Unreliable Narrator

I had this experience recently, maybe you'll recognize it. I saw a friend, someone I love. This friend is somebody who is some of the time sober and some of the time not. And I was pretty sure I could tell he'd slipped. He was trying to hide it, but it seemed to me that he was in the part of the cycle where the addiction was just too strong for him to be very convincing. Which of course, made me sad. I felt worried for him. But also, I felt his loneliness. Like, I wanted to help him, but he didn't want to be helped or seen or noticed. There was a voice in his head that was telling him everything's fine. And also adding, but make sure nobody notices. I was imagining this anyway, because I have heard that voice myself. I think of it as the second voice in my mind. Right now, October of 2026, I think that voice is obeying me. But I also know that when it's disobeyed me, I didn't notice. Every time I've driven my own life towards a crisis, I'd started it by lying to myself. Along with where I'd started lying to anybody else. That place is a lonely place that I think everybody will visit at least once. And this week, I wanted our entire episode to be an interview with a writer, I think has really captured what it's like when you're in that place. After the second voice in your head it's just taken over. The writer is named Megan Ogiblin. Her stunning new memoir is called Will and Attention. Megan has a singular mind. We talked for a couple hours about sobriety, relapse, what it's like to have faith and lose it. The kind of conversation I'm always looking for about the questions that can be hard to talk about. Hello. - Hi. - Can you say your name and what you do? - Yep, I am Megan Ogiblin and I'm a writer and essayist. I have written a lot about Christianity. So I grew up in a fundamentalist family went to Bible school for a couple years in my late teens, early 20s and ended up having a crisis of faith left that whole world. And yeah, fell into an addiction around that time and started drinking, taking a lot of pills, kind of crash and burned my life in my late 20s and got sober. And then I started writing during that time. I wrote about Christianity. I wrote a little bit about technology, which I became interested in and the relationship between technology and spirituality. And this book is really sort of looking back at that experience and particularly through this other sort of midlife crisis I had where I started drinking after 11 years actually of being sober. - And what was your early childhood in a family of a fundamentalist faith? Like what strain of fundamentalism was it? Like what did your family believe? What did you believe? - So yeah, I should say that my family would not identify themselves as fundamentalists. This is always sort of a label that you point at other people, but they were non-denominational even jellicles. And I mean, I say we were fundamentalists because I was taught six day creationism that God actually created the world in six days. We were taught that Christ was going to return probably very soon in the future, the faith. I was raised and was really focused on the end times and this idea that history was gonna get worse and worse and there was gonna be tribulations and all of these horrible natural disasters and eventually would lead to the destruction of the world. And yeah, so I grew up not really having a strong sense of the future 'cause there was this sense that we weren't gonna be around for very long, that life as we knew it was gonna be disrupted by this major eschatological event. - I think when people, like the kind of people who listen to podcasts where people talk about their, like very literary memoirs often are not people who grew up with that kind of faith, and I think if you're on that other side of the line, one of the things that people wonder about. Something that I wonder about is just what that kind of faith is like. Like when you were young and you believed that sort of all this apocalyptic tribulation was coming, did you believe in that the way you believe that there will be winter this year or did you believe in it the way you believe in climate change or did you believe in it as something that sometimes you had a hard time believing in, that you had to work to believe, what did it feel like to believe that? - Yeah, that's a great question. I should say too, it changed a lot. Like when I was a child, it was more so this absolute belief, and these are the facts. I remember our pastor when I was a kid, used to say that he firmly believed that Christ was gonna return within his lifetime, and he was in his 70s. So that was sort of my feeling of like, all right. Well, you know, am I gonna even apply for college? That kind of thing. So really, really real when I was growing up, you know, as I got into my teenage years and started to know people who did not believe the same thing I did, it became a little bit more, I don't wanna say abstract, but I became aware that this was a belief that not everybody had, and that had to be defended and had to be rationalized in some way. And that was actually, you know, despite all of that, that was not sort of the seed of my de-conversion. It was really more so the theology itself in the Bible that started to undo my faith in this problem, which is sometimes called the Odyssey, the problem of evil, which a lot of theologians have dealt with. Like if there is a benevolent, all-powerful God, does evil exist in the world, why can't he stop it? And that was a question that I wrestled with when I was studying theology and that I didn't really receive good answers to at the time. You know, I think one actually inciting event, you know, I was sort of struggling with this problem. You