Alex Chambers: Freda Love Smith is a quitter. She's been a lot of things in her life so far; a drummer in a number of acclaimed Indie rock bands, including The Blake Babies and the Mysteries of Life, an author of two memoirs, and a parent of two children. In January 2021, as the pandemic raged on and violence erupted at the US Capitol, Smith started a series of what she calls quitting experiments, temporarily giving up everything she used in a habitual to get by way.

Alex Chambers: First alcohol, then sugar, followed by cannabis, caffeine and social media. Then she kept quitting beyond even what she expected. She quit her job and her musical career as a drummer. She also started something and finished it; a book about her experiences called 'I Quit Everything: How One Woman's Addiction to Quitting Helped Her Confront Bad Habits and Embrace Midlife.' This week on Inner States WFIU's David Brent Johnson, in conversation with Freda Love Smith, coming up, after this.

Alex Chambers:  It's Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers, and I'm going to turn it right over to David Brent Johnson, who's talking with Freda Love Smith about her book, 'I Quit Everything.'

David Brent Johnson:  I think I just wanted to start by talking about the epigraph that you have in the book, which resonated with me because it's from The Bad News Bears movie, which I loved as a kid and have thought about over the years. You quote Walter Matthau's character, Coach Morris Buttermaker, "This quitting thing, it's a hard habit to break once you start." I wanted to ask you what led you to make this decision to quit these various habits, in succession, and did you know from the start that it was going to be an experience that you would turn into a book?

Freda Love Smith:  Yes. To answer the last question first. When you're a writer you're always thinking "Oh, maybe this could be a book". It's always in the back of my head, just that possibility, or at least, "This is a thing I could write about." I don't think I started specifically with that intention. I think I started much more from a place of being pretty fed up, exhausted, really stressed out and just tired of myself and I really needed something to change. It was definitely that moment that I describe in the book of feeling overwhelmed by the political moment, in the cultural moment. I talk a little bit about the January 6 riots and the preceding months of COVID, of stress and isolation and just all the change that was foisted on us.

Freda Love Smith:  My habits, like a lot of other people's, had turned, kind of, unhealthy as coping mechanisms, drinking in particular. That was really the catalyst for this whole thing was just my reflecting on my drinking habits and how something that I had turned to to soften the harshness of life and the difficulty of those months. Something that I had turned to as maybe a positive thing, or a little treat at the end of the day, had really become a negative thing. Something that was not making me happier or feel better, but was making me feel worse or making me maybe even less capable of coping. The instigation of it all was a low moment, I would say.

David Brent Johnson:  Yes. You talk in the book early on about how much alcohol sales rose in the year of 2020, which is when the pandemic begins. Early in that year, March of 2020 is when everybody goes into lockdown, goes into a very isolated state of existence, a very different and stressful form of existence. Then that all builds up to the riots of January 6, 2021, and that and COVID are, kind of, a backdrop to the book in a way, which I thought was very interesting.

Freda Love Smith:  Yes, it really was a backdrop and it was a catalyst, I think, for the whole experiment. I think that COVID in itself forced us all into an experiment, or into a lot of different kinds of experiments. What would it be like to have to do your job from home? To not be able to leave your house? Or if you had to go and do a job, to do it behind Plexiglas, or in shifts, or in these various forms of isolation? What would it be to home school your kids? For everybody to home school their kids, all of a sudden overnight? I feel like there are all these forced experiments going on and that, for me, and maybe for other people, it might have opened up an opportunity to attempt some more intentional experiments.

David Brent Johnson:  Right. You used this cataclysmic moment as an opportunity it seems like, for yourself. You decide to give up alcohol, but did you decide from the outset that you were going to give up one thing after another? Or was it a chain reaction that developed organically?

Freda Love Smith:  It developed pretty quickly. Once I decided to quit alcohol, I made a very decisive decision to do that. In doing that, it instantly made me reflect on my life as a whole; my days and how I was getting through the days, the amount of caffeine that I needed to survive, how I was not eating as well as I had before, I was eating a lot of sugar. It made me think about my recent cannabis habit and how I was also leaning on that really hard. I just kind of took a step back. Oh, and social media also. That being at home, being stuck in front of my computer, I was going on automatic a lot of the time and just clicking over to Facebook, pulling out my phone, scrolling through Instagram. Really not a lot of intention behind it, really not a lot of joy in it.

