Unreliable Narrator

An interview with a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn, who started lying to herself about her relationship to alcohol and God. And afterwards wondered: when did it start? Why did it happen? How do you make peace with the part of yourself that wants something that could destroy you? Meghan O’Gieblyn, Will and Attention https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/778492/will-and-attention-by-meghan-ogieblyn/ Sign up for Incognito Mode https://searchengine.supercast.com/#subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:29PJ Vogt?

  I had this experience recently, maybe you'll recognize it. I saw a friend, someone I love. This friend is somebody who is some of the time sober and some of the time not. And I was pretty sure I could tell he'd slipped. He was trying to hide it, but it seemed to me that he was in the part of the cycle where the addiction was just too strong for him to be very convincing, which of course made me sad. I felt worried for him, but also I felt his loneliness. Like, I wanted to help him, but he didn't want to be helped, or seen, or noticed. There was a voice in his head that was telling him, "Everything's fine." And also adding, "But make sure nobody notices."

• 1:12PJ Vogt?

  I was imagining this anyway, because I have heard that voice myself. I think of it as the second voice in my mind. Right now, October 2026, I think that voice is obeying me. But I also know that when it's disobeyed me, I didn't notice. Every time I've driven my own life towards a crisis, I'd started it by lying to myself, long before I'd started lying to anybody else.

• 1:39PJ Vogt?

  That place is a lonely place that I think everybody will visit at least once. And this week, I wanted our entire episode to be an interview with a writer who I think has really captured what it's like when you're in that place, after the second voice in your head has just taken over. The writer is named Megan O'Giblin. Her stunning new memoir is called Will and Detention. Megan has a singular mind. We talked for a couple hours about sobriety, relapse, what it's like to have faith and lose it, the kind of conversation I'm always looking for, about the questions that can be hard to talk about.

• 2:17PJ Vogt?

  Hello.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 2:19PJ Vogt?

  Can you say your name and what you do?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yep, I am Megan O'Giblin, and I'm a writer and essayist. I have written a lot about Christianity, so I grew up in a fundamentalist family, went to Bible school for a couple of years in my late teens, early twenties, and ended up having a crisis of faith, left that whole world. And yeah, fell into an addiction around that time and started drinking, taking a lot of pills, kind of crashed and burned my life in my late twenties and got sober. And then I started writing during that time. I wrote about Christianity. I wrote a little bit about technology, which I became interested in, and the relationship between technology and spirituality.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  And this book is really sort of looking back at that experience, and particularly through this other sort of midlife crisis I had, where I started drinking after 10, after 11 years, actually, of being sober.

• 3:19PJ Vogt?

  And what was your early childhood in a family of a fundamentalist faith? Like, what strain of fundamentalism was it? Like, what did your family believe? What did you believe?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I should say that my family would not identify themselves as fundamentalists. This is always sort of a label that you point at other people. But they were non-denominational evangelicals. And, I mean, I say we were fundamentalists because, you know, I was taught six-day creationism, that God actually created the world in six days. We were taught that, you know, Christ was going to return probably very, very soon in the future. The faith I was raised in was really focused on the end times and this idea that history was going to get worse and worse, and there was going to be tribulations, and all of these horrible natural disasters, and eventually would lead to the destruction of the world.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  And, yeah, so I grew up, like, not really having a strong sense of the future, because there was this sense that we weren't going to be around for very long, that life as we knew it was going to be disrupted by this major eschatological event.

• 4:31PJ Vogt?

  I think when people, like, the kind of people who listen to podcasts where people talk about their, like, very literary memoirs often are not people who grew up with that kind of faith. And I think if you're on that other side of the line, one of the things that people wonder about, something that I wonder about, is just what that kind of faith is like. Like, when you were young and you believed that sort of all this apocalyptic tribulation was coming, did you believe in that the way you believe that there will be winter this year? Or did you believe in it the way you believe in climate change? Or did you believe in it as something that sometimes you had a hard time believing in, that you had to work to believe? Like, what did it feel like to believe that?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I should say, too, it changed a lot. Like, when I was a child, it was more so this absolute belief, and these are the facts. I remember our pastor, when I was a kid, used to say that he firmly believed that Christ was going to return within his lifetime, and he was in his seventies. So, you know, that was sort of my, my feeling of like, all right, well, you know, am I going to even apply for college? That kind of thing. So, really, really real when I was growing up. You know, as I got into my teenage years and started to know people who did not believe the same thing I did, it became a little bit more, I don't want to say abstract, but I became aware that this was a belief that not everybody had, and that had to be defended,

• 6:02Speaker 01

  and had to be rationalized in some way. And that was actually, you know, despite all of that, that was not sort of the seed of my deconversion. It was really more so the theology itself in the Bible that started to undo my faith in this problem, which is sometimes called theodicy, the problem of evil, which a lot of theologians have dealt with. Like, if there is a benevolent, all-powerful God, does evil exist in the world? Why can't he stop it? And that was a question that I wrestled with when I was studying theology, and that I didn't really receive good answers to at the time. You know, I think one actually inciting event, you know, I was sort of struggling with this problem.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  You know, I was, the beginning of my sophomore year that 9/11 happened. And, you know, there was this huge tragedy where so many people died this senseless death, which seemed to beg an explanation. And I think the explosion of interest in religion and people going back to church in the wake of that experience signaled that I wasn't, you know, the only person who was sort of left with that question. But it was also this stuff that, like, people were saying about the terrorists, actually, and this idea that, like, these were people who had absolutely committed faith, like, probably a faith that was stronger than my own, but in a different religious system, and a different particular ideology that they'd been exposed to, that they really

• 7:31Speaker 01

  believed what they were doing was good. And I thought, like, well, that is, like, if that's not faith, that is, at its most extreme, a deluded faith. And then that started to bring up this question of, like, well, am I deluded too? You know, what is it about my faith that makes it real? And I wasn't totally able to answer that question.

• 7:49PJ Vogt?

  And then what does it mean? Like, how did you announce that you were leaving?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I didn't announce it. It was a slow process. I mean, I, my parents were so opposed to me leaving Bible school that I had to maneuver this, like, really complicated exit strategy, which involved going to the mission field in Ecuador, basically join a community of Christians that were trying to spread the gospel in a particular place in the world. And I don't know why, it was easier at that point to leave when I was sort of out of the country and felt like I was less under the thumb of, you know, people of authority in my life and my friends back at Moody and everything. So, yeah, I kind of just, like, slipped under the radar for a year there, and a lot of my drinking took off there, too. I had stopped going to church at that point, stopped praying.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  And I eventually came back to Chicago after that and spent basically the next eight years working in bars and restaurants. And that was when my drinking really started to take off.

• 8:51PJ Vogt?

  And this, maybe this question is, like, so obvious, but I don't know, what was the relationship? Like-

• 9:00PJ Vogt?

  Leaving your faith meant leaving community, identity, the framework you were using to understand the world. Like, that is, it's a bunch of unmooring experiences at the same time. But I don't want to make assumptions. Like, why did your drinking take off at the same time that you were leaving your faith?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I'm like, a little bit suspicious of etiology, just because it's very possible that I started drinking just because I'm an alcoholic. I do have some alcoholism in my family. And maybe that would have happened regardless of whether I had left the faith or not. But it's really hard not to connect it to that experience of losing faith. And, I mean, what I think I really lost, when I lost the faith, it wasn't even the, the loss of God that I was grieving the most. Because God, I don't know, God had always been kind of this abstraction to me. Like, I never felt like I had this very personal relationship, the way that a lot of people I grew up with did. It was more so the sense

• 9:58Speaker 01

  that life didn't have any meaning, and that history was not going anywhere. You know, like, we did have this sort of like, dark apocalyptic view of history when I was growing up in the church. But there was at least some sort of telos, like, everything that happened in the world had a purpose and was part of God's plan. And then suddenly, I'm in this world where, no, everything is just random, and there's no point. And why does it matter what I do? And that, you know, it's funny, I, I like, read a lot of Russian novels around this time in my life, because I was, basically, I think I was experiencing, like, what everyone in the West experienced in the 19th century, this idea that, like, if God does not exist, everything is permitted. But I was like, experiencing it solo, like,

• 10:43Speaker 01

  everyone else I knew who was secular was like, yeah, of course, what's the big deal? But it was really traumatic for me. And yeah, I mean, I think the drinking grew out of that sense of, either, like, everything is permitted, so why wouldn't I do this? It was the thing I wanted to do the most. Or, yeah, just maybe some sort of coping mechanism to try to escape this, you know, what set in was a really deep depression during that time.

• 11:09PJ Vogt?

  And how did you feel about your drinking then? Like, did it feel like something you were doing wrong? Or, or like, you were drinking too much? Or, did it just seem like, I had a set of rules I had to live by, I don't believe in that set of rules anymore. And this is one of the many things that I just don't think that much about?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny, I didn't feel that bad about drinking. I felt really bad about smoking cigarettes. And I felt bad about having sex by drinking. Drinking, I don't know if it was the sort of anesthetizing feeling, where it's like, you immediately have sort of all these bad feelings disappear. So, I think the thing about alcoholics, too, is that we're really good at seeking out other people who drink the way we do, so as to normalize it. So, a lot of the people that I was spending time with during that period of my life were very heavy drinkers, if not addicts, all sorts of people that made it feel like I wasn't the only one. And I was also in my twenties, you know, so some of that, I think, just seemed like what was normal for that time.

• 12:10PJ Vogt?