know, I was the beginning of my sophomore year that 9/11 happened. And, you know, there was this huge tragedy where so many people died the senseless death, which seemed to beg an explanation. And I think the explosion of interest in religion and people going back to church in the wake of that experience, signal that I wasn't, you know, the only person who was sort of left with that question. But it was also that this stuff that, like, people were saying about the terrorists, actually. And this idea that, like, these were people who had absolutely committed faith, like, probably a faith that was stronger than my own, but in a different religious system and a different particular ideology that they've been exposed to, that they really believed what they were doing was good. And I thought, like, well, that is, like, if that's not faith that is, that it's most extreme, a deluded faith. And then that started to bring up this question of, like, well, am I deluded, too, you know, what is it about my faith that makes it real? And I wasn't totally able to answer that question. - And then what does it mean, like, how did you announce that you were leaving? - I didn't announce it. It was a slow process. I mean, my parents were so opposed to me leaving Bible school that I had to maneuver this, like, really complicated exit strategy, which involved going to the mission field. And Ecuador basically joined a community of Christians that were trying to spread the gospel in a particular place in the world. And I don't know why it was easier at that point to leave when I was sort of out of the country and felt like I was less under the thumb of, you know, people of authority in my life and my friends back at Moody and everything. So yeah, I kind of just, like, slipped under the radar for a year there and a lot of my drinking took off there, too, I had stopped going to church at that point, stopped praying. And I eventually came back to Chicago after that and spent basically the next eight years working in bars and restaurants. And that was when my drinking really started to take off. - And this may be this question is, like, so obvious. But I don't know, what was the relationship, like, leaving your faith meant, leaving community identity, the framework you were using to understand the world. Like, that is, it's a bunch of unmooring experiences at the same time. But I don't want to make assumptions. Like, why did your drinking take off at the same time that you were leaving your faith? - I'm like a little bit suspicious of etiology just because it's very possible that I started drinking just 'cause I'm an alcoholic. I do have some alcoholism, my family. And maybe that would have happened regardless of whether I had left the faith or not. But it's really hard not to connect it to that experience of losing faith. And I mean, what I think I really lost, when I lost the faith, it wasn't even the loss of God that I was grieving the most because God, I don't know. God had always been kind of the subtraction to me. Like, I never felt like I had this very personal relationship the way that a lot of people I grew up with did. It was more so the sense that life didn't have any meaning that history was not going anywhere, you know, like we did have this sort of like dark apocalyptic view of history when I was growing up in the church, but there was at least some sort of telos, like everything that happened in the world had a purpose and was part of God's plan. And then suddenly I'm in this world where no, everything is just random and there's no point and what does it matter what I do? And that, you know, it's funny, I like read a lot of Russian novels around this time of my life, because I was basically, I think I was experiencing like what everyone in the West experienced in the 19th century, this idea that like, if God does not exist, everything is permitted. But I was like experiencing it so low, like everyone else I knew who was secular was like, yeah, of course, what's the big deal? But it was really traumatic for me. And yeah, I mean, I think the drinking grew out of that sense of either like everything is permitted. So why wouldn't I do this? It was a thing I wanted to do the most. Or yeah, just maybe some sort of coping mechanism to try to escape this, you know, what set in was a really deep depression during that time. And how did you feel about your drinking then? Like did it feel like something you were doing wrong or like you were drinking too much or what did you seem like? I had a set of rules I had to live by, I don't believe in that set of rules anymore. And this is one of the many things that I just don't think that much about. Yeah, it was funny. I didn't feel that bad about drinking. I felt really bad about smoking cigarettes. And I felt bad about having sex. Drinking drinking. I don't know if it was the sort of anesthetizing feeling where it's like you immediately have sort of all these bad feelings disappear. So I think the thing about alcoholics too is that we're really good at seeking out other people who drink the way we do. So it's to normalize it. So a lot of the people that I was spending time with during that period of my life were very heavy drinkers, if not addicts, all sorts of people that made it feel like I wasn't the only one. And it was also my 20s, you know, so some of that I think just seemed like what was normal for that time. Were you you're working in bars like what are your 20s look like? Like what does your life look like? I was living in Chicago for most that time. I lived in Pilsen just a neighborhood a little bit south of the loop. And I worked in several different bars in restaurants. I worked at a jazz club for several years where almost everyone who was