Freda Love Smith:  I think the decision to quit alcohol just made me examine all of these habits, and I can be a little bit of an extreme person sometimes, I write about that in the book. It's kind of appealing to me, and it was appealing to me in the moment, just to think "I'm giving all of it up. I'm just going to quit all of it." That was a grand moment, but then I immediately reflected on the fact that it was actually going to be physically and mentally challenging to do this. I knew myself and I knew that, in the past, attempts to go cold turkey, to give things up, it hasn't always been successful for me. I just kept thinking it through, I also like to make plans, I like to figure things out, so I thought "Okay, I will do this, this grand dramatic thing, but I'll do it somewhat gradually. I'll do it incrementally. I'll give up alcohol first". I thought that would be the hardest.

Freda Love Smith:  It turns out it wasn't but I thought it would be, and in some ways it was the most defining and most complicated substance that I had to quit, but I knew I needed to tackle that first. Then I just made a schedule. I basically dropped one thing every month and stuck to that. Once I planned it out it wasn't that hard to stick to it.

David Brent Johnson:  Was your intent when you started to quit these things permanently or were you challenging yourself to give them up for a while?

Freda Love Smith:  For a while, that was my intention. I did get the idea from this dry January movement, which wasn't something that I'd ever engaged with but I was aware of it. People who would give up drinking for the month of January as a reset, kind of a fresh start for the New Year, which, I think, is just a temporary way to take a break and get a little bit of perspective. Some people come out of that pursuing sobriety. Some people come out of it just going back to the way that they used to drink. Some people just reconsider their habits and make small changes.

Freda Love Smith:  It was January when I started so there were people posting about dry January. There were people posting very mockingly about it, too. I mention this in the book, on January 6, when Rebecca Makkai Tweets, "How's that dry January going?" because I think it was a moment when many people were turning to the consolation of drink or some substance. Yes, I was kind of aware of this concept of taking a temporary break and just seeing what happened. I felt open, I wasn't really sure if I was quitting alcohol forever. I didn't think so, but I wanted to be open-minded and experimental about it. I really wanted to experiment on myself and just see what happened without being too rigid and without planning an outcome.

David Brent Johnson:  There's something else that informs this book and it's the loss of your friend, Faith.

Freda Love Smith:  Yes.

David Brent Johnson:  You dedicated the book to her and I wanted to ask you about the ways in which losing her, this very close friend of yours, around the time of the book.

Freda Love Smith:  It was.

David Brent Johnson:  How that informed it.

Freda Love Smith:  Yes, she's really woven through there. Faith [PHONETIC: Coppinger], was an amazing person. Someone that I played music with, someone that I corresponded with. She was a wonderful writer. She got very sick right as the pandemic was kicking in, so I feel like her illness, her decline and her death all of this was happening in the same time line. It was just this painful restriction of not being able to go and see her, not being able to be with her, not being able to go and mourn her. At the same time, not having my usual forms of consolation or numbing or coping to help me get through it. In a strange way it got really interwoven into the story and so many people were going through things like this.

Freda Love Smith:  I actually lost a couple of family members as well, during the pandemic, not to COVID, but just the normal kinds of grieving, being together, celebration, all of this was so altered and kind of yanked away from all of us. Faith's loss really represented that to me, just like the restriction, the limitation and the loss.

David Brent Johnson:  Yes, and all of this grief and dealing with it at a time when you've also decided to challenge yourself to give up all the things one by one that many people use to help nullify the effects of it.

Freda Love Smith:  Absolutely. That I always had and that I would have been like, "Oh, my God, I need a whiskey. I need a couple of whiskeys. This is just too much, and I need to feel a little bit less." It was very raw, having no way to numb that, just having to feel my way through it.

Alex Chambers:  Coming up, the first time Freda got sober. This is music from the Sunshine Boys, the last band she performed in before she quit drumming. The song is called Underwater. We'll be right back.

Alex Chambers:  It's Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers and we're listening to a conversation that our own David Brent Johnson had with Freda Love Smith, about her book, "I Quit Everything." The first time Smith got sober, she was 20. At the time, she thought she was too young to be an alcoholic. But she'd already spent quite a few years growing up in a time and a place, Southern Indiana, in the 1970s and early '80s. And a popular culture that helped set the course for her pursuit of consciousness altering behavior.

