Transcripts For CSPAN2 Erica Barnett Quitter 20240712

We thank you all for jeanine in and what we can only describe as Interesting Times we are grateful for the opportunity to invite virtual audiences together in dialogue even though we are not exactly together in space. I would like to think erica and claire for help of keeping these ideas alive here at town hall. Tonight our program run about 40 minutes but we say at this point followed by audience q a and you can review the event on facebook, comcast or youtube. Keep insisting so we can get to as many as possible. If you news need close cap using enable real time captions on youtube with the button in the righthand corner. Upcoming staff includes on tuesday nicole haner jones discussing race in journalism, congresswoman offering of blueprint to Political Action for the next generation of women and people of color and a special live stream recording of our first podcast residency life on the margins this week featuring [inaudible]. Also make sure to visit townhalls Media Library for hundreds of events from both the recent and pre covid path which is frankly, also pretty recent. This is made possible by our sponsors [inaudible] as most of you know townhall is a Member Support Organization First and foremost and want to thank all our members. On that note, quickly, townhall has been hit hard by the economic of the pandemic and thanks to that to maximize access we hope youll consider making a donation by clicking on the button at the bottom of comcast are using the urls of the other platforms or becoming a member. One final point on the economy, lets be honest, if we were all gathered together many of you would visit the book signing table so we hope you will purchase her book or preorder that copy through our terrific partners at the la book company. Local author and local bookshop big data launch and keeping it local and maybe some of the things we loved about this pre epidemic might get to the other side. Erica barnett is in their awardwinning reporter beginning her career at the Texas Observer cofounded by molly eisen and wrote [inaudible] as a reporter and news editor for Seattle Weekly and the stranger. Shes written for a variety of local altercations including the huffington post, seattle magazine and was a cofounding editor of the beloved and spicy political [inaudible] and sorry for the air quotes. Virtually every other minute config of and shes regular guest on ko w the weekend interview. Shes a seattle native and two critically acclaimed memoirs and a Nonfiction Book investigating how relationships to good art from [inaudible] people. She is an educator [inaudible] erica barnetts first book is called quitter and its a subject of tonight talk. Please join me in welcoming erica barnett. Hello. Hello. Im so excited to be here with you. Me, too. I will jump in and say congratulations the book is incredibly impressive achievement and it reads like a house on fire and as a reader and a longtime fan of your work in a sober person i am so glad this book exists. Im honored to be here as part of your launch. Hello, this is josh from townhall and we are running into some tech issues right now. We will try to get the show back on track as soon as we can. Give us one second. Claire, are you still there . I just re arrived. Erica . I think im here. Great. Already, go ahead. Erica, i will kick it over to you for a reading. And q, claire. Its such an honor that you agreed to do this and that you will be my interviewer tonight britt im such a big fan of yours as well. This is a reading from my first book, quitter, and more of drinking, relapse and recovery. Let me tell you what is like to be sober, really sober for the first time in years. It feels like seeing color for the first time that feels like youve been looking at the world through someone elses glasses and suddenly you can make out every individual light up grass. It feels like you have a secret superpower that no one can see in the clarity of mines allows you to Reach Insights out of the most moments and your body feel stronger that it has ever been and food taste better and desire returns. At the same time everything has an intensity that scares you a little. When you have a feeling, oh my god, how will i ever stay and pack my debt you just have to sit with it, figured out, wait for to pass when you dampened every experience with the white noise of alcohol for a decade or more experiencing the world at full blast can be overwhelming and who do i need to apologize to first and how will i ever make time for nine hours outpatient treatment every week and do i really have to go to an aa meeting every so they . Why does my boss look at me like that . Does he think ive been drinking . Its been over a month since i have been a sober and ready to get back to work. My stay at rest 12, like a wakeup call, an important life that been hurtling forward with nose steering and faulty brakes. When iran to that gauntlet of upraised arms i felt the way im in bornagain cushions feel when they emerge from the baptismal waters, not just that my life was new but that it was finally mine. Almost everyone had high hopes. Mom would been so worried when she showed up at 12 weeks into my stay at home after words and proud of you, i know you can do this. My coworkers melissa and emily both also in covering and if she waited into me in their secret lunchtime ritual of driving across town to attend a new meeting once a week. It felt almost as good as been invited to a secret after party. Friends asked me out for seltzer waters and coffee and sent cards telling me i was brave. We talk about sobriety or even recovery the words are often shorthand for not drinking or not using drugs. The really overwhelming part of being sober isnt say no to drink or learning to avoid the proverbial