I sit at the potter's wheel, throw my clay on the round vat, flip the switch, and ease my foot onto the pedal to initiate spinning. Grabbing my sponge and squeezing it over the mound, I feel how the clay no longer resists my touch, and I close my eyes. Sometimes it helps, not being able to see. It allows my other senses to be heightened, for the pressure points in my thumb muscle, the flat side of my fist, and my fingertips to guide my movements in a way that won't deceive me like my eyes might. The first step in throwing a cylinder (the foundational shape of any ware), is guiding the clay into a perfectly symmetrical mound, if there are any inconsistencies, when you start to bring the walls of your pot up, some sides will be higher than others which creates a challenge in making tall or thin forms, the kind the most refined potter has. 

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I started pottery lessons early this year in the winter of 2022, part of a calculated plan to be whole. Being in the studio would allow me to be creative, I had a fitness routine that would allow me to be active and healthy, a meditation and therapy and spiritual routine that would allow me to be good, and a school and reading routine that would allow me to be intellectual. 

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After two lessons, despite my excitement, even asking my friends to alter our spring date plans to accommodate my appointments, I quit. During class time I watched the teacher carefully, I asked star students what they were doing that I wasn't, and I went to practice outside of class, but I could not manage to center the clay, the first and most important step of the process. 

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I found myself going to the gym because I disliked my body, not because I loved it. 

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During my meditation, I was wholly frustrated by my inability to stop thinking, and throughout my day I scolded my mind for its restlessness. 

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At school and in my assignments, I had no fervor for the content I was learning about, instead wondering how few readings I would have to do to keep the GPA I carefully constructed during my first two years of college. 

Worse than ever but doing more than ever, I felt no confusion about what was going wrong in my life, but I still faced denial to make the change I knew was needed. The deal I had made with myself was unsuccessful, I had an addiction and wanted to counter the most unhealthy part of my life by practicing what the most ideal version of myself, the potter, yogi, and therapist might, an effort to keep in my life a substance that had given me consistency and comfort when I needed it most. 

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Just a few months ago, I was still trying to make these deals with myself, “I’ll just smoke when I am by myself, which isn't often”, “I’ll just smoke twice a week”, “I’ll just smoke less,” “I’ll just smoke socially.” These deals always fell flat, as did the interventions of my friends and the shame I felt around my family when my withdrawal symptoms took control of my ability to be present with them. What never fell flat was my denial, my ability to find the right reddit page that would say “it's not actually possible to be addicted to weed.” 

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Before finally coming clean, the last effort I made to hold onto my addiction was to find sobriety in other areas of my life. Because of my love for psychology, I knew that it was possible for our brains to be reliant on many different substances, for them to get used to the chemicals we allow our body to ingest every day. Maybe I believed that if I found psychological neutrality in other areas of my life, I would start to feel better. I cut out social media, ate sugar, saturated fats, and refined grains only once per day, stopped drinking caffeine, watched TV and movies less, and stopped spending money on things I deemed superficial or excessive, like appearance. 

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Surprise to none, nothing was different; I still couldn't do anything without being high, I couldn't do anything while high, my relationships were suffering and I was anxious all of the time. 

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Still, I purged on. When this semester started, my most recent conviction was that if I cleared my space of all clutter, all distractions, I would find stillness and tranquility. This was true for a couple of days, there was definitely something therapeutic about rearranging my space. 

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But at the end of the day, still an addict. 

Now sober for a little over a month (ayyyy fuck it up slaaay), I am at a point where I am finally experiencing clarity and realizing the delusions of my convition. 

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Sobriety, to me, looked like absence. In emptiness there is no good, no bad, no opportunity to embody either of those things. Sure, I thought, it might be nice to embody good, but I felt willing to forfeit that possibility if the potential for embodying bad would accompany it. I associated this nothingness with a concept I had learned about in therapy, in my Buddhism course at college, and in reading books like “The Power of Now”: non-attachment. This concept trains the mind to let go of judgements to allow for acceptance instead. 

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One way I figured I could do this was though releasing my ego, and despite having done no research or having any requisite information other than what I learned in a Midnight Gospel episode tried to experience an ego death by ridding myself of reminders of my ego. 

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When I was sober, my ego felt too available to me, I was super-aware of all of the ways I could be better, ways I could look better and feel better but mostly seem better to others. By getting rid of the ego altogether, I thought, I would experience sobriety. I knew that my ego was built on judgements, that I had formed my identity by deciding what I liked and what I didn't, what I wanted to emulate and what I wanted to reject. However, adding a value of non-attachment required having the discernment to see it as valuable, a judgment itself. Of course, this had not occurred to me then, and I instead felt frustration about all of the years I spent developing a persona, despite the service the persona had done me. 

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I still think there is value in non-attachment from identity and recognizing that though the identities we all hold are different and the experiences that have shaped them are different, it is shared emotions like fear or happiness that necessitate an ego to filter the world, and in that way, we are all the same. 

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Instead of focusing on potential avenues of unification, I thought about the mechanisms of difference. One of these was signaling, a social phenomenon where we communicate to others who we are and what we believe through how we present ourselves and our spaces. I knew signaling was unavoidable, but I still believed it to bring people apart and be largely bad. 

 

I thought if I could figure out what kind of signaling rejected my idea of unification and what kind was neutral (another judgment), I could achieve transmitting only nondiscriminatory signals. So, I went to places where signals were high, my roommates' rooms, and analyzed the conventions my loved ones used to communicate to me without being in the room.