Getting High: The Power of Nature in Early Sobriety

A friend once told me that when life got hard, the secret was to get high...like, on a hill, or in a tree...maybe even in a small plane? (I’m not totally sure about the details.) While I never clarified how high, the sentiment behind this philosophy, I’ve come to understand, is that when life is feeling overwhelming, sometimes what we need is simply a shift in perspective. 

1000 days ago, I set out on a journey to become sober. (Or, more aptly, 1000 days ago was the last time I set out on a journey to become sober.) For me, chasing a new and natural way to get high was a pursuit born less out of curiosity and more out of necessity.

I started questioning my relationship with alcohol when I realized how much I clung to my experiences of intoxication. How I pushed to keep those blurry nights going. How the evening wasn’t a success until I’d climbed to the top of a batting cage fence and balanced along the edge singing “Don’t Stop Believin” to whoever would listen; until I’d shut down the bar and become best friends with the bartender; until I’d climbed a tree and called to profess my love to every friend I’d ever made. And it was really not over until I stumbled through my door, passed out on my bed, and sunk fitfully into a familiar depression.

Maybe this persona, which only felt accessible when drunk, represented youth and freedom...maybe it represented recklessness and bravery. (Maybe those were the same thing to me?) Whatever it was, there were pieces of this version of myself that I cherished. And the truth was, I knew I would never grant myself this type of freedom in everyday life. I could never square who I was in sobriety with the freer version of myself I could conjure when drinking. Or maybe the problem was, I’d never stopped to try.

1000 days ago marked what I assumed was the beginning of some sort of infinite and unbearable tedium. 

But, as it turned out…that’s not what happened at all.

Early Sobriety

So much of early sobriety was defined by not knowing what to do with my hands, or my thoughts, or myself — so afraid of judgment that I could hardly stand to exist in the same room as other people, let alone myself. Here I was, fully lucid, but unable to connect to my body or emotions or anyone around me in any real way. 

A huge part of sobriety, for so many of us, is learning to live within the confines of our own minds, processing traumas and regrets, and fears, and finding a way to accept who we once were and redefine who we’re still becoming. We go to therapy and find support groups and lean on our most trusted friends. We take all the big steps, but we sometimes fail to know how to take the small ones, how to move through our daily lives.

When you’ve constructed a world around yourself that relies on your ability to escape it, removing the easiest exit can be terrifying.

Maybe though, the problem is less about who we are and how we escape and more about the walls we try to contain ourselves within. 

So many of the things I was running from, so many of my fears, stemmed from this idea that I was not enough. That I had to shift and contort to fit into some preconceived mold, that who I was did not fit within the context of the walls I’d found myself trapped behind. 

I wondered, then, what would happen if I removed the walls, and attempted to exist in a different setting? What would happen if I let go of control (of myself, my environment) and embraced something messier? Maybe the problem wasn’t mine to hold...maybe it was mine to set free.

Finding Nature

I can still remember the first time I stripped down to my underwear and plunged into the freezing Pacific. I was six months sober and desperate for something I couldn't name. My decision was made before I’d had time to second guess it (and before I’d seen the sign that said “Don’t go in here, you’ll die.”) This was the type of behavior that I’d assumed was relegated to my college years - the years of invincibility and low-stakes, when you could get drunk and jump in a fountain at midnight and it was mostly just funny; When your ideas were the only prompts needed to move you to action. In sobriety, I assumed that this spontaneity would die.

There is still something that calls me to live on the edge of recklessness, at times, some nearly-forgotten piece of myself that begs to be brought to life. I’ve found though, that at its root, this is not a calling to destroy myself, or even risk anything, it’s more of a call to move and live, to find joy and adventure. This is not a call to push myself to the brink of disaster, it’s simply a call to act. 

The waters of Northern California answer the call. The cold hits like a punch to the face, but there is something about the way the shock is met with the lull of the waves. Something about the feeling of being alive, and not wanting to escape.

Being in nature offers us the chance to put our minds and bodies at ease by forcing them to adapt to new and changing conditions, by presenting us with opportunities to be present, without the fear that our minds will run away with us. 

Today, plunging into violent waves, jumping into October rivers, and floating in lakes created from newly melted snow are the highlights of my life, a chance to feel alive and in awe. Today hiking and biking and exploring are regular practices and every time I climb a tree or attempt some made-up yoga position atop the highest boulder I can find, I feel a connection, not just to myself and within my body, but to something bigger...something I can’t explain.

When I first stopped drinking, the idea of connecting to some power greater than myself was touted as one of the many necessary stages to recovery. And while I don’t know that it is the same as believing in God or an afterlife or some other whimsical notion, nature is certainly bigger than I am, and full of as many mysteries as anything else. If there were ever a power I felt compelled to respect, this was it.

Rediscovering Ourselves

I can still recall the feelings of drunkenness. The weightless moments that lived somewhere between my anxieties and regrets. For a long time, I missed the feeling, longed for it. But it never occurred to me that there could be something in the world of sobriety to rival that feeling.