people, places and situations that induce temptation but its figuring out how to live an unfiltered life and that is hard enough when things are going pre much okay but how many times have you said i need a drink when what you really mean is this date was moderately annoying and can be damn near possible when there is wreckage stretching out over the horizon in every direction. To recap, over the past few years of drinking i had broken my moms heart, riven away my best friends, alienated all my other friends with my erratic behavior and constant sob stories and nearly lost my job and accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt through emergency routes and detoxes. I was ashamed to show my face at work, overwhelmed by all the moments in a mens i thought i needed to make right away. I was scared to death that josh would continue to doubt my commitment to sobriety or that he would be watching over my shoulder every minute ready to pounce on any sign i was slacking off. I had wasted so much time and had to fix everything right away but i had absolutely no idea how to start. So, i froze. I withdrew to my comfort zone and worked and went to the gym, lifted weights and work to the phone and before long i was too exhausted to go to outpatient therapy three nights a week. Too exhausted to make it to aa every day too exhausted to do anything besides go from work, to gym, to home and to fed. Aa meetings which i attended sporadically for the past seven years bummed me out and everyone was so relentlessly all the time and i found the three hour outpatient sessions i agreed to do part of my post rehab depressing with watching these etch videos on derby couches and complaining about how sobriety sucks. Not more than a month went by before i fell back into drinking. Not jumped, fell. The way you fall into fed with the exlover because you dont have anything going better on. I cannot pinpoint when i said screw it, its too hard but its more like an in support imperceptible slide into drinking from selfpity to indifference to bottoms up. I was a non drinkers said i was a drinker again and simple as that. I passed the liquor aisle in the Grocery Store, drop back and dropped smirnoff in my casket casually like a vegetarian dropping a tray of beef on two of granola bars. I wish i had a better story, one that made sense and maybe i lost my job or had been evicted but my relapse would have been justified but some alcoholics refer to events like this as was ovations and if my mom dies then i will drink if my husband leaves me or if i get a terminal illness but i dont have a good reason or any reason at all. Normal people look at alcoholics who relapse the way i didnt wonder what made you take that first drink and for me the answer was always nothing in particular. One minute youre a sober person in recovery in the next youre telling yourself everybody else does it so i can die. I learned so much and i will manage at this time. Maybe you dont even think about it at all but selective amnesia of the chronic relapse is a force of nature and rather how many bad things happen or how many times we say never again and mean it we forget all of it instantly happened to look up as we walked past the liquor store. The relapse is never a conscious decision but more an act of not deciding and it is true as many addiction researchers have argued that people who suffer from addiction [inaudible] and have trouble developing order cognitive function like impulse control and the ability to way consequences. I have the same sense of invulnerability and not that i didnt remember what happened the last time i drink or hear the warning i learned to repeat in rehab that before you take the first drink, play the tape forward. I did but its just theres a lot of voice in my head saying you know how to handle it and it will be different this time and rehab equips you with mantras like what it can force you to do is hear them. Its astonishing how quickly the compulsion return. My head the voice of someone in a meeting and alcoholism is coming, baffling and impatient. In the after buying that first celebratory bottle and look at me, i beat this thing i woke up with my hands shaking in a race for the bathroom to retch into the toilet bowl print right away a magical thinking set in. On the way to work i grabbed another bottle just to get rid of the tremors, i thought. By three in the afternoon i was peering over the edge of the same familiar pits. In meetings oldtimer state you dont have to drink even if you want to but the fact is most of us to drink again and our brains think relapse practically inevitable and even after physical withdrawal and the thinking of early sobrietys slighted my brain would not stop whispering, isnt this better with a drink . Dependents doesnt make a brainless capable of expressing pleasure or even maintaining equilibrium without a steady supply but it also creates longlasting pathways between neurons that cause the brain is strongly to associate certain mental states, depression, loneliness, excitement and guilt or experiences with an overwhelming urge to drink. Every time i relapse i went through withdrawal and that desire got stronger and stronger more key likely that i would relapse again. Dont talk about the high failure rate of residential treatments failure in this case many people dont stay sober after they leave but that rate is important and it is something people should be armed with before they decide to spend tens of thousands of dollars on what may be little more than a 28 date tryouts. Here are the numbers. Before and six alcoholics who enter residential treatments to get out until the end and about those, half will relapse within the first year of leaving treatment. Over four years 90 of people who go to treatment will start drinking again and although many of them will