It’s a Plan
Letting go of certainty and walking through fire
This essay has been a while in the making and has shifted in focus more than once; it’s not what I originally envisioned, but it really fits with where my mind is now. That’s how most of my writing has been in my life. I have this constantly growing list of ideas, but I’m always drawn to one that ends up speaking to me on a personal level. There’s a common saying out there that says to “write what you know”, but I think it’s equally important to write in the areas we don’t fully know. One of my main motivators in writing these essays has been to explore an area I’m still learning about : recovery and life in general. I don’t know everything about it, but I’m figuring things out. I just started watching The Family AffairI, a comedy starring Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman. I recently realized a newfound appreciation for Zac Efron after seeing his performance in The Iron Claw (my beef with him is a longer story), and he’s pretty funny in The Family Affair so far. Nicole Kidman’s character, a writer, describes her purpose in writing as “to find out about things I don’t understand.” Spot on, Nicole. Even if that’s from a script written for you. I think the writing I care the most about is when I’m struggling throughout the process because I don’t have easy answers or feel entirely confident in what I’m saying. Many times I stress over even posting my essays because I don’t feel qualified to write about recovery when I’m still very much in the learning stages of it, but Kidman’s quote rings true for me. We write to process and find out (among other things).
I’ve been writing on this site for almost a year now, and this topic was one of the first ideas on the list. I’d been scrolling through Spotify looking for any songs remotely applicable to recovery, and I came across “Fire”, by Gary Clark. Ever since I’d first heard it in an episode of Modern Love, I’d been drawn to the song. It’s catchy, and there’s some cool language in it. And I really liked the visual sequence that accompanied it in the episode. It hit home in some way the first time I watched it, and that song has given me that same sense of being understood every time I’ve heard it since.
If you haven’t seen Modern Love, it’s a series of standalone episodes based on the essays published in The New York Times Magazine weekly column of the same name. They’re all love stories, and that’s one of the few factors they share. The plots vary widely, but they all tell of characters whose love drives stories that include loss and redemption, joy and heartbreak, and a deepened understanding and love of self. The episode that includes “Fire” is titled ‘In the Waiting Room of Estranged Spouses’. It focuses mainly on this guy, Spence, a military veteran who finds out pretty quickly in the episode that his wife is cheating on him. He hears the news at a Fourth of July barbeque, and his life quickly takes a turn for the unexpected. As I rewatched the episode (I like to do thorough research when writing these essays), I realized that Spence’s story bears a lot in common with mine and those of others in recovery. His problems are unique to his set of personal experiences, but we find him on a difficult path to recovering his sense of self and fulfilling his place in life. It’s a journey we know well in recovery.
There’s an element I love about the production of this episode that gives us insight into Spence’s psyche. Upon observation, Spence maintains a pretty composed, stoic demeanor, but underneath that surface level lies a fraught combat zone. When something terrible happens in his life, the scene plays out as if he were handling it in combat mode without a clear indicator that we’re accessing his imagination and thus blurring the lines between dream and reality. The first occasion of this sort of magical realism occurs at the aforementioned barbeque. Spence’s wife has just gone off with Nick, a guy friend, claiming they need to buy more sparklers for the kids, even though Spence notes a bunch of them on one of the tables. As they leave, Spence slips into military mode, tracking their movements from a close distance with an armed team who quickly surround and carry a flailing Nick off down the sidewalk. The fantasy separates Jeannie from both Nick and his sparkler mission, making Spence the hero and his wife the grateful recipient of his efforts. A bit later in the evening, Nick’s wife, Isabelle, approaches Spence to tell him her suspicion that something between Nick and Jeannie has been going on for a while. Spence calmly denies the possibility, explaining that it’s not part of the plan.
This plan is something we learn more about later in the episode. It seems that he clings to the plan as the one thing he can be certain of in his life since his time in active service. When we see his life drifting from the plan, Spence slips into an imagined reality. The second one of these trips into imagination takes place as Spence plays video games while texting his estranged wife. He’s been drinking on this occasion as well, this time more heavily. We watch as the game on the screen becomes a sword fight between Spence and Jeannie, who exchange blows in the spaces of their conversation. We learn that their ongoing conflict involves the divorce papers that he has yet to sign. Falling to the ground on screen and facing Jeannie’s sword, Spence says, “Nothing makes me feel better.” The scene cuts to Spence hanging upside down in his flipped truck in the middle of the night as a dispatcher on his cell phone assures him that help is on the way. We can fill in the empty space of reality between seeing him on the couch to the aftermath of a serious accident. He was drinking, playing the game, texting Jeannie, and he was alone with that terrible thought that nothing could make him feel better. A lot of us in the program have driven under the influence. Our rational minds tell us it’s illegal, incredibly irresponsible, and dangerous to both us and the other drivers on the road. So why do we get behind the wheel? It’s a big why with different answers but the same general disregard for self and others that we lack in active addiction.
