EVEN MY BALLS HAVE TO BE LIMITED EDITION

In the last four years of sobriety, I have lived approximately fourteen years.

I had a second child. A beautiful little girl named Aria. My heart. She’s two, so thankfully I have plenty of time before she starts dating—which is good, because as a Jew in America these days, I’m already well on my way to being sufficiently armed by the time some terrified sixteen-year-old shows up at my front door.

For entirely unrelated reasons, of course.

Becoming her father was one of the greatest things that happened to me in those four years.

But that’s the thing about getting sober: life doesn’t suddenly become a montage of sunsets, gratitude journals and inspirational quotes.

Life keeps lifing.

Sobriety didn’t change what life was capable of doing to me.

It changed what I was capable of doing when it happened.

Sometimes life hands you a daughter.

Sometimes it takes your left testicle.

Mine apparently enjoys range.

That happened in October 2023.

I had a precancerous tumor in my testicle, which resulted in the removal of my left guy.

Rest in peace, buddy.

The weirdest part is that, to this day, my very well-educated doctor still has absolutely no idea what the fuck it was.

Where did it come from?

What exactly was it?

Why was it there?

Great questions.

He sent samples of the tumor and my testicle all over the world to experts considerably smarter than me, and apparently considerably smarter than each other, because nobody could agree on an answer.

Eventually the consensus became, essentially:

We have no fucking idea.

Which tracks.

Of course I couldn’t just get a normal tumor.

I’m special.

I’m an anomaly.

Even my balls have to be limited edition.

My left ball has now traveled farther internationally than I have, which somehow feels fitting. Somewhere out there, pieces of him have seen places I’ve never been.

I hope he had a nice time.

What I do know is that the symptoms that resulted in losing him caused the worst physical pain I have ever experienced. The kind of pain where dignity becomes an abstract concept and you suddenly understand why people in old movies bite down on pieces of leather before removing appendages.

I lost a job I hated and, frankly, sucked at.

Then, almost accidentally, I found a career path I love. One that feels less like something I chose and more like something that had apparently been waiting for me to stop fucking around long enough to notice it.

Then, this past year, I got separated.

Eventually, I got divorced.

More on that later.

I watched the life I thought I was going to have disappear and had absolutely no idea what was supposed to replace it.

That was the worst emotional pain I have ever experienced.

Fear. Uncertainty. Anger. Grief. Loneliness. Shame. Relief, followed immediately by guilt for feeling relieved. Then sadness again. Then anger again. Then some weird Monday where everything felt completely fine, which somehow made me even more uncomfortable because I had become so accustomed to something being wrong.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I realized something else:

I’m fucking sick of the comeback story.

I really am.

I don’t want to be resilient anymore.

I don’t want another opportunity to discover how strong I am.

I’ve discovered it.

We’re good.

I don’t need another character-building exercise from the universe. I have enough character.

Arguably too much.

People love the comeback story because they get to skip to the comeback.

They see the person standing back up.

They don’t have to live through the part where he’s on the fucking ground.

And I’m grateful that I keep getting back up. I am.

But sometimes I don’t want to overcome anything.

I don’t want to rebuild.

I don’t want to rise from the ashes.

I’d actually love it if, for once, nothing burned down.

I want normal.

I want boring.

I want a Monday where Monday hasn’t really put me through a lot.

I want my kids healthy. I want to paint. I want to work. I want to laugh. I want to go to bed and wake up the next morning without discovering that life has prepared another fascinating opportunity for personal growth.

Maybe that’s what four years of sobriety has changed the most.

Chaos used to feel like proof that I was alive.

Now peace does.

And through all of it—

I didn’t drink.

I didn’t use drugs.

Not once.

Which is strange when I really think about it.

Because for years, considerably less significant events were enough justification for me to completely blow up my life.

Bad day?

Drink.

Good day?

Definitely drink.

Celebration?

Obviously. With a cocaine chaser.

Argument?

Perfect excuse.

Monday?

Well, Monday had really put me through a lot.

I never needed an actual reason.

I needed an excuse.

And when you live like that long enough, you become incredibly talented at manufacturing them.

So why didn’t any of these things—the mystery tumor, surgery, losing a job, changing careers, separation, divorce, fatherhood, uncertainty—send me back?

I don’t know.

I really don’t.

I wish I had some profound answer here. Something I could put in italics and charge $29.99 for at an airport bookstore.