eventually quit and yet Treatment Centers focus on all entirely on relapse prevention will teach her patients almost nothing about what to do about relapse when it occurs. It teaches you to halt when you file drinking and hungry, angry, lonely or tired and for conditions that can proceed relapse. They teach you to practice dreams which practice for diet, exercise, acceptance, meditation and schedule. They teach you the tool of rational theater therapy. Having trouble keeping track of all these acronyms imagine how hard it is for alcoholic and early sobriety. I created a card in my wallet and carried a card in my wallet for months to keep them straight. In early severity your brain is still putting itself back together and during a process called postacute withdrawal syndrome better known as its own acronym, pause. Can last for more than two years my first few weeks of sobriety when i could barely remember to brush my teeth twice a day i picture brain as a soft sponge, filled with holes. I never found out how long it would take me to get this through this phase because before i could get there i went back through the revolving door. Thank you and that should give people some idea of the nature of this book. Erica has weaved reporting and research in with her own personal story and it is quite astonishing. She makes it seems easy and its not. So, thank you. I wanted to start by just asking if you could give the people in the audience, since the book is not out yet and will be out jult preorder it but since the book is not out yet i was wondering if you could give the audience just an overview or macro sort of a funny word but idea of your dragging story just what that looks like, what the timeframe was. Sure. I started drinking pretty young and i think a lot of people who have become heavy drinkers later in life do. I didnt really drink much when i was in college. I was a good kid quote unquote. I didnt drink and early adulthood. The time i talk about in the book really is a time of ten or 30 years from basically my early 30s to my late 30s so i was here in seattle and working and you know you sort of describes where the places i worked so it was sort of when i worked at [inaudible] and then of course i didnt mention this in a particular excerpt but it was about the first time i went to rehab but i got fired from a job and then got sober shortly after that so that was about five and half years ago. Were talking about a decade of time. Got it. Okay, thats helpful to have that out there about what happened. I think one of the things that is astonishing about this book and we talked about this a little bit before is a show called the ugly drunk story. Its very warts and all and the warts are wordy. There are some tough stories in here and i feel like that is really an contrast with most recovery stories we see from women. Womens memoirs of alcoholism tend to storefront the idea of im high functioning and keeping it together but im a drunk and i can only think of a couple exceptions to this rule, a notable one being karen [inaudible] if you have read her book. I guess my questions are to start with, why do you think that is and why do you think those are the stories that get told in or published . Spirit could i jump on that one and then we go to i think there is there is such a taboo still about admitting that you are a messy drunk or an ugly drunk or a problematic person or just like a piece of crap and i thought of myself, even when i was still drinking, maybe especially then as a dirt bag drunk because there is some early discussion of the book cover being a glass of wine and my reaction to that was i never drink from a glass. I drink from the bottle. Thats just the kind of drinker i am. As a woman i think it is very uncomfortable for people to think about women being that w way, although we can think of all kind of examples of men being that way and the guy on the bus drinking out of the paper bag over all the stereotypes and even like the sort of ones we agile late like [inaudible] was someone i worshiped when i was a kid and that was also a messy drinker and drug user but i just think women are supposed to be tidy we are supposed to be careful and i think we are supposed to keep our problems secret and small and in my problem was not small and it certainly by the end was not secret either. I think the one thing happening that we can talk about later but in the dialogue around women and dragging right now is this idea and im just going off what you just said, this idea that we need to push against that stereotype of the wino with the ground paper bag because alcoholism can look a lot of different ways to look like the bottle of the wine you drained after putting your kids to fed and its important to tell those stories but that is not every womans story and the fact that that is getting presented as the face of female alcoholism, your story, your book pushes against that and says that you know, this is where addiction can end up in it is scary and raw and real. Do you think that is fair . I think it is not just where this can end up but that this is where it can end up for women to and i think there is, you know, a very upper middle class white aesthetic to the new acceptance of a certain kind of woman drinker and this is not a book about drinking per se but kat parnells book when you mentioned karen, she wrote a wonderful book about being an absolute mess and not in like a hot fun way. I would read her book and think oh my god, i did think she was so cool because she is so much cooler than me but i also was just like while, i relate to this and i havent related to many addiction memoirs because they do tell a story that takes an arc and then everything is okay and my story is like arc after arc after arc. I think this is just an aside popping into my head but