Ask a Sober Oldster #31: Sydney Lea
"I am 83 and if I don’t get drunk or otherwise wasted for the next few months, I will have been clean and sober for 26 years."
This monthly interview series is a collaboration between Oldster Magazine and The Small Bow, A.J. Daulerio’s excellent newsletter about recovery and mental health, and appears in both newsletters. Learn more about this collaboration in this Oldster podcast/videocast episode.
Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate, and recipient of his state’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (recently Now Look, 2024), seven volumes of personal essays (recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), Wormboy (2020), a mock epic collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka, and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines 2023). His new and selected poems, Dancing in the Dark, is due in early 2027. He is a regular contributor to Oldster. A December, 2023 interview A.J. Daulerio conducted with him on The Small Bow sparked the Sober Oldster series.
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How old are you, and how long have you been in recovery?
I am 83 and if I don’t get drunk or otherwise wasted for the next few months, I will have been clean and sober for 26 years.
How did you get there?
After years of self-deception, and efforts to use willpower to cure my malady, one night I had a moment of clarity. My wife was away and I had two very young daughters to see to, and I said to myself, You are in no condition to be a proper parent...or husband or friend or citizen.
On the outside, you see, all looked fine. I was employed by a tony college, chaired a worthy non-profit Maine conservation trust, and an organization that provided just what its name suggested, Central Vermont Adult Basic Education—designed for those who had either dropped out or finished school with insufficient literacy to be satisfied with their lives and also, increasingly, to various immigrant groups. I had published widely across the genres, won Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, and been a Pulitzer finalist. I spoke three languages...And yadda yadda.
Inside, I was a total mess—quick to anger, contentious, arrogant, but full of such self-loathing I had trouble looking in the mirror.
Twelve Step groups may not be for everybody, but they saved my life and all that’s good in it. I still attend at least three meetings a week, to carry its message to fellow substance-addicted people and to help others the way some wonderful veterans helped me. Such help as I can offer, by example not preachment, keeps me sober too.
On the outside, you see, all looked fine. I was employed by a tony college. I had published widely across the genres, won Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, and been a Pulitzer finalist…Inside, I was a total mess—quick to anger, contentious, arrogant, but full of such self-loathing I had trouble looking in the mirror.
What are the best things about being in recovery?
I have to say that the luckiest family life anyone was ever given is first and foremost. We have five children and eight grandchildren, and my relations with them would never have been what they are today—though in fact I think I’d be long since dead—if I had kept traveling that ruinous road.
I also used to thrive (well, wrong verb, probably) on resentments. If anything was going wrong in my life, it was someone else’s fault. It took me a couple of years, but I purged those resentments, most importantly toward my poor alcoholic mother. Some of her treatment of me even as an adult was of a sort I hope never to exert on members of my family. But one day I thought “You are resenting someone who had the same disease as you do, but who was not blessed—there’s no other word—with recovery.” I got over that big one right then.
I have one resentment that is “justified,” and everyone aware of the situation knows it. But a sponsor advised me in my first year that righteous indignation was something best left to people who could handle it without going wacky. Now, when the thought of this man comes to mind, it’s like the thought of a drink or drug: it’s bound to arrive, but I can just let it pass through my brain immediately and let it disappear, not dwell on it and lket it eat me up.
Another thing from early in sobriety: I heard an older woman say something that really resonated with me: “I got off the debating team.” I’d spent countless hours of my life insisting I was right about this or that. Sometimes I am, but no matter: I don’t waste any energy on pursuing such a claim. Believe me, that’s a liberation.
I could go on and on about the benefits…
What’s hard about being in recovery?
I truly must answer “nothing.” Really and truly. Early on, I was quite agoraphobic without booze to give me courage. Large groups of unfamiliar people especially cowed me. Now I can socialize even with social drinkers in whatever numbers and I’m fine...unless someone gets drunk and starts to carry on with me. I think, “God, was I that boring, arrogant, self-dramatizing, self-pitying, etc.?” And I find a way to disengage. Also, if tasked with some public presentation, I recognize that the best I can do is the best I can do. And if that’s not up to par, the world will keep on spinning.
Twelve Step groups may not be for everybody, but they saved my life and all that’s good in it. I still attend at least three meetings a week, to carry its message to fellow substance-addicted people and to help others the way some wonderful veterans helped me. Such help as I can offer, by example not preachment, keeps me sober too.
How has your character changed? What’s better about you?
I don’t pontificate, rarely lose my temper, acknowledge some others’ superiority to me with admiration and not jealousy, and have a reasonable share of life-saving humility. None of this was true of the wasted Syd.
What do you still need to work on? What “character defects” do you still wrestle with?
