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I love the TV show Succession. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably at least heard about it, about how the show is essentially all terrible people doing terrible things and you just can’t stop watching it. It’s very dark and very funny, sometimes at the same time.
Sunday is the season finale of Season 3 of what is supposedly going to be a five-season show. So we have a long way to go, but I think by the time the series wraps up, it will be my No. 1 show that I’ve ever seen, passing The Wire, The Sopranos, Mare of Easttown and some of my other all-time favorites.
I spent some time wondering why I feel that strongly about the show, and it’s a bunch of very obvious answers.
I think the writing is great. I think the characters are great. As I said, it can make you laugh or cry, sometimes in the same scene. I also think it’s an incredible window into how the super-rich exist in a fantasy world many miles above the rest of us schlubs. There’s some addiction stuff within the show that certainly grabs my attention, too.
But during one recent episode, another thing hit me. One of the characters is offered $2 billion to cash out and just leave the toxic company that his toxic family runs. He could just walk away with enough money to buy a small country, start a foundation, do whatever he wanted. He’d be free, at last.
And yet… he didn’t take the offer. He couldn’t. He was addicted to the chaos and the toxic ness. As relieving as it might have been to unplug from that disastrous situation, he couldn’t bring himself to actually do it. Walking away had uncertainty, and fear, and insecurity, and an ego hit, all wrapped up together.
That’s how all of the characters in the show are. They want to take over the company and have wealth and prestige and all the trappings of being the boss, but they don’t actually want to be the boss. They love the idea of having power at any cost, consequences be damned.
I get that. During the last two years or so of my addiction, I was terrified of what would happen to me if I didn’t get help.
But I apparently was slightly more terrified of what would happen if I actually got the help. The devil I knew involved lying, stealing, overdosing and breaking peoples’ hearts—including my own!—every day… and yet I knew that chaos, and was uncomfortably comfortable within it. I didn’t know what to do about the fact that I was taking 40 painkillers most days and then drinking six beers with two Ambien at night… but holy s**t, what would I do if I didn’t do that? It was the great unknown. So I kept going for a longggggg time.
Fast forward to getting sober, and I still have situations that are bad… but again, they’re uncomfortably comfortable. So I don’t change.
I think about my old house where our water heater produced enough hot water to run one full bath, so I’d get in the bath knowing once the water got cold, there was no way to warm it up. I’d take a long bath and then sit in room temperature water, shivering before I finally got up the courage to just take the 10 second hit of grabbing a towel in the cold air. I have so many other lukewarm baths over the years that are unpleasant but at least I am familiar with the unpleasantness.
I think that can apply to relationships with people, jobs, living conditions and a big one for me: other addictive tendencies. When I went to rehab, I was chewing two cans of Skoal every day and I kept the nicotine habit going. I told myself that I was trying to push through opiate and alcohol addiction, so taking away nicotine might have been too much for an addict to handle.
That’s a fair conversation to have, I think, but I only had that conversation with myself. And six months into sobriety, my life had turned around and I had a plan for living where I could survive without all the painkillers and booze… and guess who was still chewing Skoal every day? I eventually transitioned to nicotine gum but guess who chewed nicotine gum for three full years because he was scared of what life would be like without any nicotine whatsoever?
To bring it back to Succession… actually, I just love talking about Succession, so I’m not sure there is a great connection between the show and my main point!
Which is this: I need to constantly work with others—that’s key, it can’t just be my sick mind trying to fix my sick mind—to make sure I am not staying in room temperature baths because I am scared of getting out. If the right thing to do is to go through some discomfort to get through some discomfort, I need to do that.
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Heard from an old-timer: "I probably only need one meeting a week, but I go every day because I don't know which one it's going to be."(Credit: AA Grapevine, Sept 2006, Annie R. from Ashland, Pa.)
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