Episode 15 -- May 28, 2020

Lately, there has been a lot of conversation in the media about the vital work that keeps our society functioning. Healthcare professionals, housekeeping staff, grocery store workers, and delivery drivers are all being pushed to their limits; being hailed as everyday heroes. Yet, there are a lot of other kinds of work that are vital to keeping our communities emotionally healthy. We also need to recognize the value of creative work--of art, music, stories, and entertainment--at the most challenging times. A lot of us creative people, whether we make art for a living or for the pleasure it brings to life, are also being put to the test. We may struggle with feelings that our work isn't "essential." Stress and worry may be blocking our creativity, causing an additional crisis of identity. These feelings may even remind us of the worst days of our addiction. So, let's turn to this excerpt from Jennifer Matesa's book The Recovering Body. Here, Matesa reminds us of the importance of creative work in our darkest moments, and reassures us that our moments of creative blockage and self-doubt will pass.

It has been edited for brevity.

Listening to music has, for me, always been almost as important as eating food. Maybe sometimes more important. I was brought up in an intensely musical family. Both my parents played instruments and sang in church choirs. All three of us kids took music lessons from the age of nine, and my sister and I later trained in voice and performed in ensembles. It wasn't as though our family were the "New" von Trapps--we didn't inflict our performances on audiences--but we easily pulled off four-and five-part harmonies that made us happy in our own living room at Christmastime. My primary image of those gigs remains vivid in my memory: my dad, standing tall, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, rocking on his feet.

My father felt the music in his body, and so do I. My mother told me one of my earliest pleasures as a toddler was planting my diapered bottom in front of the "hi-fi" speakers and rocking out to Dad's Ray Charles or Dave Brubeck albums. Later, one of my most prized possessions (and I didn't have many) was a Panasonic AM transistor radio with a socket for an "earplug." The image in my mind's eye of this plastic device, globe-shaped and the size of a grapefruit, advertised as "portable" back then but enormous and cumbersome by today's standards, looks like an anthropological artifact of another civilization, and in fact it was. Back then, there was no instant gratification in the pleasure of listening to music. We had to earn the money to buy whole vinyl LPs. We had to wait for the deejay to play our songs. We had to call in to the radio station (on landlines, through constant busy signals) to make requests. Then, finally, hours later, the deejay would announce, "This goes out to...."

In high school I finally got hold of an FM radio that allowed me to listen to the one actual rock station in town, on which I could hear, for example, Robert Plant sing "Fool in the Rain" and "Stairway." The ability to listen to those voices--Elton John, Jackson Browne, Freddie Mercury, Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks--put me in touch with the outside world and with the internal harmony that's a part of my neurology. And it saved my life.

More people than we realize are robbed of these pleasures during active addiction. "I don't even consider music to be recreational since it's so vital to me," says Matthew, a thirty-three-year-old financial analyst and former bodybuilder I interviewed who used to binge on Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Matthew finds pleasure spending a couple days each month listening to new music and crafting playlists for people like me who like music but don't have time to look for it. I ask whether he was able to enjoy music while he was drinking and drugging, and he laughs. "When I think of the time I was drinking and using," he says, "it was so cold and lonely, and there was no time for music. I didn't practice yoga. I didn't exercise. There was no soundtrack to my life. And there's a soundtrack now." The other day he uploaded into my Google Drive thirty-odd songs I'd never have found without his help. This kind of sharing of pleasures makes our recovery community larger and tighter.

Considering the fact that my teenage kid and I both constantly carry our music in our back pockets, I don't know how I survived high school and college without an MP3 player. My sixteen-year-old makes his own music--a creative practice that's antithetical to the destructive habits of addiction. To have fun making music, to do it successfully, you have to be able to feel its rhythm in your body. Yet so many creative people turn to drugs to alleviate the insecurity inherent in the creative process. After all, how the hell do we know where the good material comes from? We don't. It moves in and out of us, like breath. Like love. We can't control it.

Maybe one day that movement will stop forever: the ever-present death instinct, even if it's just the death of a part of ourselves, is a frightening prospect that we're tempted to numb out.

On an online forum for recovering opiate addicts, I met a young musician named Mikey, and we ended up having a long conversation about heroin, creativity, and other topics. "It's not like I consciously come up with the songs on my guitar or the words on the page," Mikey said at one point in our conversation. "I play my guitar and it seems almost by magic that my fingers find the right chords that fit together perfectly. Or when I write, I just let go and the words flow from my fingers to the page with my mind not interfering at all. Perhaps part of the reason addiction is so common among artists is because we feel like we have no control over our art. It's hard being in this position, because I never know whether one day that magic will stop. But I've discovered that while on heroin my creative ability is deadened."

It's no fun when you can't feel anything.

I had felt the same anxiety when I was just a little older than Mikey. My writing was "automatic," people loved what I produced, I got fan mail when I reported for daily papers, readers clipped my columns. I won awards. I had stalkers. Then I went to grad school so I could work on writing books and found out that real writers (and their editors) call "automatic" writing "a first draft." I loved writing, I even loved revising, and at the same time I was terrified of the pleasure it gave me to play with language and to enjoy the attention my ideas got me when I published them, so I drank. I thought "I" powered my talent. Like Mikey, I never knew whether "one day that the magic would stop."

"Your creativity is not 'magic,'" I told him in my nicest mom voice (Mikey was young enough to be my son). "It's a combination of a gift, which is a unique tool nobody can buy, and hard work, which is energy, effort, and love. The discipline of practicing with the tool is up to you, but the tool is yours for life. 'God'/The Universe/Genetic Selection was planting seeds the day you were conceived and decided, 'Mikey should be Creative. He wouldn't like being an insurance salesman. Let's give him an ear for melody and rhythm and language.' These traits are part of the fabric of your body and mind. Nobody can take them away from you except yourself."

That's the way it goes in recovery: while I was talking to Mikey, I was also having a conversation with the person in the mirror.

About the author
Jennifer Matesa, a seasoned health writer, authors the award-winning blog Guinevere Gets Sober and contributes regularly to TheFix.com. In 2013 she became a fellow of the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Jennifer is the author of two books from Hazelden Publishing, The Recovering Body: Physical and Spiritual Fitness for Living Clean and Sober and Sex In Recovery: A Meeting Between the Covers.

© 2014 by Jennifer Matesa
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