David Brent Johnson:  And your book talks about how you very early on became acquainted with these various substances and ways of modifying your feelings, making you feel like somebody else. When you undertake this task in the very early Spring, late Winter of 2021, at that point, you're in your mid-50s. And your book documents a history of using various substances since your early teens really. So, you're turning away from 35 years off and on, of having these things in your life, that you're kind of putting away these chemical tools that you've been using. And I wanted to ask you about how this kind of goes all the way back to growing up in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1970s and into the early '80s. A period when the culture was very loose, as you talk about in the book. A lot of kids had parents, not all kids, but a lot of kids.

David Brent Johnson:  Your situation as one, had parents who were in one way or another, very permissive, or maybe not present necessarily. And there's also kind of an ongoing afterglow or hangover, either when you want to use both from the 1960s of this countercultural embrace, of drugs, including alcohol. People often refer to them separately, but alcohol is a drug too. And you're growing up all around this. How did that shape you as a person?

Freda Love Smith:  It was really formative. I mean, just that time period imprinted on me so deeply. I think a positive aspect of it, growing up in Bloomington in that time period, and growing up around different alternative communities, I did feel like I had a very expansive understanding of what a life could be like. That, you know, I had friends who had very traditional families, nuclear families, went to church. This is Southern Indiana and there were a lot of conservative people around then. And I had friends like that, but I had friends who had grown up on communes. There were still some active communes like Needmore and things like that around here, back in the late '60s and early '70s. So, I saw that, okay, that's another way that you can live your life and raise a family. I saw single parents, I saw people that were academics, I saw people that were very working class. I'm really grateful for that. Like, it definitely gave me a kind of openness that has been really helpful to me, really valuable to me as a parent, as a person.

Freda Love Smith:  You know, grew up around a lot of musicians and artists as well. So, I think that when I look back on that, I mostly see positives. But there were definitely some challenges too, to the kind of permissive parenting, or almost a largely benignly negligent parenting that a lot of us experienced. And so, I think there's this idea of the wise child. I talk about it in the book that I think was a real cultural phenomena. Like, a kid that grows up really fast, and then almost relates to their parent like another adult, or like a friend. And I think it can be complicated, and I think can definitely raise challenges. And I think maybe having that early exposure to drugs, to alcohol, to parties, it normalized it in a way for me, that maybe has been something that I've had to trouble, to question a little bit. Like, maybe it's not normal, or great, or maybe it's not appropriate for everyone to party to that extent, to turn to substances to that event. Or, to have substances so interwoven into just the normal fabric of life.

David Brent Johnson:  I remember, growing up my household was a pretty conventional household. And I came down to Bloomington as a teenager, and started dating a teenager who had grown in Bloomington. And we smoked marijuana with her mother one evening in the living room. I was like, wow, this is a whole different kind of a cultural realm than what I was used to. And I thought it was kind of cool. But also part of me was, like, is this really appropriate, or just seem kind of weird? I had a kind of ambivalent feeling about it.

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah. Ambivalent's a good word for it. Because it's like you're looking to the adults in your life, to help you create boundaries, or create parameters and to find what your limitations are. And so it can be confusing if they don't really seem to have those.

David Brent Johnson:  Right. Or they just have a different value system where this is an acceptable custom. But it was a very different kind of generational experience to have, maybe than some of the generations that followed, when sort of the, Just Say No," ideology took hold in the '80s. And I think subsequent generations had a less permissive attitude about it, than maybe what you were experiencing.

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah. I think that's right. I think there definitely was a cultural shift that happened, with "Just Say No." And I'm glad that I got to live through some of that era of more openness, you know, even though I think that it's complicated and there are downsides, I'm still kind of grateful for it, and I don't necessarily think, like, "Oh, that's terrible. You shouldn't smoke pot with your kids." I actually wouldn't, I haven't done that, but I don't judge it. And I think it was really coming from a cultural moment, and a desire to not be a hypocrite, and to be honest, and to be a human in front of your kid. There's so much about that, that I actually appreciate and value.

David Brent Johnson:  Yeah. It seems like there's a lot to sort out there from a '70s childhood. You also talk a lot, early on in the book, about these pop culture influences that really shaped you. In fact, I think you devote entire chapters, short chapters, but chapters to several different movies that had a big impact on you, particularly with alcohol. You talk about "The Bad News Bears," where there's a lot of beer drinking including the kids. [LAUGHS] You talk about "Arthur," which celebrates this rich, charming young playboy who's an alcoholic basically.