  Were you, you're working in bars, like, what are your twenties look like? Like, what does your life look like?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I was living in Chicago for most of that time. I lived in Pilsen, just a neighborhood a little bit south of the Loop. And I worked in several different bars and restaurants. I worked at a jazz club for several years, where almost everyone who was working there was probably an alcoholic, in hindsight. We, we all drank at work on our shifts. And I was often so drunk at the end of the night, I couldn't count out my drawer. And, yeah, I was a blackout drinker. I was a blackout drinker almost right from the start. So, I would just continue past that point where it was enjoyable, actually. To the point where I would, yeah, I would lose consciousness. And I was taking other drugs at that time,

• 12:59Speaker 01

  too. I was taking a lot of Adderall and Uppers when I was drinking. So, I would, this happens with a lot of people who are heavy drinkers, too. They try to find other drugs to help them drink more.

• 13:08PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Or help them stay clear, you know? And for me, what Adderall did was, it just allowed me to have fully functional blackouts, where I was like, driving my car down the Dan Ryan in a complete state of unconsciousness. Like, I would get up in the morning, sometimes, and have no memory of where I had parked my car. And I would be like, wandering around the block, like, just searching for where my car was. And then I would find it, like, often, like, in a perfect parallel park job, or messy parallel park job, sometimes. Or sometimes I wouldn't find it all, and it turns out it's in the impound, you know, just these masses of waking up and having no clue what you did the night before.

• 13:45PJ Vogt?

  Would you feel afraid?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was afraid. I mean, I started having really bad withdrawal. And part of that was this sort of panic, feeling like you're going to die. And there were several points where I was like, okay, I have to, I have to give this up, you know, especially when I started to get into my late twenties. And it started to become clear that, like, not everybody was drinking this way, you know? And it was taking this physical toll. I was really worried about what it was doing to my mind. Like, I would do, I would do crossword puzzles every day after I'd been drinking, just to like, you know, if I can finish this, and that means I'm okay, and I can continue drinking. Because I knew, like, the effects of blackouts on the brain and all of this. But despite those

• 14:31Speaker 01

  consequences, yeah, I was not able to stop. I would go sometimes for like, you know, I would say, like, I'm gonna go for a month without drinking. And I'd make it to the weekend sometimes. Sometimes I would make it like, two weeks, and then talk myself back into it. And the thing was, like, when I stopped drinking, I felt really miserable. Like, miserable in a different way, you know, not like my life is chaos, but that everything is just sort of flat, and nothing means anything. And, yeah, I would inevitably just end up returning to it.

• 15:02PJ Vogt?

  And at that point, like, did the question of whether you were an alcoholic, sort of, break the surface of the front of your mind? Or, like, how did you understand what was going on?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  There was a lot of justification. Like, I used to think, oh, I'm just a very passionate, extreme person, and I do everything to the max, you know? That kind of thinking. And eventually, you know, as I started having more consequences, I think I started to realize that I was an alcoholic. So, there was some awareness there, but it was like, this weird, you know, I talk about this problem in the book, actually, which is where, like, part of you knows something is wrong, but you keep doing it anyway.

• 15:48PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  And there's this problem that, like, the Greek philosophers used to call, akraisia, which is basically weakness of will. And they said, like, basically, anybody who knows what they're doing is wrong, will stop doing it. And if you're doing something wrong, that's because you lack knowledge. And I always could not understand that idea, because I've gone through so many periods of my life where I knew something was wrong, and I did it anyway. And it felt like I wasn't able to do the things that I approved of. I kept doing the things that I disapproved of. But I do think there's some truth to that idea about knowledge, where it's like, if you keep doing something, that you say, you know, you're sent intellectually to the fact that this is wrong, but you keep doing

• 16:32Speaker 01

  it, some deeper part of you doesn't really believe it's wrong, you know? Like, maybe it's the unconscious part of you, or it's your revealed preference, as opposed to your stated preference. But there, there is some sort of lack of, of knowledge there. And I think that was where I was for years, with drinking, where, you know, I, I knew on some level that I should probably stop, but at the same time, I was just not willing to do that, and didn't really understand just how bad the consequences would get.

• 17:02PJ Vogt?

  It was like, there was a part of your mind that knew it was a problem, and that it needed to be fixed. And then, there was some deeper part of your mind that just disagreed with that, that you couldn't access, you think?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was largely unconscious. Like, I remember so many times, I would wake up feeling miserable. And I would write these, like, screeds to myself in my journal. Like, you gotta get your shit together. This is ruining your life. Here's all the ways in which this is ruining your life. And I would write that, and like, I would feel really good afterwards, like, okay, I put it, I put it down, I know what's right. And then I would immediately go to the bar after that. Like, it didn't make any sense. And, you know, I don't know, I think anybody who's had a really serious addiction has gone through that experience, where it's almost like you're taking actions that are contrary to what you want, or what you feel that you want. But those actions are also what you

• 17:55Speaker 01

  want, right? There's this sort of disconnect between two different desires within you, that you can't seem to reconcile.

