people that are coming back, are they coming back for the experience of the trail, or for me, or…? I’m hoping that they’re coming for the yoga and for the trail. I don’t want the Yoga Hike to be a cult of personality. What’s been great is that me, as a dumb ol’ country boy from Beaumont, Texas, people have had profound experiences on those hikes. And I want anybody that has the desire, to provide that, to be able to do that by facilitating a yoga hike.

So the one thing that I would hope that everyone, that I do want to close my experience with everyone with is that, there’s something about this that is a calling for you, and I hope that all the things fall into place in order to make this kind of experience a thing that supports the kind of lifestyle that you want to live. That’s my biggest dream for you and for anybody that’s interested in listening to this conversation between you and I.

I’ve finally completed my interview with Rod. I’m grateful for his vulnerability. I think when we are honest and open about our life challenges, our insecurities, our fears, our mistakes, we enter a deeper, more meaningful relationship with everyone around us, including ourselves. 

This episode is about alcoholism. Rod's openness about what finally made him quit, leads me to question what are some of my own avoidance behaviors, what are some negative patterns in my life that I can change. There are many forms of addiction, not just substance addiction.    

The gift of vulnerability is that it makes us braver and softer at the same time. We can face the storms that will come and go, with more resiliency and grace. And Rod has discovered this in the most amazing ways.

Transcript:

Flora:    OK. How many years would you say you were addicted to alcohol?

Rod:    I started drinking when I was 14, and I probably started drinking every day when I was 20, 21. Maybe not every day then, but pretty close, so 23 years.

Flora:    How long have you been sober?

Rod:    I’m about 2 weeks short of 3 years.

Flora:    Yay! Congratulations!

Rod:    Thanks!

Flora:    How does it feel?

Rod:    It feels good.

Flora:    Good. You’ve mentioned that one of the ways you dealt with your marital issues was with alcohol. Tell me more about that.

Rod:    That routine of drinking was I guess comforting. Go to school all day, and then come home and drink, and then later, go to work and come home and drink, where there were problems in the marriage, it was easy to let it pass. It made things that weren’t normal seem normal. Like the drinking itself wasn’t normal, but it seemed normal because I’ve been doing it every day for 20 years!

Flora:    Did you guys fight about it? Did she bring it up? Did she tell you to stop?

Rod:    No, we didn’t fight about the drinking. I smoked marijuana for many of those years, and she didn’t like that, and we did fight about that, but I quit that almost 10 years before I quit drinking.

Flora:    OK, so talking about smoking marijuana, I was going to ask you, were there any other things that you were addicted to besides alcohol?

Rod:    Well, I was a regular cigarette smoker, and that was the first thing that I knew I was addicted to because I tried to quit it, and it was hard to quit. I wouldn’t say that I was addicted to marijuana. I don’t know if people get addicted to marijuana. I guess maybe not in the same way, like a physical addiction, but I mean, it was a habit. But it wasn’t something that I did every day. I’d smoke it until it was gone, and then I wouldn’t buy anymore sometimes for, you know, a couple of months or whatever. So it’s not the same kind of daily, I gotta do it.

Flora:    Going back to smoking cigarettes, how did you quit?

Rod:    That one I quit several times over the years. I was constantly quitting, and I think the experience of quitting cigarettes helped me quit drinking because I knew what didn’t work. You know, I hadn’t smoked for a week or something like that, and then I would be like, “Well, it’s a  stressful day; I’ll just have one, or I’ll just smoke for tonight” or “It’s my birthday! I gotta drink on my birthday!” or you know… So for smoking, it was usually it was a stressful day, I’ll just have one. Every time I ever did that “I’m just going to smoke tonight” or “I’m just going to have one” or whatever, every time I did that, the very next day I was right back to the full… Probably the most I smoked was probably about a pack a day.

Flora:    How many years has it been that you haven’t smoked?

Rod:    11 ½ years.

Flora:    Did you answer the question of how you quit?

Rod:    There’s no magic to it. It was just, my whole secret to quitting was, when you want one, don’t have it. That’s all. That’s the only way to quit smoking is to not smoke. The only way to quit drinking is to not drink. I got to the point where my motivations were strong enough to outweigh that desire. Like the reason I quit smoking was we decided we were going to start trying to have a child, so I quit. I quit smoking as part of that to, you know, to get healthy, to not be a smoker with a child in the house, to save the money, you know, all those reasons.

