Writing is the reason I didn’t get sober sooner. My daily alcohol and pill habit was unsustainable. My first attempt at detoxing, I wanted to do it on my own without medical assistance. If I went to the hospital, people in my life would know and I couldn’t have that, so I threw out all my bottles and baggies and buckled in. Twenty-four hours later, I was shaking uncontrollably. Neurons smothered by substances for years roared back to life and began firing with unprecedented intensity. The walls of my apartment shimmered, swam, and breathed. I called a friend to drive me to the emergency room. The sunlight pierced my eyeballs and clawed at my brain. I could feel my bones scrape against each other every time the car took a turn. I doubled over and hugged myself to try and hide the extent of the tremors from my friend.

I laid in a hospital bed for four days. Most of that time, physical suffering precluded thought, but when that waned, it was replaced by anxiety and shame that made me yearn for the aches and shakes to return. The substances had long erased my capacity for concern and left me incapable of seeing the severity of my problem. Between the misery of those days and a series of “come to Jesus” conversations with medical professionals, it was clearly time to get sober. The withdrawals tapered off. I was discharged and walked out of the hospital exuberant over the possibilities of a sober Travis. More than anything, I was excited to write. Surely my output was going to skyrocket. The projects I’d had sitting on the backburner for so long would finally come to fruition.

Back home, I sat down at my desk and stared at the screen, my hand poised over the keyboard. Nothing came. When writing, I always have to push the words onto the page, but the words themselves are also pushing to get out. There’s an internal pressure that needs to be released. My words weren’t pushing out that day. They recoiled and fled. I remembered detox, the visual hallucinations, blood pressure so high I could feel it in my eyeballs, a nurse sitting with me in the waiting room, worried I’d have a seizure before they could administer phenobarbital. Whenever someone recollected something I’d said or done in the preceding months it was often news to me, my brain so thoroughly sedated it could scarcely create memory.  Dependency endangered my health and undermined every aspect of my life. To not stay sober was to invite doom. Early sobriety is never fun. I was holding on, but day after day I couldn’t write. The stories inside of me I once needed to tell, that I lived to tell, were gone. I was devoid of inspiration and imagination, unable to even string words together in a meaningful way. I couldn’t meet the few simple deadlines on my plate. My utter inability to write strained my tenuous hold on sobriety until it broke. I convinced the people in my life I was better, and with a vow to control my consumption that I knew I could never keep, I relapsed. 

I’m far from the first writer to go through this. Truman Capote shared my love of pills and alcohol. On several occasions, he detoxed and went to rehab, but he never dropped the habit. He kept drinking and popping pills until the cumulative damage killed him. There were multiple narcotics in his system at the time of death. Tennesse Williams also battled addiction. He dried out in hospitals, stayed in mental health facilities, but could never break the habit. Eventually, he fell victim to an overdose. There are many reasons why one might relapse, and as a writer myself, I couldn’t help but wonder how much writing factored into theirs.

Why is writing often intertwined with substance abuse? There are theories. Science has made attempts to understand the phenomena, and most theories go something like this: Writers need inspiration, and inspiration generally comes from novelty, either new experiences and information, or seeing the familiar in a novel way. Great writers find novel ways to approach the page, to discover new ideas, perspectives, and structures. Writers also need to be able to take risks, both to innovate and explore but also to publish. To put one’s work out into the world is to expose something intimate and treasured, knowing it will be criticized, even ridiculed. Novelty seeking and risk taking—along with another notorious writer’s struggle, depression—are features of a low-functioning dopamine system, a genetic feature that’s prevalent in addicts. But that and other scientific theories only provide a narrow look into what’s going on. Countless writers, not just those of us who cannot control ourselves, have a glass of wine or smoke a joint before hitting the page. The relationship between creativity and alteration goes deeper than genetic quirks.