• 18:03PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, it was funny, one of the things, reading your book, that I found, it wasn't a feeling of reassurance, reassurance is a wrong feeling. But, this is an embarrassing thing to just say, so you're so smart. Like, you, you just have, like, an astonishing mind. And you're describing just making the normal mistakes that anyone in an addictive relationship will make. And being able to see someone else's mind struggle with that, to me, what it really underlined is that the part of you that, like, knows the good, that wants to do the good, and the part of you that disagrees, have access to the exact same amount of intellectual horsepower?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is the most insidious thing about addiction or any type of self deception is when you think that you're acting within the guidelines of your higher self, but you're actually, it's actually your lower self that's sort of disguising itself, right?

• 19:03PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Where you have this, this feeling like, okay, I'm gonna do this because this is the rational thing to do, but it's actually your addiction that's completely hijacked your mind.

• 19:13PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  So I wrote about, um, in the book, like during the relapse, there were times when I had a speaking gig. So I was, I was basically just drinking when I was away on work trips for a period of time. And there were times when, you know, I was booking my travel for a speaking gig and I was like, of course I'm not gonna drink this time. I always said, you know, this time, I, that was the last time was the last, this time I'm not going to do it. But I'm booking my flight and I'm like, uh, should I get the early morning flight or choose a later flight? Um, and so I would choose the later flight and I would have all these reasons like, oh, you know, I'll, I'll be able to get breakfast at the

• 19:54Speaker 01

  hotel before I leave. It'll, you know, it'll be better for XYZ reason, all of these things that were ostensibly rational. But the truth is that I knew I was gonna be drunk and hungover that morning and was not gonna be able to make an early flight. But there was, again, the part of myself that knew that that reason I was completely cut off from. And I would recognize it sometimes in hindsight, but I just didn't have access to that part of my mind at the time.

• 20:18PJ Vogt?

  I think what I want to be true, and I don't think it is true, is that there's some final battle where you're like, one's wiser mind defeats the other guy, you know, like the self-destructive imp. And like, if you meditate enough, or you're honest enough, or, you know, you meet with your psychiatrist enough times, like that there is some practice after which you could say like, I am in harmony, you know? And because your story is a recovery story, I mean, it's a relapse story and it's a recovery story. I was like, there was parts where I said to myself, oh, well, this is what writing is for, you know? Writing is a place where so often when I've written, you know, personal writing, retrospective

• 21:03PJ Vogt?

  writing, I have found that it is like an amplifier for a wiser part of me. The person who I am, when I'm writing sentences, often is a lot smarter than the person I am when I'm making decisions. But the person who makes bad decisions is fantastically capable at prose as well. Like, that person is also great at being like, no, no, no, let me tell you why you need the later flight. Like, that person's voice, they don't present themselves cleanly. Like, the one disguises is the other one, and it's so vexing.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I certainly felt that when I was writing the book. Like, there would be times where I was writing about drinking and I would go back and read it and was like, this was written by my alcoholism. Like, there's like moments where I'm kind of romanticizing drinking, or, you know, I'm downplaying the consequences. And yeah, I did, I had to do a lot of revision for this book for precisely that reason, where, you know, I think anytime you're writing about an addiction or any kind of self deception, like, you're an unreliable narrator. And the idea was to go back over that and try to weed out the half-truths,

• 22:14Speaker 01

  the lies, all of these things that were not the truth essentially. And I mean, there's limits to what you can do, because, you know, I don't have access totally to the truth and can't see everything about myself. But I do think there's a process by which, like, writing about this, I was able to bring those selves into harmony a little bit, which is not to say that I obliterated the doubleness. Like, I think that's, that's one thing I realized by the end of this project, was that there's this ideal state of wholeness that I think is the motivation for so many religious disciplines or spiritual disciplines, this idea that like, oh, if I can finally let go of my ego, I'll finally be at peace

• 22:57Speaker 01

  with myself and I won't be arguing with myself and I will just, you know, know what's good and do it. And that's also the, the appeal, or it was for me of intoxication, this idea that you're kind of silencing that second self that's always watching and judging you. Carl Jung actually wrote about the first time that he drank, and he said that he had always had these two selves inside of him, that he called them number one and number two. And he said, the first time that they merged into one self was the first time he drank. And I don't know, I'm interested in that question of like, can, can we ever reach this, that state of wholeness? Um, and what does that look like? Like, I've experienced

• 23:38Speaker 01

  it only in glimpses. And I, I do feel like I've gotten close to it through writing, but to a certain extent, I think we need the doubleness in order to function. I mean, it's to some extent, it is just the human condition.

• 23:51PJ Vogt?