Flora:    Going back to the years that you were drinking heavily every day, how were you different when you were not drinking and vs. when you were drinking?

Rod:    It didn’t feel the same all day, that’s one of the reasons why it’s hard to stop is I would feel normal sober, and I would feel normal drunk, but at a certain point of it’s been so many hours, it’s been 18 hours since I had a drink,I got home from work, and OK, it’s time to relax, I would feel anxiety, like I should start drinking, I need to get a drink in me. And part of it was you need to start drinking to get enough into you to be drunk enough to fall asleep, because at a certain point, it became very hard to sleep without alcohol. So that was a big motivation. You have to start so you can get enough so you can go to sleep and start the whole thing over the next day.

Flora:    What was your personality like when you were drinking and when you were not drinking?

Rod:    I don’t know if this term has a real, clinical definition, but I always thought of myself as a functional alcoholic. Like, I could go to work all day and not drink and be normal, and I never got, like, you know, the shakes or whatever heavy drinkers talk about. You know, I didn’t get up in the morning and start drinking. That’s why I never lost a job because of it, and you know, I told myself that I was fine and I was normal because of those things. I didn’t destroy my relationship. I didn’t destroy my job. I didn’t destroy my life.

Flora:    So no one noticed? So your family members, friends, co-workers, employers, no one noticed?

Rod:    Yeah. That’s where I was going with it is that I could be normal either way. When I did quit, and I started talking about how much I had been drinking, there wasn’t anybody who knew me who heard that who didn’t say, “Wow, I had no idea. I had no idea that you were drinking that much.” So, I think I kept it enough under control that it wasn’t a noticeable thing to the people around me. I don’t think I was a different person one way or the other. It just made it easier to not notice that I was unhappy, depressed, and not going anywhere, undermotivated, you know, that my life was a rut.

Flora:    Do you think your depression came after you started drinking? Did you start drinking because you were depressed?

Rod:    It’s some of both. I don’t think I started drinking because I was depressed. I think I started drinking because my first experience with drinking was when I was 14, and I went out of the country on a Boy Scout trip, and we all stayed in host homes, and everybody was in a different home. So I was in a host’s home by myself. My father was in a different host’s home. And that very first night when we were there, at dinner, the host family asked me if I wanted a beer. And I was 14, and in the United States, it’s not accepted for a teenager to have a beer with dinner. But there, it was totally normal. That trip with that first beer, I was infatuated with the idea of drinking, like it seemed like a grown up thing to do, and there were additional things on that trip where I got invited to parties from the host scouts, the kids my age took us to parties. I remember one of them was just a huge I guess like a block party, but it was out in this big, empty field, and there were all these cars pulled up for lights, and there was music, and everybody was drinking and passing around alcohol. And it made me feel included. It made me feel welcome. It made me feel grown up. It made me feel sophisticated. And it was so much fun, and it was so different than anything I’d experienced in my childhood before that that it made a huge impression on me. And then I had a couple of incidents on that trip where I did some binge drinking, got really drunk, and I remember a wild night where we had gone to like some clubs in one of the bigger cities, and I got drunk, and I got us thrown out, and we were being chased through the streets by some locals that were yelling things about the gringos, and… I mean, it was just, it was a wild time unlike anything I’d ever had before. It was a big adventure, and it made a big impression on me, and I think through my teenage years, I chased that feeling by drinking and going to parties, and going to parties with kids that were older than me, and it just established a pattern. When I went to college, I continued that pattern. When I got out of college, and it wasn’t so much about partying and wild time and fun. I still kept drinking. That’s when it became a daily routine rather than a wild time, you know. I don’t think I started drinking because I was depressed. And I don’t think I got depressed because I was drinking. I think drinking made it easier for me to get into a rut, being stuck in a rut, and alcohol was part of that rut, and alcohol made it easy to ignore the fact that I was in a rut. So I think somewhere in there, as my marriage started to fall apart, and I got more and more depressed over the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere, alcohol certainly didn’t make that better, and it made it harder to break out of it.

