The One You Feed - A Journey to Sobriety with Laura Cathcart Robbins

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Meet Laura Cathcart Robbins, an inspiring writer and speaker who advocates for representation and inclusivity in addiction recovery for people of color. Laura has transformed her personal journey into a message of hope and resilience that has touched the lives of countless individuals. Her powerful storytelling, vulnerability, and candid approach to her writing have made her a sought-after personal essayist and author of a captivating memoir. Laura's passion for promoting empathy and understanding within the recovery community is evident in her dedication to fostering inclusivity, making her a remarkable guest and champion for change. In this episode, we discuss: Learning to distinguish between intuition and instinct How she was able to claim her recover for herself as opposed to for others Finding the creative outlet of writing and reading to help her connect with her authentic self How she found herself at the intersection of race, privilege, and addiction Understanding the importance of inclusivity and representation in overcoming addiction For more info, click here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The success that I envisioned was me being comfortable, but the priority was that we were still a family, just a different kind of family. That was the success that I envisioned. That was my priority. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure,

and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Laura Cathart Robbins, an author, freelance writer, speaker, and host of the popular podcast, The Only One in the Room. She's been active for many years as a speaker and school trustee and is credited for creating the Buckley School's nationally recognized committee on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. On this episode, Eric and Laura discuss many topics, including her new book, Stash, My Life in Hiding. Hi, Laura. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Eric. Thank you so much. I am really happy to have you on. We're going to be discussing your new book called Stash, My Life in Hiding. But before we get to that, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent, they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you

do. Well, having been a fan of your show, I know that I'm not the first person to say it gives me chills every time I hear that because it does. It's just something from the first time I heard it, I knew that it was profound, not just in life, but for me particularly. And I think for me, there's an absolute black and white way that I look at that. When I was in my addiction, it was far more obvious. Anything that took me further into my addiction was feeding that bad wolf. Mainly, I was fearful during that time. That fear was so great. It was heightened fear 24-7. There were certainly levels of it, but it was mainly around 8, 9, or 10. And so anything I could do to ease that, regardless of the impact that it had on anyone, was what I did during that time, that survival time. But prior to living in an addiction and

post-living in an addiction, I've also had times where I've made the choice to feed that bad wolf because I have been rageful or fearful. Usually everything is fear with me. Everything, every other negative response is based on fear. Where I am now, and you and I had another conversation on my show, and I know that we're around the same time in recovery, on my show. And I know that we're around the same time in recovery, which is different for me than just sober time. I've spent a lot of these almost 15 years really working on evolution, my own evolution. And so that choice, I think the difference is I didn't know that I had a choice prior about which wolf to feed. It was just instinctual. And then uncovering what created the addiction in my life allowed me to see the difference between intuition

and instinct, which gives me that choice of how to act intuitively or act in instinct out of fear. And instinct out of fear for survival is often feeding that bad wolf, acting in my intuition, which is usually the right thing, the aligned thing with what's in front of me, feeds the good one. There's a lot of different places we could go from there. I guess I'll start by just wondering whether you first heard that parable like I did in a recovery meeting? I don't think so. Oh, okay. My parents were hippies. And so, I mean, I was like in drum circles and stuff when I was a little kid. I think I heard it when I was younger. Okay. But definitely, it hit me in a recovery meeting. Yeah. But I'm pretty sure I heard it when I was younger. Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, very early recovery, that parable is so

spot on and also very clear. At least it was for me. You know, it was pretty clear to me by the time I heard it, and I would have heard it in the first couple months of recovery. And it had been spelled out to me fairly clearly, like, here are the things that are likely to get you in trouble. And here are the things that are likely to lead you towards recovery. And so I had a very clear idea of that. And there are times I miss the simplicity and clarity of that. Because I think there's a phrase I've heard that sometimes the path gets narrower in some ways. And in other ways, I think the path actually gets wider. So it's kind of an interesting thing. But the idea that it gets narrower, meaning that, you know, we have to continue to refine

who we are and what matters to us and what's acceptable and what's not. And so that clarity can get a little bit harder. But I'd love to ask you about intuition versus instinct. Because I think it can often be confusing, the difference between the two. And I also think that a lot of times, intuition, again, particularly early in recovery, might be broken. Maybe not. I'd be curious what you think about it because trauma often shows up as a very deep knowing that feels like what intuition can also sort of feel like. And I've heard you also describe like you never feel like working out, but you know, it's really good to do. So, you know, your intuition there, I'm just curious how you distinguish the two and how your ability to distinguish the two

has gotten better. For me, it's, I mean, it's my whole life. Yeah, I'm 58 years old and I am still learning how to distinguish between the two. I think I distinguish faster now than I used to. The irony of that is the way that I do that typically is with pause. So instead of reacting or responding, because I don't know which one I'm going to do if I just do it, I will take either a five-minute pause. Sometimes not even five minutes. Sometimes maybe it's under a minute, but I will take a moment or 24 hours if it's really unclear and either do some self-reflection, maybe do some writing, maybe get someone else's eyes on it depending on what the situation is. Because I understand and I am full of compassion for myself that my instinct is my survival mode and I needed it in order to survive my childhood.