Freda Love Smith:  Totally.

David Brent Johnson:  There's a wonderful description of you going to see that movie alone, at the Old Village Theater in Bloomington, and just how taken you were with it. You do a great job of, kind of, looking back, more critically, 40 years on, but you're seeing it as a 13-year-old, however old you were at the time, and it's shaping you. And then later on when you're approaching the cusp of your 20s, or in your teens, reading the works of novels, Charles Bukowski, seeing the movie "Barfly," which is based on a screenplay or book of his. I just wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about how those movies shaped who you became as a person?

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah, absolutely. I think as I was quitting alcohol and feeling a bit of an identity crisis, I think I titled one of the chapters, "I Drink Not Therefore I Am Not." Because I just felt like it was so entrenched in me, and who I was, that I was inspired to explore that a little bit. It felt like detective work just trying to figure out, like, okay, why do I have this relationship to alcohol? Why do I define myself as a drinker so deeply? I think sometimes, when people are trying to understand themselves better, there's a psychological impulse to look at your family dynamics. To look at those, or to look at other relationships that were really formative and influential. And I felt like I did that, but I kind of did that through the lens of movies. That, that kind of gave me a way to access my childhood, and to access some of the familial and peer influences that I had. And it was a fun way way to do it.

Freda Love Smith:  And I was watching a ton of movies during the pandemic too, so I just feel it was very much in my mind, and it felt like a fun kind of research, sort of, me search to do. So, definitely that, "The Bad News Bears," "Bugsy Malone" era, that I get into, I do feel like there was something so liberatory about that moment in children's media culture. You know, a child didn't have to be this perfect, obedient, well-behaved little mini adult. But that childhood can be this kind of wilder, more creative, more fun thing. I don't know, there was a lot of freedom in that, and it was really appealing to me. But at the same time, you could let a kid be a kid, but it's also, like, letting the kid operate in an adult world. And also, I feel like, the sense that - and I write about this with "Bad News Bears" - that pretty much all of the adults are irredeemably corrupt.

Freda Love Smith:  And this seems like a really '70s thing too, of just the way that people were so disenchanted with government and with the structures of our culture. And there just seemed to be so much corruption, so much disappointment. It was a little bit, like, well, the children are actually the ones that have more integrity.

David Brent Johnson:  I definitely remember that from the milieu of the '70s. And I remember thinking that, even though my parents pretty much had it together as parents in the '70s, just looking around the whole landscape that, yeah, that adults were corrupt. It was all kind of a carry over too of "Catcher in the Rye" in some ways. That to enter the adult world is basically to become corrupt or whatever. And that the children are almost having to run the show at times too, because the adults are so kind of lost. After all this chaotic upheaval of the '60s, which was good, which was much-needed to overturn all these kind of horrible things that have been baked into our society, in terms of race, gender and all these other things. But everybody's kind of wandering around in this blasted cultural landscape, and the kids are like, "What's going on here? You know, I guess we have to kind of figure things out for ourselves."

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah, I think so. And a lot of these movies were also post-Watergate. And so, I think that there was that kind of disenchantment as well, with the adult word. So, I mean, as a kid I really picked up on that. It was like, it can be cool to be a kid. And with "The Bad News Bears," I was so drawn to the freedom that the children have, that there really is like this realm, this world of children that's a better world, it's a better place. It's freer, it's more sincere. And I also liked how these movies - and especially "Bad News Bears" - really take childhood seriously in a way too. I actually think, if you watch that movie, a lot of the music is adapted from the opera "Carmen." And so there are all these themes from "Carmen," like the "Toreador Song," there's like a riff on that. And it's played for comedic effect, because it's this terrible baseball team, and they're dropping balls, and they're fumbling all over the place. And it's this heroic music playing.

