In November, my wife and I had decided to take some time apart. When she came back to New York City three week later, I was waiting for her at our apartment, and she told me without hesitation that she was done. It hit me very hard, not a total shock, but my life was upended. We had been together for ten years. I had taken a passive role and shriveled inward. I wasn’t giving the attention or time to the relationship that I should have been, and I was mostly high and unpleasant to be around. Of course, at the time I thought I had done little wrong. My ego got the best of me.
The next day I woke up early and alone in a shitty hotel room in Chinatown on the Bowery. I was escaping to Atlanta to see my family and then going to Alaska to produce a campaign for a big outdoor lifestyle brand. On that flight to Atlanta, the longest two-hour flight in history, I decided to get sober.
I concluded that I needed to be sober to handle my new situation, to actually understand and process what I was feeling. I wanted it all to hit me at once in real time, as it was happening. Drugs had allowed me to bob and weave, to hide. I knew this was too big to avoid; it needed to be taken head-on.
Alaska in December, as you can imagine, was literally and figuratively dark for me. I woke up every morning and hit the hotel gym. It was quiet, almost eerily so, the entire town was muffled in snow and gloom. The sun came up at 10 A.M. and went down at 3 P.M., and the days were short and grey. But I felt motivated. Exercise was the only thing keeping me sane. Normally, a week photographing glaciers, riding on prop planes, and dog mushing at sundown would have been fun, but I felt blank, outcast, and most of all unmoored. I left Anchorage and went back to Atlanta for the most depressing Christmas I will ever have.
I was driving around my hometown in a rental car listening to melodramatic rock ballads, replaying all the events that had gotten me here. How bad had I been? Had I fully checked out of the relationship? Did my depression make me impossible to be around? Was the drug use just too much to bear? I had always prided myself on being sure, always confident in my decisions and my actions, but now I was questioning everything.
After an excruciating and decidedly unfestive week in Atlanta, I decamped to Los Angeles. Generous friends were leaving town and offered up their Los Feliz apartment, which sat at Hillhurst and Franklin. I had three and a half weeks of sunshine to drink cold brew, eat grain bowls, and try and understand what had just happened. I was taking stock of my crumbling life while getting a nice base tan.
Being in Los Angeles and not using drugs, particularly not smoking weed, felt sacrilegious. I had only experienced my favorite city in a cloud of Sour Diesel. Driving down Sunset Boulevard blasting Fleetwood Mac and smoking a perfectly rolled blunt was my happy place.
But that was no longer an option—instead, I forced myself to rise at the crack of dawn to do reps at Body Builders on Hyperion, sprints at Barry’s Bootcamp on Hollywood Boulevard, or long sun-drenched hikes in Griffith Park with my friend Jason. Like a lot of New Yorkers in their mid-thirties, most of my friends had moved to L.A. to escape the breakneck pace, extreme weather, and outrageous rents. For those three and a half weeks I was surrounded and supported. I still felt crazy and a little unhinged, but I had people that cared about me, people I could intimately discuss my mindstate with.
While I was in L.A., on a whim, a group chat was formed to make planning easier. That’s how things work there. People in Los Angeles love group chats, it’s the easiest way to let all your friends know you are going to be late because of traffic on the 101. It was my first one; they seemed like wastelands of unnecessary communication, and the idea of them had always turned me off. (Even though secretly I still longed for the days of BlackBerry Messenger.) My introduction to group chats included myself and four male friends; three of us had been through breakups recently, and I think in some way, subconsciously, we all needed a place to congregate. Discussing my situation in person, with anyone, could happen anywhere—at Proof Bakery in Atwater Village, in a Prius with Primal Scream playing softly in the background, or while waiting for a table at Din Tai Fung. But the less intimate stuff, the stuff that actually kept me sane, took place in a group chat. There was always a place to go for support, to get roasted, or to discuss workout regimens. It never got overly serious or emotional, but that constant conversation about mostly trivial things (sneakers, food, rap music, memes, etc.) could keep me occupied, and allow my mind to drift to a happier and less serious place. I never even felt the need to put it on “do not disturb.”
As my flight back to New York City approached, I felt an uneasiness wash over me. In Terminal 2 at LAX, full-on dread set in. Was New York City still even my home? I got back the second week of January and found an apartment in the East Village and a therapist in Union Square. I continued to exercise almost every day. It seems silly to say, but this group chat was a huge part of keeping me on track after I got back to New York. Even after I had departed, the chat was littered with uplifting and supportive messages like, “When Chris was cool and did drugs, he'd rent a black Chevy Impala and we’d listen to Young Dro and drive to The Grove. Now he wakes up before coffee shops open and drives to Barry’s Bootcamp blasting music thats so painfully caucasian it makes Taylor Swift look like George Clinton.”
This year for my 35th birthday, the group chat had a private workout led by a trainer in Los Angeles. It was a great departure (replacing 8-balls with kettlebells) of my birthday celebrations in the past. But the choice to do it illustrated how far I had come: I had been broken, and with the help of this thing I used to think was silly, my West Coast friends had become an invaluable support system. With a continuous SMS stream, sobriety, my therapist, and the gym, I feel like myself again. Almost. It’s been over a year and I haven’t even considered putting the chat on “do not disturb.”
Chris Black is a partner at Public Announcement. Follow him on Twitter.