I don't think I would be here if I didn't have this instinct that I have. My maternal instinct is the biggest instinct I have. It is the instinct to protect my children at all costs. These instincts are really valuable. I also have an instinct for self-preservation that feels even different than my survival mode. Because survival just feels like every moment of every day, that self-preservation thing kicks in when I'm in my own way. Like when I was in my addiction, I was killing myself with lethal doses of drugs and alcohol. It was that instinct for self-preservation that kept me alive then. I know that. So these instincts are useful and important, and I am grateful for them. As an adult woman, I do not need the same instincts

that I needed to survive my childhood. I don't need the same instincts that I needed to survive my teenage years either. I didn't know the difference between my instinct and my intuition, but even just that time period that I write about in Stash, what I hoped to show was through the cloud of my addiction, there were periods where my intuition shone through. And one of those periods, I call it a moment of grace, I stepped through and I was able to enter into treatment and start my sobriety journey. That was intuition. It felt all kinds of wrong. My addiction's like a person. That's how it feels to me anyway. And it talks to me and it says, don't do that. They're going to take away all your drugs. You're never going to be able to sleep again. That's absolutely the wrong move. Let's do this because it's not that bad. It's

really not that bad. We can just do this, this, and this, and then you can manage it. But my intuition was the one that was like, very clearly, you're going to die. And not only are you going to die, but these two boys that you've been fighting so hard for are going to have to bury you. So let's get you well. And those were two distinct voices to me then. And you're right, now in sobriety, it's harder to distinguish between the two when it comes up. But I also have the knowing, like the grandparent in that parable was telling their grandchild, you have a choice. I didn't know that before. And now I know that I do. When you were talking, it made me think of something you were talking about your children.

And there's a trope that goes along in recovery that says you can't get sober for anyone else. But I think anybody who's gotten sober knows that other people can often be a powerful motivation. And there's also a section in the book where you describe being fairly newly in recovery. And a moment came where you suddenly wanted sobriety because it was yours. You were like, they might take my kids away. I might lose all my money. I might lose all these things, but this thing can be mine. And I'm the only one that can sort of give it away. And I'm curious how you think about those two elements of like, clearly, a lot of motivation coming from the love of your children, which just resonates through everything that you write.

And also a moment of sort of claiming recovery, indeed, for ourselves. How did those two kind of come together and work for you to get you sober? You're right. There is that trope and I've heard it a lot and I heard it a lot in early sobriety and I didn't really know what to do with the fact that I had gotten sober for my kids and I wasn't supposed to have. But what I think actually happened was I went to treatment for my kids. I think that's what happened. I think the sobriety was for me, even though in my mind, my primary motivation was my children. But I think I was so disconnected from anything that could be for me at that point, because I was lost. I was absolutely lost.

I was lost. I was absolutely lost. I had given myself away in so many different areas of my life and tried to be what I thought people wanted me to be. That Laura, the beautiful, fantastic, curious, energetic five-year-old who had started editing herself when her stepfather came into her life, I didn't know how to get back to that girl. I didn't even know she still existed. But I knew my kids did. I didn't want them to lose me more than I didn't want to lose them. I didn't want them to lose me. I didn't want that to be their story. And so I absolutely went to treatment only for them. I would not have gone if I didn't have kids. I don't know if I would not have gone if I didn't have kids. I don't know if I would have been addicted if I didn't have kids. If I didn't have kids. That moment that you're talking about is really interesting because I wrote that chapter and my editor, we were going back and forth and she's like, I don't understand why you didn't take it. Because I'm presented with something that I like in that chapter that, you know, it kind of comes into my world all of

a sudden. And I have a moment where I could break my sobriety and take it. And I think no one would know. And she said, I don't really know why you didn't take it. So I told her what I wrote. I said, I think in that moment, I realized that this was the one thing that no one could take away from me. My identity was shot. If I wasn't his wife, if I wasn't their mom, if I wasn't the PTA president, if I wasn't the board member, I didn't know who I was. Everything I had was a role, everything, except for writer. But I wasn't in touch with that then. And so there was this like lightning bolt moment where I realized that this is something that I can have, but I can be this. I can be a sober, recovered woman. I can be a woman in recovery or a person.

It doesn't need to be genderfied. And I can be this person and that's who I am. And she's like, you have to write that. You have to put that in there because that's really powerful. And I was like, it is? And she's like, yes. That gives us, for the people that are looking in the window of your life then, that makes us feel safe knowing that you've had this realization. And there are lots of bits in the book like that, that I just wrote what I felt then, but that's kind of in a way popping out and giving perspective to the story, which I really didn't want to do a lot. I really wanted to be really sensorial and active first person and kind of take you on this journey. And that's one of the few times where I have perspective in the story. And I'm sitting there in my fabulous home, which can all be taken away

from me in a minute, you know, with my kids who could be taken away from me with the realization that by giving away this thing that I really wanted to imbibe, I've given myself something that no one can take away. It makes me think about something that comes to mind often for me, which is we talk about consequences as an important part of recovery. And I think they are. I mean, I think, you know, if everything's going well, who would give up something that we all love as much as our substances, right? So consequences have a role, but they're clearly not sufficient because we all know people whose consequences are staggering and on they go,

right? All the way to death. And so, you know, I've often thought about that and I've sort of thought about like, there's something about consequence and hope, like they both need to be there sort of simultaneously in a way. That's the sort of fertile ground. But when I read that with you, I also realized that there was a point where for me, sobriety went from a vision of what I was getting rid of to what I was becoming or could become. There was not a day in there, right? But there was at some point where I went, oh, this is not just so that I don't go to jail. And this is not just so that I don't die. And it's not just because I haven't had anywhere to live. And it's because like,

I'm starting to get a sense that like, I could become the person I would want to be. And I could become a happy person. And for me, that was, again, not a moment, but an important shift that occurred somewhere in early recovery. Yeah, no, I agree. There's this kind of theme that I had that year that was not as evident to me in the beginning of the year and more evident toward the end of choosing the possibility of happiness. Yeah. Because I was enduring. I felt like I was in the hallway and I had no idea what door would open or when or if a door would open. And to continue on in that place because I would have faith eventually that a door would open and behind that door might

be happiness, was better than staying where I was, where I was so terribly unhappy. Not just because I was in this addiction. It was because I was so far away from my authentic self. I needed the drugs and alcohol in order to show up for this life that was so inauthentic. I did. I couldn't have lived it otherwise. And it was just like increasing unhappiness on a daily because I was getting so mired in this bog where I wasn't going to find happiness. I want to go back to something you said a couple minutes ago, because you were talking about that everything in your life was a role. Being a parent was a role. Being the good wife was a role. Being the PTA president was a role.

I think I heard you say being a writer is not a role. Yes. And the reason I ask it is that I think as creative people, we can often get, at least I can, attached to my ability or my role as a creative person becoming part of my identity in not a good way. And so I'm curious for you what that means that being a writer is not a role. It certainly can be a role. Absolutely, it can be a role.

It can be a job. And it's just not how I view it for myself. It's the only thing, besides being a reader, which also can be a job, but I'm talking about reading for pleasure. I'm also talking about writing for pleasure and not necessarily writing for a job. But that can be both. I can write for money and I love it. So there's those two things. But I can be a reader and a writer by myself. It's not dependent on any relationship that I have with anyone. Unless I'm talking about writing for money, then other people come in because they need to pay me. So then there's a relationship there. But's a relationship there but my identity the way i

have identified since i was a little kid is as a reader and a writer that's who i am and that's with people around that's with no one around that's money that's no money it doesn't matter i do this because it's oxygen because i have to because i to. And it was hard for me to kind of, what's the word I'm looking for? Like distill that down to these two things. This recovering person that I am is one thing that's not dependent upon other people. This is not something that anyone can give me and not something that someone can take away from me, as is being a reader and a writer. I mean, certainly they could take away the utensils and the books, but they can't take away that essence of me, that this is what I love to do. This is what I would do. If people say like, what would you do

if you could do this one thing for the rest of your life? This would be it. I would do it regardless. It's beyond love. Like I said, it's just oxygen for me. It's part of me. It is in many, many ways who I am. I'm thinking about this idea of it becoming a role because I'm sure you know lots of people like this. And I've been a person like this at different points with different things where all of a sudden the identity to be that or the pressure to be that or the pressure to be good at that or be seen as good at that suddenly starts to kill the thing itself. And it often then blocks us from being perhaps someone who loves to write because the judgment process is so strong. The fear of not being good at it, the idea that like, well, if I'm not good at this, then who am I, then cuts you off from the thing itself.

And I think what you're describing is how you've managed to distill those two things apart and how they do come together sometimes naturally and they have to, but that you do have a way of tweezing them apart for yourself. Yeah. Thank you for putting it like that. It's true. I mean, I had, and I'm very grateful for it, great success with getting articles published and obviously the memoir published, but I write a lot more than that. Like I write all the time and, you know, some of it I send off to get published and some of it I don't. And my fulfillment is not right now dependent on getting it published or getting that feedback from something that I've written. from something that I've written. But certainly, there have been moments where I've had to be mindful of how attached I am to the outcome of these things that I poured myself into. And I think like, you know, for me as a writer, I'm a personal essayist, it can start to feel a little journalistic when I'm picking things out, you know, the news,

and I'm deciding to weave my experience into those things to get published, which is fine, but it's not the writing for pleasure that I love. I don't want those things to be conflated when I'm writing just because I need more published articles. I want to stay relevant. That can be quite different than Laura the writer. This is like Laura the, I don't know, I don't know what the name for that Laura is. The professional writer. Like, that would be really good for me. So I try to really be mindful of, you know, getting right up to that line and kind of looking over at that abyss and saying, don't jump. Like, let's stay over here where it's fun, where you have joy, you know, where you would do it regardless. Yeah. Let's try to stay on this side of the line.

And so far I've been able to do that pretty well, I think. But I'm aware that it could change. And I might need to do a little bit more dancing around that to make myself right sized in that area. Yep. Yeah, I think it does become tricky if we're fortunate enough that the thing that we are loving doing suddenly becomes a way in which we can make a living. If we're fortunate enough to do that, I do think that the danger is it gets complicated. It's easier when it's really separated and simple. Like, I just write for fun and there's no professional ambition to this at all. That's where I am with guitar, right? Like, I play guitar because I just like to play guitar. I have zero ambition with it. I used to have ambition with it. I severed it with a fair amount of work. Now it's just for fun.