especially when i think of goods or wellknown books about drinking and women but this includes some of the people like [inaudible] or carolyn and one thing that is unusual about your book is that you stay with it at every step so what often happens with you are calling it relentle relentless. Yes, lets jump ahead to that royal question. [laughter] not only do you stay with it but you stay with it in theme. You dont start to generalize about what is happening. You take us through moment after moment after moment which is from a rating point of view pretty astonishing and we can talk more about the content of the book but want to acknowledge the structure and writing of the book. Its complete and exhaustive and at times it is exhausting and i mean that in a good way. We feel your weariness and inability to escape. You hold us in the story and its quite unusual. Could you talk about how you structure the book, especially the length of the book . It is quite big which is it is funny that you say that because the original manuscript i turned in, i dont know what we eventually got to but i believe its under 100,000 in the ministry pattern and was like 125, 12030 so we cut so much from the book and i think that was right i have this amazing editor who was able to get to the heart of one of his being repetitive and when i was being relentless and when i needed to let the reader take a breath. I wanted to be, you know, very thorough about telling the various points when i have what you would consider to be in a traditional narrative a rockbottom in the book starts with one of those and then comes back to it later but there are many in between and it happens over and over again because that is what it was like. It is just like there is no such thing as a wakeup call. Could be there is to some people but for me it was important to tell that story of like look, you dont just hit a rockbottom and then get it. There is no, there is no causeandeffect that you can find in any holick to stay sober. If you want to tell that story after the fact and say i quit and therefore the worst thing that happens before i quit was my rockbottom thats fine and you do you but i think that is like an ex post factor of justification or a way of greeting narrative and explain to yourself why or how you were able to get sober. For me, this is my ex post facto of expanding it to myself which which i did not get it until i just did. Thats helpful. I think that first, i want to acknowledge on the writing part of it, i want to acknowledge what you said about repetition and i think this is Something Interesting in writing stories and memoirs that when you are really getting honestly with experience in repetition is kind of both bug and feature and when we make bad decisions and it doesnt matter if you make one bad decision about what matters is if you make bad decisions starting at 14 and going to 44 or whatever it is and thats whats interesting decrease in narrative problem because how do you represent that honestly and yet not, you know, not making inert for the reader which i feel like you really achieved. Thank you. I tried. [laughter] since you brought up black bottom i want to talk about that. Its heart of what is in this book content wise, you are pushing against certain perceived narratives intriguing stories like rockbottom and how the rehabilitation industry works and what it means to relapse and these are all ideas you are working with but a lot of what you are dealing with is this idea that rockbottom needs to be interrogated so could you talk about how that will work with other people as well. I think when you think of having hit rock bottom as having learned a lesson from that it makes it really impossible to then relapse and feel, im not saying you should feel okay about relapsing but it makes it impossible to look at that experience instead of that story that you have told yourself about what the alcoholic or the drug attic is so if i got fired from my job and evicted from my house today i would probably think, you know, and my husband left me even though i dont have a husband but this is hypothetical but there are all these terrible milestones we think of ourselves and if all that happened and then i got sober then i relapsed what is my problem . It must be a knee problem and that is i am failing to fit into the story as opposed to the story doesnt fit in so i think that does damage to people and i think that because relapse is so incredibly common as i described in the excerpt there you know, it just sets us up for disappointment but also sets us up for failure because we dont have the tools we need because we dont think we will need the tools. We think we will be the exception that just gets it. I thought that when i left rehab the first time. I thought well, i know that none of these girls will get it but i am. And that was i just cannot have been further from the truth. So many questions. What is interesting is i just open the book and was leafing through it while we had all these technical issues and i happened to open it to the page which was germane to what you just said. Youre talking about your friend or our friend josh and. Hello, josh. You said he knew something about me i was not willing to acknowledge about myself but i will turn anything into an intellectual exercise even my own life. Do you think your intellectualism and your intelligence cap you stuck in your loop . Thinking you had this figured out . I think one of the things of one of the characteristics, i dont want to talk about myself i guess on that front but so im trying to say that this is a universal truth that i found with people who relapse a lot is that they over intellectualize everything and for me i thought especially when i was in treatment and doing outpatient and doing all these Different Things and going