Flora:    Do you remember doing anything that was really embarrassing while you were drunk? Anything dangerous, like car accidents? Jail?

Rod:    No. And that was one of the reasons why it was easy to ignore that I had a real…

Flora:    Drinking problem?

Rod:    Yeah, a real drinking problem was I...

Flora:    And also others too didn’t notice.

Rod:    I never got fired. I never ended up in jail. I never woke up after a 3 day blackout binge. You know. I just… I lived my life, but part of that life was drinking. A lot.

Flora:    It’s such a socially acceptable thing to drink every day, especially after a long day of work. When did you realize that you drank too much, and that it might be alcoholism?

Rod:    Well, the volume that I was drinking, the amount of money that I was spending on it, it seemed pretty clear it was a problem, but it’s really easy to rationalize that when you want to keep doing it. It’s easy to tell yourself it’s OK that you’re doing it. And people who drink tend to have friends who drink, so the people that I was around drank a lot, and if we went somewhere… You know, going out meant drinking. Having a party meant drinking. So, socializing meant drinking. So it was easy to think, “Well, everybody does it.” So I never felt like it was radically abnormal, but I periodically over the years thought I should quit, but it’s easy, it’s really easy when you’re addicted, or when you’re in that pattern of doing it to tell yourself that you can quit tomorrow or, “Well, I can’t quit before the weekend, so I’ll quit on Monday.” And then Monday comes, and you think, “Well, wow, that was a really crappy Monday. I’m going to have a drink. I’ll quit tomorrow.” Then, “I can’t quit on a Tuesday, so I’ll quit next Monday.” It’s really easy to keep pushing back the date that you’re going to do something about it. And to do that over and over and over again until years have gone by.

Flora:    Do you think there was a root cause for your addiction?

Rod:    No, I don’t think there’s a root cause. I wasn’t abused and drank to drown out my pain over that, or… You know, there wasn’t any single incident that I can point to and go, “Ah! That’s why I started drinking!” Except maybe that experience of travelling to Central America and having an amazing time that in some ways centered around alcohol, and that making alcohol seem like a very special thing. 

Flora:    Do you feel like maybe you had social fears, and it made it easier when you drank to socialize and be loose and all that stuff?

Rod:    Oh absolutely. I mean they call it a social lubricant for a reason. It reduces inhibitions, and I had a lot of inhibitions, and I was socially awkward, and I would get nervous about being around people, or especially about meeting new people. 

Flora:    OK. Let’s talk about your recovery now. Tell me how you stopped drinking and why. Because you say you tried several times, so the last time you tried, what was the difference? What happened?

Rod:    The first real success I had in quitting drinking, or a big success, was when my wife was pregnant. When she was pregnant, I said OK, I’m not going to… She can’t drink through the pregnancy, I said, OK, I’m going to quit drinking through the pregnancy, you know… Like a show of solidarity. And I didn’t make it through the whole pregnancy. And I made it probably 3 or 4 months. And again, just like every other time, it was something happened. I don’t remember what. I started drinking, and immediately it was right back to drinking every day. And that’s what I’d done with cigarettes always. So when I did quit, that was the big lesson that I’d learned is, there can’t be any, “I’ll just do it a little bit. I’ll do it now and then. I’ll do it now because it’s a rough day, but I won’t do it tomorrow.” I knew enough to know that if I did that, it would be all over, and I’d be right back to drinking. So, there were 2 things that came together to give me the motivation that I’d never had before to really make the effort. One was, I’d gone for my annual physical, and I got a voicemail from my doctor’s office telling me that there were some numbers with my liver tests, abnormal or whatever they said, and I needed to quit drinking immediately and schedule a follow up appointment, and that kind of scared the shit out of me because that had been in the back of my mind about drinking for years was drinking damages the liver. And it was easy for years to go, “Yeah, sooner or later it’ll be a problem, but I can keep drinking this week,” You know. “I’ll deal with it later.” And that was something that said, no, you better deal with this now. And the other thing was, right about the same time, about a week before that, my wife had said she wanted a divorce. And while the divorce wasn’t really about the drinking, it was something that I knew in my heart was a problem, was a fault of mine, something that I needed to work on to make myself better. And I was still thinking at the time that if I could make myself better, I could save the marriage. So it wasn’t necessarily that I need to quit drinking to save the marriage, but it was that I needed to make improvements to myself, make changes in my life, and that that might help save the marriage. So with the doctor’s office calling and my wife wanting a divorce, it finally hit me that there is no tomorrow. It’s now. Now’s the time. It has to be now. And so I quit drinking. And it wasn’t like, “I will quit drinking on Monday.” When I got that voicemail message, it was like, “I need to quit right now.” And I quit that day and never had another drink.