Freda Love Smith:  But I feel like there's a subtler message there too, that it's like, no, when you're a kid a baseball game is everything. The stakes are high, and it's something that we can take seriously. And there is like a heroism in that film. And so I feel like that music, kind of captures a lot of what I love about that movie. That it's funny, but it's also really serious. Treating sugar as a drug. Treating caffeine as a drug on par with alcohol and cannabis. It wasn't something that I thought that much about, going into the experiment. But as I was writing the book and especially in retrospect, something I think about a lot is that the drugs that we're addicted to, that we consume, we tend to think are kind of okay. And the drugs that other people do, we tend to think, oh, that's dangerous. And especially in terms of hard drugs, so to speak, like cocaine or heroin. And I wanted to kind of level that all out, and just be like, no, these are all drugs, they are addictive.

Freda Love Smith:  Maybe some can potentially have more dangerous outcomes than others. But, one thing really surprised me in the book, was in reading Dr. Carl Hart's research. He is the author of, "Drug Use For Grown-Ups," which is a recent book. And he writes that only ten to 30% of heroin and methamphetamine users, are actually addicted. And that actually surprised me. I mean, I've always thought I had a pretty open mind about drug use, but I just assumed pretty much everyone who uses heroin is addicted to it. So, I mean, it was just kind of helpful to turn down the volume on kind of demonizing other people's drugs, or certain kinds of drugs. And to say, like, hey, 90% of the adult world is addicted to caffeine. And yeah, that's a pretty safe drug and it's cheap, and it's easily available, it also has some health benefits and all that. But still, on a certain level, I think it's kind of helpful to just realize we are all addicted to drugs. And maybe that can help us to have empathy for people who are struggling with drugs that can be more damaging, and be more dangerous if that makes sense.

David Brent Johnson:  I totally agree with that. It's funny too, because I don't think I realized for a long time, but TV is even kind of like a drug too. And I remember, I realized at some point it was like, this is something that you just turn on a button and there's something to divert you, to take your mind off whatever you've been thinking about.

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah. And there's a dopamine hit as well. And to kind of jump back to Saturday morning cartoons, I definitely think that feels like a very modern sensation of being on social media, and feeling left out, or feeling inadequate, feeling less beautiful, feeling less fabulous. I got a taste of that with those Saturday morning cartoons, and especially with the commercials of the lifestyle that was depicted, and the kids, and the foods that everyone else seemed to be allowed to eat, but I wasn't. So, that kind of missing out feeling, or just slightly inferior feeling. So, I don't know, I think that there's a real line of connection there for me.

David Brent Johnson:  Yeah, because that was also kind of the flip side for you, of having this sort of hippyish countercultural mother, who was permissive in some ways, but on the other hand was making you wholegrain natural peanut butter sandwiches to take to school, that you're not thrilled by. When you're, like, I just want a bowl of Captain Crunch, I don't want a carrot or whatever, you know? [LAUGHS]

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah, everyone else is bringing baloney sandwiches, and I have these grainy, mushy, peanuty things that were just these weird grainy hippy lunches, that definitely made me different. In a way that I now very much appreciate, but very much did not appreciate at the time.

David Brent Johnson:  When you're nine, you're like, "No! This is awful!"

Freda Love Smith:  No. I just wanted to be normal, whatever that meant. [LAUGHS]

David Brent Johnson:  "Am I being punished? Like, damn, why can't I enjoy what everybody else gets to enjoy?" Yeah, also you grew up at a time too - and this may still be the case today too - but I think especially in the '70s and the '80s, all these musical and rock and roll kind of cultural influences that you and I both absorbed, and grew up with. That drugs and alcohol are totally enmeshed in that culture. They are celebrating that culture, they are a staple of that culture. Was that also an influence on you?

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah, I mean a lot. I mean, one of the bands that I write about, in particular, is The Replacements, who are still one of my favorite bands, a lifelong favorite band of mine. And I think in the book I call them, the "Bukowski of Bands" because I think they show the dark side of the it as well. But especially, seeing them live during a certain period of time. And what would this be? I mean, the Bob Stinson years when he was literally passing a bottle whiskey around the club. And it was just so wild and expansive, and over the top, and celebratory and communal. And just all of these very positive wonderful things. But at the same time, they were poisoning themselves, and it was destructive too. But it was just that expansive wildness, that sense of connection between the band and the audience. You know, you're like literally passing a bottle through the audience.

Freda Love Smith:  And then, of course, just the music. I mean, it was so beautiful the way they would sing about heartbreak and pain, but in a way that was so soaring and inspiring and moving. And they definitely made intoxication, drunkenness, seem like this beautiful, artistic statement.

