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On the very therapeutic Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers album, Kendrick Lamar told us that “you ain’t felt grief ’til you felt it sober.” He’s not referring to just drugs and alcohol, but any activity that impedes emotional processing and authentic Presence. Unsurprisingly, I think he’s on to something.

The adage “time heals all” is well-known and well-intentioned, but a bit misleading—rehabilitation is by no means an automatic process. If healing really was just a waiting game, then anything that helps you kill a few hours, in theory, would be useful. But time does not heal all, and many of the things we use to numb our pain are only sophisticated forms of intoxication; a desperate, perhaps even unconscious, effort to keep uncomfortable thoughts and inconvenient truths away from our psyche. I’ve never been one for substance abuse, but I do excel at other means of running away from my own baggage.

In fact, just this last week, I was chatting with a friend about the importance of community, and the tension between relying on a friend group while still maintaining a healthy degree of self-sufficiency.

“The people can’t always be there,” my friend reminded me. True!

And from somewhere deep inside my comically fractured ego, one of my aberrant personalities sent an intrusive thought to the forefront of my mind with such surprising volume that I almost made myself jump:

“People aren’t always there — but the work is,” I told myself.

Nothing like catching a stray from your own conscience, amiright?

Jiminy Cricket had a point though. Most methods of self-medication have a time limit and even healthy means of coping have their fail points. It’s difficult to stay drunk all the time and there will inevitably be a moment that you have to face yourself in isolation. Perhaps that’s why I like to make productivity my poison—because there is always another task that I can assign myself: another room that needs to be cleaned, another skill that needs to be learned, another report that needs to be filed, another paper that needs to be turned in, another blog that needs to be written. Yes… progress is my favorite form of procrastination and productivity my preferred guard against processing. I’m working on it.

Of course, the catch twenty-two here will not be surprising to most people. If I move fast enough then the negative emotion can’t catch me, but neither can the good stuff. Gratitude, Delight, and Beauty are like a first kiss— they require a deep breath and low velocity. This may ruin metaphor by taking it too far; but you might say that toxic productivity is smoking his cigarette before deep healing even takes her clothes off. It’s a bad look.

All this to say, I am leaning more and more into the commas and periods of my weekly rhythms. Life is a gift and nothing can waste it with more efficiency than being perfectly efficient all the time. Transformation isn’t found in the busyness, but in stillness—and in taking long views.

With Sobriety,

Bradley