But the podcast got interesting when I started going, oh, well, I do love doing this and I want to keep doing it. And I might be able to do it as a way of making a living. I'm curious, what about writing is joyful for you? Like, how do you get yourself into a joyful state with it versus a performative state? When I write, and I'm sure you've heard this because you've had a lot of authors on your show, there is a state that occurs. I call it the flow. And there's something else that takes over. I feel like a conduit. I kind of make myself right until I get to this point. It's actually not very long. I can usually hit it. Maybe it's like a stride, but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like a hose that was

just trickling. And then all of a sudden I've turned it on, not a fire hose, but like a garden hose. And there's a nice full flow that's not of my doing. And once I achieve that state, it's like I'm levitating. It's like I'm surrounded by light. Like Scott will bless his heart. He does the grocery shopping. He does the cooking. He started this when I decided to go plant-based three years ago. And it's one of his many ways that he takes care of me. So at seven at night, flow or not, he's ready for me to come downstairs because dinner's ready. And if I'm still in the flow, it's really hard for me to pull myself away. It's joy, but it's beyond that. I'm a writer. I should have the words, but it's hard

to describe. There is a need in addition to the joy, unlike anything I've ever felt before. It's different than my need to be with my kids, which is also really powerful. This is a need to stay in that creative flow place. And I don't have that experience in any other part of my life. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week Buying Power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing

our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Let's change directions here. I want to talk a little bit about the book. And I want to start by reading something that you write very early on in the beginning, which I think is going to lead us into some other discussions. But you say that Stash takes place at the intersection of race, privilege, and addiction. What do you mean by that? What is your intersection of race, privilege, and addiction? So at the time, during this book,

during the March of 2008 through December of 2008, I was living the life that I always thought if I had the big house, if I had, I don't even know if I knew about private jets, but later on when I did, like if I had access to private jets, if I had a housekeeper or servants, or if I could just go shopping and buy whatever I wanted, then everything would be okay. Then I would be fine. Then I wouldn't ever want for anything. And I was living that life. I was living this dream life.

And I felt incredibly guilty because I wasn't happy. Because I was enduring this extremely privileged life, waiting to get to the other side of what, I don't know. But I was waiting, waiting until my kids were older, waiting until my now ex-husband wasn't so busy, waiting until I actually liked all of the shopping and the spa days and the jewelry shows like my peers did. I was waiting, but nothing was coming and I was miserable in this life. Not to say that I was miserable all the time. Certainly there were periods of joy. There were really fun times and times where my energy matched what it looked like, you know. But the year that I write about, they were very few and far between, you know. It was

mainly living in fear and living like that. So I had this very, very privileged life. I'm a black woman. I grew up poor, not destitute, but I grew up poor, like welfare poor, like shoplifting groceries poor. When I was a kid, my mother used to do that. And what it meant to be black in the world for me was different than a lot of my peers, because I had grown up in all these white spaces. My mother was shoplifting groceries, but she managed to send me to independent schools. And all these independent schools were almost entirely white spaces. For a while, I was the only black kid in my school, and then later on in my class, but never had a black

classmate. And that was okay. I didn't feel like that growing up. That's not true. I didn't feel like that when I was a little kid. As I started growing up, I became very aware of being black in those spaces. It didn't matter as much when I was little, I don't think, or at least to my surroundings, it didn't seem to matter as much. So I grew up poor, but I'm this black woman, and now I live this very privileged life, and in comes my addiction full force. So I do what I've always done, because as we talked about, I identify as a reader. I looked for books that would give me the experience of a black woman who lived a privileged life who was mired in an addiction. And I found some, but none with all three. So I found stories of black women living with addiction, but those stories involve prostitution and drug dens and homelessness. I found stories of privilege and addiction, all written by white women, each and every one of them.

I also found stories of motherhood and divorce, and there were other things that were interwoven, but none with everything, none from that particular intersection. And even, Eric, there weren't any movies or TV shows either that depicted someone like me going through something like what I was going through. Right. If there were a woman fighting through an addiction with a privileged life, looking to be in her children's lives, they were white women. Yeah. Period. So that's why I wanted to put that at the very beginning of the book,

to set people up to understand that this is what sets this book apart from any other book you've read this year, or maybe even the last decade, because there just aren't very many like this. Yeah. And I think in general, if you look at the phrase people use as quitlet, right, which means well-written books about addiction. You talk about how there's almost no one of color in that sort of top tier of those books, or maybe even many tiers of those books. Yeah. When I was writing Stash, I had to write a book proposal, which was just exhausting in a way. But in this proposal, I had to come up with three comparisons, because publishers want to see books that are like the ones you're pitching that have done well.

So it can't just be books like the one you're pitching because they want to see that they've sold copies. And I couldn't find any. Not one. Not one book. Actually, I did. That's not true. I found one book that had done well in 2007 called A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown. She has another book coming out. She's fantastic. But it needed to be current. This needed to be a 2020 book or 2021 at that point that was doing well, that was in my genre. And I didn't have one

comparison. I thought that was outrageous, honestly, that up until mine, there hasn't been an emphasis on stories of color in this genre, which means for someone like me, who was just like looking to get sober in 2008 discreetly, that maybe there aren't people like me. Yeah. You know, maybe sobriety isn't for me because I don't see it on TV. I don't see it in the movies and I don't read about it in the books. Yep. Or magazines. Is that changing? I mean, if people buy stash, it will.

You said you don't like selling, but you're good at it. Yeah, but I'm not joking. Like, okay, it doesn't have to be stash. But people, specifically white people, really white women, need to purchase books that are outside of their genre in order to show publishers that there's a need for them. Yep. And so the people that have been purchasing stash and giving me feedback, I'm so grateful. There are so many people. There are white men.

There are white women. There are Asian, Latino. There are white men, there are white women, there are Asian, Latino. A lot of Latino women have been coming back to me and saying, thank you. Thank you for this story. Because their stories aren't reflected. Asian women don't have their stories reflected back to them. This dearth of voices of color isn't specific to black women. But if a book like mine sells, publishers will be looking for more stories like mine. Yep. And you're right that you are representing an interesting intersection that you don't see a whole lot. As you were talking, I was thinking about myself and I was like, well, you know, mine is a pretty common story. Upper middle class white kid gets himself into trouble.