Flora:    Did you tell anyone? Who was the first person you told?

Rod:    Told…?

Flora:    That you were going to stop drinking, or drinking was a problem.

Rod:    I thought about how am I going to do it, and I didn’t really know. I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous, and I knew that there were treatment options. I didn’t really know where to start to get help, so I went to one of the smartest people that I know who just happens to work in that field, and that’s my Social Worker Sister-in-Law. She works in adolescent substance abuse. She gave me a whole big 3-ring binder full of resources and knew who to call, where to start, how to get in touch with local AA. She’s great at setting aside the emotions of our personal relationship and just going into social worker mode, and she was the person that I went to at first to talk about the end of my marriage and what I was, how I was going to deal with that and how I could maybe try and salvage it. You know, I talked to her about all those emotions that went along with it, and I talked to her about the quitting the drinking. And she was a huge help on both fronts.

Flora:    So now that she gave you all those resources, what are some of the action steps that you did since then?

Rod:    Well, I looked at the binder, and I started calling about what kind of coverage my health insurance had and what kind of programs I could get into. I talked to some people, and I went to an AA meeting down the street from where I lived, and I read…Alcoholics Anonymous has a book. Reading the book was helpful. Reading the stories about quitting. Reading the stories about quitting and relapsing and quitting and relapsing and quitting and relapsing. All that stuff helped a lot, and I told myself that I was not going to do any of that. And I went to an AA meeting, and they were all super nice. I sat, and I listened to stories, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to talk that first night. But you know, she asked if there was anybody new, and I was new obviously, they all kind of knew each other, I stood up, and I said the thing: “My name is Rod, and I’m an alcoholic.” And as soon as I said it, I started crying because it was the first time I’d thought, or first time I’d said it out loud, “I am an alcoholic.” I always thought, “I’m not really an alcoholic. I drink too much, but I’m not really an alcoholic.” And that was the first time I said it out loud, or said it that directly to myself. I was really glad I went, and I think it helped to go, but I never went back to another one because it just didn’t feel like it was for me. It didn’t feel right for me, partly because of all the stuff about God, which they say, you know, that that’s not as important as people make it out to be or people think it is. You can substitute for a higher power. It doesn’t have to be God. Like somebody at that meeting said you can substitute a doorknob for higher power, just whatever you need to do to get past that part, but that didn’t help me. That didn’t help me get over it because I was like, that’s just semantics. You’re still talking about God. You’re still talking about a higher power. And maybe it’s ego. And I didn’t want to give up power over my own life to a higher power that I didn’t believe in. And I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life talking about alcohol, going to meetings and talking about alcohol. I wanted to be done with alcohol. I felt like if I went to AA, it would continue to be the center of my life, and I just didn’t want it to be the center of my life anymore. So it didn’t feel like it fit. So I never went to another meeting.

Flora:    So then what were the things that you did to help you with recovery, like medicine, therapy?

