IT’S CRAZY I used to think all writers drink. When you quit, you notice how many don’t drink anymore, or never did. This is true for every creative field. Throw a stone in Hollywood, and you’ll hit a sober person. Rock stars, comics, visual artists—they learn sobriety is the path to longevity. Any tabloid reader knows that walking into certain AA rooms can be like stumbling into a Vanity Fair party, which helped kick the fame delusion out of me.
I was a child who worshipped celebrities—Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, River Phoenix—each of them was a hero to me. I spent way too many of my younger years grasping for whatever fame I could get my fingers around. But in the battle for a better life, fame is a flimsy weapon. Those rooms were not divided into famous people and nonfamous people. Just people who had all reached for the same fix.
Sobriety helped to knock a few false prophets out of me. Alcohol. Other people’s approval. Idealized romantic love. So what should I worship now? I didn’t care to find the answer, honestly, but the program kept placing one word back in front of me, even after I pushed it away. God.
The word made me squirm. Like so many people, I resisted AA, in part, because of the words “higher power.” Even the major work-around of a “God of my understanding” was way too much God for me. I was raised around conservative Christians who did not always strike me as charitable. I was puzzled by the demented winner-takes-all spirit of traditional religion: I go to heaven, and you do not. College taught me religion was the opium of the masses. God was for weak people who couldn’t handle their own lives, and it took me a long time to understand that, actually, I was a weak person who couldn’t handle my own life, and I could probably use all the help I could get.
The “higher power” idea came to me in increments. Like sobriety itself, it was not a spectacular, flailing jump but a tentative inching in the same direction. I thought a lot about storytelling. That was a power way bigger than me. When I listened to someone’s story, when I met the eyes of a person in pain, I was lifted out of my own sadness, and the connection between us felt like a supernatural force I could not explain. Wasn’t that all I needed? A power bigger than me?
I needed to be reminded I was not alone. I needed to be reminded I was not in charge. I needed to be reminded that a human life is infinitesimal, even as its beauty is tremendous. That I am big and small at once.
I worship the actual stars now, the ones above us. Anna lives out in West Texas, where the night sky burns electric, and her back patio is the first place I understood the phrase “a bowl full of stars.” The stars tilt around you, and you can feel the curvature of the earth, and I always end up standing on my tippy-toes out there, just to be two inches closer to the rest of the galaxy.
My spiritual life is in its infancy. But the major epiphany was that I needed one. A lot of my friends are atheists. We don’t talk much about belief, and I wouldn’t presume to know theirs, but I think their stance comes from an intellectual allergy to organized religion, the great wrongs perpetrated in the name of God, the way one book was turned into a tool of violence, greed, and bigotry. I don’t blame them. But I wish belief didn’t feel like a choice between blind faith and blanket disavowal. I’m a little freaked out by the certainty on either side. No one has an answer sheet to this test. How we got here, what we are doing—it’s the greatest blackout there is.
Whether God exists or not, we need him. Humans are born with a God-shaped hole, a yearning, a hunger to be complete. We get to choose how we fill that hole. David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College, a speech that is a bit like a sermon for people who don’t want to go to church:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
I worshipped alcohol, and it consumed me. I worshipped celebrity and the machines of external validation, and it cratered me. To worship another human being is to set yourself up for failure, because humans are, by their nature, flawed. I worshipped David Foster Wallace once. In some ways, I still do. His suicide is another reminder that all the knowledge and talent in the world will not stop your hands from tying the noose that will hang you.
I seek all the sources of comfort I can find. Music. Old friends. Words that leave my fingers before the sun rises. My guitar, strummed in an empty room. The trees as they turn, telling me that I am not a towering redwood but another leaf scraping the ground. I also hit my knees each morning and bow to the mystery of all I don’t know, and I say thank you. Does anyone hear me? I don’t know. But I do.
TWELVE
THIS IS THE PLACE