Fight Club and Deadpool




Excerpt from the preface of Ballad of a Sober Man: An ER Doctor’s Journey of Recovery:

Successfully getting sober is much like successfully getting
wealthy—it’s slow and methodical, and it requires patience.
It is a blessing that alcoholics and addicts never have to do
it alone. My recovery required a letting go of my ego-driven
independence and trumped-up sense of self-importance; I col-
lapsed, figuratively, off my pedestal and into the arms of a car-
ing crowd, allowing myself to be held up by the glorious mosh
pit of my sober network. I had to, as Tyler Durden exclaimed in
the movie Fight Club, “Just. Let. Go.”

I had been provided with the gift of desperation. As par-
adoxical as that sounds, I have found it to hold true. Only
through extreme emotional and physical conditions have I
been able to overcome my disease, get stronger, and start to
evolve. I needed to learn to feel and process previously incon-
ceivable and intolerable amounts of anguish and pain to spur
my spiritual development and propel myself into a new para-
digm of living. Profound grief, rather than making us wither,
has the uncanny capacity to expand us, introducing new door-
ways in our minds, leading to previously unexplored passages.

Facing fears, embracing the now, ditching the overindulgence
of self, reaching out for and to help, and staying vulnerable
have been the cornerstones to my recovery, modalities that I
continue to work with today and every day. Sometimes I feel
like the recovery version of the character in Deadpool, only
without Ryan Reynolds’s sassiness or vulgarity.




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