ten silentbob 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 one two three four five six seven eight nine ten 050716 ... tender square michael is ten years sober today. he decided to stop drinking when he was 25, as he was entering grad school at ole miss, returning to a town where none of his friends were living anymore. michael’s best friend erin had also been recently killed in a drunk driving accident two months prior. he realized that the alcohol wasn’t working for him like it used to, resulting in the “oh, fuck” moment. michael told me that when he first quit drinking, he ate ice cream every day for a month. he attended a few sober campus meetings but found that they weren’t for him. he said willpower got him through that first year of sobriety, “but will can only take you so far.” it wasn’t until he started seeing a jungian analyst, an older gentleman named ben, that michael said he found life and possibility again. i asked him what advice he’d give to his younger self if he could go back in time, and he had two tidbits: 1) “intelligence and being able to make good arguments are not very important; it’s not satisfying.” 2) “the institutions that promote and go along with that thinking…can actually be harmful, they can confuse more than illuminate. they exist to promote their own understanding of the world using reason, and that’s not the crux of life. there’s a deadening quality to it.” michael grew up in an educated family. his mom had several degrees: a bachelor’s in chemical engineering, a master’s in psychology, a doctorate in counselor education, and later an associate’s and master’s degree in nursing. when michael was growing up, his mom often started sentences to him with the statement, “when you go to grad school…” it was ingrained in him from a young age that education was a priority and for much of his life michael tried to use that as a yardstick to define who he was. michael doesn’t shy away from an intellectual challenge, but in undergrad he never found his path; “i never got the ‘this is the thing’ signal, it was more ‘this isn’t it.’” drinking was a way for him to not have to figure out the direction for his life or to suffer the pain of what he chose not being the right thing. after graduating, he went to houston for a time to live with his dad before he moved to dc to be closer to his sister anne and intern at the future music coalition. “it was terrifying. you’re 24 and you’ve got your degree and there’s this expectation that you do some normal thing,” he said. michael moved out of dc after a few months realizing it wasn’t right for him either; that’s when he opted to go to grad school back at ole miss for sociology. he felt that he had given it an honest shot in multiple ways. “i’d gone through traditional institutions and succeeded, and it was still fucking miserable. and i couldn’t relate to the people in those places—and it’s not that they’re bad people, but clearly they are satisfied by traditional cocoon—that’s what i was up against.” drinking at that time was a way to have his dissatisfaction coexist with his desire for something more meaningful; drinking made the dichotomy palatable, it helped him to escape. michael did not begin writing until three and half years ago, and only after he stepped away from the phd application process he’d begun. yesterday he reached a milestone of 75,000 words for his first novel, a bildungsroman about a character named jude moving through the world that he’s in the midst of completing. it’s taken him a long time to get here. toward the end of grad school, michael was in bed one saturday night and had an epiphany. yet the word epiphany doesn’t quite capture the depth of what happened to him: “it wasn’t just a thought, it moved all the way through the body, it was a resonant thing.” it was less a voice and more an imperative speaking through him, which said, “you’re a writer.” he says the message was more profound than a conversation; he kept questioning the assertion and found that it stuck around no matter which angle he took with it, the statement came back with greater insistence. the only other time michael has encountered this imperative was when he was twenty and thought that he should stop drinking. that time he ignored it. “if there is something you’re doing supposed to do and you’ve been tricked by the world into not doing it for so long, it will come through it a radically intuitive way,” he said. 211009 ... tender square GAH! typo in the last great quote: "if there is something you’re supposed to do and you’ve been tricked by the world into not doing it for so long, it will come through it a radically intuitive way." 211009 what's it to you? who go blather from