Op-Ed: How surfing helped one recovering addict break the cycle

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In the waves, a power greater than ourselves (via latimesopinion)

I became addicted to alcohol and drugs in my mid-20s. I was a broke, vaguely angry, vaguely depressive young poet. To drink and drug to excess seemed almost a requirement, a mark of authenticity. There was addiction in my immediate family, along with mental illness and suicide. No matter. I had quit surfing years earlier, on the threshold of college, and never imagined I would return to it. But it later proved essential to my recovery.

Yet as a bond with addictive power, surfing is hardly the serene, blandly wholesome lifestyle portrayed in popular media. What I felt, streaking along the highway on the morning of that storm swell, was a sense of heedlessness and impulsivity that reminds me of nothing so much as my drug days — what addiction researchers call “now appeal,” an inability to defer.

This was at Casino Pier, a misnomer since its destruction by Hurricane Sandy. The classic spidery roller coaster famously photographed standing half-submerged by Sandy’s foamy storm surge had been replaced by a smaller one, but it and the arcades had the mirage-like, irrelevant cast of everything seen from the lineup on a day of good waves.

 

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