  Why do you think we need it in order to function?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  I mean, what we're talking about in a way is just self-awareness, right? Like, I think this is something that distinguishes humans from machines or from animals. Not just that we have desires, but that we can want different desires, or we can critique our desires, or try to, you know, talk back to these trains of thought that we have going through our minds all the time. And I think it's also true that it's, it's like impossible to have a moral life if you don't have that second self within you, right? Because this is the part of ourselves that's reflective, that can interrogate, you know? Like, what you're saying is not actually true, what you're believing is actually false. Hannah

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Arendt wrote about this in one of her essays. She talked about how consciousness in a lot of languages is like really closely etymologically linked to conscience. She called consciousness the two-in-one. So this idea that in order to have a moral life, you have to be able to be in dialogue with yourself. You have to be able to argue with yourself and witness yourself. And the people who shut down that second part of themselves, you know, her example was Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the major architects of the Holocaust. And she talked about how he had sort of just deferred to bureaucratic cliches and was not at all aware of this enormous self-deception that was required in order to carry out those crimes.

• 25:22PJ Vogt?

  It's funny though, because you'd imagine, I mean, I don't know what it felt like inside of Eichmann's mind, but I bet that to him, it felt like harmony. Like, if the feeling you're looking for is like quiet, the base, aggressive, selfish, cruel, hedonistic, whatever that second voice is for you, the feeling that it's finally been conquered could also be the feeling that actually it's finally taken the wheel. Like, if, if what she was saying was, he took the, the part of himself that monitors himself to figure out if what he's doing is right off and just handed it over to like Nazi bureaucracy, it probably felt amazing. Like, he probably felt untroubled, because the part of him that troubled himself had been vanquished. Do you know what I mean?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's so many paradoxes when you start talking about the inner life, which, I mean, I think this is a great example, is like, yeah, we can be unthinking in a way that's virtuous, or unthinking in a way that is really awful. Simone Weil, who I write about a lot in the book, writes about how the ultimate goal of a spiritual life is to act automatically. Like, she said, you should eventually get to a point where you desire the good so fiercely that when you are placed in a moment of temptation, where you're faced with, you know, a moral dilemma, somebody who's suffering, you don't hesitate to act, you just act, right? You don't sit there and deliberate the way that

• 26:47Speaker 01

  most of us do. She uses the phrase automaton at one point, this idea that you should almost act like a robot, like, to seek the good without any sort of conflict or friction. And that, to me, initially, I was like, this seems wrong, because

• 27:03PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  you don't wanna go through life unthinking, and what if you're Eichmann and you're doing something unthinking, but you're doing something awful? And what I think that, that she was actually saying is that, like, you wanna get to that place eventually with being able to choose the good automatically, but you don't do it through just shutting off your brain, because that's when you start just deferring to social convention. And if you're in a bad social situation, for example, like Eichmann was, you're gonna open yourself up to getting steered into bad actions. But her idea of attention, which she writes about a lot, was that you, you should be constantly paying attention to your thoughts and paying attention to the good that you want to pursue, to the point where that daily form of thinking

• 27:49Speaker 01

  produces the effect of being able to act automatically, right? So it's, it's more so that that ease of action grows out of this long practice of daily attuning your mind to whatever good you're trying to pursue through daily acts of attention. And that actually requires a lot of work and a lot of thought. But the idea is that when you're in that moment, thought is not gonna help you, because you've already essentially become the person who's going to take that action.

• 28:15PJ Vogt?

  Is that something that you believe, or is it something that is closer to like faith, something that you would like to be able to believe?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  It's something that I do believe. I mean, I think any sort of spiritual practice requires some measure of faith. And I think the thing that makes me most convinced of its truth is because I've experienced the opposite. You know, when I relapsed, for example... I spent months before that fantasizing about drinking. And it seemed like really innocent fantasies. It was kind of like, oh, well, you know, of course I'm not going to act on this. But I'm in an airport waiting for my flight bored. Maybe I'll just look into this bar and think about what I would order if I was drinking and how that would feel. And those thoughts, they were happening entirely in my mind, but they gathered force over

• 29:04Speaker 01

  time and they gathered their own momentum. And when I was actually presented with an opportunity to drink where I thought I could get away with it, it felt like I didn't have a choice.

• 29:15PJ Vogt?

  Because you're in your mind, it was as if it's the inverse of what she describes. You're saying like, in your mind, what you had thought of as just sort of idle fantasies had been that part of your mind rehearsing. And so then when the opportunity came, it was automatic.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it had become such a deep part of my beliefs and my desires and my mental landscape that by the time I had the choice, it was like I was destined or fated to take the drink.

• 29:48PJ Vogt?