I was reflecting back though, and these days it's pretty common to be an opioid addict. But in 1994, to be an upper middle class white kid with a heroin addiction was a strange thing. It had largely been an inner city. And I'm not trying to say that our experiences are linked because that was just a small part of my life where yours is the identity. But I do think that there is this desire to see ourselves well reflected and you can get by if you don't see yourself well reflected, but it takes a lot more translation. There's an article you wrote about AA about, you know, like I didn't believe in it,

but it still worked. I'd like to explore that more. But part of the challenge is you are having to sit there and go, well, I've got to sort of take all this in through my lens and sort of translate it. And I remember that a little bit about recovery for me, because when I went to NA, I did not feel like I fit. It was black street culture. When I went to AA, I didn't fit because they were like, well, we don't talk about drugs here. I mean, this was a long time ago. And so it wasn't that I couldn't find a way to make the different stories fit,

but I had to sort of cobble a little bit. Yes, yes. And so I think it's why work like yours is important and a diversity of voices out there is important Yes. Yes. don't fit here. Everyone wants that. And the harder you have to do to find how you fit, it's additional labor. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't fit here and here's why. It's you, it's you, it's you, it's you. It's that story you just told. It's this book you just gave me where I'm not anywhere in these pages. And I mean, absolutely, I was looking for an excuse. You know, it's still tough. I had a kind of come to Jesus moment with 12-step recovery in 2020 because, I mean, I felt like I had been poisoned that year. I was weak.

I was exhausted. I was in pain. I always wake up happy. You know, I just do. I always go to bed peaceful. And I was not doing either of those things, starting with Breonna Taylor and then Ahmaud Arbery, and then of course, George Floyd, and there were more in between. And I was just having a really hard time. And it felt like not an attack, but it felt abrasive to be in a room where I needed to recover, where my experience wasn't being reflected back to me. And in most of the meetings I go to,

if there's more than one person of color, it's like one or two. Everybody else is white. That's just how it is where I live. And that's a combination of your color and your privilege, right? Because I mean, I don't know what it's like now. And I'm a little bit distinct and I'm white. So I'm going to be walking out on a plank that I want to be careful on, right? But when I was in 12-step recovery, there were certainly meetings that I would go to that would be predominantly black meetings. Yes. It wasn't like there was one of them.

There were a bunch of them, but it was very, duh, part of town specific. Yes. Yes. Right? And on the other side of the hill from me. Got it. Yes. And you're in LA, so the other side of the hill might as well be, you know, a different city.

Yeah. I could fly to Tucson faster. But I could get there. Exactly. In Columbus, you could be like, well, you know, it's an extra 10 minutes, no big deal. But in your case, so based on where you live, which is a is sort of a function of privilege, then based on color, you're constantly in a space where significant parts of your identity are not reflected. Exactly, exactly. And thank you for mapping that out, because that is important. Because I don't want people to think there's not black recovery, there absolutely is. And I do go to those meetings sometime. The other thing 2020 did, which was really incredible for

12-step recovery, was to start virtual people of color meetings. And that was extremely helpful. So some of those meetings are still in my repertoire. I will still attend those meetings virtually. There's one in London that's fantastic. And it's like 150 people of color, all different kinds of people of color, and some white people as well who just really enjoy the space. But we meet and we talk very frankly, we share frankly, rather, about our experience in the world as people of color, as people dealing with an addiction or alcoholism or alcohol use disorder, however you want to term it. And that feels good. That feels really good. So I feel like I took you slightly on a detour for a second there. I want to go back to you feeling tired, exhausted, and not reflected in the recovery area that you were in.

Yes. Right? We could say it would be akin to being, I'm just trying to make a parallel, you could be in a rural area, right? And you would be the only black person there, at least in rural Ohio, right? And you wouldn't have the option of just being like, well, I'll just drive over there. So you are isolated. So how did you respond? What did you do? You know, another comparison would be like, if I were the only parent struggling with something with my kids, and I was in a room full of people who didn't have kids. To be able to express my experience but not have it reflected back to me

would feel isolating. And that's what happened. I would express my experience as it was happening, and then people would either do one of two things. They would either try to fix it for me. They would try three things, actually. They would try to have me teach them how to be better about it. What can I do was a really common question that I got then. Or they would let me know. No one ever told this to me. But they would let me know either through their shares or body language that they didn't appreciate me sharing about race in these meetings and what was happening in our country. And so I just wanted to go.

I don't want to educate you. I don't want you to ask me how you can fix it. And I don't want to be around you if you don't want me there sharing my... Because that's all I'm going to do right now, is I'm going to share my experience. Because this is leading me closer to a drink. This is the most bereft I've been in my sobriety. Yeah. And so then I, you know, I got an email from someone for one of those people of color meetings. This amazing thing happened.

