My addiction, I believe, began with surfing.
It began the first time I rode a wave. The feeling. The rush. The high. I didn't know it then — I was a kid, Long Island, summer, the world was uncomplicated — but something got switched on that day that never switched off. I spent the next thirty-plus years chasing that feeling. Sometimes on a board. Sometimes in a bottle. Sometimes both.
I never thought the one would bring me to the other.
November 8th, 2022. Day 34 of sobriety. I was in the lineup at dawn — the first time I'd tried quad fins on a new board. The spray was coming off the tops of the waves in red morning light. It was cold. It was quiet. And I asked myself, sitting out there: why do I surf?
I went home and wrote the answer down.
"I surf because it cleanses me. It makes my cold wet body feel vulnerable to the waves and water. It is the dance between what can kill us and what makes us feel bliss. It is the ability for something to be powerful and beautiful at the same time. It's the essence of the smells, feelings, movements and most of all the energy that surrounds us. The perfect balance between the life of the surfer and the death of the wave."
I told my son once: every wave deserves to be ridden.
It's true. Because it is the tricky balance between life and death, suffering and bliss, that makes the entire world go round.
Thirty years. California, Indonesia, the Maldives, the Caribbean, New England, Nicaragua. Longboards, shortboards, eggs. Overhead barrels and waist-high peelers on frozen Massachusetts mornings when I'm the only one crazy enough to be out there.
I have surfed alone in 28-degree water, suited up, board on the roof of the car, pulling into the parking lot and watching the cam on my phone for thirty minutes before deciding whether to paddle out. I have always paddled out.
I have surfed in tropical depressions in Grenada with a friend who thought I was insane. I have nose-ridden perfect small waves in front of strangers on the beach and felt the ego surge when they watched. I have then gone home and asked myself why I needed that.
The ocean doesn't care about any of it. That's the point.
Here's what I've come to understand about surfing and sobriety: they're after the same thing.
The alcohol was trying to do what the wave does — quiet the noise, make the body feel something that isn't anxiety, create a moment where nothing else exists. The wave does it better. The wave doesn't give you a hangover. The wave doesn't make you count what's left in the bottle.
The wave just ends. And then you paddle back out.
That's the whole practice, really. Whatever comes — the good set, the bad wipeout, the flat spell — you paddle back out. You don't get to keep the wave. You just get the riding of it.
Sobriety works the same way. You don't get to keep yesterday's 1,349 days. You just get today.
I don't know if my kids will surf. I hope they do. I hope one day I'm in the lineup with one of them and we catch a wave together and I can tell them what I told my son years ago.
Every wave deserves to be ridden.
This one does too.