It is five in the morning and still dark. There is a chilly wind blowing in from the Baltic and I’m sat outside with a coffee trying to land on one word for how I feel. The word that turns up is doubt.
But doubt is the wrong word, or it ought to be. Solomon, the app I have spent the better part of a year building, is on the cusp of launch. I have worked harder and more steadily on it than on anything I can remember. He is in as good a shape as I can get him. By any sensible measure this should be a morning for pride, or at least for relief. But what I feel, sat here in the dark, is doubt.
I have been turning it over, trying to be honest about what the doubt is. It is not a fear of failing, exactly. It is narrower and odder than that. It is the fear of what happens when something breaks. People will start using Sol, I hope, and things will go wrong, because things always go wrong, and most of what could go wrong is technical and sits outside my personal reach. For months the whole thing has been in my hands. There has always been one more job to do, one more thing to fix or tweak or improve. The build gave me somewhere to put myself. Launch is the handover. It moves Sol out of my hands and into the hands of strangers, and systems I cannot get at from a chair on the terrace. And it takes away the thing I have been hiding inside all this time, which is the building itself. When the building stops, the excuses stop with it. There is nothing left to do but open the door and see who comes in.
A familiar kind of waiting
Then this morning something else surfaced and made me think. What I am feeling now is almost exactly what I felt in early recovery.
I stopped drinking the best part of a decade ago. For the first year, maybe eighteen months, I was aware of people watching. Not unkindly, most of them, but watching all the same, waiting in some corner of themselves to see whether I would hold.
They needed convincing, and the hard thing I had to swallow was that I could not convince them. There was no wand to wave. No amount of me insisting I was fine was going to make me trusted. The only thing that would rebuild the trust was time.
Uneventful time. One day after another of the feared thing simply not happening, until at some point, on their timetable and not mine, they decided I was probably going to be alright.
Launch is that, all over again. I cannot argue Solomon into being trusted, not by other people and not by myself. He earns it the only way trust is ever earned, by working, one ordinary day after another, until one morning I notice I have stopped waiting for the crash.
The odd part is that the roles have reversed. Back then I was the one being watched. Now I am the one watching. I have taken that old scrutiny, the kind that used to be aimed at me, and turned it on Sol. Is he working? What if this breaks? What if someone presses that button and nothing happens? I am stood where my doubters once stood, keeping the same watch, only now it is over my own creation.
The feelings that came back
Here is the part that unsettled me most. The emotions that have come back are the emotions of the drinking years. Fear. Uncertainty. A wobble in my confidence I thought I had seen the back of. They came hurtling in to taunt me at the exact moment I should feel strongest.
I have chosen to read it differently, however. Those feelings have not come back because something is wrong. They have come back because I am doing something that exposes me, and exposure is the condition that calls them up, in anyone. It is not a relapse of the spirit. It is what it feels like to have skin in the game.
And there is a tell that the recovered part of me is doing its job. This time I am not being run by the feelings. I am sat outside at five in the morning giving them a name, turning them over, putting them into words. That is the whole of what recovery taught me. Not that the hard feelings stop coming, they don’t, but that you learn to meet them, sit with them, feel the feels, and keep moving anyway. The feelings coming back is not the addiction reaching for me. It is the toolkit working the way it was built to.
What the build was for
There is a thought underneath all of this that I keep circling back to, and it is a Frankl thought. Viktor Frankl held that the deepest human need is not for pleasure or comfort but for meaning, and that meaning is a force, a sustaining one. He watched it keep people alive in the worst place on earth. Give a person a why, he said, and they can bear almost any how.
The build has been my why. A why with a shape and a deadline and a thousand small tasks, and it has carried me through months of odd hours and solitary work. It gave every strange early start a reason. Now the build is done, and I am face to face with the quiet Frankl warned about, the emptiness that turns up not in the struggle but just after it, when the thing that held your purpose is suddenly finished. It has a very plain name. Now what?
Fortunately, I think Frankl hands me the answer too, if I will take it. The meaning was never in finishing Solomon. It was never in the completion. It was always further out than that, in what Solomon is for. The build was only ever the vehicle. The meaning lives in the person I have not met yet, the one who will open Sol at their own five in the morning, in the dark, coffee going cold, a word like doubt sitting on their chest, and who will find something there that helps. That is the why, and it has not finished. It has changed address. It has moved from making the thing to being of use through the thing, which is a harder kind of meaning to sit with, because it asks me to let go of the part I control and trust the part I do not.
Built the way I was rebuilt
I will say the thing I have been a bit shy of saying, because I think it is the truest line here. I built Solomon the same way I rebuilt myself.
Sober. Which is to say with restraint rather than grand claims. One thing at a time. Honest about what it cannot do. Serious underneath, even when it is light on the surface, because that is recovery to the letter, a very serious business worn lightly. I did not build a cheerful little novelty. I built a companion for people in a hard place, out of the same materials I used to put my own life back together. That is not a marketing line. It is just the fact of it, and it is why I can stand behind him even while I am frightened.
I also know myself well enough to own the reputation I have, fair or not, for turning up with a bright idea and not always seeing it through. I have felt that particular doubt in the room, the unspoken one. Let us see if he actually launches this. The only answer I have to it is the one I had all those years ago. Not a speech, not a promise. Just the fact of the thing happening, and going on happening, past the point where everyone expected it to fall over.
So here I am. A bit daunted. Less triumphant than I had hoped, more like a rabbit caught in headlights. But I know these headlights. I have walked into them before, when the thing I was launching was a sober version of myself, and I know now that the fear does not have to lift before I take the step. It lifts afterwards, slowly, in its own time, once enough ordinary days have stacked up behind me.
Now what? Now the part that is not building. Now being useful. Now letting time do the work no argument ever could.
Viktor Frankl (1905 to 1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist and a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. He founded logotherapy, the school of thought built on the idea that our deepest drive is not for pleasure but for meaning, and he set it down in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, written out of what he lived through. The line about giving a person a why so they can bear almost any how is his.