This was later, after I was already in, you know, really regularly going to these people of color meetings. Can I tell you a really quick story? Please, yeah. I was January 6th, two years ago, right? That was the insurrection? I think so. vote. I forgot what it's called. I want to say consecrate, but I don't think that's the right word, but they solidified the election, right? So Mike Pence was going to cast the deciding vote, and then Joe Biden would be officially the president. So I had the TV, I always had the TV on. So I had the TV on, and I was like kind of watching, and then I saw what was happening. And all I could think while I was watching all these white people storming the steps with signs and weapons, and then the more I saw what the police response was, I was like,

if they were black, there'd be blood all over those steps. They would have never gotten up there. And I started to spiral hard. And as I'm sitting in front of my computer, just like I'm doing now, and I got a notification that there was an email and it said, and I'm smiling if you can't hear that, the email said, emergency people of color meeting right now. And I clicked on the link, Eric, and you know how people start to pop in, right, to the Zoom room? I popped in and I saw others popping in, and it was 300 people. I stayed on there for an hour and a half, and it was the most healing balm of discussion and sorrow and expression. I could have never gotten that in one of my regular meetings.

This is why I love 12-step recovery too, because this is what we did. We morphed, we figured it out, and we made a space for the people who needed it. There are all these specialty meetings and they're kind of controversial and people have feelings about them, but my goodness, that meeting, I was as close to a drink as I'd ever been in sobriety at that moment. Not literally, because I don't have anything in the house. And I was at home, I would have had to get in my car and drive and blah, or order it, I guess. But that meeting, it just saved me that day. And I felt seen, I felt that relief that I needed.

I was deeply disturbed by what was happening. And that disturbance, that is the anxiety, I guess. There's something in our literature that says when we are disturbed, our first need is to quiet it no matter what the cause. And I know exactly what quiets that disturbance. I know how many of them there are in a bottle. I know what shape they are. I know what sound they make. I know how they feel in my hand. I know how many of them there are in a bottle. I know what shape they are. I know what sound they make. I know how they feel in my hand. I know how long they take to hit my bloodstream.

Like, I know what quiets that disturbance, but that's not what I wanted. And it's not what I got. What I got was something that was profoundly more effective and long-lasting. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk

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It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week Buying Power column.

Very few companies who go viral are, like, totally prepared for what that means. The SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week Buying Power column. Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I think that's a beautiful story. I kind of was getting chills as you were sharing it. It's so beautiful, and it is unique to being Black. And it's also not in that we all do really need,

and what recovery in the right way can give us is that feeling of not being alone. And I think your analogy of being a parent in a room full of people who don't have kids is a great one. Maybe they have specialty meetings for parents and not, I don't know, they didn't once upon a time. You've got it all in LA, right? Probably specialty meeting for, you know, 50 year old men who have Mohawks, right? I could probably find my own tribe there. But if you walked into a 12 step meeting, and you were saying, I'm really struggling, my kid is really having a hard time, and I feel like drinking, the people in the room are gonna listen, right? They're gonna listen,

but they're not going to be able to make you feel like you're not alone with it in the same way. And so I think that's a really good analogy. And I do think it's why specialty meetings can be helpful. And it's interesting. We run a program called Spiritual Habits. And part of the Spiritual Habits program is we divide the big group up into small groups. And those small groups meet together once a week. once a week. And we've had a debate amongst the One You Feed team a number of times about should we do specialty meetings, specialty groups. And we did do one once because we offered a bunch of BIPOC scholarships. And I then talked to people who I respect who said, we think you should offer

that as a specialty. You should have a BIPOC group if people want to opt into it. And they gave all the reasons why. And we did that. And I think it turned out well. Well, that then led to the question of, should there be others? You know, should there be one for people in recovery? Should there be one for divorced mothers? And all of a sudden, you start getting into the debate that I'm sure happens, which is,

well, how finally did you start to divide that? And isn't part of this that we hear different perspectives and we get to know different people? And so it's been an interesting debate. And I feel right now comfortable with, for reasons of safety issues and feeling like as a black person in a white space, you can't be fully yourself. I do think that our decision to do a BIPOC group is the right one. How far we want to splinter that further, I still don't think we know because I think these questions are probably the same thing that swirls around specialty meetings. It is really interesting. And I used to kind of scoff at specialty meetings. You know, there's actually a really great writers in recovery meeting that I like. But when I first heard about it, I was like, they don't need their own meeting. That's silly.

Those writers, they're fine just going to regular meetings. And there is something that is especially othering about visible diversity versus an invisible othering. There are visible disabilities and invisible disabilities, right? So I think there's something especially othering, particularly othering about the visible ones. That's my opinion. I don't know if that's true. as a black woman sitting in a meeting next to a white woman who's also a mom, who's also struggling with exactly the same addiction, who's also going through a divorce, I do feel like she's going to find herself more easily in that white meeting than I will. I just do. I don't know if

that's true. And at the same time, your mental gymnastics thing holds. I love these meetings. I start at one of these meetings that I go to every week. And I started it with my best friend who's not white, but she's not black. And we created this space where all these white people come and really kind of get into the work. And I love the work. And I love that. It's very important to me. It's not an either or for me. It's an and. That really sort of sums it up for me, which is there is a time to be with people who are very much like me, who can understand me and my specificities. And it's really helpful for me to be able to see the commonalities that I have with

all people. You know, I need both those things for me to feel like I'm truly both supported and being supportive. A hundred percent. I want to ask you about an article you wrote whose headline made me laugh, which was, did I get sober 10 years too soon? Today's weed is making me wonder. Now you and I have a different relationship to marijuana. You had an aversive relationship with it because of that your, I believe it was your stepfather abused you when he smoked weed, right? I, on the other hand, love this stuff, like just loved it. And the fact that you can now shop for it and it's like a brand experience is

just, it blows my mind. But I think this basic idea of we hear about whatever the new thing is, or the different type of drug or the way it's working for other people. And it's natural that some part of this wakes up. I was thinking about it yesterday. After I was reading that, I was like, it's kind of like my addiction goes way quiet. It's almost like an old lady in a nursing home. And there's all sorts of noise going on around her and people talking and she just sits there and nothing, nothing gets a reaction out of her. And then like an old song that she used to love comes on the radio. And it's all of a sudden for a few seconds, it's like she starts bopping her head to the music, you know? And that's what today's weed can occasionally do to me. It sort of just wakes that little thing up.