  You talk about, you write about in your book, how this sort of workaround that the part of you that rationalizes developed was not ordering drinks verbally, but ordering drinks using QR codes. Can you just talk about that?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is during the pandemic. And, you know, part of this like fantasy life that I developed about drinking was I would always get to this point where I imagined myself going into the bar and ordering a drink. And I just could not imagine myself actually saying it out loud. And I don't know why that was. It felt like it was the moment when it would become real, you know, when the fantasy where actually speaking aloud to another person, this thing that I had built my whole life around avoiding was going to be this, this final blow where I couldn't actually say it out loud. And then, yeah, lo and behold, these QR codes started appearing at restaurants and bars where you could put in an order without actually talking to anybody.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  You didn't have to speak your sin aloud. And that was, um, yeah, the first time that I got like really drunk. It was because I, I used a QR code to, to order a drink and then many more drinks after that. Um, and it felt like, it felt like a loophole in a way. Like, I felt like I had sort of created this condition, like, oh, of course I'm not going to drink. Of course, this is just a fantasy because I'm not going to actually be able to say that thing out loud. And then as soon as that barrier was removed, it was like, okay, the universe has granted me permission.

• 31:21PJ Vogt?

  Hmm.

• 31:31PJ Vogt?

  We're going to take a short break. When we return, what it felt like for Meghan to surrender to something she'd been trying not to.

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• 32:23PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back.

• 32:25PJ Vogt?

  What did it feel like to surrender to this thing that you'd organized your life around not surrendering? Like, what was the experience of drinking again after having not had a drink in so long?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel really uneasy about sharing this, um, just because, I'll say for one thing that I would never share this in a meeting with people who are trying to stay sober, because the focus is always supposed to be on like how awful it was and how much you regret it. But it was amazing. Yeah, it was like, you know, all of this spiritual work that I've been trying to do to escape myself, to shut down this hypercritical mind that I suffer from. Like, none of that had worked as effectively as just taking a drink and all of that was gone in a second. And, you know, I don't know what it is about me. I'm, I'm wired in such a way that I don't experience alcohol the way that normal drinkers do.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I experience it as something like religious rapture, you know, this feeling of totally transcending yourself. And I wanted to write about that in the book because it was important for me to be honest about, you know, this is the thing that keeps me hooked. Like, it got bad. It got really, really bad. But I, I think just in terms of like trying to explain addiction to somebody who doesn't have that kind of relationship to alcohol or to any substance, like, I, I do feel like it's important to emphasize, like, this is the thing, like, this is what we're seeking. And it is a sort of spiritual experience. And I think that the, the thing that a lot of people are seeking in spirituality is very similar to what we seek in substances.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  There's this parable in the New Testament about the pearl of great price. And it's the story of this guy who, um, is just like obsessed with this one invaluable pearl. And he ends up selling all of his possessions and like divesting himself of everything he owns just so he can have this one pearl. And it's this completely senseless act. I mean, by like, you know, any sort of rational standards. But I've always felt that way about alcohol, that it's, it's this, it's this object that is so intrinsically desired for its own sake, that I have and was, you know, ready to sacrifice everything for it. It was, it was something that you couldn't really weigh against other things in your life.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  It had this almost like totemic power to it. And what I found in this is that, you know, in sobriety, like you have to find some other pearl, essentially. You have to find something else that is so good for its own sake, whether it's, you know, a moral ideal, or whether it's God, or whether it is some idea of beauty that you're trying to work toward, um, something that is just good and right for its own sake, that that's really the only thing that's going to keep you away from the substance.

• 35:21PJ Vogt?

  The other sort of like, um, you have this relapse into alcoholism. And then the way you describe it, it's like a, a relapse into faith, but you start sort of secretly, without letting your partner know, without letting people in your life know, like pursuing Catholicism. And I'm curious, like, can you tell me about that? And can you tell me why you think that those things happened at the same time?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Well, there's something really similar about surrendering to God and surrendering to substances. I was, you know, going to mass largely just because I wanted to forget myself. You know, I wanted to surrender to something that was bigger than me, which is what, you know, taking alcohol was always like too. It's this feeling of letting go that brings this enormous sense of relief for people who are predisposed to, to feel that way.

• 36:14PJ Vogt?

  Reading your story, I think one of the reasons people struggle with sobriety is that life feels ordinary and boring and sobriety feels like giving something up. And it feels in the beginning, empty. And then their lives fill with all these things, hopefully. And after a while, it doesn't feel that way. And I think from the outside, your life looked that way. You write terrific books that people love. You have like partnership, you have friends, but then there's like a passion with which you pursue relapse and a passion with which for a while you pursue religion. And it feels like a person who was like waiting 11 years to get out. And I guess I'm curious, like, is that what your interior life felt like before that happened?

• 36:58PJ Vogt?

  Or were you surprised to know that that was in you at that intensity and volume?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I mean, I think some of what you're describing, I, I recognize as like this feeling almost of boredom with how stable my life was.