to therapy i thought i could talk myself through it and i thought that if i just fully and thoroughly understand every aspect of this i can do the things that are required and here are the things that according to me are not required because im smarter and better than that and it will work and the funny thing is the thing that ended up working and well, it was a combination of everything i had done to this point but the last thing i tried was aa. Its not a dumb system but a system that literally anybody can just do. Its like you just plug yourself in and you decide not to reject things and then it could have been something that did it but i just decided to stop rejecting things and stop, you know, making intellectual arguments for why i do not need to do things. I feel like that is a theme touchdown at length at the leslies books and this idea that a certain kind of alcoholic who is very special and who is with their own specialness and that aa with its really structured approach pushes air brings you to your own ordinariness. Yes, i think one of the things i was in treatment i got a bunch of my or i got basically my entire medical file after the fact as part of the reporting process for writing this book in one of the things that kept coming up over again was intellectualizing and i think that is just it was almost like they could have just checked the box because its so common and so i think its just, i think intellectualizing unfortunately because i love it and i want to do it to everything and i want to construct an argument around everything but it doesnt work for so variety. It just doesnt fit ive never seen anybody get sober by talking themselves out of drinking. [laughter] is a a part of your life now . To an extent but a much lesser extent than it was a first. I think aa is like a, there was a lifeboat for me. I think as you or as i got a little more sobriety under my belt and, you know, it i just didnt need that kind of day today going to a meeting everything all day and that is what i did at first but i will say even when im not doing things like going to meetings and just working the steps of aa there is so much of it i integrated into my life like just pausing and being grateful and doing all of that and i was [inaudible] [laughter] sorry if my parents are watching or something but all the cheesy stuff that they tell you to do i integrated into my life in a way that was organic and i have a much just a completely different attitude and outlook on life now than i did, even when i was first getting sober. I will take it down to basics for a second because i dont know how many questions we will end up getting and i feel like there are a couple important things to say paid one as there are 150 people listen to this right here and if some of those people are may be want to start by suggesting thinking some of them i been trying to quit drinking or relapsing or considering it and i guess just on a basic human level is there anything you can say to people and early sobriety . Icon to any word i could get when i was very early sobriety. As did i. I think the thing that helped me was just knowing, of course, a million aa things are coming to me but one day at a time and that is one of the things i clung to when i was very early in it. The other thing is what i found over time is that things, this is not universal necessarily for everyone but my own experience is things got different very fast. For me they got better very fast but i dont thank you can guarantee that your life will get better but it will just get different. If you wait a little bit and just say, you know, i will make it to this point im not going to drink until this point and we will see what happens and then you see what happens and i think what you will find is that in addition to all the help benefits of not drinking especially if you were a heavy drinker like i was then your brain will come back and that is such a gift and for me i talk about pause in the god, i cant remember but post acute withdrawal symptoms but its totally true. It affected my brain and took a good year to men itself and recuperate to the point like i felt i was back at baseline and at such a gift to feel that happening and if you dont stick with it you are robbing yourself of that experience. So yeah, thats early sobriety. Early sobriety is getting through those first 60 days and feeling better every day and man, i cannot do it for a long time but the other thing is, if you relapse, you know, i do think counting days is pernicious and i think that it makes people feel like failure because you feel this compulsion to crawl back into whatever program you are in and say i must stop and i was 37 days but now im at zero and i think thats a really problematic and toxic way of thinking about that because you didnt lose that time. You have whatever experiences you had during that time he learned something from it whether you realize it now or not and you absolutely learned from however many days you made it and you can just start over. Its a new day. Thank you for speaking to that. While we talk about things that are pernicious and problematic, could you talk a little bit about your thoughts about the rehab industry and i thank you call it the alcohol industry correct treatment industrial complex. [laughter] i went to treatment twice, went to detox a number of times and i went to various therapists and i think i will define this as we have specifically because that is what most people think of when they think of treatment. I went to 28 day treatment twice and ultimately it was good i want both times but im saying that from the perspective of someone who has Health Insurance so my dad from that ended up being less than 10000 which is a lot but it wasnt ultimately the end of the world and i paid it off but, you know, the thing is