I empathize with Spence’s situation. It’s the loneliness and the looming fact that nothing is helping. Most of the time, I just needed to escape the isolation that felt all too pressing in my depressing apartment. I thought that being out of that place and going somewhere, anywhere, would be better than sitting another minute where I was. Most times I was going to find someone. Most times I was positive I could handle driving a car. And most times I also didn’t place too much worth on the life sitting behind the wheel. This last thing I’m not proud of because I know that even if I didn’t value my own life enough to keep it safe, I disregarded the many people whose lives would be forever altered if something irreversible happened to me. The things that did happen had heavy consequences and definitely wouldn’t have made it onto the blueprint if I’d outlined a specific plan for my life, but they pushed me onto a path that eventually led to my time in recovery, and I’m grateful for that. Spence’s accident clearly works as a wake up call for him, because the next scene finds him in the waiting room of a therapist’s office. There, he runs into Isabelle. They make the awkward recognition, and Isabelle suggests they get coffee. Over coffee, Spence gives her the basics of his plan, and even though he recognizes the impossibility of planning life, he explains himself to her: “I prefer to control the controllable.” This need to be in control in life reflects his inability to accept life on life’s terms. He refuses to accept what’s right in front of him at times, attempting instead to project his desired future into the reality of his now.
The word ‘plan’ shares the same etymological roots as ‘plane’, as in a flat expanse, mostly stemming from its connection to plans originally charted out as two-dimensional maps and blueprint-esque drawings. The idea is that even the most complex plans can be presented in simple, flat form. Any life plan functions in the same way; you can put it on paper. Humans like to be able to put things on paper. We like facts and predictability because they’re knowns. If we’re presented with two visuals of our future: a blank paper and one that outlines specific dates, places, occupations and events in organized detail, the temptation to choose the planned version stems from a desire for certainty and structure. The blank one will appeal to us if we’re more accepting of the unknown in life and the factors outside our control to plan. I get the weekly 3-2-1 emails from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, that share a collection of his thoughts, quotes from others and thought provoking questions. The thought from a couple weeks ago pertained to the nature of facts and predictions: “Do not mistake a confident explanation for an accurate prediction.” If we’re making plans as though they’re destined to happen, we write in pen rather than pencil because we don’t see the need to change what we’re putting on paper. This feature doesn’t allow for too much chaos or unpredictability, and it also reduces our lives to two-dimensional stories.
When our plans not only take form in ink rather than erasable lead but also include factors we can’t accurately predict, we can be setting ourselves up for the same disappointments experienced by Spence. Spence’s plan relies on the involvement and cooperation of his wife, so when she deviates from his expectations, she takes with her the crux of his planned world. When Isabelle enters his life, she seems to fit into the gaping space left by Jeannie. Her space in Spence’s life as a friend, but also as someone in need of love and care, gives him the sense that parts of his broken world can be repaired according to the plan with her in it. He starts fixing various things around her house that have fallen into disrepair in Nick’s absence, since Isabelle’s main focus is the care of her child. At one point, Spence comments on his role, “I like making your life better” or, he qualifies, “at least trying,” Spence clearly likes Isabelle; their friendship becomes a light in his life - she makes him feel needed and useful, and though I believe that their attraction to and love for each other is real, there is an aspect to it in the beginning that has the potential to harm their relationship. Spence assumes the role of savior in his relationship with Isabelle in much the same way he did in his relationship with Jeannie. Rather than letting himself be entirely vulnerable and open with her, he inserts her into the space left by his ex and sees her presence in his life as something that could give him direction. I don’t think this is intentional; it happens because Spence has an emptiness in him where his plan with Jeannie used to be. The plan served as his control factor, his solution for coping with a life full of uncertainty and loss. When he meets Isabelle in the therapist’s waiting room, he is only in the beginning stages of finding a new solution, so she steps into this new solution without either of them realizing it’s happening.
