John Mulaney Is Pleasantly ‘Shocked’ That His Sobriety Actually Stuck
If you’re lucky enough to know absolutely nothing about addiction, it’s a common tsk-tsk among the initiated to label yourself as a “former addict” or “former alcoholic.” The addiction, whether to drugs, alcohol or huffing air duster, is always there, you’re just treating and avoiding it. It less gets “cured” and more goes into remission, like a weird form of cancer that makes you do a lot of karaoke.
Relapses, for many addicts, are also a common roadblock on the road to recovery. It’s not uncommon for it to take a couple attempts at sobriety. So, when you get to a point where you feel like it’s actually sticking? It’s a massive relief, knowing you’re not going to have to white-knuckle it at Buffalo Wild Wings when the table’s scattered with ice cold Budweisers and you’re just trying to watch the game.
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Being confident in your sobriety, enough to weather triggers and temptation, also gives you the ability to exist in some situations and locations that you’d completely eliminated for your own good at the outset. Ideally, though, you’d re-enter those under your own control and in your own time. For me, it was gingerly testing the ability to hang out in some of my favorite booze-soaked Brooklyn dives and still ask for seltzer every time I belly-up to the bar.
John Mulaney, thanks to life’s unrelenting deluge, instead got asked to walk over hot coals in gasoline-soaked socks. His wife, Olivia Munn, has been fighting aggressive breast cancer, which means in addition to the hell it’s obviously wreaking on her, he’s been wading through a less-than-ideal daily combo of dread and plentifully available, powerful pills. Some people with partners who struggle with addiction keep their house free of triggers. That’s a lot more possible when it’s “can we not have whiskey in the house even though you love an Old Fashioned” versus “Sorry, honey, no painkillers after your double mastectomy.”
Mulaney, however, seems to have come out the other side with feet unimmolated. He told Woody Harrelson and Ted Danson on their podcast that while bringing the bedridden Munn her prescribed and very necessary medication cocktail, he realized that “the obsession of it was gone.” He’d been carrying a tray that, alongside food, was studded with Xanax, Oxycontin and nerve medication, which is like a final exam no recovery center in their right mind would give a patient.
The successful delivery of the tray, every ingredient properly ed for, was a pleasant shock not only in the moment, but as a reflection on his sobriety as a whole. He told them, “It’s a huge change. Just a huge way of looking at everything. I’m shocked I did it. I’m shocked I was able to do it,” adding, “Like, nothing wrong or shameful about relapse. I just mean I’m shocked, always, that it landed.”
At least he can still enjoy the simple pleasure of cancelling plans.