what they teach you, just going into treatment, one of the things they teach you in every single aspect of it is that you dont know how to manage your own life and that you essentially need to be made helpless and they take away your phone and your way to communicate with the outside world and cant have a computer or bring in places i was that you couldnt bring in any outside reading material and so its very in vandalizing. They make you do chores and what they tell you is its because you dont know how to be responsible for anything and i dont think thats fair. I dont think thats fair to tell people that. I especially dont think its fair to tell women that because women no matter how screwed up we are or how little we are taking care of our own lives we tend to deal and feel responsible for other people and we feel this tremendous weight of guilt and shame when we are not able to be there for other people. I dont have kids and i cant imagine what that burden feels like when you feel like you are feeling but i definitely felt like i went into rehab both times because this amazing weight of shame and all they did was compounded by telling me i didnt know how to do anything and also i think if you go to rehab more than twice, youre just giving them money. It did, in one case it did save my life in the immediate sense because i was able to detox their and alcohol withdrawal is can be deadly and detox is incredibly important so that was very important to me but i dont know that taking a route of the world for 20 days and then dropping you back in the world is a very effective way and that doesnt teach you what to do when you relapse because i didnt learn any of that so i just dont think its an effective way of dealing with a deadly brain disease. You brought up in your remarks just now the idea of shame that this compounding guilt and shame that is created in rehab as something you experienced and when we were speaking on the phone earlier this week you talked about the experience of quitting what you had called an ugly drunk look out in the world and you said you dont feel shame though you do feel guilt about your story and could you talk about shame and putting chain behind you and your relationship to that word, i guess. Yeah, i wanted to distinguish between guilt and shame because shame is something, guilt is something you feel because of other people because you feel an obligation to make things right. I think guilt is a healthy emotion and it causes us to behave better and causes us to make amends to people whereas shame is something you do to yourself. Its all inside your own head and so by the time i wrote this book i had gotten beyond a lot of the shame so one of the questions ive heard a lot was wasnt really hard to talk about this or that episode and it wasnt and it was. It wasnt as hard as you would think because i had already talked about it so much with my aa sponsor, with others in my life and i had talked to my parents and apologized just started that process of trying to assuage the gills. After that i was able to not feel shame about a lot of the stuff and it is funny because some of the stuff was fairly public and fairly wellknown locally and probably not to the extent i thought it was because i thought i would be buried in shame for the rest of her life and it was very terrifying and horrible at the time when things became public about my behavior but now i feel absolutely unafraid of talking about the experiences i went through because first of all, i have a disease. I do believe addiction is a type of disease. Second, i have made my peace and my amends with the people i owe that too. To an extent, it is an ongoing process for your life because you are always screen out. Everyone is always screwing up and having to say i am sorry but yeah, there is no room i cant walk into and talk about what i have done and say yes, i did that and that was me. That seems very free. It is the gift of sobriety that i could fathom. Talk about early sobriety but i did three years, four years and then you really start doing that internal work that you need to do and you will feel great because you will just have, shame is the worst emotion appeared i can be angry and get over it but shame just gets into your dreams and into your relationships with people and it is so toxic and so part of writing this book was to say look, all this happen and is what happened you this bad and oh no, well guess what, you can get over it. I got past all of this and i didnt have to leave seattle or go live in antarctica and not buried in a cone of shame. People are horrible to me online with my experiences of addiction even now and i just think thats very sad. I dont take it personally anymore. I can see we have one question so go ahead and ask a question at the bottom of the screen and type in your question and all those and i will ask them on your behalf once we gather a few more. Going back to that idea that its interesting, people recognizing your addiction against you in this moment and you do a lot of work that is politically adjacent and seen people use that against you is too bad but definitely seems more about them than you. My question was that i wanted to ask was due you, youve been doing such incredible work this last month and the reporting and you are always doing great reporting in this month its been very visible. Could you talk about what happened and what changed in your work once you stop drinking . Everything changed. Immediately when i stopped drinking i did not have a job and so i had a lot of time to just think about what i wanted to do next and i know this isnt exactly the question you asked me i will get to that but one other great gift of having a really bad addiction and really bad addiction experience is that if you can get through it and if you can get sober