David Brent Johnson:  Yeah, very Dionysian. And I mean again, this goes obviously back to the '60s again, and bands like The Doors and The Beatles that are all kind of celebrating in one way or another, this expansion of consciousness. But also, just this kind of notion that it's a good thing to get messed up chemically in one way or another. That it's freeing somehow. That it frees from you these cultural restrictions. But obviously, with the nature of substances being what they are, that a lot of people end up being restricted, or confined by the dependence that they end up developing with these substances.

Freda Love Smith:  Yeah, that's right. It's like you kind of go so far to the extreme of freedom and openness, that you come out on the other side into a very restricted place. So, yeah, I mean, there's that danger for sure. But I believed, and I still believe, that it is really positive to experience different states, that it's important that it's part of a full life. And so, whether you achieve that through yoga and meditation, or through chemicals that alter your consciousness, I think it's valuable, I think it's important. And I always, and I always will, but I just think that what that looks like, is really different from person to person and I respect that. It's not a good idea for some people to drink at all, some people really can't and shouldn't. Maybe some people can play with it and dance with it safely. But it's something that it's risky, but the risk is maybe part of the benefit.

David Brent Johnson:  Well, yeah. And also, I should probably say too that the idea of the intertwining of substance use and artistic pursuit goes way way back before the 1960s. Baudelaire, the French poet who wrote poems celebrating opium, and other writers who wrote about it, Thomas De Quincey. You remember "Confessions of an Opium-Eater?"

Freda Love Smith:  Right, of course.

David Brent Johnson:  I mean, there's a long tradition of the intertwining of creative exploration. You know, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the, "Kubla Khan" poem that was inspired by an opium dream, and things like that. So, there are deep roots.

Freda Love Smith:  There are deep roots. And I do think that people get stuck in ruts of certain ways of being, and certain ways of thinking, and it's valuable to break out of it. But with my book and with my experiment, the rut that I needed to break out of, was actually one of too much intoxication. So, I think that on any path, it's possible to just be kinda of stuck in your patterns of behavior. And that it's really beneficial to take a break, and to take a step back and just take a look at your life and your situation and the way that you're approaching it. I think that drugs can help to break you out of ruts. But then I think drugs can also dig you into a rut.

David Brent Johnson:  We've been talking a lot about the '70s and the early '80s, but your initial kind of confrontation with being in a kind of rut, dates back to the late 1980s, at a time when recovery culture has really emerged. Alcoholics Anonymous had been around since the mid-1930s, I think. Narcotics Anonymous I believe, began in the mid-1950s. But it seems like it was really the early '80s when they started to become more prominent in the culture. We've been talking about artists, you have artists like Lou Reed. A guy who wrote a song for the Velvet Underground called "Heroin." And who was a notorious speed user throughout the 1970s, is suddenly embracing AA, is suddenly embracing sobriety. In the '80s, there's a whole kind of a conservative turn in the culture in general. The rise of the "Just Say No" Movement, and all these things. So, by the late '80s when you're, I think, at the very end of your teens, and in the book you talk about. What led to your first decision to say, "I've got to stop drinking, and I don't think I should drink again?"

Freda Love Smith:  Yes. Things had gotten really bad. I was young. I was 20 when I got sober the first time. And it was a culmination of a couple of years of hard drinking. So, I left Indiana when I was 18 and moved to Boston, I was very young, and immediately started playing music, started the Blake Babies very quickly after moving there, and was gigging in bars even though I was, you know, young, I was a teenager. So, I got very caught up in the culture of bars, in the practice of getting together with friends and drinking. That was my social life, my social life was drinking which I think is not uncommon at that age. And I saw people around me that were able to somewhat moderate themselves, that didn't always end every night, you know, passed out or sick and the next day just feeling like they wanted to die. So, there were people around me that had a little bit more of a handle on it.

