On penance, music, and what the muse actually needs.

“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

Kurt Vonnegut

It’s funny. When I drank heavily, I never ran with music. Not podcasts. Not audiobooks. Not a single song. Just breath and footstrike and the full volume of my own head.

I told myself, proclaiming loudly that I was a purist; that real runners run in silence. (That wasn’t it.)

Running was where I went to be alone with my thoughts. And my thoughts, during those years, needed the whole damn road, all lanes in both directions, because it was very crowded, snarling traffic everywhere. My thoughts needed to pace and argue, accuse and negotiate, and then loop back around and start all over again, on an endless repeat with no resolution. There wasn’t space for music because the noise inside was already at capacity, and it was damn loud.

And then there were the penance miles.

You may know them. Three extra because you had one (or three) too many drinks last night. The math somehow made sense: run far enough, hurt enough, and the ledger will balance. Iris, you are strong; you are FINE. See? Lookie there – look how far you went! Oh, the miles. Oh, the sweat. Oh, the determination. Reduce that debt so you can start all over again accumulating it again tonite.

And honestly, music would have made the running feel too good. Running was not allowed to feel good. Running was repayment. Penance.

Here’s what I know now, a year and a half sober and soundtrack button firmly pressed to “play”: I was always searching for a feeling. We all are. We are human. Of course we are.

I found it first in a martini. That first one. The warmth from chest outward, the slight softening of every edge and the ease into the feeling of “just being”, momentarily, exactly enough. I chased that feeling without knowing I was chasing it. Added a second and a third because the first one worked, so why wouldn’t two work better?

The wine witch has her own logic. Seductive. Circular. Completely insane. A real self-serving asshole with endless patience and perseverance to wear you down.

What I didn’t know was that I was seeking something real. Something that actually does exist. The feeling of sitting in the audience while the music lifts from the musicians filling the hall, your heart filling so completely it might float out of your body. The feeling of hot yoga when your breath locks in with the room and you stop moving alone.

THAT state. Better than any martini. Better than anything poured from a bottle.

I knew what that state was. I have spent three decades producing it for other people. Standing in the wings at Carnegie Hall, watching an audience receive something enormous, something that cracked them open. I built that container. Those conditions. I understood, professionally, exactly what was happening in that hall.

And when I was the one performing, flute in hand, I touched it too. A phrase that landed exactly right, the vibrations and rhythm shared with everyone in the same space, indescribable, no words. The room holding its breath, and you holding yours with it.

And then I would move on; without pause, without a full breath, without letting it land. To the next piece. The next hall. The next production. Next. Next. Next.

Maybe I didn’t deserve to stay; maybe I didn’t know how. Maybe the forward momentum was its own addiction, the check-done, the rush of what’s next. I’m still not sure. But I was always moving through it rather than into it. The glass was just another way of chasing what I kept leaving behind.

Running with music, it turns out, is one of my doors.

When the beat aligns with my stride and my mood, and the song lifts exactly when my legs want to lift, and the whole thing clicks into rhythm… I’m in. And holy shit, that’s when my good stuff happens. The muse shows up, ideas arrive fully formed, words I didn’t know I had been holding. The music now supports my thoughts; it doesn’t drown them out as I foolishly told myself before.

But I purposely don’t run with podcasts or audiobooks, again, not because I’m a purist, I gave that story up, it wasn’t true; because the muse needs the room. Not the noise of my drinking days, where thoughts paced and argued, and the miles had to cost something, paying off some debt I had accumulated. My muse, she needs and deserves what music provides: rhythm, space, permission. I didn’t realize I was keeping her out with my drinking.

The beat drops. My stride matches. Something lifts.

I’m in.

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This essay first appeared in Camera Dark Notes, where I write about sober-minded living and what comes into focus when the noise clears. New essays every other Sunday. Subscribe free here.

→ Mental Laundry: Notes from the Back of the Pack — four deserts, nine NYC Marathons, the back of the pack as a way of life.