When do you know it's time to stop drinking? (Also, our plan to leave Substack)

A question for Dry January

The underrated pleasures of beach volley ball / Illustration by Edith Zimmerman

Happy New Year Searchers,

It’s 2024 and we’re back with a new episode for you. In fact, we have five new episodes for you over the next five weeks. Five episodes! We hope you’ve been saving up your laundry, that you haven’t walked your dog in weeks, and that your dishes are piled up on every available surface.

This week’s episode

This week, we interview writer A.J. Daulerio about sobriety and ask him a possibly impossible question: When do you know it’s time to stop drinking?

A.J. runs one of my favorite places on the internet, The Small Bow, a newsletter that publishes essays about sobriety and recovery. The Small Bow tackles all sorts of things — substances, but also money shame, sex and love addiction, disordered eating, mental health — the gamut of modern demons.

This week’s episode is about what it’s like to build a community on the internet where people seem to be getting better, not worse. It’s also the story of AJ’s strange, decades-long journey. We hope you enjoy it.

This show marks us reaching a personal editorial goal. We have now asked all of the big question: Who, What, Where, When, and Why? (we’ve even asked How?)

Also, don’t read the below quote until you’ve finished the episode. (It’s not a spoiler, it just won’t be very meaningful.)

I received this nice email about the episode from a listener and I wanted to share it:

listening to the new episode as we speak and couldn't help but write in -- 

I completed a long term 9 month inpatient rehab in 2013. and the best days were volleyball days. had a whole group of us that went out almost every day. the nurse loved to play, so she would come pull us out of seminars and classes to go play volleyball. it was more therapeutic than most of the actual treatment. 

and the biggest plot twist of all -- I ended up having a baby with one of my rehab  volleyball teammates. we broke up years ago but still are both clean and coparenting an awesome kid. and I have rehab volleyball to thank for that. 

Reminder, the Brooklyn Search Engine Meet Up is January 26th!

Time and venue details have gone out to paid subscribers. Come, meet the team! If you’re not a paid subscriber and would like to attend, sign up!

Some of my Small Bow favorites

I wanted to share from some of my favorite Small Bow essays here in case you wanted to check out the newsletter.

Edith Zimmerman / The Small Bow

It’s OK If You’re Not Ready… — This is the essay we reference in the interview, A.J.’s story about being newly sober. It’s just very good. He describes getting home from rehab, wanting to take drugs, and searching his apartment for any he’d accidentally not thrown out. He stumbles on some anti-smoking pills:

Chantix. The prescription stop-smoking medication.

I tried and failed to quit smoking with Chantix in early 2013. These weren’t the pills I was hoping for, plus these were probably expired—but WAIT 

When I was on Chantix, I became very strange, sometimes insane. Some of the changes were comical—I developed a ridiculous sweet tooth. I regularly drank Shirley Temples and chocolate milk with margarita salt on the rim. I also ate many ice cream cakes. Once, I completely cleared out the grocery store freezer of all its Carvel products. I was not smoking, but I was also mainly subsisting on the food you’d find at an 8-year-old’s birthday party. 

I also became obsessed with online shopping, especially for shoelaces—I bought dozens of colorful shoelaces for “my sneaker collection,” but I did not have a sneaker collection. And surprisingly enough, I didn’t buy any new sneakers. But I did purchase many Moroccan throw rugs from One Kings Lane.

There was also a very dark side to my Chantixing. I got into a loud, shit-talking argument with some random dude who cut the line on me at the grocery store. He could have easily killed me with one punch, but I had Chantix muscles.

And when I’d get drunk, there were some crying fits—we’re talking horrific ugly sobs because I’d get nostalgic about past relationships or the cruel impermanence of the universe. “We’re all so small and doomed!” It was awful.

With all this historical evidence at my disposal, a reasonable human being would finally throw the Chantix into the trash. Not me, though: I saw an escape hatch. I wanted to scrape off the dull crud of early sobriety and take one last New Year’s Eve to be what I considered the best version of me, even if that version of me was perilously deluded.

Chantix takes two weeks to enter the bloodstream, so swallowing them was pointless. Here was my next idea: smash it all up and stick this Chantix up my ass. It worked for Stevie Nicks, right? I have no problem doing that at all. It would not be the first drug I’ve crammed in there. Besides, what’s the worst thing that could happen? I stop smoking?

I had the pills out on a wooden cutting board, a hammer in my hand, but then I came to my senses. What kind of person thinks like this? A drug addict kind of person. I was a drug addict.

I set the hammer down and threw the Chantix away. I smoked three cigarettes instead.

Edith Zimmerman / The Small Bow

What’s the Point of Truth If It Destroys Hope? — This is a reported essay about former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Ford died in 2016. He was infamous for a string of scandals, in the most memorable one, he was caught on tape smoking crack. This is a story about A.J. trying to track down the truth of a rumor that Ford was sober for two years before he died. But, like anything great, it’s about more than that. Highly recommend it.

A Really Bad Day - This isn’t actually an essay from The Small Bow, it’s an episode of the companion podcast to the newsletter, which is called Really Good Shares. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve heard in years. I don’t know why more people don’t talk about it.

A.J. in conversation with the author James Frey. Frey wrote a popular recovery memoir called A Million Little Pieces, which turned out to have been partly fabricated. It was a big scandal, the world landed on James’s head for a moment. The interview is about how someone would move on from something like that.

It contains a scene I would not have expected involving a Hell’s Angel. It contains another scene that involves Oprah Winfrey being very human and compassionate in a way that really moved me.

Really Good Shares is on hiatus right now, which is too bad. It’s a criminally underrated show.

We’re planning to leave Substack

Our plan is to switch to a platform that might feel like a better fit for us. Ideally, one that allows us to provide, in exchange for your financial support, some of the extras our listeners have actually asked for.

We’re talking to a few companies, and we expect to make a decision and begin our move in February. When that happens, your existing paid Search Engine subscription will roll over. You won’t need to sign up for anything new, and you won’t need to cancel anything.

But for now, thanks for listening. We will let you know where we’re going once we know.

Yours in strange times,

PJ