working there was probably on aaholic in hindsight. We all drank at work on our shifts. And I was often so drunk at the end of the night. I couldn't count out my drawer. And yeah, I was a blackout drinker. I was a blackout drinker almost right from the start. So I would just continue past that point where it was enjoyable actually to the point where I would yeah, I would lose consciousness. And I was taking other drugs at that time too. I was saying a lot of Adderall and uppers when I was drinking. So I would this happens with a lot of people who are heavy drinkers too. They try to find other drugs to help them drink more or help them stay clear, you know. And for me, what Adderall did was it just allowed me to have fully functional blackouts where I was like driving my car down the Dan Ryan in a complete state of unconsciousness. Like I would get up in the morning sometimes and have no memory of where I parked my car. And I would be like wandering around the block, like just searching for where my car was. And then I would find it like often like in a perfect parallel park job or messy parallel park jobs sometimes. Or sometimes I wouldn't find it all and it turns out it's in the impound, you know, just these messes of waking up and having no clue what you did the night before. Would you feel afraid? Yeah, I was, I was afraid. I mean, I start having really bad withdrawal. And part of that was this sort of panic feeling like you're going to die. And there were several points where I was like, okay, I have to, I have to give this up, you know, especially when I started to get into my late 20s. And I started to become clear that like not everybody was drinking this way, you know, and it was taking this physical toll. I was really worried about what it was doing to my mind. Like I would do, I would do crossword puzzles every day after I've been drinking just to like, you know, if I can finish this and that means I'm okay. And I can continue drinking because I knew like the effects of blackouts on the brain and all of this. But despite those consequences, yeah, I was not able to stop. I would go sometimes for like, you know, I would say like I'm going to go for a month without drinking. And I make it to the weekend sometimes. Sometimes I make it like two weeks and then talk myself back into it. When the thing was like when I stopped drinking, I felt really miserable. Like miserable in a different way, you know, not like my life is chaos, but that everything is just sort of flat and nothing means anything. And yeah, I would inevitably just end up returning to it. And at that point, like, did the question of whether you were an alcoholic sort of break the surface of the front of your mind or like, how did you understand what was going on? There was a lot of justification. Like I used to think, oh, I'm just a very passionate extreme person. And I do everything to the max, you know, that kind of thinking. And eventually, you know, as I started having more consequences, I think I started to realize that I was an alcoholic. So there was some awareness there, but it was like this weird, you know, I talk about this problem in the book, actually, which is where like part of you know, something is wrong, but you keep doing it anyway. Yeah. And there's this problem that like the Greek philosophers used to call a crazier, which is basically weakness of will. And they said like basically anybody who knows what they're doing is wrong will stop doing it. And if you're doing something wrong, that's because you lack knowledge. And I always could not understand that idea because I've gone through so many periods in my life where I knew something was wrong and I did it anyway. And it felt like I wasn't able to do the things that I approved of. I kept doing the things that I disapproved of. But I do think there's some truth to that idea about knowledge where it's like if you keep doing something that you say, you know, you sent intellectually to the fact that this is wrong, but you keep doing it. Some deeper part of you doesn't really believe it's wrong, you know, like maybe it's the unconscious part of you or it's your revealed preference as opposed to your stated preference, but there is some sort of lack of knowledge there. And I think that was where I was for years with drinking where you know, I knew on some level that I should probably stop, but at the same time I was just not willing to do that and didn't really understand just how bad the consequences would get. It was like there was a part of your mind that knew it was a problem and that it needed to be fixed. And then there was some deeper part of your mind that just disagreed with that that you couldn't access, you think? Yeah, I think it was largely unconscious. Like I remember so many times I would wake up feeling miserable and I would write these like screens to myself and my journal. Like you got to get your shit together. This is ruining your life. Here's all the ways in which is ruining your life. And I would write that and like I would feel really good afterwards. Like okay, I put it, I put it down. I know what's right. And then I would immediately go to the bar after that. Like it didn't make any sense. And you know, I don't know. I think anybody who's had a really serious addiction has gone through that experience where it's almost like you're taking actions that are contrary to what you want or what you feel that you want. But those actions are also what you want, right? There's this sort of disconnect between two different desires within you that you can't seem to reconcile. Yeah, it was funny. One of the things reading your book that I found, it wasn't a feeling of reassuring, reassuring the wrong feeling. But this is embarrassing