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Sobriety is about not consuming a substance or engaging in a behavior. Recovery is about understanding and addressing the underlying issues that turned the substance or behavior into a coping mechanism.

 

When someone uses the terms sobriety and recovery interchangeably, it is a great indication that the person is full of shit.

 

I am about ten years sober from alcohol. I am just starting to understand perhaps the most impactful underlying issue for which I was using alcohol to cope.

 

More.

 

As an entry-level sales representative fresh out of college, if my assigned hours were 8am to 5pm, I worked 7am to 6pm. While other reps correctly identified sales call reports as a worthless waste of time that no one in management ever read, I spent my Saturdays getting all of mine done. My boss didn’t read them. I could have copied pages from the phone book or written workplace erotica and no one would have known. But he was aware that I was up to date while my coworkers were delinquent. I was not the smartest or most charismatic with customers, but I was willing to work the hardest, and that resulted in raises and promotions.

 

For years, I have incorrectly, I think, diagnosed this as a wildly common case of “people pleasing.” I think my ailment is actually much more serious. I have a debilitating affliction whereby I think the solution to every challenge is more.

 

More.

 

When I got tired of, “working for the man,” my wife, Sheri, and I bought a whole grain bread bakery. Our sales were mediocre. Instead of working on product quality or developing word-of-mouth worthy customer experiences, I did what worked in Corporate America.

 

I did more.

 

Within a few years, we had two bakeries, four retail locations, and about 50 employees. As anyone who has run a small business knows, that kind of more can mean only one thing: more problems for the owner to manage.

 

My friend and financial guru, also named Matt, looked at me at a weekend BBQ shortly after we opened our fourth location and said, “I don’t know how you do it. I feel overwhelmed running one business, and you have four times as much stuff on your plate.” It was one of those comments that was probably a throw away for him, long forgotten and barely meaningful at the time. But for me, I remember where we were standing on his back porch as his words hit my ears. For many years, his feedback hit like so many other comments about my work effort, my productivity, and my dedication. I felt like I had something others lacked. I felt like my superpower was my ability to grind on, relentlessly, undeterred by the limits of the hours in the day or any notion of balance. I thought Matt’s quizzical statement was a compliment. “I don’t know how you do it.”

 

The curse of more.

 

After a decade of dealing with employees in their late teens and early 20s, I was looking for a solution to the lack of reliability of poorly paid young people asked to come to work hours before sunrise. My solution was the same as always: I would just do more. I would employ fewer unreliable people who lacked my work ethic, and spend less time on management tasks freeing me up to spend more time operating the business. I traded headaches for constantly bumping up against my human limits for productivity. For many years after that, I told people that while the bakery business definitely sped up my descent into addiction, it also taught me how hard I could work. Again, I found a badge of honor. I took great pride in my ability to do something mere mortals couldn’t, even as I acknowledged my unmanageable need for a liquid poison to help me cope.

 

More work.

 

More alcohol.

 

As a college and high school soccer coach, I have pulled weeds to make our facilities superior to that of our competition. I have run sessions with middle schoolers to get them excited to come to our high school. I have taken my teams to division one college soccer games, led workouts at exotic places, held mandatory film sessions, and hosted fundraisers and community service events that make the other coaches look like part-time slackers. And most of the more was done unpaid, in my free time. The justification was always that my dedication would pay off with Ws. When my teams were mediocre, I answered with the only strategy I knew.

 

More.

 

Why do I coach college and high school soccer, anyway? Pure love of the game? If only. When whatever I am doing in my primary career is not meeting my financial needs, as has been mostly the case for 22 years now, I look for a side hustle to supplement.

 

I look for more.

 

During a summer visit a couple of years ago, my nephew was complaining about his schedule as a production supervisor. He was working three twelves one week, then four twelves the next. He was on day shift and always had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. What a pussy, I thought to myself and said to my wife. I work five twelves minimum, and at least another ten hours over the weekend. He had a schedule dreams are made of, and he had the nerve to complain.

 

Hadn’t he heard of the magic of more?

 

Not coincidentally, that nephew is not an alcoholic. From the best I can tell, he is a pretty laid back young adult, and a great father and husband. He has nice things and takes vacations and his wife and kids are peaceful and happy. Look at what he’s missing without a compulsive fixation on more.

 

I have used the term, maladaptive coping mechanism, to describe alcohol since long before I started to understand my self-inflicted compilation of things with which to cope. I hear other drinkers talk about boredom as one of their triggers to drink, and it is one of the few things I hear consistently with which I cannot relate. I am never bored. I take almost any downtime and find something more I can do. “Once my financial goals are met,” I tell myself, “that’s when I will relax my pursuit of more. Maybe then I’ll know what it feels like to be bored.”

 

For those of us who suffer from a chronic case of more-ism, boredom is not an issue. Anxiety, mediocrity, half-assed task completion, and outcomes unrealized–those are the emotions and experiences that take the place of boredom.

 

More.

 

I recently pulled down aerial telephone and data lines, and two telephone poles, with an excavator. Accidentally. You might be wondering where the hell that fuck up came from. Sales job. Bakery. Writer. Soccer coach. What in my job history called for training in operating excavation equipment. Nothing, obviously. That’s why I pulled down two telephone poles and the lines strung between them–lack of training. And it was a big excavator, too. If you are in construction or excavation, it was a 155. If not, the machine was about five times the size of the ones you see in the Home Depot parking lot. Why the fuck was I driving it? For now, let’s just say:

 

More.

 

I would like to believe that years of growth and recovery work have brought me to my realization about more, but that’s just not true. The toll it takes to meet all my self-imposed deadlines and pile more on top of more-than-enough has brought me to a breaking point. I can’t keep going like this. For the first time in years, I am thinking about alcohol. I know it’s not a long-term solution, but right now, I would take some short-term relief without concern for the consequences.

 

This is where a writer is supposed to, “land the plane.” Give a moral to the story. Solve the problem for the benefit of a reader who resonates. Tell everyone that it’s going to be OK.

 

From the best I can tell, if I include my own youth participation in sports, I have been operating under the delusion of the glories of more for like four decades now. I know that less is part of the solution, but what the fuck does that really mean. Less of what? Less when? Less where?

 

Some guys have midlife crises that involve sports cars and infidelity. That sounds a little more exciting than doing less. Rewiring my brain to have a more viable reaction to stress and discomfort sounds about as glamorous as writing sales call reports no one will ever read, ever.

 

When I eat a scoop of ice cream on a sugar cone, no matter what flavor I choose, it always tastes the same. It tastes like more. But I don’t eat more. I mean, what kind of psycho goes out for ice cream with family and friends, and after eating his treat, goes back to the counter and orders another scoop. Even I, with my dedication to compulsivity and relative disregard for the opinions of others, have never done that.

 

Ice cream. Less. It is a starting point. I will, in my spare time, to battle my impending boredom, develop what I’ll call my ice cream doctrine of doing less.

 

There. Consider this plane to be crash landed.

 

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