Relationships can be complicated in early recovery for much the same reason. We need to be able to understand that another person, however much they mean to us, can never be our solution. We can’t use others to fill something in us; we can only give ourselves a chance to truly find love when we actively pursue a solution within us. If we rely on the attention and need of someone else, even someone we really think we could love, to fulfill our lives, we do ourselves and them a disservice. We need to be able to understand that needing or being needed, wanting or being wanted, and helping or being helped are not the same as love even if they can be part of it. We need to let go of the belief that someone else can become our solution instead of finding it within ourselves.
When Isabelle’s baby, Charlie, develops a serious fever, she calls Spence to cancel their dinner plans. Spence happens to be at the store picking up flowers for her, and he shifts gears to purchase a “Get Well Soon” balloon and other amenities to bring to her and the baby. He runs into Nick, who (as Charlie’s father) is also concerned about his baby and is anxiously searching for something to bring over. They have a fairly awkward exchange in a scene that includes another of Spence’s imagined realities - he hurls cans of soup turned into bombs as Nick flees down the supermarket aisle - but they depart on friendly-ish terms when Spence advises him to take Charlie to the hospital if he thinks that’s the best move.
When Spence arrives at the hospital, he finds the two parents watching over Charlie together. Spence, although embraced joyfully by a grateful Isabelle, recognizes without resentment that he doesn’t need to be there. In his eyes, Nick has finally become the man Isabelle needs him to be, so Spence leaves them. As he does so he calls Jeannie, who doesn’t answer. Spence experiences a loss of his own making here; he mistakes Nick’s presence and improvement as a father as a reason for Isabelle to take him back into her life, and so he loses her as he has placed her in the plan.
The next scene is a blend of imagination and reality, mainly serving as a symbolic visual of Spence finally letting go of the people and things that have been blocking his recovery. Gary Clark’s song “Fire” plays during this sequence; it’s a fitting soundtrack for anyone experiencing obstacles even as they strive to move forward in their recovery. I’ve listened to this song so many times that I feel like I’ve developed my own understanding of the language in it. Whatever Gary’s intention, I’m making it work as a recovery translation and may take some liberties with the interpretation. While the song plays out, we see Spence walking down the sidewalk, still holding the phone to his ear. He then holds the unanswered phone before him and tosses it over his shoulder without looking back. He proceeds to toss a series of other items to the ground as he shifts in appearance to reflect the time in his life relevant to each item. The specific things he carries and lets go of hold symbolic significance to what he allows himself to let go of emotionally, and we’ll get into that after looking at the lyrics of Gary Clark’s song.
The opening line - Now you know who you’re talking to, you know I’m not a liar - emphasizes the honesty to self and others that is crucial if we’re going to find the insight and strength to let go of the perceived solutions that are not serving us in life. I’ve torn my pants and learned to dance on love and razor wire is such a great line - it reflects growth that involves pain but also reward and the ability to accept and live with both the good and bad. Dancing implies a level of grace and balance in this learned navigation of life with the embracing, constant energy of love as well as the sharp cut of pain and misfortune. There will always be the fire of suffering, conflicts and sorrow in our life; it’s as inevitable as the presence of shadows in our light. They will always be there.
The song continues: I learned to keep on moving when the flames were getting higher. When the devil's stalkin' you, keep walking through the fire. This image of walking through fire serves as the central message of the song - a recognition of the fire and the way to move forward through it. The significance of fire deserves some attention here. Fire is an element that needs to consume to stay alive, and in consuming it destroys. Fire is also something that’s become an integral resource in our lives. And fire captivates. It has an attractive lure to it when contained or at a safe distance, but it has the potential to destroy us if we let it grow out of control. The fire in our lives functions similarly. The flames of our fire are the elements we can’t control, the hardships and tragedies that invade our path and threaten to destroy our progress. The internal chaos that we can’t seem to shake for more than temporary spans of time. These pains deserve recognition and acceptance for their place in our lives; they tell us of the things lacking in our recovery when we listen. But we can’t just sit and watch these flames like kids at a bonfire. When we wallow in the little fires in our life, we supply the oxygen it needs to blaze even stronger and give greater power to the very thing we see destroying us. We need to keep on walking or we find ourselves consumed.