thing to just say, so you're so smart. Like you just have like an astonishing mind and you're describing just making the normal mistakes that anyone in an addictive relationship will make. And being able to see someone else's mind struggle with that, to me, what it really underlined is that the part of you that like knows the good, that wants to do the good, and the part of you that disagrees have access to the exact same amount of intellectual horsepower. Yeah, I think this is the most insidious thing about addiction or any type of self-deception is when you think that you're acting within the guidelines of your higher self, but you're actually, it's actually your lower self that's disguising itself, right? Yes. Where you have this feeling like, okay, I'm going to do this because this is the rational thing to do. But it's actually your addiction that's completely hijacked your mind. Yes. So I wrote about in the book like during the relapse, there were times when I had a speaking gig. So I was basically just drinking when I was away on work trips for a period of time. And there were times when, you know, I was booking my travel for a speaking gig. And I was like, of course, I'm not going to drink this time. I always said, you know, this time, that was the last time was the last this time I'm not going to do it. But I'm booking my flight. And I'm like, should I get the early morning flight or choose a later flight? And so I would choose the later flight. And I would have all these reasons like, oh, you know, I'll be able to get breakfast at the hotel before I leave. It'll, you know, it'll be better for XYZ reason. All of these things that were ostensibly rational. But the truth is that I knew I was going to be drunk and hung over that morning. It was not going to be able to make an early flight. But there was, again, the part of myself that knew that that reason I was completely cut off from. And I would recognize it sometimes in hindsight, but I just didn't have access to that part of my mind at the time. I think what I want to be true, and I don't think it is true, is that there's some final battle where you're like one's wiser mind defeats the other guy, like the self-destructive imp. And if you meditate enough, or you're honest enough, or you meet with your psychiatrist enough times, that there is some practice after which you could say, like, I am in harmony. Because your stories are a recovery story, I mean, it's a real-ab story and it's a recovery story. I was like, there's parts where I said to myself, oh, well, this is what writing is for. Writing is a place where so often when I've written personal writing, retrospective writing, I have found that it is like an amplifier for a wiser part of me. The person who I am, when I'm writing sentences often, is a lot smarter than the person I am when I'm making decisions. But the person who makes bad decisions is fantastically capable at prose as well. That person is also great at being like, no, no, no, let me tell you why you need the later flight. That person's voice, they don't present themselves cleanly. The one disguises the other one and it's so vexing. I mean, I certainly felt that when I was writing the book, there would be times where I was writing about drinking. And I would go back and read it and was like, this was written by my alcoholism. There's moments where I'm romanticizing, drinking, or I'm downplaying the consequences and yeah, I had to do a lot of revision for this book for precisely that reason where I think anytime you're writing about an addiction or any kind of self-deception, you're an unreliable narrator. The idea was to go back over that and try to weed out the half-truths, the lies, all of these things that were not the truth essentially. And I mean, there's limits to what you can do because you know, I don't have access totally to the truth and can't see everything about myself. But I do think there's a process by which like writing about this, I was able to bring those selves into harmony a little bit, which is not to say that I obliterated the doubleness. Like, I think that's one thing I realized by the end of this project was that there's this ideal state of wholeness that I think is the motivation for so many religious disciplines, or spiritual disciplines, this idea that like, oh, if I can finally let go of my ego, I'll finally be at peace with myself and I won't be arguing with myself and I will just, you know, know what's good and do it. And that's also the appeal for, or it was for me of intoxication, this idea that you're kind of silencing that second self that's always watching and judging you. Carl Jung actually wrote about the first time that he drank and he said that he had always had these two selves inside of them that he called them number one and number two. And he said the first time that they merged into one self was the first time he drank. And I don't know, I'm interested in that question of like, can we ever reach that state of wholeness? And what does that look like? Like, I've experienced it only in glimpses. And I do feel like I've gotten close to it through writing. But to a certain extent, I think we need the doubleness in order to function. I mean, it's a some extent, it is just the human condition. Why do you think we need an order function? I mean, what we're talking about in a way is just self-awareness, right? Like, I think this is something that distinguishes humans from machines or from animals. Not just that we have desires, but that we can want different desires or we can critique our desires or try to you know, talk back to these trains of thought that we have going through our minds all the time. And I think it's also true that it's like impossible to have