This ease of being in nature was enough to get me thinking: what is it that we get from drugs and alcohol that is mimicked here? Why do so many of us feel free and restored? Seen and accepted? Safe and held? I began to wonder if maybe everything we had deluded ourselves to believe we were running towards by drinking, was actually available to us in the natural world. 

While there are so many paths to addiction and alcohol dependency, and no simple solutions or quick fixes, I can’t help but wonder if many of us, in addition to our deeper issues, are also starving for feelings of awe and wonder, for some presence of magic in our everyday lives.

For me, drinking had been largely about escape. Less from the problems in my life and more from the incessant hum of my brain, the voices in my head that ran the same narratives, filled with the same lies, over and over and over again, no matter how much I tried to drown them out. As anyone who has ever drunk alcohol knows, the voices can only be quieted for so long, and in the end, they always seemed to come back louder.

I remember being newly sober and in therapy (for anxiety that had shifted to panic attacks and near-constant paranoia). I remember speaking to my therapist about all the things I’d wished I could do but was too afraid to try. At the top of the list were always the same few things: hiking alone, surfing, camping with my kids. I couldn’t shake the feeling that who I was and who I wanted to be, would never coincide. 

I’m not sure if it was something she said or some slow realization that progressed over months, but I began to push myself to spend time outside in ways that were uncomfortable. I had to face fears of murderous wildlife and even more murderous humans, fears of sharks and undertows, of snakes, and being alone with my thoughts. In time, the life I imagined for myself, the life I longed for and needed in sobriety, became the life I was leading. In some sort of magical gift of synchronicity, “who I wanted to be” suddenly became much closer to “who I actually am”.

Honesty and Acceptance 

I feel like I should be holding a crystal and beating some sort of handmade drum as I expound on the purity and honesty of nature, but despite the painfully cliche trope, I can’t help but believe it is true. With nature, there is no facade. Sure from a distance it is pristine. A snowy mountain top. An alpine lake. The sun setting slowly into the sea...but get up close and you’ll find that it is an entirely different story.

One of my favorite settings is a grassy hillside dappled with cows. You’ve seen it before: The bright green hills set against a perfect blue sky, 7 wispy clouds peacefully poofing by. (It is possible that the Windows XP background, circa-2001, has brainwashed me.) But what happens when you get up close? What happens when you park your car and hop the fence and head up that perfect hill?

Here’s what happens: It’s literally covered in shit.

Truly, just shit. Everywhere. 

Rocks. Thorns. Snakes. Shit. Not one square foot of grass that looks suitable for sitting on. Just the luckiest version of factory-farmed cows with their sweet big eyes and dangling little ear tags looking at you like: “Why the fuck are you here? This is our poop hill. Can we not find peace anywhere? Please go away.”

Because here’s the thing. Anything can look beautiful from far away, but pretty much everything is a mess if you look closely enough.

Take any natural wonder and I’ll show you the murky underside. This is the duality of life...the very nature of existence. There is no black and white, there is no perfection. Everything is all of it, all of the time.

1000 days ago I did not understand what it meant to be all of it, all of the time. I didn’t understand the complexity of the mountain that sat before me, could not grasp the nature of the climb or the difficulty of the landscape. 1000 days ago clouds were just beginning to part so that I could finally see the sun. 

Today, I am somewhere on the mountain but with the understanding that I’ll never get to the top. I climb because I need the freedom to explore and the space to be myself and the air that is fresh and new. I climb because the alternative is to tumble off of the cliffside and plummet to the river and drown. I climb for the clarity and the perspective and the views. I climb because I can feel the earth beneath my feet and it reminds me of being a child, reminds me that I’m connected to something I cannot understand, reminds me that there is mystery and adventure waiting for me. I climb not because I am headed toward a destination, but because I’m learning to revel in the challenge of the never-ending journey, because there is joy here, and beauty. Because everything I’d ever longed for - freedom and escape, peace and chaos, honesty and connection - all reside here.

I used to think life was about shutting all of the bad parts of myself out so that the beauty could shine. Now I understand that it was that manner of thinking that led me to drink in the first place. The trick isn’t to suppress who you are to be something else, it’s to see the beauty in every piece of yourself, even when it’s a total disaster, to build a life free from the confines of our shallow judgments, to recognize our shortcomings, and love ourselves anyway.

In sobriety, we are forced to grapple with every version of ourselves, who we’ve been through every season, forced to sit with whatever shame or guilt or sadness we’ve spent our lives amassing and running from. Here, there is no running. We are the beautiful shit-covered hillside. We are the mud beneath the melting snow. We are the seagull choking on cigarette butts as the sun slips slowly into the sea. (Someone please find a way to put this on my headstone.)

There is an honesty in nature not because it’s perfect, but because despite its inherent chaos, it’s still beautiful... awe-inspiring...worthy of our love and admiration.

I’m beginning to wonder if maybe we love nature not because it represents something more pure than us, but because it is just like us: a total fucking mess—-and it’s beautiful.