That Something Good Feeling

Hope and Pause in Tom Petty’s “Something Good Coming”

I don’t really get into the hype of New Years Eve or Day, or at least I haven’t been crazy about it for about a decade now. It was awesome as a kid when we’d all gather at my godfather’s house and bang pots and pans when the clock hit midnight, but in my adult years it’s become more a haunting taunt of the unchanged nature of my life. I’ve tended to ignore accomplishments and focus on the failures of the past year, only declaring the new one will be a good one for me if it’s an odd number because I prefer them to the even numbered years. There’s no sense in that; I just needed something to give me hope for a better year than the previous one. No matter how my years went, I somehow always felt that I was in dire need of a better one by the time we made it to the end of December. This is the first New Year that I don’t feel that way. And it’s not because 2025 is an odd year.

A few nights ago, I’d just left a bunch of family members to head home, and I put in a headphone for some train music. Tom Petty has joined the mix recently, and I found myself playing “Something Good Coming” more than a few times on repeat as I headed back to my place. This song, from his twelfth studio album, Mojo, captures what I’ve been feeling as December comes to a close. Most of the time, I find that songs capture my feelings in a way words just can’t, and I’m feeling “Something Good Coming” about not only the new year, but about this space in time in general. The opening lyrics give voice to that experience of ocean therapy, standing on the sand and taking in this vast, unfathomable part of nature that so aptly reflects our souls. Petty sings, watching the water, watching the coast, suddenly I know what I want the most. The coastal imagery suggests possibility without defined limitation, but it also gives a sense of distance. We can see the horizon over the ocean, but what seems so close and within our view stretches for miles more than it appears. He doesn’t say what it is that he wants, and that’s the great part about these lines. Instead, he follows with, and I want to tell you, still I hold back. I need some time, get my life on track. I like that he keeps it vague, but it’s still understood that part of what he wants lies in his connection to this other person either physically present with him or in his heart. Someone with whom he wants to share this desire but restrains himself, either from a fear of not attaining it or not knowing how to vocalize the thought. That fear is the same one that tells us we’ll jinx something if we lay our claim to it too soon. In early recovery, when we’re still working through all the mess of our past and the feeling that we’re still not doing enough to make up for lost time, it’s scary to hope for anything that’s not a guarantee let alone voice that hope, so I get where Petty’s coming from. It’s still a beautiful moment to have that wish float unsaid over the coastline, offering hope in something even if it’s far beyond our current reach. I’m OK with that kind of hope right now. I haven’t let myself hope for certain things that I’ve wanted for even longer than I’ve been in recovery, and in Petty form, I won’t name them all here, and I’m not even sure I could beyond a vague sense of that they are; but something about the place I’m in now gives me hope that there’s something good in store for me further down the path I’ve been slowly chugging along this past year. 

A lot of the frustration I’ve felt in this year has stemmed from my belief that I’m behind in some way. Behind in life and in recovery. In the past I’d look at different aspects of my life in the same way I’d see stats on a baseball card. I took stock of educational and athletic achievements, relationship status, career advancement, living conditions, and general life goals such as having a dog, traveling or doing something noteworthy, looking at them all as indicators of my worth as a person and using them as gauges of what more I needed to do to be enough. Even when I had many of these stats to count in my year, I’d still see them as not enough to mean something. When I finally began my life in recovery, I didn’t feel that I had any value as a person. Whatever I’d achieved pre-sobriety seemed to matter little to the person I felt I was becoming, and I expected to be patient for a few months or maybe a whole year before seeing the AA promises that people kept referencing in meetings come to fruition in my life. My stats may look about the same this New Year as they were at the onset of 2024 if I’m using my former success categories, which Deirdre from a year ago would not have been too happy about. A year is a long time, and I figured at the time that 366 days of sobriety would earn me some tangible results. If anything, my perspective has changed, and something feels different about this December-January handoff. I feel the way Tom Petty sings, I know that look on your face, But there’s something lucky about this place. And there’s something good coming for you and me. Something good coming, there has to be. Only for me, it’s not a place. It’s more the people in my life. I feel this sense of being home with certain people that somehow assures me that there’s something good here and some good I can’t yet fathom on its way. That’s my something good right now. And I can see that I have that even when I get in my own way and lose sight of that water and coast that Petty reflects on. 

The “Something Good Coming” feeling doesn’t invalidate hardships or erase any of those negative feelings we carry with us in recovery. Petty includes the ghosts of the past but doesn’t let them take away from the dominant sense of hope: And I’m thinking about Mama, and about the kids, and the way we lived and the things we did. As she never got a chance, never caught a break. And how we paid for our big mistakes. In these brief lines we get a picture of life’s difficulties and the kind of hardships we create for ourselves in our misguided attempts to have a better life. These big mistakes are the ones we make when we think we have to take our happiness and wellbeing into our own hands; we hurt people and ourselves by trying to avoid fear, numb pain or vindicate ourselves when we experience injustice or injury. We may suffer at the hands of others or outside circumstances, but we do so much harm to ourselves. The lines about Mama are hard; we see someone who didn’t seem to get a fair hand at life, and that’s how many of us can feel in life, whether we’ve suffered in some way from addiction or not. We may have our own tragic experiences or see others go through senseless suffering that makes it difficult to find any goodness or reason for them, and sometimes it seems that all we can do is try to move on or be there for our people. The memory of this past has a sadness to it, but there’s also love for the people involved and a peace that suggests acceptance and forgiveness. The song also emphasizes the shared nature of his experience. However hard the past is that he recalls, he uses the plural pronoun “we” rather than making his hardship something that isolates him. Despite the big mistakes and a history of seeming injustice, he still finds himself in a place where there’s something good coming just over the hill. There’s something good coming, he repeats,  I know it will. 