The speaker continues: And I made friends with the monsters growlin' underneath my bed. I held a ball and invited all the voices in my head. I love these lines for both the cool scenes they evoke in my mind and the way they reflect a significant aspect of the inventory work we do in recovery. The monsters we befriend are the various fears in our lives. We look at their place in our lives and the power we give them in our attempts to avoid pain and maintain the illusion that we can control our lives. The voices in our heads work hand in hand with the fears. They are the resentments, intrusive thoughts and delusions that keep us in an egocentric perception of the world. The voices in this kind of world tell us that every movement made by another being is one made in relation to us, so we develop realities in which we are the victims of intentional wrongs, the reason for others’ variable moods or absences, and the source of conflicts directly or indirectly related to us. When we recognize these voices for what they are - just thoughts - and look at how we’ve made them into monsters by giving them more power than they deserve, we’re able to move forward in our recovery journey more successfully than if we let them be the ones to host the ball in our lives. We familiarize ourselves with our fears so that they become forces that work for us rather than against us, and we put the voices in their place as visitors in our heads rather than our only reality.
We have to do this work for ourselves, because - as Gary sings - in the end, my friend, you have to be your own messiah. He’s not saying that we have no one out there to help us, but that we have to want to recover and to be willing to do the work for that recovery. We can ask for help, but we can’t count on someone else’s place in our life as the solution to our fears and feelings. We have to be honest with ourselves and others about the nature of every fire in our life, and we have to summon the courage to let go and move along from the ones whose flames threaten to consume us or derail our progress.
The things that Spence lets go represent the pieces of his plan to which he has clung to give him a sense of order and control. When he throws the phone over his shoulder, he releases Jeannie from her place in his mind as the center of his world. He lets go of the need to have her as part of every stage in his life ,and in doing so he frees her from his constant attempts to tie her to him. He then takes off his wedding ring and throws it behind him, signifying his willingness to let go of the thing that has kept her in his life. We see this willingness to let go manifest in the next scene in which he meets her and tells her he’ll sign the divorce papers. They have a sober, honest conversation about the situation here, and we can see two people who truly care about each other let each other move forward with their lives without guilt or blame.
Back in the “Fire” scene, Spence’s image shifts into one of him walking in his military fatigues; we see him remove his weaponry and helmet and let them fall to the ground behind him. In a way, this represents his willingness to work on whatever trauma he has been keeping in his life from his time in the service. It may not be something he can entirely let go of, but he can release himself from its hold on him and give him space to live without the need for the plan to give him security. By letting go of his military gear, he allows himself to be vulnerable as he continues walking forward without the protection of these items. We then see him as if dressed for his job, wearing a construction hat and reflector vest and carrying what looks like a blueprint. Letting go of these items signifies surrendering his plan completely and accepting life with all its unpredictability. Letting go of his plan doesn’t mean abandoning all purpose and sense of a future in life. For Spence, it involves giving up his self-appointed purpose: building a comfortable life centered around Jeannie. He lets go of that small purpose and opens space in himself for a greater Purpose and Plan about which he doesn’t have all the information.
We need to plan to some extent because we live with the belief in tomorrows, but we have to find the balance between planning for knowns and accepting unknowns. In dropping his blueprint, Spence shows his willingness to accept a life that cannot be contained to the limited space of paper. He doesn’t renounce his career in the military or abandon his job (really not sure what exactly he does, but it involves blueprint) - but he rejects them as the most important definitions of his identity in letting go of these uniforms. We are more fluid and expansive than the limited identity a career title gives us.
Careers by nature are part of our efforts to construct small plans for ourselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that if we do so with the acknowledgement that they are only complimentary to a much greater Plan. For me, a career in teaching seemed like the plan I’d have for however many decades to come. I began a career in education right out of college and loved it, but I let it dictate a lot in my life. I defined myself as a teacher and made certain choices and sacrifices that cost me in other areas. I wouldn’t change my experience for anything, but I can see now that teaching was only a small part of my identity for those years. I gave it a lot of weight in my mind because it felt more secure and structured than the part of me that really mattered. That’s the part I’m recovering.
Spence’s job might look the same to him: something that seems to important because it has the capacity to take his plan where it needs to go when in reality it should be an expression of his true self rather than the whole of it. After ditching his work gear, Spence shifts into his appearance as it was at the barbeque. He holds two sparklers before him and lets them fall behind him, and in doing so lets go of his resentments against Jeannie and Nick, the original sparkler villains. The sparklers, since they’re connected with the first occasion of him hearing of her affair, represent all the fires associated with that event. His resentments against Nick, Jeannie, and anyone whom he viewed as having a hand in burning down his plan, are all held in these sparklers. By letting go of the sparklers, he separates himself from the view of their actions as personal affronts.