I don’t.

What I do know is that somewhere along the way, I found somewhere else to put it.

For me, that’s art.

That’s probably the closest thing I have to understanding a higher power.

I’m not suggesting everyone needs to buy a six-foot canvas and start spraying obscenities across it. I’m saying I needed something larger than myself that could absorb what I couldn’t.

Or maybe absorb isn’t even the right word.

The goal isn’t to make the feelings disappear.

For most of my life, that’s exactly what I was trying to do.

Shut them up.

Drink them quiet.

Get high enough that whatever was happening inside my head couldn’t find me for a few hours.

Art does the opposite.

It lets them out.

Which apparently means that after spending years trying to chemically suppress every uncomfortable emotion I’ve ever had, my recovery strategy became the central thesis of a Tears for Fears song.

Shout.

Shout.

Let it all out.

Those guys figured this shit out in 1984.

I required rehab.

When I feel the old trauma creeping back in, I put it on the canvas.

If I’m angry, it’s spray paint. Words. Aggression. Big gestures. Things crossed out. Things painted over. Things that probably shouldn’t be written anywhere permanent, which naturally means I write them in permanent paint.

If I’m happy, it’s line work. Creatures. Characters. Movement. Little worlds start appearing.

And when I’m just… okay?

That’s actually my favorite place to be now.

A “bozo on the bus,” as they say in the rooms.

Not euphoric.

Not devastated.

Not setting anything on fire.

Just okay.

Those paintings are usually the strangest ones to me. They make the least amount of sense while I’m making them and, inexplicably, seem to make the most sense to everyone else.

People will stand in front of one and tell me what they see.

They’ll find a story.

A memory.

Sex.

Death.

Childhood.

Addiction.

Consumerism.

Religion.

Detroit.

Love.

Some deep psychological meaning I apparently buried beneath twelve layers of acrylic and a cartoon animal with fucked-up teeth.

And I’ll stand there thinking, Sure. Whatever you say.

Maybe they’re right.

Maybe they’re completely wrong.

It doesn’t really matter.

Because I’m starting to realize that the painting stops belonging entirely to me the second I finish it.

What it means to somebody else isn’t really mine to decide.

What matters to me is what happened while I was making it.

Something left my body.

Anger became paint.

Fear became a character.

Grief became texture.

Anxiety became a line that turned into another line that turned into some ridiculous creature staring back at me.

Chaos became composition.

That’s the part that matters.

And maybe that’s why this has worked.

Because I don’t think I ever stopped loving chaos.

That’s probably an uncomfortable thing to admit four years into sobriety.

I love intensity.

I love drama.

I love things happening.

I like turning the volume all the way up.

There is still a part of my brain that sees a perfectly calm life and immediately wonders whether we should introduce a small electrical fire just to keep everybody engaged.

More on that later.

Sobriety didn’t remove that part of me.

It taught me where to put it.

For most of my life, when something became unbearable, I destroyed myself.

Now I destroy a canvas.

Or beautify it, depending on whether you like my vibe.

I attack it.

Cover it.

Scratch into it.

Spray over it.

Paint something beautiful and then completely ruin it because apparently personal growth has its limits.

Then I fix it.

Or I don’t.

Sometimes the thing I thought ruined the painting becomes the best part.

There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but I’ll spare you all.

The point is that I get to put all of it somewhere now.

The beautiful shit.

The ugly shit.

The divorce.

My children.

The fear.

The resentment.

The gratitude.

The part of me that misses chaos.

The part of me that desperately wants peace.

The person I was.

The person I’m becoming.

None of it has to stay trapped inside me until I need a chemical to shut it up.

I don’t have to shut it up anymore.

I can let it out.

I can put it on a canvas and let somebody else stare at it in a gallery someday and decide what the hell they think it means.

Maybe they’ll understand it.

Maybe they won’t.

That’s not really my job.

My job was surviving whatever made me paint it.

Four years ago, I had a very different way of getting things out of me.

It nearly killed me.

Today, somehow, someway, I destroy a canvas instead.

And then I hang it on a wall.

Turns out that’s considerably easier to explain to my children.

I’ve lost a lot in four years.

A job.

A marriage.

A version of my life I thought would last forever.

And, quite literally, my left nut.

But through all of it, I never went back.

And after four years sober, I can finally say something with absolute certainty:

I still wouldn’t give my left nut for a hit of cocaine.