Mishka Shubaly’s Journey of Recovery
Bio: Mishka Shubaly is a best-selling author and a cult singer-songwriter. He teaches a summer writing workshop at Yale and in 2017, he achieved his highest honor when he became a clue on Jeopardy!
Name: Mishka Shubaly
Occupation: writer/ musician
Drug of choice/Length of use: Alcohol/ 17 years
Length of Sobriety: 9 years in 2018
Something unique about you: When I was 24, I survived a shipwreck.
1. What do you do on a daily basis to maintain your sobriety, and what is the most challenging part about it?
I try to take care of the machine that houses my mind: my body. I try to sleep 8–9 hours every night, no naps, moderate to strenuous exercise nearly every day, no refined foods (especially sugar), no caffeine after 2pm, get up early and go to bed early, eat a plant-based whole food diet. It’s frustrating to me that we still often default to binaries that don’t serve us, like “mind vs. body” and “natural vs. unnatural.” If you try to get sober and stay sober by only treating your mind or only treating your body, you’re making a difficult task that much harder. Similarly, the way many people see “natural” as good and “unnatural” as bad is foolish to dangerous. Poison ivy is natural, toilet paper is unnatural: which of these are you going to choose when you go to the bathroom? Alcohol is a naturally occurring substance. You could make organic vegan cocaine or heroin and it would still ruin your life if not kill you. Americans tend to overmedicate, but anti-depressants and other psychotropic medications have saved thousands of lives, maybe hundreds of thousands. Getting on anti-depressants was a huge help to me in early sobriety. Conversely, Xanax is a poison for me. Use your brain when it comes to your recovery. Do not trust anecdotes or hearsay or hunches. Talk to a licensed psychiatrist.
And once I’ve cared for my body… yeah, I have to push back hard against my mind. I’m a pessimist, I’m a fatalist, I’m a nihilist. It’s like I got the song backwards, I accentuate the negative and eliminate the positive. My life is incredibly rich — I drank and drugged like an animal for years, came out of it with no lasting damage to my physical health, became an ultra-runner and turned my misspent youth into a successful writing career. My writing has won me praise from friends and strangers, helped me build friendships with some of my childhood heroes, and given me a career. Still, each morning when I wake up, I’m like “Christ… this again?” I try to stay positive. I’ve never succeeded, but I haven’t stopped trying, so I haven’t failed. But staying positive is infinitely easier when I’m running and eating right and getting enough sleep.
2. How have you reconnected with your body since being in recovery, and what are some things you include in your daily life to increase your health and vitality?
I was fairly athletic as a kid, always playing sports at school, riding my bike, etc. When I started drinking heavily when I was fifteen, I abandoned all of that. Once I got over my acute physical withdrawal, I started exercising as a means of killing time, trying to care about my life again, and tiring myself out enough that I could sleep. I’d never been a runner, even when I was a kid, but at 32, I discovered that I could run. Learning how to run, how to care for and take pride in my body and my accomplishments, that was absolutely transformative. My father ran marathons and I despaired that I would ever match his accomplishments. Less than a year after quitting drinking, I ran my first ulra-marathon. Then I ran two sub-four-hour marathons in a week, two marathons in a weekend, two marathons in a day, etc. Yes, I beat myself up in the process and eventually had to learn how to run in a healthy manner. I don’t crank out incredibly long distances anymore, but it’s my hope that I’ll be able to run into my 60s. Yoga has been incredible for rehabilitating my body, and boxing and kickboxing have been incredibly therapeutic for my mind.
3. How have your relationships changed (types of people, length/meaning of relationships etc..) from when you were actively using to being in recovery?
I’m still pretty close with most of the folks I was friends with when I was drinking. I like to think I’m a better friend now, if marginally less entertaining. I’m not friends with a lot of practicing alcoholics, but then I wasn’t even when I was drinking. Most of my friends still drink or use drugs casually, though I have gained a lot of sober friends in the last nine years and friends who just aren’t big drinkers. I understand my experience to be atypical in that, though. Even nine years sober, I have a hard time just socializing. When I was drinking, I was happy to meet a friend at a bar and spend the next ten hours there. Now, we always have to be doing something: running, training, building a guitar, working on a project, something. Overall, I think my relationships have improved — my relationships with my family and with my self have improved astronomically — but it’s important to point out that all my relationships are still flawed. I still get annoyed, I still get my feelings hurt, I still make people angry, I still get my heart broken. Sobriety is a cure for alcoholism, not a cure for the human condition.
3(a). Who are the top 3–5 people you surround yourself with and why are they influential in your recovery?
As a touring musician, I don’t really have the luxury of surrounding myself with anyone… or maybe it’s a luxury that I don’t have to surround myself with anyone? Either way, I keep in close touch with my family, a couple of old rock ‘n roll buddies from New York, and a couple of ex-girlfriends. Some of my old buddies are sober, some aren’t, but all of them have a lasting investment in underground art/ music/ culture, and that’s still of central importance to me. I always had a good relationship with my mother but my relationship with my younger sister has improved a lot. I didn’t speak to my older sister or my father for years. Now I talk to my dad a couple times a month and I talk to my older sister nearly every day. It’s huge progress for me to be in touch with exes because my old relationships always used to end in flames. They still sometimes now, but it’s much easier to salvage a friendship out of it now that I’m sober.
4. What is your spiritual life like and what do you do on a daily basis to integrate it into your life, and why do you think spirituality is important for growth and sustainability in recovery?
I do not think spirituality is important for growth and sustainability in recovery. I have no spiritual life to speak of. I’m anti-religion and anti-theist, which is to say not just that I don’t believe in gods or religions or karma or soulmates or whatever, but also that I think belief in any kind of deity is harmful to humanity at large. Furthermore, I think the insistence upon a belief in a higher power in AA is opportunistic of the program and alienating for many addicts. I know that this puts me at odds with the recovery community at large, but I think it’s important to hit it here and hit it hard because I know there are other folks like me out there. I’ll go one step further. What has been incredibly helpful to my sobriety and my overall mental health is hallucinogenics like psilocybin, LSD, and DMT. Every time I eat mushrooms or acid or smoke DMT, I wake up the next day with renewed determination to move forward as an artist, as a sober person, and as a human being. It helps my anxiety, my depression, and my alienation. People tell me I’m not sober because that word has been perverted by AA until now it doesn’t apply to anyone not going to meetings and subscribing to their outdated religion. I’m a writer, I trust the dictionary. You look up “sober” in the Oxford English Dictionary and it’s two definitions are ‘not affected by alcohol’ and ‘serious.’ I absolutely fulfill both of those definitions. Furthermore, the lasting positive effects of hallucinogens on mental health have been documented in clinical trials by institutions like Johns Hopkins and NYU. Scientific studies support what many of us already know, that these are not life-destroying drugs like cocaine, meth, opiods and alcohol, but powerful medicines to be used responsibly and treated with respect.
5. What was one situation you found yourself in that confirmed in your mind that you must seek treatment and recovery and why?
I didn’t have a rock-bottom that preceded some stunning epiphany that alcohol was going to kill me and that I needed to change. Instead, I realized almost out of nowhere that alcohol was never going to kill me (which was what I had wanted) but that it would just give me such a garbage life that, when my death finally came, it would be a tremendous relief. I guess I finally figured out that I was going to keep living for a while, and that it was time to finally learn how to live. I was right — sobriety has brought me a life I could never have dreamed of when I was drinking. Getting sober is absolutely the right thing to do… and there’s no one way to do it. This is how I do it but if something else works for you, well, it works for you, and I support it.
You can find out more about Mishka and grab a copy of one of his best selling books here:
