Lego My Ego

Get over yourself in twelve easy steps or your money back.

Everyone who blogs about 12-step meetings gets to use a still from Fight Club exactly once.

I was reading recently that the key to having a good newsletter is to make readers a promise about what they can expect to get out of a post up at the top, and then deliver on that promise. The idea is that people are busy, read mostly on the toilet, and will click away as soon as they start to… hey wait, where are you going? 

So, uh, yeah, this is a post about my ego, and maybe your ego, and what we can do about that (I have suggestions). It’s also more recovery-focused than some of my recent stuff. Still with me?

Right, so, I went to this new 12-step meeting last week. Well, new to me at least. It was at a community space a few blocks from my house that I’d never noticed despite walking past it countless times. But they gave the place a facelift, adding new signage and a colorful mural. Awesome, I thought, after checking what I believed to be this brand new spot’s website and seeing a listing for the meeting. I assumed that since the space was new, the meeting was probably new, too, which means it’d probably be small, fledgling. There’d probably be, like, five to seven strangers there all looking around sheepishly. Then I’d arrive, confident, assured. Ah, a small meeting, I’d declare in my head but also project to the other sheepish folks, channeling Charlton Heston for some reason. I’ve been to these. I’ll use my leadership skills to provide guidance, a steady hand. 

Is this what my inner monologue sounds like? I don’t know. Let’s keep going. I’ve got promises to keep. 

See, I’m a fan of small meetings, have been to plenty. On my six-month sobriety birthday, I went to a “meeting” that took place at a picnic table on a beach in Phuket. It was me and five other white middle-aged expats from Australia and New Zealand, two of whom looked exactly like Robert Shaw in Jaws. The guy who led the meeting had this dogeared copy of the Big Book that looked like he’d been carrying it around in this back pocket for decades, and boy oh boy were these folks impressed when I shared that I’d banked six months of sobriety. Actually, they weren’t, not particularly—they were just kind and supportive and told me to keep coming back, and then we proceeded with the meeting and when it was over one of them gave me a ride to my hotel on the back of his scooter.

For my second sobriety birthday, me and a friend were staying at a hotel right on the Grand Canyon during a little southwest road trip. I decided to check to see if there were any meetings within driving distance—a fat chance given we were in this little sequestered tourist village. But lo and behold there was a meeting that night in a little rec room within walking distance, used primarily by the workers who had various service jobs catering to the tourists. The meeting had maybe five people in it, but they still did the thing where they gave out chips for varying lengths of sobriety, and so I marked two years about a quarter mile from that big hole in the ground, and boy oh boy were these folks impressed by the fact that I’d banked two whole years of sobriety, asking for my autograph and offering to name their future children after me. Actually, none of that happened—they were just kind and supportive and told me to keep coming back, and one of them, a woman in her thirties, lived in a nearby Native American community where several of her friends and family struggled with alcoholism, and while she was working hard to stay sober the decision was nearly impossible to explain to her loved ones, who resented her for it.

You’d think I’d have learned a thing or two about humility after all these years, but nope—once again, I headed off to what I thought was this brand new meeting at this brand new spot near my house, imagining a small room eager to receive and celebrate my experience and wisdom. But the meeting wasn’t small—it was huge and well-established, with close to fifty people in attendance, and as things got underway it felt like everyone was finishing one another’s sentences and laughing at all the inside jokes. I had nothing to offer. Nothing! Was my story even as good as everyone else’s? Did I bottom out hard enough? Did I come sufficiently close to completely ruining my life through substance misuse? Did I even belong? 

This is what it sounds like sometimes in my head. 

So, there’s no punchline here, no denouement. The meeting was great. I was one of several dozen faces, each with their own reason for being there, each with their own story to tell, or not. The cool thing about 12 step meetings is you can go to a thousand of them and hear a lot of the same cliches over and over again — “progress not perfection,” “gratitude is an attitude” — but then on like the one thousand and first meeting you hear something you’ve never heard before, despite the fact that it’s a total cliche, like one of those dollar bills that has the texture of felt it’s been passed around so much. In this meeting, someone dropped the phrase “compare and despair,” which is red-state-bumper-sticker levels of lame, but which I absolutely needed to hear in that particular moment, referring as it does to our shared tendency to measure our own self-worth relative to everyone else’s. Preach, brother, preach. 

There’s another saying I first heard in the rooms that I’ve never been able to source. The person who shared it attributed it to an actress from the ‘40s, but that sounds specious, and the internet can’t corroborate it. In any case, it goes like: At first I thought I was better than everyone else, then I thought I was worse than everyone else. Finally, I realized I was the same as everyone else. 

This, for me, continues to be one of the hardest lessons to internalize. Chalk it up to the fact that I was raised in a culture that prizes individuality above all else, that determines your worth by your achievements, that has a million-and-one systems for grading and sorting and measuring you, from your weight to the number of followers you have to your bank balance and all on down the line. You’re either better or you’re worse, and which is it gonna be today? Last week I sat on the roof of my brother’s $8M beach house, which is in the midst of being built from scratch. It has three fireplaces, two kitchens, and a goddamn elevator. Compare and despair, my friends. Compare and despair. 

Oh but wait, I made a promise and I need to keep it: You can let it all go, right now. You can, I can. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m not saying I will. But I know it’s possible. I can see the grasping and the clinging, I can see the greed, the endless desire, the feeling that tells me If Only I Had This… You know what they call that? “If-Only Mind.” If only they understood me, appreciated my achievements, if only they liked me, right now, if only they liked me. If only I had this much money, was published in this place, read by these people. If only I could ride alongside Jeff Bezos on a trip to the moon, and we’d stop along the way for some skywriting and the message would say GARRETT DID EVERYTHING RIGHT, THE END. 

If only that, if only that—then I’d be happy. But you can let it all go. You can. I can, too, in theory at least.

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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.

Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.

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