• 37:12PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Which is something that, ah, I think this is like one of the most assiduous things about addiction too, is like, once you finally are in a place where you've, you know, surrendered, I'm an addict, your life gets better. And then it's sort of like, yeah, there's, it sounds awful and ungrateful, but like there's a way in which you can get bored with that and miss the chaos and miss the rapture of it. And for me, I think the problem was that I wasn't moving forward anymore. Like when I was, you know, the first eight or nine years that I was sober, I was really active in recovery communities. I was working with other alcoholics. I was spending a lot of time meditating in the morning.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And I felt like I was on like a spiritual journey, like I was moving farther away from my addiction and all these behavioral patterns too, that by the way, don't go away when you stop drinking and sometimes they get worse. And it's really, I think a lot of people in recovery see like, this is the work of a lifetime, is just try to move away from that stuff. And I had, you know, for various reasons, stopped going to, to meetings and stopped being involved in those communities for a couple of years before I started drinking. And I really think that part of it was that, that sense of like, I'm no longer on this journey. I'm just kind of like here hanging out and enjoying all the fruits of that work that I did.

• 38:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And yeah, that was when my mind started to get really crazy.

• 38:40PJ Vogt?

  Huh. So it's like, the way you understand it now is that maybe a little bit you were lulled into a false sense of security and a little bit that, like you described how when people become sober, they have to find a pearl, like they have to find a thing that like gives their life meaning that, that feels bigger than themselves. Like, it can be God, it doesn't have to be God. But it was like, things did not feel dynamic anymore. It felt like you were maintaining a good life instead of pursuing something. And maybe like, you missed the, it sounds crazy to someone who doesn't have this, but like the dynamism of ups and downs.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  It's just one of the most baffling things about human nature is that we don't always want what's good for us. And we sometimes want the opposite of what's good for us. And, you know, there's a very romantic way to view that, which is that, you know, I think this is actually Dostoevsky's explanation is that in those moments, we're trying to prove that we're free, that we're not robots, right? That we have, like, within us, this sort of radical will that can choose what's bad, even when it doesn't make sense. And I've certainly thought about my own actions that way, too. But then there's this other part of me that thinks, um, maybe you don't really know the things that you think you know, or maybe you have managed to convince only your intellectual self

• 40:02Speaker 01

  that something's wrong, whereas this much deeper part of you is not on board with the narratives you've been telling. And I think that was, that was part of it for me, too, is I had been, you know, telling the story of my life and how my life got better. I'd been like, talking in meetings and, you know, on the podiums of church basement, sort of telling this, I was lost and now I'm found story. And it started to become rote. And it was almost like I was just saying the words and I didn't really believe it anymore because I had gotten so far away from the pain, it didn't feel real. And I think really, the work of recovery is like, trying to constantly rekindle that belief, whether it's by staying close to other people who are deep in their addictions and like, remembering what it was like, you know, remaining in this ongoing

• 40:47Speaker 01

  dialogue with yourself. And when you do have thoughts about drinking, like really taking time to respond to them and saying like, no, that's a lie, and not just letting the fantasies fester in your mind.

• 40:58PJ Vogt?

  I was curious, though, I mean, you call your book Will and Attention. It's divided into two sections, Will and Attention. And I, I don't know, like, what I felt like I was tracking was an evolving belief you had about the way to manage, like, your own divided self. Like, it felt like you were shifting from an idea that it was about willpower and practice, and in the end, that it was maybe about something that was like, slightly more complicated than that?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, the, the start of the book for me was this quote by Simone Weil I came across, where she says, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. And I was so fascinated and mystified by that quote. I mean, on one hand, I read this like, shortly after I came back from the relapse. So this idea that will had limits, that I couldn't will myself out of addiction was very much something I already believed. But attention, I had never really thought about before. I had always thought of my drinking as a failure of will. And what if it was actually a failure of attention? You know, what if it was that I had, you know, not, um, yeah, not stayed the

• 42:11Speaker 01

  course in this commitment to something that was working and, you know, paid enough attention to that part of my life to ensure that it continued working? Because, again, once you get to that point where you're faced with a temptation or decision, like, the battle's already up by then.

• 42:28PJ Vogt?

  Maintaining a habit of attention, that also requires discipline, but it feels like a discipline that I can actually reasonably commit to, while knowing that, like, for me, like, I've eaten four popsicles today. I'm on a diet.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Thank you for sharing that. Yeah.

• 42:50PJ Vogt?

  I walked out of the kitchen and my partner saw me eating a popsicle and was like, didn't you say you wanted to eat healthily? And my brain flashed to the wrappers of three other popsicles.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:02PJ Vogt?