it brings you, in a way, i think its totally, totally unexpected for me because i had worked this job, essentially the same job the time i was 19 years old until i was 37 or whenever it was that i got fired just reporting and that is all i ever wanted to do. It was the most important thing. I was the job in the job was me and when i lost the job it was like i had lost everything. I dont know who i am anymore and i have no identity. When i so there was that but once i got past that i realized i could do absolutely anything i wanted and that was this incredibly freeing feeling and so i started my blog and now it was a self sustaining thing that i do full time and so when i am picking subjects to cover it is partly, its definitely reader interest i was covering and if it had gotten no interest at all it would not be sustainable but i cover addiction a lot and they cover homelessness on lot and i cover, issues that affect people that are vulnerable and reasons that may not be medially perceptible particularly with the people experience in homelessness and i think people have theories about what causes homelessness quote unquote. I think them are right and some are partly stupid but but for me when youre talking about people who really have Big Mental Health struggles and struggles with addiction that are prevalent among people who are homeless i feel that it could have been me but for a lot of privilege and a lot of luck. Another thing that runs through my story is an insane amount of luck. There is a story about driving down the freeway for 30 minutes in the town worm from and in a complete blackout like a 12 lane freeway going who knows how fast waking up in the parking lot headed to the airport and was on the other side of town in houston goes forever and i had no idea where it was and it was the era before smart phones and it was like why in my life . I dont know. So, what i look at someone who is living in a tent and is addicted to say alcohol or heroine, i just think if i had not been lucky and if i had not had a certain number of privileges like that that absolutely could be me. I feel empathy for Homeless People but i think a lot of reporters feel empathy for Homeless People but i think i feel it in a different way because i truly feel like i could have been there. Sobriety has really changed my empathy level for sure in a way that is not sort of, you know, about how great i am but it just happens to me because i have the experience of imagining myself and the other persons position so much more. Base level of, its not great journalism. You cant write as well. I think i really made it might ambition, the idea of writing a book would be impossible. I told myself a story about myself is that i cant write more than 500 words because i dont have that kind of Attention Span or are not literary or have these capabilities, im not smart enough, i dont have the focus there were so many stories partly true, i didnt have the focus but i also have the capability inside me somewhere, i just thought im such a piece of crab that no one wants to read anything more than typical items for me and i really believed that. Its interesting because you come from an industry about alcohol. You think a lot of journalists are may be operating with some of that . Thats an interesting question. Ive never asked that of another journalist, that would be a little invasive but it wouldnt surprise me because i think a lot of journalists, i do know you just tell stories about yourself in your industry and what youve done. I also think if youre just barely hanging on because youre hung over in the morning, just trying to get the facts straight in your story and make it makes sense, youre not going to be a more ambitious thing necessari necessarily. Their gender breaks down, too. Guys are like the next american novel. Perhaps that happens among people who think of themselves different but i can totally see that because it was so much my experience. Feeling like i am not good at this. Im lucky i am here in peoples here are fooled into thinking im here because i do know what im doing. Going to jump to the next audience question. The question after my own heart. What are tools you use over the regret over the time you lost when you were drinking . I dont feel i lost the time because this is perhaps a positive spin on what the years were like, they were terrible but the fact is i wouldnt be where i am now had it not gone that way. I dont have any way of knowing what it would have been like had i not lost to the ten years or so and i find regret like shame is a toxic emotion and its harder to expunge it away because you look back at the time and think oh my gosh, i could have done this and this. An example i heard, this comes with my own age, although i never wanted kids, but i could have had kids. People lost their kids and didnt get time with them. The best way to get through the regret is the same way you get through shame with addiction and thats talking about it and finding out how if theres a way to make amends to the people you have hurt. That doesnt mean apologizing, it means is that anything i can do now that would be helpful to you ask not dictating what you think should be done for them but asking. That helps expunge regret for me and i have this strong belief that you are who you are because of everything youve been through so i dont know what i would have been like but i do know im probably would have told myself stories about myself that were true. For example, i lost my job and i thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me but it was actually one of the best things to happen to me which is crazy to hear coming out of my mouth now given the way i felt when it happened. I was crushed. So it just takes time and perspective. Its interesting the answer to these sticky emotions, i