The Professional Lingerer
The phone is growing hot against my ear, a literal heat, maybe 104 degrees of radiant frustration, and Gary is still talking about his mother’s collection of ceramic owls as if they are the primary architects of his current relapse. I have been trying to end this conversation for precisely 24 minutes. I’ve used every trick in the book: the ‘I have a hard stop,’ the ‘We can pick this up on Tuesday,’ the heavy, performative sigh that usually signals a shift in the space-time continuum of a coaching session. But Gary is a professional lingerer. He treats silence like a vacuum he is personally responsible for filling with the debris of his 34 years of accumulated resentment. I stare at the clock. It’s 4:44 PM. My neck hurts.
I realize, with a sharp pang of hypocrisy, that my inability to hang up on Gary is the exact same neurological loop that keeps Gary pinned to the needle or the bottle or the ceramic owls. It’s an inability to tolerate the discomfort of a clean break.
AHA: The Subscription Model for the Soul
We talk about addiction as if it’s a moral failing or a chemical hook, but after 14 years of working as a recovery coach, I’ve realized the core frustration is much simpler and more terrifying: it is