Rod:    I went to a counselor who was great. I don’t know that we talked much about drinking or alcohol, but having her to help me deal with all those feeling about myself, to start seeing myself differently, to process the feelings about my marriage and its end definitely helped a lot. I went and saw my doctor, my general practitioner, I went and saw him and talked to him about it, which I think was a big step for me, because I had never told any doctor how much I was drinking because I thought, what’s the point? I know what they’re going to say. They’re going to say quit. So I never told anybody. I told him that I thought part of the end of the marriage was about depression, that I didn’t have any idea of what the next step in my life was supposed to be, and I had no idea where to go, and I was depressed over that fear of the future, that uncertainty, and he said, “Well, you know, sometimes people get on antidepressants, and it doesn’t have to be forever, so why don’t we just put you on something low dose for 6 months to help you break out of the rut.” And he also prescribed a sleep aid which was extremely helpful. I was reluctant to take it too much, because I didn’t want to substitute one substance for another and end up addicted to sleep aids. So I tried really hard not to take it, but I did take it 3 or 4 times a week for the first couple of weeks to help me get over… Like, when I tried to sleep sober, I would… You know, that… like a lot of times when people doze off, they’ll get that feeling of falling and then jump or twitch. I would do that over and over and over all night long when I first quit drinking and tried to sleep without an aid. I could never sleep because as soon as I started to doze, I would feel like I was falling, and I would jerk myself awake again, and so I would be awake all night long. So I took the sleep aid a couple of times to help me get through the first few weeks until that part of it faded away a little bit. So I think those 2 things of being on antidepressants for a few months and being able to use sleep aids to help.

Flora:    How was it during those first few weeks? How hard was it?

Rod:    It was extremely hard because all of the triggers that had ever kept me drinking, all of the excuses I ever had for I’m just going to drink tonight, they were all there and worse than ever, because that was my marriage falling apart. And there was stress and animosity, and everything between me and my wife. We were not relating well, and that was extremely stressful, and stress was a reason for me to drink all those years. And so I had the stress of the end of the marriage on top of the stress of trying to quit drinking, one on top of the other, and it was very hard to do, but I had the motivation to just power through it, and over time it got better. And it didn’t take me as long as I thought it would to get to the point where I didn’t even really want to drink. You know, it was probably a couple of weeks of, “I really want a drink, but I’m not going to have one” before I got to “I don’t really want to.” And then not long after that before I got to “I made it through the hardest part. I’m not going to fuck it up by going back.” And that’s where I’ve been ever since is I don’t really, I don’t struggle with wanting to drink. I don’t, when I’m around people who drink, I don’t go “God I wish I could have a drink too.” And I don’t know why. I don’t know you go from drinking heavily every single day for 20 years to not drinking at all without God or meetings or whatever. I don’t know. The motivation came together in the right way for me that I could do it, and maybe there’s something about my personality where it’s I’ve got a 3 year streak going, and I don’t want to mess it up. I don’t know.

Flora:    When you first told your family and your friends, what were their reactions?

Rod:    Well, some of my friends who still drank after I quit, a lot of them were extremely supportive and proud of me and amazed at the idea of exactly how much I had been drinking. They didn’t know. They knew I drank because I drank with them, but they didn’t know all the ways that I would hide how much I was drinking because I didn’t want people to know. You know, it was embarrassing, so I wouldn’t let people know exactly how much. And I had strategies for drinking more without anybody knowing.

Flora:    Like what?

Rod:    Well, if I was going to go out, of course I would drink before I went out because you got to get that base level of drunk in before you start drinking. Like I remember going camping, and everybody on the camping trip was drinking, and they were mostly drinking beer, but I had a big old bottle of vodka in my tent so… You know, beer was not strong enough. I would have to drink huge volumes of beer to reach the level of… with the way my tolerance was after all the drinking that I’d done, for me to reach a satisfactory level of drunk from beer would take a huge amount, so I didn’t want to publicly drink that much and have people go “Oh my God, he just drank a case of beer by himself.” So I would sneak some vodka in between, you know, then I could go drink 6 beers like everybody else and still get the level of intoxication that I required, and nobody would notice. And it was pretty easy. So yeah, that’s what people would say was, “Wow, I can’t believe that you were drinking that much. It’s great that you quit.” But I was kind of surprised that there were a couple of people who were also drinkers that would say, “Never? You’re never going to drink again? Never? Not even, not… I mean, you’re not going to just cut back to just beer? I mean, you’re not going to come back to just drinking on the weekends? You’re never going to drink? Never? Ever? Never. Never again. Your whole rest of your… Never going to drink. Wow!” You know. That kind of thing.

Flora:    And your response was?

Rod:    I think I kind of stayed away from other people drinking for the first few weeks or whatever, and once I got to the place where I was comfortable, it was just “Yeah. Never. I’m never going to do it again.” Because I had that experience with cigarettes and with drinking where I knew if I ever went back, I would be right back where I was, so it was, “Yeah. I’m never doing that again. Never.”