dont know if they are emotions, shame and regret that your answer to both is the same which has to do with amends which takes the emphasis off it, too. I think a lot of recovery and work and talk is about taking emphasis off yourself and figuring out what you can do for other people which is a great way to recover from all kinds of things, such as addiction. That is a big thing right now for all of us. It is interesting to think about amends in that context. You feel like taking one more question . Yes. Okay, lets do that. There are a couple more. Lets take two more and then wrapped up. The first one is another great question, what are your thoughts about the Alcohol Industries influence on drinking in our culture and Public Health outreach on alcohol related issues. That is a great question. I think part of the reason we dont talk about relapse or alcohol addiction is because the industry is pernicious and every aspect of life. I have piles of magazines over here and everyone is full of liquor at, you walk into the Grocery Store and it just in your face. I think policy wise, i would like to see more regulation on alcohol regulations and higher taxes because it does reduce the amount that people drink. I dont know we are ever going to get to where we think of it its funny because we have drugs we make completely illegal like heroine which i dont think should be illegal and drugs make extra legal like really supposed to be consuming, if you dont, theres nothing wrong with you. Like alcohol. Used to be cigarettes as well. It is possible but we are not headed in that direction right now especially in quarantine for the message is just have happy hour with your friends, its 4 00 somewhere. 11 00 a. M. Somewhere. People just feel, i have picked up on this myself, this tremendous pressure to target drinking as this is the one way to have fun while stuck inside. I did want to bring that up. You mentioned earlier this idea of reservations, people having certain reasons they get to relapse. I feel in this moment in covid that there is constantly people coming up with justified relapse, surrounded with people talking on social media talking about how people need to be drinking. Can you talk about how these situations justify our drinking . I certainly did when i was drinking, especially when i was drinking publicly. Most of it was drinking shamefully in private but i do think theres a sense in which, i was reading the other day an advice column, the lead question was, somebody is having a dry wedding, how do i deal . The answer was bring a flask. It is so everywhere and i wish i could make it stop and let people make their own choices because the only reason we think drinking is the way to get through things and cope with things, instead of running or another substance, we do, whatever is because it is constantly pushed on us. That connects right back to the question, you think this idea that you are really drinking, it is your own choice, of course you are, they are choices you are making but there is a truly valid industry making sure you are doing that and you are subject to a capitalistic force. Whenever you choose our choices in a capitalistic system, its not possible. You think you have free will all you want but theres still this capitalism over your head at all times. And more than your evening glass of wine. Yes. Okay, one more question and if you could take the question how you would like because its open minded. How long have you been clean, how long have you been writing . We just lost you. You might hear . This is josh. I can hear you. So just keep going and hopefully we can go. Go right ahead. Okay. Can you hear me . Yes. While we wait for her to reconnect, i started drinking when i was about 13 and i did some other drugs, pretty minor stuff. I didnt really drink until i was in my 30s. I have been, i didnt really do a lot of other drugs either. Drinking was my main one once i really started. Ive been sober five and a half years. Sobriety date is february 4, 2015. I have been writing basically since forever. I started writing when i was, professionally, was about 18, 19. In college i took internships one it was something he did not get technically paid for and ive been doing it ever since. I started as an intern and have been in 2009, i went in online platforms. How many years has that been . More than 20. Are you back . Kind of. Im going to step aside and close this out because i keep dipping out. Erika, any final words . Thank you so much for hosting this and im glad we were able to get past some technical and thanks to everybody on facebook and youtube thank you, everybo everybody, our apologies for starting late, thank you for being with us. Thank you for tuning in and thank you to erika and claire for being here. If you enjoyed this event, you can find many more town hall seattle. Org and we hope you consider a donation to town hall and your support will allow us to continue having events like this one. If youre interested in please order a copy, it will be out july 7, use the link and finally, thank you again for being here. We hope you have a great evening. You are watching book tv the latest Nonfiction Books and cultures. Cspan2, created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your provider. We think this month, we drink book to the programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, robert gates and james mattis look at the use of u. S. Power around the world since the end of world war ii. In christian rose, former staff director of the senate of Services Committee hightech warfare. His secretary and director of policy. Talk about the Nuclear Arms Race for two. Cspan2. Do thousand four, and was discussing his normal, i am charlotte senate. Book tv, accompanied him as he appeared at the Aspen Institute and was just a radio show