I was in New York City recently. I mean, you can't go two feet in that city without it smelling like marijuana. I cannot believe how everywhere it is. Everywhere. Yes. I was just in New York too, and I was struck by the same thing. Every time I got out of an Uber, actually, we were in our Uber on the Brooklyn Bridge with all the windows up, and there was this car next to us, and there was so much weed coming out of that car. It enveloped us. It was crazy. Yeah, you're right. I never liked weed. I never got it. Obviously, I tried it. Not obviously, but I did try it. And each time I tried it, it just made me like wired and paranoid. It did exactly the opposite of what everybody else professed to feel. But I have this podcast. I

think I write about it in the article called The Cut. It's not my podcast. It's one of my favorite podcasts. And they were talking, they were interviewing these two moms who were saying how much easier the zoo was with their weed gummy. They could take their kids every day to just pop a weed gummy and it was really pleasant. And it flew by their time there. And I was like, wait a minute. Do you mean to tell me that I could have been eating weed gummies instead of popping Ambien at night and having a pleasant time with my kids instead of managing an addiction. This is what my head told me. Because that sounded fun. That sounded like something I could get with. Right.

This was not the weed of my stepfather who kept the shoebox full of stems and seeds and whatever under his bed. This was a gummy bear. This was, a tincture of oil that you could drop in under your tongue. An essential oil. Yeah, that sounded extremely appealing and mellow. Yep. And just like dope. Like I was genuinely pissed that this wasn't created when my kids were little. Yep.

that this wasn't created when my kids were little. Yep. But then I go on in the article and I interview a couple people about their weed experience because I want to know, like, is this something I should consider, right? I mean, my kids weren't little anymore then either, so I couldn't have justified it the same way I would have. But I wanted to know if I was really missing out on something. And I got some experiences relate back to me that told me that I was absolutely in the right place.

Yep. Well, you ask a really fundamental question in that article that I think is a really useful one, which is like, if this is so good, who wouldn't do it all of the time? Yes. Right. And that immediately to me surfaces the addict in me because I have this exact same thought. You know, I did my own version of this. So I got sober at 24 from heroin and I was a homeless heroin addict. And I mean, we've talked, you kind of know my story a little bit. I weighed a hundred pounds. I had hepatitis C, very low bottom and stayed sober about seven, eight years. And I suddenly was doing very well. I was making, I mean, compared to what I used to make a fortune.

I lived in a nice part of town. I was a good dad. I mean, everything was going pretty well. And my brain started saying to me like, well, you were young. And of course, heroin is a terrible idea. Like, no, I mean, anybody knows heroin's a bad idea. So maybe alcohol. Now I drank alcoholically, but alcohol is similar to today's weed in that you can look around and see people imbibing it all around you, singing its praises and seems like it's okay. It wasn't for me, spoiler alert, you know, I had to come back to recovery, but that was my version of that where I went like, oh, it's not that there's a formulation of a drug that's suddenly going to work for me. It's the entire mechanism and process that goes on inside me in relation to something that can make me feel that

much better that quickly. Yes. Yes. And that's the thing for me, right? When it's the instantaneous. Yes. I know I'm in trouble. Yes. I know I'm in trouble. It is for me, it's got to be slow and steady, which I hate. Yes. I want that fast fix want that fast fix. But I know that when it comes like that, this is something for me to look at. And it honestly, as much as I may want it, it might not be for me. Yep. There's also just a risk reward profile. I'm like, well, you know, let's say I could have a couple of drinks a week. Okay. So I would have one evening a week where I felt, you know, a lot better for a couple hours. Okay. That's nice. That would be lovely. What's the downside to that? Oh, everything. My entire life. That risk reward benefit

helps me a lot sort through that too. I'm like, well, supposing you could do it moderately, which you can't, but just suppose you could. So what? Yeah. I love that article. It just made me laugh. But I think surface is a really fundamental point that all of us who maintain long-term sobriety have to figure out is how to work with that voice that says there's a different

way to do this. Because every 10 years, something will come along that will have people extolling the virtues and the upside of blank. And we don't really have to do anything, but it would be good to really look at what it is that people are able to do and not do. It's just to examine it, rather, before jumping in. Yep. I want to jump to the end of your book. We haven't talked about it nearly enough, so I hope that's okay that we've talked around it. It's a beautiful book. I'm sure people from hearing you talk will get a sense of how articulate you are. But a big part of the book happens as you are going through a divorce. And there's a real sense near the end of the book where you are getting differing advice

about how sort of lack of a better word, how hard to go after your husband and how much to sort of ask for money wise, wealth wise, all these different things. And you sort of end up working for a balance, but I just want to write something that you wrote because I think it's really beautiful. And I just love to have you expand upon it. You say, I wonder sometimes if I were to go back to that day in the hallway of Nancy's office, that being your attorney, knowing what I know now, would I ask for more? If the world was divided into winners and losers, which is a theme that comes up in the book different times for you, which one am I? Am I a loser because I should have fought for more money or more property? Or am I a winner because I get to spend almost every day with my kids? And you go

through various different versions of that question. I just thought I'd give you a chance to talk about that for a second, because that really, really touched me. And as somebody who's unfortunately been through more than one divorce, I'm familiar with this dynamic of that. But I think it's also one that we all wrestle with in different areas of our lives, right? Because we're always making trade-offs among things. You could have more money, but that would mean I would have more time. I could have more time. There's all this trying to figure it out and then knowing what's the right proportion for me. So I just would love to hear you sort of reflect on that a little bit more.