Flora:    Did it change your social life?

Rod:    Not really, because I spent the first year and a half after I quit drinking still hanging out with the same people, still going to their houses where they were drinking, still going to the same, you know, neighborhood parties where everybody was drinking. And I hung out with them, and they all still drank, and I didn’t, and it was fine.

Flora:    How did you feel when you were around others who drank?

Rod:    It’s different being like the only sober person in the room. Or not the only sober person, but the only adult who’s not drinking at all. Drunk people seem different when you’re sober than when you’re drunk. You know. I don’t know. Everybody thinks things are funnier when they’re drunk. Drunk people like to talk about drinking. I noticed that was the conversation in a lot of parties was, “Wow, we are going to get drunk tonight! Do you remember the last time we got drunk? Do you remember that time 3 years ago when I got really drunk?” 

Flora:    You don’t feel like you’re missing out?

Rod:    No, just the conversation seemed kind of boring. Like, I don’t know. It got to the point… That’s part of why I don’t spend as much time with those same people anymore is when you’re a heavy drinker, your life is about drinking. And your conversation is about drinking. And your activities are about drinking. And I just… When I wasn’t participating, it just didn’t seem that interesting anymore. It didn’t seem that funny. It didn’t seem that clever. 

Flora:    What about when your girlfriend drinks and then kisses you? How does that feel? Do you want to drink?

Rod:    No. It doesn’t affect me. And, like I have this weird thing where I can’t really smell. Like I don’t smell, if my girlfriend drinks, I don’t smell it on her breath, I don’t even really notice, and it certainly doesn’t make me go, “Oh, wow, I really want that.” I think the only things that affect me that way, and only really slightly, it’s just a little twinge, is I used to like to try all kinds of beers, and I had some beers that were favorites. Like, or even alcohols, like I really liked the Dripping Springs vodkas. They’ve got, you know, different flavors. So sometimes if I’m with somebody, and they’re trying a new beer that they’ve never had before, it’s a beer I’ve never had before, sometimes I’m like, “Ah, I’d like to try that.” But I’m not going to.

Flora:    Why not?

Rod:    Because I’m never having another drink because I really am, I don’t know if afraid is the right word. I think it would be really easy to fall straight back into another pattern by going on that “I’m just going to have one” thing. I think the safest thing for me is to just never do it again. And it doesn’t lower the quality of my life not to drink, so why would I?

Flora:    Are you proud of yourself for going through so much during that period when you decided to stop drinking and you did not go back to drinking even through the divorce and next relationship breakup issues and things?

Rod:    Yeah, I’m very proud of the fact that I quit drinking and lost about 40 pounds during what was one of the hardest, most stressful, most painful periods of my life. That was an awful, awful time, and what makes it better was that I accomplished things that I had wanted to accomplish for decades and never did. And I finally did them, and I did them at the worst time of my life. That’s pretty cool. I’m pretty proud of that.

Flora:    That is pretty cool. You’ve got some willpower. So what would your advice be to someone who is struggling with addiction?

Rod:    I said it to someone once about quitting smoking, and it just pissed them off, so I don’t know that I have anything that would help anybody, but the only way to quit drinking, the only way to quit smoking is when you want one, don’t have it. That’s it. That’s the whole secret. You want a drink? Don’t have one. Because if you have one, you won’t quit drinking. I don’t know. I really don’t. I don’t know what switch flipped in my mind. I don’t know why I couldn’t do it for years and then suddenly I could, except that it was the combination of those 2 things. One was really scary with the doctor, and I don’t know why that one stayed being a motivation 3 months later, followed up with the doctor after I hadn’t been drinking, and my liver numbers, everything was back to normal, and there was no big terrifying health crisis hanging over me about drinking anymore. It was just by then, I had 3 months, so I didn’t want to go back. But that, being terrified that that health crisis that was always in the back of the mind while I was drinking had finally come, and my marriage was over. Those 2 things coming at almost exactly the same moment finally smacked me upside the head and said, “Look at your life and make some changes.” So I did.

Flora:    What are some of the positive things that resulted from stopping drinking?