A year after my relapse, my dependency was escalating and something had to give. My writing output was negligible. When I did write, I was so dull and disconnected that nothing worthwhile reached the page, but my frustration with that didn’t spur me to sobriety. I became fixated on the idea of a point of no return. There is a line for addicts and alcoholics—once crossed, their physical health is irrevocably destroyed or the mental toll of breaking their habit is more than they are able to pay. A switch flips, and that’s it. F. Scott Fitzgerald battled alcoholism for much of his life. Against all odds, after years of trying, he managed to get sober at the age of forty-three. Unfortunately, the health issues incurred by his habit persisted, and he died of a heart attack a year later. Fitzgerald crossed his point of no return before he got sober. For reasons I cannot explain, I felt my point of no return was imminent. Some friends became aware I was no longer sober and confronted me. Instead of lying or minimizing like I always did, I agreed to detox. I returned to the hospital hellbent on staying sober for the long haul. 

Back in the hospital, I watched Law and Order: SVU for four straight, sleepless days. Ice T and the rigid cadence of the show’s plot comforted and cradled my awareness just far enough away from the chills, aches, trembling, stomach problems too brutal to put to words, and jagged, panicked thoughts. The fourth night, to the soothing sounds of Olivia Benson nailing another New York scumbag, I dozed off and slept through the night. I woke free of acute symptoms, once again a human being, discharged, and started an intensive outpatient program. 

For two weeks, I rode out the insomnia, anxiety, and other lingering symptoms while I journaled and played with new story premises. Writing was always on my mind. I wasn’t sure I'd be able to. I stifled that fear by fixating on my grand design for the coming months, the projects I’d execute while I secured my sobriety. One morning I woke with energy. My mind felt clear and sharp. I sat down to write.

My piece was a near-future speculative story I’d thought up months before. The idea came to me in one of those blinding flashes of inspiration where you feel the whole piece, each element and how they fit together, the full emotional texture, the exact way it will hit the reader as they finish the final sentence. I believed in the story, and knew it could work well if properly executed. I had an extensive outline. The only thing I had to do was follow it. 

I sat down, focused, motivated, and excited. Three hours later, I had a mild panic attack and stepped away from the computer. Every writer has battled their inner critic. Some killed that motherfucker decades ago. Some will fight it to their grave. Mine has never been a pushover. That day it wasn't even a battle. We were in a fistfight and my critic was a grown man while I was a toddler just taking haymaker after haymaker to the face. Every sentence I wrote was wrong. The words were flaccid, unoriginal, uninteresting, hackneyed trash. When I managed to push the boulder up the hill and finish the opening paragraph of the story, I could only see how it failed. I thought if I wrote the intro in a different place or from a different perspective, I could incorporate the crucial missing elements. Then I’d write the new intro, read it, see nothing but glaring, unconscionable deficiencies, so I’d try again and repeat the cycle. The whole time, my inner critic steadily eviscerated the premise as a whole. It was pointless, self-indulgent, worthless. Whatever I’d seen in the flash of inspiration for the story was false. I was vain and silly for ever thinking I should waste anyone’s time by making them read it. 

Substances quiet the inner critic. Most people I know who drink or smoke before writing do so for rough drafts. Intoxication allows you to partially get outside the cage of self-awareness and self-consciousness. You can take yourself and your endlessly chattering mind out of the equation, let the words flow from that powerful place beneath awareness. Without the extraneous noise, you can listen to the piece as it’s being formed, hear what it wants to be. A rough draft is supposed to be rough. We fill the page with raw material to then sculpt into something more. Newly sober, my long suppressed inner critic came back with a vengeance. I could not stop myself from dissecting every word I typed until it was all too flimsy to hold together. 

People know journalist and writer Hunter Thompson for his drug and alcohol consumption as much as his writing. He couldn’t write without at least a bottle of Chivas and a pile of cocaine, and he often threw in several different drugs for good measure. Thompson’s writing is fearless, caustic, lauded for cutting through the bullshit that would blind the rest of us. Instead of battling his inner critic, Thompson simply drowned his. Getting fucked up may have helped him to blaze new literary trails, but the habit wore him down and fueled an intractable depression. Thompson eventually shot himself with his grandson and daughter-in-law in the next room. There was a single word on the typewriter in front of him: “counselor.”