  And like, I don't know, for me, it's weird. The, a question I genuinely don't know is like, the part of me that is like, a mindless beast pursuing obliteration, like, I don't know if, like, feeding him those popsicles is like, tithing him in a way that calms him, or if, like, genuinely speaking, like, those popsicles are a problem. Like, I don't know. I know that, you know, in seven days, I'm going to talk to my psychiatrist, and I'm going to be like, hey, just so you know, I'm stealthily eating popsicles. Do you make something of that? And like, somehow that feels like my system, and the system feels like a commitment to trying to observe what is happening and be honest about it. And to know that I, I have to be vigilant about a part of

• 43:46PJ Vogt?

  myself that I do not understand who wants things I don't agree with, and who I can't kill. Like, I can't, if I try to kill him, all I'm doing is putting him in like, a ninja suit. And like, I relate to your book because that struggle feels to me like a fundamental struggle of being a person.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. Oh, man. I mean, that's, this is like, the most baffling thing is that when you do have that deep problem, it's almost like your efforts to quell it is like, working against yourself.

• 44:13PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Right? That you're actually getting in your own way, the more you try willfully clenched to fight it, the more you end up just needing it more. Right? Because I think, especially when it's something like food or alcohol, where you get this release, it's like, the effort to resist it is also creating the need for the release more.

• 44:35PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:36PJ Vogt?

  And it deepens the pleasure, like, a relapse of anything that you've been trying not to do, is really pleasurable, up until the immediate consequences of it. Like, and, and, and part of the, the like, if you were mathematically graphing the pleasure, yeah, it's like, the harder you clench, the better the release. And the idea that the answers might be in attention, rather than purely in will, I find to be, like, hopeful, I guess.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, something that I think is confusing about a lot of Vay's writing is that we tend to think of attention as like, focus, right? This is like, a very modern understanding of attention, is that you sort of like, you know, clench yourself up into a ball and zero in on this one thing. And that attention actually requires a lot of willpower. And the type of attention that she's talking about is almost the opposite. She talks about attention as a form of waiting, and a form of looking instead of grasping. And this idea that, like, sometimes when you're struggling with a problem, you need to just stop trying to solve it, and just look, and witness, and observe. And I think that's sort of what you're describing with the mindfulness practices, right? Where

• 45:47Speaker 01

  you're just sort of watching what happens before you succumb, and, you know, becoming aware of, like, okay, what are these feelings or these patterns that, you know, I'm feeling before I actually take action and, you know, relapse into this behavior? And just looking at that without trying to solve it is sometimes really helpful, actually, because, you know, then what you do is you're shutting down the part of your mind that is denying and justifying and doing all of that. Right?

• 46:16PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  You can't pay attention when you're trying to get something. Like, you can't really look and see when you're trying to grasp something. And so there's almost this paradoxical way in which you have to give up that fight. And this is what happened when I came into recovery communities. Like, I had tried so much to cure my own addiction. And what people told me is like, just stop, just give up, just come here and listen to other people tell their stories. And it doesn't make any sense, but that's what worked.

• 46:45PJ Vogt?

  Why?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Because I was seeing myself in other people. You know, I was seeing, almost like, objectively, the ways in which other people had let addictions ruin their life, and the way in which their lives had gotten better. Um, it's easier to see that in somebody else than it is in your own life. And there is some level of faith, I think, where you have to sort of trust that what you're doing, even when it seems like it's pointless, you know, that that work is going to have some sort of future result. I mean, it's tricky, because I think we today tend to think about attention as like, a productivity hack.

• 47:24PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  This thing that's gonna like, it has this really instrumental purpose, like, we're going to get results right away. But this is a much older form of attention that you see in some of the old spiritual writers, that is, attention is the work of soul building. This, like, what you turn your mind to, what sort of capacities you cultivate within yourself, that is basically creating the person that you're going to be in those moments when you are tried in some way, or when you face a challenge. And that, the act of overcoming faults of any kind, or addiction, or moral failings, is not to, like, just try your hardest in that moment. It's everything you do leading up to that point, what

• 48:10Speaker 01

  you attend to, how you spend your time, that is making you into the kind of person who's capable of acting well, when that moment comes.

• 48:23PJ Vogt?

  This is, thank you for talking about this. It's really, um, talking about it feels like the way, um, reading it feels like, just like, it's a nice place to get to visit.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you so much. That means a lot to hear that.

• 48:44PJ Vogt?

  Megan O'Giblin. Her latest book is called Will and Attention, a memoir I've been buying copies of already for lots of other people. It is for anybody who is interested in the mind and its many afflictions. And when you finish that one, if you haven't, you should also pick up her earlier book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, where she thinks hard and beautifully about being a human in the AI era.

• 49:55PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamanemi, who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Fact checking this week by Annika Robbins. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please email us, [email protected]. Subject line, advertising. That is also where we take your questions. We are always looking for more questions. If you have one, please send it in. If you're a listener who would

• 50:37PJ Vogt?

  like to hear a version of this show without ads, you can sign up for incognito mode. That is our paid feed. You also get bonus episodes, and your money keeps this show running. You can find a link to subscribe in our show notes or at searchengine.show. It's just got a nice refresh. Also, if you're considering a cheaper way to support us, you could just consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or following us on Spotify. Those are the preferred behaviors for those algorithms. Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll see you next week.