I can lapse into periods, less and less long, when I have a low opinion of my own worth. I think this may come down being raised by my mom, who, barred by her gender from the sort of career she was certainly bright enough to pursue, always felt she’d have done better than I, given the same educational opportunities. For some time, even in sobriety, I had trouble vacationing, lest I disobey her persistent insistence that I “apply myself.” Fact is, this self-doubt is the flip side of arrogance: in either case, I am taking myself way too seriously. I have had an extraordinary spouse for four decades-plus, and she’ll often remind me, “Your mother is dead.” Oh yeah, I think....
I used to thrive on resentments. If anything was going wrong in my life, it was someone else’s fault. It took me a couple of years, but I purged those resentments, most importantly toward my poor alcoholic mother. Some of her treatment of me was of a sort I hope never to exert on members of my family. But one day I thought “You are resenting someone who had the same disease as you do, but who was not blessed—there’s no other word—with recovery.” I got over that big one right then.
What’s the best recovery memoir you’ve ever read? Tell us what you liked about it.
Mary Karr’s Lit, hands down. For one thing, unlike some (and there are those who, having written recovery books, go back to being wasted), she waited until she had a truly extended chunk of recovery before she offered it, and was wise enough to speak self-descriptively, not prescriptively.
We also share authorial careers. Hers, needless to say, is far more distinguished than mine, but be that as it may, her accounts of a different approach to her writing resonated deeply. Her commitment to the Higher Power that our fellowship(s) refer to, and which she vigorously resisted even for some time in sobriety, became a conversion to Roman Catholicism.
Mine is a lot less orthodox and billowy—a friend once described me as a “forest Theist”—and yet I, like most of my co-conspirators, believe that something much bigger than I redeemed my soul. Who knows why? My younger brother died a cocaine addict in his 30s and a cousin drank himself to death at the same age, and there’s nothing in my character that made me “deserve” recovery more than they, who simply never got it.
What are some memorable sober moments?
Well, first, I vividly remember lying post-detox in the local hospital’s locked psych ward in utter despair. Sobriety looked like Everest to me. At 3 a.m. or so on my second night, there was no burning bush, no white light, but a very matter-of-fact voice that spoke to me, saying, simply, It’ll be all right. I felt the weight of the world lifted from me and have not felt any compulsion to drink since that night. Those sentimental about their own skepticism will claim I imagined that voice. Could be. But to me it’s still as real as Boston, NYC, or the White Mountains I see out my window. I’ve been there.
Another moment. My late friend and predecessor as our state’s poet laureate, Ellen Bryant Voigt, arranged a “wired classroom” program, in which various Vermont poets, I among them, would interact with high school students, a few in person but most online. I’d been used to public reading and speaking but had never done anything like this, and for whatever reason found myself extremely nervous beforehand. But I remember clearly standing on the granite doorstep to the venue and thinking, “Just be the authentic you; if that’s less than they hoped for, there’s nothing you can do about it.” My anxiety evaporated in that instant. I won’t speak for the students, but I really enjoyed myself.
Are you in therapy? On meds? Tell us about that.
I take a threshold dose of Wellbutrin, and did have an excellent therapist early on. She died heartbreakingly young and I haven’t felt the need for another since her death.
Early on, I was quite agoraphobic without booze to give me courage. Large groups of unfamiliar people especially cowed me. Now I can socialize even with social drinkers in whatever numbers and I’m fine...unless someone gets drunk and starts to carry on with me. I think, “God, was I that boring, arrogant, self-dramatizing, self-pitying, etc.?” And I find a way to disengage.
What sort of activities or groups do you participate in to help your recovery? (i.e. swimming, 12-step, meditation, et cetera)
Twelve step meetings, clearly. Meditation (when I remember to do it). I hike a lot, living far in the backwoods. I often paddle a kayak on the nearby Connecticut River and the lakes surrounding out little, even more backwoods Maine camp. Until my 80th year, I participated in flatwater kayak races up to 12 miles. I have recently had some health setbacks, but these have been greatly mitigated. Races or no, I mean to resume paddling hard again after ice-out. In fact, I’m planning on doing a six-miler in July.
Are there any questions we haven’t asked you that you think we should add to this? And would you like to answer it?
I think I may already have rambled on too long.
Thanks Syd 40 years ago I heard a 79 year old physician claim his second year anniversary emblem. He said: "These have been the two happiest years of my life!" I am so grateful that you and I (at a mere 82 and 7 months tomorrow) did not have to wait as long as he did for the promises to come true. It is very likely I will claim my 44the chip later this year unless I get whipped off to the great meeting in the sky prematurely.
Under the mercy
Peter
Thank you for rambling. I enjoyed every word.