I never missed a day. Each morning, I sat down to write and went for as long as I could, until the criticism and doubt built and the pressure forced me away from my computer. Anxiety accumulated, but I had no desire to relapse. I saw how I’d been committing a slow suicide, how I was only semiconscious and a shell of myself for a staggering amount of my life. Still, the fear I’d lose writing forever due to staying sober began to color every thought.

Creativity is play. Even in writing on the most horrific subject, there are moments of joy when something lines up, when the words flowing through you encapsulate an idea you weren’t sure could be encapsulated. Writers invent when they’re playing. They follow a satisfying thread to something new, exciting, and effective. They discover what a piece can be and how to make it work. I was not playing, though. The less I produced, the more I spun my wheels, the more I was afraid my ability was gone, and so the harder I pushed. I sat down at the desk with the grim determination of someone en route to sacrifice their life for an ideal. On some level, I understood this mindset was partially to blame for my struggles, but frantic activity was my only way to cope.

The authors I’ve mentioned all experienced an identical trajectory, as did Malcolm Lowry, Dorothy Parker, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hemingway, Carver, Kerouac, and countless other alcoholic or addicted writers. Universally, as their dependency persisted through the years, their writing output plummeted. They possessed a spark that fueled brilliant works and created the literary landscape we see today—until their habits inevitably extinguished it. Before sobriety, I was on track to suffocate my spark and strangle my literary career before it even began in earnest. I didn’t often have hope I’d reach the light at the end of the tunnel, but I knew the only way out was through.

At three months sober, I joined a workshop and faced my first deadline. The date loomed on the horizon. A story needed to be completed. Failing was unacceptable and I wouldn’t allow it. I read over the sticky notes that covered my desk. Reminders like “Stop being an asshole, chill the fuck out, and just type.” Suggestions to think of writing like taking a shit, to just let it fall out and not fixate on the mess. Amid the admonishments and messages scrawled in sharp, panicked letters was a two letter message that read “have faith.” I put my hands to the keyboard. Necessity forced me to type, to string words together. It felt wrong. I found myself in revision loops, endlessly shuffling words around. The inner critic jeered. For the first time, I told it to shut the fuck up with some bass in my voice. Paragraphs turned to pages. So gradually it was almost imperceptible, my brain had been repairing itself over the preceding months, forging new connections, clearing out the fog. 

And it happened. I lost awareness of myself until there was only the story and the keyboard. Components clicked into place better than I’d imagined. Epiphanies guided new additions, new ideas. Surprise and joy sat at the edges of my mind, eclipsed by the torrent of words pouring forth. Hours passed. The piece became so incandescent and alive that doubt was lost in its glow. Substances had once helped me enter a state of flow, but I managed to find it sober. I could still write.

The literary giants drank and used until their livers failed, their hearts gave out, they overdosed, or the strain led to suicide. Many likely progressed in their consumption for the same reason so many writers feel substances help their process—intoxication as a tool to lower the barrier to a state of flow, help get down ideas, scrape together a draft. I imagine all those legendary writers had concerned friends and family urging change, doctors warning them of the damage they were doing to their bodies. They may have tried to dry out, but these were individuals defined by their vocation and who lived for the written word. As much as anything else, the inability to write would have driven them back to their addictions. Who knows what incredible works we missed out on because of that. I write more sober than I ever did while using and my work is the best it’s been. Whatever advantages substances give to a writer, however they enhance creativity, I know I’m better off without them.

The transition from dependence to sobriety is inherently miserable. There’s no way around that. You’re in for a rough couple months. Your spark will vanish. Joy is tough to come by. Everything you suppressed with substances resurges and assails you. Riding that out can feel far worse than trying to manage things while insulated in intoxication, but if you hold on, one day it’ll change. You’ll wake up and go through your day. At some point, you’ll pause and realize how good that day has been, how good you feel, how clear your head is. You’ll feel a sense of agency and an unfamiliar but exhilarating possibility for personal and artistic growth. All that is withheld in the transition into sobriety is returned in abundance.