a moral life if you don't have that second self within you, right? Because this is the part of ourselves that's reflective, that can interrogate, you know, like what you're saying is not actually true. What you're believing is actually false. Hannah Arrent wrote about this in one of her essays. She talked about how consciousness in a lot of languages is like really closely, etymologically linked to conscience. She called consciousness the two in one. So this idea that in order to have a moral life, you have to be able to be in dialogue with yourself. You have to be able to argue with yourself and witness yourself. And the people who shut down that second part of themselves, you know, her example was Adolf Leichman, who is one of the major architects of the Holocaust. And she talked about how he has sort of just deferred to bureaucratic cliches and was not at all aware of this enormous self-deception that was required in order to carry out those crimes. It's funny, though, because you'd imagine, I mean, I don't know what it felt like inside of Eichman's mind. But I bet that to him, it felt like harmony. Like if the feeling you were looking for is like quiet, the base aggressive, selfish, cruel, hedonistic, whatever that second voice is for you, the feeling that it's finally been conquered could also be the feeling that actually it's finally taken the wheel. Like if what she was saying was he took the part of himself that monitors himself to figure out what he's doing is right off and just handed it over to like Nazi bureaucracy, it probably felt amazing. Like he probably felt untroubled because the part of him that troubled himself had been vanquished. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, there's so many paradoxes when you start talking about the inner life, which I mean, I think this is a great example. It's like, yeah, we can be unthinking in a way that's virtuous or unthinking in a way that is really awful. Simone Veu, who I write about a lot in the book, writes about how the ultimate goal of a spiritual life is to act automatically. Like she said, you should eventually get to a point where you desire the good so fiercely that when you are placed in a moment of temptation where you're faced with a moral dilemma, somebody who's suffering, you don't hesitate to act. You just act, right? You don't sit there and deliberate the way that most of us do. She uses the phrase automaton at one point, this idea that you should almost act like a robot, like to seek the good without any sort of conflict or friction. And that to me initially, I was like, it seems wrong because you don't want to go through life unthinking and what if you're like minute and doing something unthinking, but you're doing something awful. And what I think that she was actually saying is that you want to get to that place eventually with being able to choose the good automatically, but you don't do it through just shutting off your brain because that's when you start just deferring to social convention. And if you're in a bad social situation, for example, like Ikeman was, you're going to open yourself up to getting steered into bad actions. But her idea of attention, which she writes about a lot, was that you should be constantly paying attention to your thoughts and paying attention to the good that you want to pursue, to the point where that daily form of thinking produces the effect of being able to act automatically, right? So it's more so that that ease of action grows out of this long practice of daily attuning your mind to whatever good you're trying to pursue through daily acts of attention. And that actually requires a lot of work and a lot of thought. But the idea is that when you're in that moment, thought is not going to help you because you've already essentially become the person who's going to take that action. Is that something that you believe, or is it something that is closer to like faith, something that you would like to be able to believe? It's something that I do believe. I mean, I think any sort of spiritual practice requires some measure of faith. And I think the thing that makes me most convinced of its truth is because I've experienced the opposite. You know, when I relapse, for example, I spent months before that fantasizing about drinking. And it seemed like really innocent fantasies. It was kind of like, oh, well, you know, of course, I'm not going to act on this, but I'm in an airport waiting for my flight board. Maybe I'll just look into this bar and think about what I would order if I was drinking and how that would feel. And those thoughts, they were happening entirely in my mind, but they gathered force over time and they gathered their own momentum. And when I was actually presented with an opportunity to drink where I thought I could get away with it, it felt like I didn't have a choice. Because you're in your mind, it was as if it's the inverse of what she describes. You're saying like, in your mind, what you had thought of as just sort of idle fantasies had been that part of your mind rehearsing. And so then when the opportunity came, it was automatic. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it had become such a deep part of my beliefs and my desires and my mental landscape that by the time I had the choice, it was like I was destined or faded to take the drink. You talk about it, you write about in your book how this sort of work around that, the part of you that rationalizes developed was not ordering drinks for verbally but ordering drinks using QR codes. Can you just talk about that? - Yeah, so this was during the pandemic. And part of this fantasy life that I developed about drinking was I would always get to this point where I imagined myself going up to the bar and ordering a drink and I just could not imagine myself actually saying it out loud. And I don't know why that was. It felt like it was the moment when it would become real. In the fantasy where actually speaking allowed to another person, this thing that I had built my whole life around avoiding was gonna be this final blow where I couldn't actually say it out loud. And then, yeah, low and behold, these QR codes started appearing at restaurants and bars where you could put in an order without actually talking to anybody. You didn't have to speak your son aloud. And that was, yeah, the first time that I got really drunk, it was 'cause I used to queue our codes to order a drink and then many more drinks after that. And it felt like a loophole in a way. I felt like I had sort of created this condition. Oh, of course, I'm not gonna drink. Of course, this is just a fantasy 'cause I'm not gonna actually be able to say that thing out loud. And then as soon as that barrier was removed, it was like, okay, the universe has granted me permission. - Hmm. (gentle music) (gentle music) - We're gonna take a short break. When we return, what it felt like for Megan to surrender to something she'd been trying not to. (gentle music) (gentle music) - Welcome back. What did it feel like to surrender to this thing that you'd organized your life around not surrendering? What was the experience of drinking again after having not had a drink in so long? - Yeah, I feel really uneasy about sharing this just because I'll say for one thing that I would never share this in a meeting with people who were trying to stay sober because the focus is always supposed to be on like how awful it was and how much you regretted. But it was amazing. - Yeah, it was like all of this spiritual work that I've been trying to do to escape myself to shut down this hypercritical mind that I suffer from. None of that had worked as effectively as just taking a drink and all of that was gone in a second. And I don't know what it is about me. I'm wired in such a way that I don't experience alcohol the way that normal drinkers do. I experience that as something like religious rapture. You know, this feeling of totally transcending yourself. And I wanted to write about that in the book 'cause it was important for me to be honest about, you know, this is the thing that keeps me hooked. Like it got bad, it got really, really bad. But I think just in terms of like trying to explain addiction to somebody who doesn't have that kind of relationship to alcohol or to any substance. Like I do feel like it's important to emphasize like this is the thing, like this is what we're seeking. And it is a sort of spiritual experience. And I think that the thing that a lot of people are seeking in spirituality is very similar to what we seek in substanceives. There's this parable in the New Testament about the Pearl of Great Price. And it's the story of this guy who is just like obsessed with this one invaluable pearl. And he ends up selling all of his possessions and like divesting himself of everything he owns just so he can have this one pearl. And it's this completely senseless act. I mean by like, you know, any sort of rational standards. But I've always felt that way about alcohol. That it's this object that is so intrinsically desired for its own sake that I have and was, you know, ready to sacrifice everything for it. It was something that you couldn't really weigh against other things in your life. And this almost like totemic power to it. And what I've found in this is that, you know, in sobriety, like you have to find some other pearl. Essentially, you have to find something else that is so good for its own sake, whether it's, you know, a moral ideal or whether it's God or whether it is some idea of beauty that you're trying to work toward something that is just good and right for its own sake. That's really the only thing that's going to keep you away from the substance. - The other sort of like, you have this relapse in alcoholism and then the way you describe it, it's like a relapse into faith. But you start sort of secretly without letting, your partner know without letting people in your life know, like pursuing Catholicism. And I'm curious like, can you tell me about that and can you tell me why you think that those things happen at the same time? - Well, there's something really similar about starting to God and surrendering to substances. I was, you know, going to mass largely just 'cause I wanted to forget myself, you know, I wanted to surrender to something that was bigger than me, which is what, you know, taking alcohol was always like to, it's this feeling of letting go that brings this enormous sense of relief for people who are predisposed to feel that way. - Reading your story, I think one of these people struggle with sobriety is that life feels ordinary and boring and sobriety feels like giving something up. And it feels in the beginning empty. And then their life's still with all these things, hopefully. And after a while it doesn't feel that way. And I think from the outside your life looked that way, you write terrific books that people love, you have like partnership, you have friends. But then there's like a passion with which you pursue relapse and a passion with which for a while you pursue religion and it feels like a person who was like waiting 11 years to get out. And I guess I'm curious like, is that what your interior life felt like before that happened? Or were you surprised to know that that was in you at that intensity and volume? - That's a really good question. I mean, I think some of what you're describing, I recognize as like this feeling almost of boredom with how stable my