Rod:    I’m free. I feel free. Like I can go anywhere, do anything. There’s never any reason for me to be scared of drinking and driving. That will never happen to me again. I won’t have to worry about getting pulled over. I won’t have to worry about getting myself home if I’ve had too much. I don’t have to be home to make sure I get enough in me so that I can sleep. I can go anywhere, any time, do anything I want. I don’t have to be home at a certain time to get the booze in me. I can’t imagine the money that I spent on it. I should have stacks of money piling up in my apartment, but I don’t somehow. I don’t know where all that money goes now, but…. I just, I’m free. I was chained down by the alcohol, the routine. I had to keep the routine. I had to spend the money. And I don’t have to do either one of those any more, and I can… I’m always the designated driver, so… I don’t know. I’m free.

Flora:    Free at last!

Rod:    Yep.

Flora:    Anything else you want to add?

Rod:    Alcoholics Anonymous is an amazing program, an amazing organization. The things that Alcoholics Anonymous does for people as far as changing their lives and giving that same freedom that I have to other people, it’s so valuable, and I don’t want anybody to think that I’m putting down that program in any way because I didn’t participate in it. If it appeals to you, if it works for you, that’s wonderful. My life and the way I’m doing this, I’m the cautionary tale as far as people in AA. I’m sure that anybody that heard my story, that does participate in AA would look at me and think well, it’s just a matter of time before I relapse because I don’t have that support system. I mentioned it in the interview about the dating, that that woman said I didn’t take responsibility for my alcoholism because I wasn’t doing AA. I can’t argue with any of that. I can’t understand why it worked for me without a structured program, but I don’t want anybody to think that I’m saying that you don’t need AA. Lots of people do need AA. And I’m not saying that I’m better in any way for not needing it. It just wasn’t for me. But it is for so many people, and I don’t want anybody to think that I’m saying it’s not a great program. The book itself helped a lot. The loving kindness and attention of the people at that meeting towards me helped a lot. It just… I didn’t have the kind of stories that they were telling about waking up after a 3 day bender and waking up in rehab again or waking up in jail again and not knowing what you did or how you got there. I don’t have any stories like that. I didn’t fit in with those people. I didn’t fit in with the religious aspect, and I’m too egotistical to give up power over my own life. So it didn’t work for me, but it works for a lot of people. And if there’s nothing else that has helped, and you’ve tried over and over again, by all means, try it. I tried it. You should try it. I don’t have any magic formula to give anybody as to what I did and how it worked for me. It just… I don’t know. “How’d you quit drinking?” “I don’t know! I just did.” “How did you quit drinking?” “When I wanted a drink, I didn’t have one. That’s how I quit drinking.”

Flora:    So we’re up to my last question, the best one. You ready?

Rod:    Sure.

Flora:    What is your superpower?

Rod:    My superpower is a short memory.

Flora:    Why is that a superpower?

Rod:    Because I don’t, in some ways literally I have a short memory. I forget things. I just literally don’t remember. But also, symbolically, I have a short memory in that I don’t hold onto things. I don’t hold a grudge. I don’t hold resentments for a long time. You know, I’m at almost 2 years divorced, and I don’t hate her guts. I wish her well. I hope she’s happy. I hope she is doing well. I don’t stew over all the worst parts of the marriage and carry it around with me. I’m not mad at her. I’m not mad at myself. I think I have a pretty good ability to let things go. And I think that’s kind of new, too. And I think the breakup of the relationship after my marriage, that second one, I think that helped teach me that. Because I spent a lot of time in that breakup like obsessing over what I could’ve said and should’ve said, you know, when we would have a fight or whatever, and obsessing over what she was thinking and going around and around and around in my head and losing sleep over it. And I can’t really say why, but at some point during all of that, I stopped. I stopped doing that, and I let it go. And I’ve still managed to carry that ability with me of just letting it go. I don’t hold onto stuff. That’s a superpower.

Flora:    Awesome. Well thank you so much for this interview.

Rod:    Thank you! Now do we get to make out?

Flora:    Did it turn off?
 

While we wait for part the third of the epic interview that Flora conducted all about me and my love life and everything else, in which I use a lot of words and frequently forget before I'm done answering just what the question was, here's a little fun I had with some of the audio outtakes. Please to enjoy!