Specifically with regard to the divorce, I think what happened was because, of course, I was getting sober and divorced at the same time, which had I to do again, would not to do at the same time. I didn't, I mean, I guess I had a choice, but it didn't feel like I had a choice then. The divorce was in motion and I was dying, so I had to get sober. Both things were happening. What I did was out of fear, which is like so many things in my life, I researched and found someone that I thought would keep me safe through this process, which was so foreign to me. And the other thing was I had completely isolated myself at this point in my life. Nobody really knew what was happening with me. I wasn't vulnerable with anyone. When I met with this woman, my divorce attorney, I met with her alone and didn't speak about her to anyone afterward.

So there was no kind of back and forth, like, is this the right one for you? I made all those decisions entirely by myself. And very quickly, like in between detoxes, I started the process when I wasn't in withdrawal. And by the end of the day, I was, and I needed to make a decision. So that was guiding me as well. But what I think was I chose somebody that was not the right fit for the outcome that I desired. Yes. And the outcome, the success that I envisioned was me being comfortable, but the priority was that we were still a family, just a different kind of family. That was the success that I envisioned. That was my priority. I'm not saying

that I would have been happy if he had taken everything away material-wise and financially and property-wise. I certainly wouldn't have been. But that wasn't my priority. My priority was, how can I dismantle and rebuild this family in another way? Or how can we do that so that it's still a family, but it looks different? And as we went along, it just became more and more obvious that the path that she was laying out in front of me, I didn't think we'd be able to do that. I didn't think we'd be able to just become another kind of family. I think he would have ended up hating me. And so I chose to really look at what is a win for me here. And if I'm honest about what's a win for me, what path am I going to choose? Am I going to continue down this path with her,

knowing that she's the only person on my side too. Right. I didn't have anybody else. I mean, I had friends, but they weren't really in the loop. No one was in the loop except for her. And she's the expert saying, you've got to protect yourself. You're hearing this from somebody, the only person who, as you said, is on your side at that point that you've put on your side, who is the expert, which is why we hire attorneys, is to be expert. So it's a difficult position. And I just so admired how you managed to negotiate it. Again, I think that was the instinct versus intuition. I really think it came into play then. And there's a few moments in the book, like we talked about, where the intuition comes in.

And, you know, one is with Scott, where everything, including my outside sources, are saying, no, no, you can't. You know, it's ridiculous. There's this guy you met in treatment. You can't bring him into your life. My intuition is what I listen to there in my divorce. And then post-divorce, which I write about a little bit at the end of the book, my ex-husband and I did some really unconventional things, non-traditional ways of being a family that people probably would have objected to or tried to

dissuade us from engaging. And I listened to my intuition there too, because I felt like this was the right thing for us and maybe it wouldn't be the right thing for other people. But that was that instinct kind of, I pushed it aside and listened to the intuition. I love it because I think it points to a middle way or a third way, right? We talked about this a little bit earlier. It's simple when it's one or the other. I've got this high power to turn and we're going after after him or I'm going to roll over and play dead. How do I do something in between?

And my second marriage, my partner and I wanted the kids to be together. We each had a kid from a previous marriage. We wanted them to stay together. We wanted to keep the home together. We wanted to keep a stable unit, but we were a nightmare for each other. And what we ended up doing, which I never would have thought was possible, was that we remained in the home together, co-parented the kids, ended the quote unquote marriage. We shared it all with our kids.

We did it. I'd have no idea how it worked, but it's exactly what I wanted, right? It gave me what I wanted and needed. But I spent years in leave or stay, stay or leave, leave or stay. I couldn't see that there was a different option available, that there was a blend of those things. And so that part of the book just resonated with me so much because you are sort of doing that tradeoff, trying to figure out what really matters, and we all have competing priorities, but then also being able to really negotiate a third way that was really beautiful for you, your kids, and your ex. Well, yeah. And then what you're describing, which is fantastic, takes two adults who are putting their children first. Yes. Which is not always the case.

And so I always, when I talk about this, I acknowledge that, that I know that not everybody's path can look like mine. Absolutely. I agree 100%. Like one person cannot have that design. I got fortunate that somehow we both were able to find that path. We both wanted the same thing, which was what was best for those boys. Yes.

And how wonderful for your kids. I mean, kids know. They know they were put first. Yeah. You know, they just do and they feel it in everything. My older son has a really big ego. They protected him all the way through school. And not in like a monster way, but like,

he just, he's like a little bulletproof, you know? And I think it's because he's so secure and safe. You know, he's never nervous when dad and I are in the same room together and he doesn't dread like what we might say or is it okay if I said this? Everything can be shared. Everything is fine. Everything is safe. And it's always been like that for him and my younger son as well. And I just love that I was able to give that to them. Would not have been the case, I imagine, had I not gotten sober. Right, right. Probably not. Well, Laura, thank you so much for coming on. I've enjoyed every time we've gotten to talk and I love your new book. Your podcast, The Only One in the Room is amazing. We'll have links in the show notes to both those things. But thank you so much for coming on.

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