life was. Which is something that, I think this is like one of the most as serious things about addiction too, is like once you finally are in a place where you've, you know, surrendered, I'm an addict, your life gets better. And then it's sort of like, yeah, there's sounds awful and ungrateful, but like there's a way in which you can get bored with that and miss the chaos and miss the rapture of it. And for me, I think the problem was that I wasn't moving forward anymore, like when I was, you know, the first eight or nine years that I was sober, I was really active in recovery communities. I was working with other alcoholics. I was spending a lot of time meditating in the morning. And I felt like I was on like a spiritual journey, like I was moving farther away from my addiction and all these behavioral patterns too that by the way don't go away when you stop drinking and sometimes they get worse. And it's really, I think a lot of people in recovery see like this is the work of a lifetime, is to try to move away from that stuff. And I had, you know, for various reasons stop going to meetings and stopping, involved in those communities for a couple of years before I started drinking. And I really think that part of it was that sense of like, I'm no longer on this journey. I'm just kind of like here hanging out and enjoying all the fruits of that work that I did. - Yeah. - And yeah, that was when my mind started to get really crazy. - Huh. So it's like the way you understand it now is that maybe a little bit you are lulled into a false ensued security and a little bit that, like you describe how when people become sober, they have to find a pearl. They have to find a thing that gives their like meaning that feels bigger than themselves. Like it can be God, it doesn't have to be God. But it was like, things did not feel dynamic anymore. It felt like you were maintaining a good life instead of pursuing something. And maybe like you missed that. It sounds crazy that someone who doesn't have this, but like the dynamism of ups and downs. - Yeah. It's just one of the most baffling things about human nature is that we don't always want what's good for us. And we sometimes want the opposite of what's good for us. And, you know, there's a very romantic way to view that, which is that, you know, I think this is actually Dostoevsky's explanation is that in those moments they're trying to prove that we're free, that we're not robots, right? That we have like within us this sort of radical will that can choose what's bad even when it doesn't make sense. And I've certainly thought about my own actions that way too. But then there's this other part of me that thinks maybe you don't really know the things that you think you know, or maybe you have managed to convince only your intellectual self that something's wrong, whereas this much deeper part of you is not on board with the narratives you've been telling. And I think that was part of it for me too, is I had been, you know, telling the story of my life and how my life got better. I'd been like talking in meetings and, you know, on the podiums of church basements sort of telling this, I was lost and now I'm found story. And it started to become rote. And it was almost like I was just saying the words and I didn't really believe it anymore because I had gotten so far away. from the pain. It's in feel real. And I think really the work of recovery is like trying to constantly rekindle that belief, whether it's by staying close to other people who are deep in their addictions and like remembering what it was like, you know, remaining in this ongoing dialogue with yourself. And when you do have thoughts about drinking, like really taking time to respond to them and saying like, no, that's a lie. And not just letting the fantasies fester in your mind. I was curious though. I mean, you call your book Will and Attention. It's divided into two sections, Will and Attention. And I don't know like what I felt like I was tracking was an evolving belief you had about the way to manage like your own divided self. Like it felt like you were shifting from an idea that it was about willpower and practice. And in the end, it was maybe about something that was like slightly more complicated than that. Yeah, I think so. I mean, the the start of the book for me was this quote by Simone Vea came across where she says, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. And I was so fascinated and mystified by that quote. I mean, on one hand, I read this like shortly after I came back from the relapse. So this idea that will head limits that I couldn't will myself out of addiction was very much something I already believed. But Attention, I had never really thought about before. I had always thought of my drinking as a failure of will. And what if it was actually a failure of attention? You know, what if it was that I had, you know, not, yeah, not say the course in this commitment to something that was working and, you know, paid enough attention to that part of my life to ensure that it continued working. Because again, once you get to that point where you're faced with a temptation or decision, like the battles already up by then maintaining a habit of attention. That also requires discipline, but it feels like a discipline that I can actually reasonably commit to while knowing that like for me, like, I've eaten four popsicles today. I'm on a diet. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. I wanted to be kitchen at my partner's time eating a popsicle and was like, didn't you say you wanted to eat healthily? And my brain flashed to the wrappers of three other popsicles. Yeah. And like, I don't know, for me, it's weird. A question I genuinely don't know is like the part of me that is like a mindless beast pursuing obliteration. Like, I don't know if like feeding him those popsicles is like tithing him in a way that calms him. Or if like genuinely speaking, like those popsicles are a problem. Like, I don't know. I know that, you know, in seven days, I'm going to talk to my psychiatrist and I'm going to be like, hey, just so you know, I'm stealthy eating popsicles, do you make something of that? And like, somehow that feels like my system and the system feels like a commitment to trying to observe what is happening and be honest about it and to know that I, I have to be vigilant about myself that I do not understand who wants things I don't agree with and who I can't kill. Like, I can't, if I try to kill him, all I'm doing is putting him in like a ninja suit. And like, I relate to your book because that struggle feels to me like a fundamental struggle of being a person. Yes. Yeah. Oh man. I mean, this is like the most baffling thing is that when you do have that deep problem, it's almost like your efforts to quell it is like working against yourself. Yeah. Right. That you're actually getting in your own way. The more you try, you'll fully clenched to fight it, the more you end up just needing it more. Right. Because I think, especially when it's something like food or alcohol where you get this release, it's like the effort to resist it is also creating the need for the release more. Yes. Yeah. And it deepens the pleasure, like a relapse of anything that you've been trying to do is really pleasurable up until the immediate consequences of it. Like, and, and, and part of the, the like, if you were mathematically graphing the pleasure, yeah, it's like the harder you clenched, the better the release. And the idea that the answers might be in attention, rather than purely in will, I find to be like, hopeful, I guess. Yeah. I mean, something that I think is confusing about a lot of vase writing is that we tend to think of attention as like focus. Right. This is like a very modern understanding of attention is that you sort of like, you know, clench yourself up into a ball and zero in on this one thing. And the attention actually requires a lot of willpower. And the type of attention that she's talking about is almost the opposite. She talks about attention as a form of waiting. And a form of looking instead of grasping. And this idea that like sometimes when you're struggling with a problem, you need to just stop trying to solve it and just look and witness and observe. And I think that's sort of what you're describing with the mindfulness practices, right? Where you're just sort of watching what happens before you succumb. And, you know, becoming aware of like, okay, what are these feelings or these patterns that, you know, I'm feeling before I actually take action and relapse into this behavior. And just looking at that without trying to solve it is sometimes really helpful actually because, you know, then what you do is you're shutting down the part of your mind that is denying and justifying and doing all of that, right? Yeah. You can't pay attention when you're trying to get something. Like, you can't really look and see when you're trying to grasp something. And so there's almost this paradoxical way in which you have to give up that fight. And this is what happened when I came in to recovery communities. Like, I had tried so much to hear my own addiction. And what people told me is like, just stop, just give up, just come here and listen to other people tell their stories. And it doesn't make any sense, but that's what worked. Why? Because I was seeing myself and other people, you know, I was seeing almost like objectively the ways in which other people headlet addictions ruin their life and the way in which their lives have gotten better. It's easier to see that in somebody else than it is in your own life. And there is some level of faith, I think, where you have to sort of trust that what you're doing, even when it seems like it's pointless, you know, that that work is going to have some sort of future result. I mean, it's tricky because I think we today tend to think about attention as like a productivity hack. This thing that's going to like, it has this really instrumental purpose. Like, we're going to get results right away. But this is a much older form of attention that you see in some of the old spiritual writers that is attention is the work of soul building. This is like what you turn your mind to, what sort of capacities you cultivate within yourself that is basically creating the person that you're going to be in those moments when you are tried in some way or when you face a challenge. And that the active overcoming faults of any kind or addiction or moral feelings is not to like just try your hardest in that moment. It's everything you do leading up to that point, what you attend to, how you spend your time that is making you into the kind of person who's capable of acting well when that moment comes. This is thank you for talking about this. It's really, talking about it feels like the way reading you feels like just like it's a nice place to get to visit. Oh, thank you so much. That means a lot to hear that. Megan Ogiblin, her latest book is called Will and Attention. A memoir I have been finding copies of already for lots of other people. It is for anybody who is interested in the mind and its many afflictions. And when you finish that one, if you haven't you should also pick up her earlier book, God Human Animal Machine, where she thinks hard and beautifully about being a human in the AI era. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Mooby. 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