The final item he lets go is the baby sock he’s held onto since the day he and Isabelle met in the therapist’s waiting room. He had picked it up that day and put it in his pocket, pocketing the small feeling of hope and connection he felt with her. As he looks at the sock in the “Fire” scene, we see an image of Isabelle, holding her baby and smiling, appear as it would in his mind. When he lets go of the sock, he lets go of Isabelle, of trying to make her life easier in an attempt to salvage his own.
This scene suggests that he has to let go of everything - the resentments, the delusion that a relationship can save him, the Plan, the imagined realities, the drinking, the belief that he can control his life - in order to truly recover himself. We have to work for that same kind of surrender when we engage in the action of recovery from addiction, from trauma, from anything that holds us back from being in touch with our true selves. We have to recognize the people, places and things in our lives that no longer serve us, and, despite their familiar cling to our sense of self, we have to let them go. We’re letting go of a particular kind of attachment when we do this. When Spence lets go of Isabelle, he doesn’t swear off ever seeing or talking to her again, but he lets go of the thought that she might be a solution to the space left by Jeannie. When he lets go of Jeannie, he lets go of his need to have her as the center of his life. In doing this, he allows space for each of these women to be in his life in a different way. We all have these people in our lives - the ones we hold to certain expectations that we need to let go of in order to free up space for a more fulfilling relationship with them.
Because he no longer views Isabelle as a potential solution to his broken life, Spence can engage in the work of recovery with honesty and self-awareness. He doesn’t need to fix someone else’s life in order for his to have meaning. When he sees Isabelle again at Charlie’s birthday party, he asks if he can help with anything, to which Isabelle suggests he take her on a date. I love this. Spence almost falls back into their relationship of helper and helped, but she stops him and gives him an indication that she wants him in her life in a new way. Because he has done the work on himself that letting go gave him the space to do, he is able to step into that relationship in a new way.
Plans and fires don’t work well together. Fire is the element a mere boy scout can produce yet can also spring into being from a bolt of lightning, and it runs with a force entirely its own once started. No two-dimensional plan does justice to the magnetic beauty of its flame, the havoc it wreaks or the power it holds. In our lives, fires come in all forms and from different sources. In active addiction, we definitely contributed to the inception of a lot of chaos, and we were especially susceptible to the magnetic draw of fires we didn’t start and had no place in contributing oxygen to. When we take things personally or try to micromanage, we fuel fires that don't need to be so destructive in our lives but rise higher with the added air we give them. Our fires can be any situation that holds the potential to arouse intense emotion in us: a misunderstanding or drama with a friend, an injury that keeps us from our daily routine, a weighty career event, the loss of a loved one, a series of small unfortunate events, expectations that ignore reality, etc.
There are several ways to put out a physical fire. You can douse it with water, spray it with one of those fire extinguishers, or you can let it burn out. The last is the most natural of these methods, and it’s a good one to keep in mind when handling our personal fires. When looking at the fires in our lives, we need to understand the nature of them in order to perceive the most effective means of living with them. I’m currently going through a big life change, which is exciting, but it’s taking place amidst a bunch of other circumstances that I’ve been letting myself stress over. As I’ve been returning to my writing throughout the past week and change, I’ve been able to see how I’m engaging in these situations in a new way. If there’s a conflict or drama that indirectly pertains to me but weighs heavily on my mind, occupying more space than the immediate people and places in my day, then I’m letting myself be pulled into that toxic cycle of feeding a fire that threatens to consume me. In the case of misunderstandings or perceived wrongs, I can see how certain action would feed the conflict created while other action would let it die. In the case of loss, I know I have to keep through it. This one is the hardest for me, because moving through something inevitably involves change and loss of the moments that slip by. I’m a wallower. I let myself drown in anxiety and grief because I’m terrified of what’s next. I definitely don’t have that awareness in the moment, but I can see it in how I deal with the waves of feeling that come with these experiences. Sometimes the only way to deal with loss is not to run from it or into it, but to keep walking the straight path beside it.
There’s a lot going on in this essay that makes it a little less clean or direct than it could be, but that’s where I’m at with feeling and thinking. I highly recommend Modern Love, James Clear’s newsletter and The Iron Claw. I can’t give the same commendation to The Family Affair as yet, but it’s fun so far.