It’s as if those hard times have given him this space to pause in his life and experience the peace in that pause. This idea of a pause is something my cousin introduced to me recently. I’d been helping her edit an application essay in which she talked about being in a pause period in her life, a space in which she was able to think about the chapters of her past and look forward to how she wanted to be in the next step of her life. That concept resonated deeply with me and helped shift my perspective on where I am now. I’d been stressing about not knowing how long I’d be holding space in this stuck period rather than accepting it as space to look deliberately at where I want to be and consider the steps I’m able to take to get there. I’ve viewed certain reminders of my past as obstacles to my growth rather than things that no longer need to define me and that certainly don’t diminish the work I’ve done or the potential of my own something good on the horizon. I think a lot of us in recovery struggle with similar ghosts. Legal constraints, health issues, physical and emotional scars, memories and feelings - they threaten to drag us back to mindsets we used to live in but are no longer where we have to be now. I can see now that though mine may be holding me in the pause period, they’re not holding me back. Only I can do that. There’s a bit of that pause feel to Petty’s song, which occupies a space between a sad past and hopeful future. He’s been through something, and though it’s remained with him, it doesn’t take away from his ability to see that those hard years have led him to where he is now. 

The pause period feels like taking a moment in a long run to stop and breathe. It doesn’t mean the work is over, but it offers a break from the effort of the miles completed and the work yet to come. Petty touches on that anticipation in the lines: And I’m in for the long run, wherever it goes, riding the river wherever it goes. There are two parts to these lines: both the anticipation of the work ahead in the long run and acceptance of the idea that he can’t control where he goes on this path. He recognizes that he’s giving himself to a trajectory that a power higher than himself narrates, and while he determines to do his part in moving forward along that path, he also sees that there will be factors beyond his ability to manage. This is the balance we have to find in recovery: we control what we can, and we practice acceptance of the factors beyond our control. These uncontrollables include the people who come into our lives and choose to stay or leave, how those people feel about us, new opportunities in our careers as well as unforeseen setbacks, feelings of loss and grief, political and societal circumstances, forces of nature, and the outcomes of our favored sports teams, among other things we're invested in. We do what we can in the time given to us and in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but we have to accept the past and present things that aren’t in our power to alter for our own liking. 

We have to trust in the process, and if we believe or can be willing to believe in a higher power who has a plan for us and this world, we begin to find it more natural for ourselves to have this trust. Trust and hope seem to come hand in hand. If we can trust in a higher power with whom we’re working everyday to cultivate a stronger connection, it becomes easier to accept when things don’t seem to go our way. It doesn’t take the pain away from experiences like loss or being hurt by someone we love, but it can give us some assurance that something else is in store for us in the long run if we can find it in ourselves to go on with grace. We don’t necessarily know the specifics of where we’re going, and we can’t design the exact life that we want, but we can learn to accept what life holds for us and practice gratitude for those things as something for us. 

The acceptance doesn’t come easy; it takes work. Petty touches on this, I’m an honest man, work’s all I know. You take that away, don’t know where to go. He emphasizes the honesty that so many of us lacked in active addiction as well as the need for consistency in this work. Honesty can be especially hard when we’re recalling shameful pasts, things we did to hurt people or ourselves, and current limitations. I’ve gotten more comfortable disclosing that I’m in recovery to all the people in my life, but there’s still the slightest bit of hesitation in my mind when I have to give away that information to someone for the first time. I know that honesty is the clearer path, the one that doesn’t require me to do as much work to keep the record seemingly straight, but it still involves the fear of judgement and rejection. It’s a selfish fear since it’s rooted mainly in my need for the approval and acceptance of others for me as I am, so it’s one I’m working on walking through. The best way through that fear and the plethora of others that have surfaced in the past year or so is through honesty and transparency with both self and others. The practice of writing and reading a fourth step or inventory is part of that, but I think the ways we communicate with our people and show up for our communities also are part of this work. I get what Petty says about losing his way when I falter in any of this work. It is work, but it’s the kind of work that sustains us and makes us stronger for it. It’s what we’ve come to know as crucial to our wellbeing; it keeps us on a track to recovering that state of being in which we belong. 

Petty ends with his refrain,  And I know that look that’s on your face, there’s something lucky about this place. There’s something good coming for you and me, something good coming, there has to be. I love that look on our face line; it conjures up the little moments when you’re making eye contact with one of your people and have something shared between you, something simpler and yet inexpressible by words. It’s a shared understanding that love and connection make possible, and I even find myself experiencing that kind of feeling when I’m on my own. It’s the Something Good feeling. The moments, however insignificant, are only the surface level of the connected nature of our lives with others. 

Even something as small as these shared moments or solitary experiences of connection are little pauses in our lives. They offer the Something Good Coming promise, and they give us something to hold in both peace and chaos. Something good coming doesn’t mean only good things are on their way for us; Petty’s song isn’t about a happy ending or an easy life from here on out. It’s about recognizing the kind of people we’ve become through our hardships, finding gratitude for the place we find to be our present state, and choosing to move forward with our work with trust that there will be good in it. We all have something good coming if we commit to honesty and choose connection over isolation. Wherever we find ourselves now, whether we’re days or years into recovery from addiction to a substance, just coming off a relapse and feeling terribly about ourselves,  or just trying to better our lives in some way, we can benefit from taking pause before resuming the steps that our work requires. I won’t say everything is great now; I still have all those fears and feelings keeping me company and still have an easier time finding fault with my life stats, but I can see the good in my life in this pause. I really believe there’s something good coming, and that’s enough.