Freda Love Smith:  I wasn't one of them. Like, I never seemed to be able to stop myself at a reasonable point. It always seemed like I wanted a little bit more, no matter how much I had. I talk in the book about some of the work of anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, and his idea of optima and maxima. And maxima is just this idea that more is better, more is better. And that's how I was in my late teens, and early 20s. There just could never be enough. And not surprisingly, I did a lot of damage to my health. And so by the time I got to this very low point. What do they call it in AA? Just like bottoming out, hitting the bottom. I was drinking almost a fifth of whiskey a day. And after one bad night, I couldn't stop throwing up and there was blood, and I was just in pain. I went to the hospital and ended up being admitted into rehab from there, after a conversation with a doctor. Where she asked, "Do you have control over alcohol?" Which was an interesting question and an easy one to answer. I said, "No, it has control over me." But she asked me, "Do you think you're an alcoholic?" And I'm like, "Oh, I'm too young to be an alcoholic."

Freda Love Smith:  Which is really weird. I don't know, I guess I thought of an alcoholic as an old guy.

David Brent Johnson:  [LAUGHS] Yeah.

Freda Love Smith:  An old man. [LAUGHS]

David Brent Johnson:  Yeah. Or Charles Bukowski, right, or somebody like it?

Freda Love Smith:  Exactly. That's not me. I'm a 20-year-old woman. But in any rate, I was admitted and I feel that that saved my life. That that was a crucial intervention I needed to completely quit. And I did. And I went to meetings for a while, and I found them tremendously helpful, really supportive and interesting too. A lot of the content of AA, I think I mentioned earlier, I'm a planner, I'm drawn to programs. And so there was much about it that I found helpful and attractive. But I drifted away from it after a couple of years. And that was completely against a lot of the messaging of AA, which is just that if you are an alcoholic, you always will be, and you cannot safely drink. And so I dig into that a little bit into the book because it's something that I'm still, like, huh, it's weird. I mean, am I or am I not? I feel like I drink very, very moderately now, so I don't think I am. Is it possible that I was one then? Well, I sure looked like one, and I sure behaved like one. I guess I'm starting to think it's not quite so simple for everybody.

Alex Chambers:  Coming up... quitting addictive habits leads to quitting a job, quitting a lifetime artistic pursuit. And does quitting everything mean quitting quitting? We've got more Smiths final band, The Sunshine Boys. This is, "Keep It Right Where You Need It." I'm Alex Chambers. This is Inner States.

Alex Chambers:  In January 2021, Freda Love Smith, a musician, writer and academic advisor decided to quit, one by one, a variety of substances that she'd developed strong reliances upon. Alcohol, sugar, caffeine, cannabis and social media. WFIU's David Brent Johnson spoke with her about her quitting experiments and her memoir, I Quit Everything: How One Woman's Addiction to Quitting Helped Her Confront Bad Habits and Embrace Midlife. Although I Quit Everything offers a nuanced view of substance usage and addiction, Smith emphasizes that it's not a rebuke of recovery programs or the concept of recovery, citing her own experiences with Alcoholics Anonymous.

Freda Love Smith:  For me, when I was completely sober for those years, Alcoholics Anonymous was an incredible resource. I loved meetings and I found them super helpful and I have many, many friends who are in the program and for whom it's a total lifeline. I think it's great. I really admire that work. Bill W., The Big Book. Like, I think there's tremendous value there. I just also think that there's space for other approaches with substances and even other approaches to sobriety.

David Brent Johnson:  So, you gave up alcohol, sugar, cannabis, caffeine, social media. What were the hardest ones to give up?

Freda Love Smith:  Alcohol was the most difficult personally, just because I had such a long relationship with it and it had very much been built into my life. It was hard to let go of, more psychologically than physically. I didn't have a lot of physical withdrawal from alcohol. I had a little bit. I had a little bit, but it was more just the sense of self. A kind of loss of sense of self that I experienced in taking a break from that that was really hard. But it didn't remotely compare physically to my withdrawal from caffeine, which was catastrophic. It's not like this for everybody. Like, I think some physiologies are more sensitive to it and I'm definitely, like, much more sensitive, which is part of the problem to begin with. You know, that I had to get my dosage just exactly right and the timing had to be right and, yes, just like a strange, delicate constitution when it comes to caffeine. And so, quitting it was devastating.

Freda Love Smith:  I did some research before. I had attempted to quit it before and had successfully, maybe a couple of times, but I would read articles. Like, oh you might have a headache for a few days. That was such a lie. I was nauseated, I got sick, I had blinding headaches for days and, honestly, I was very, very ill for weeks and I couldn't think straight for months. It was so extreme. Michael Pollan writes about caffeine. He had similar experiences where it was a lot harder, a lot more intense and took a lot longer than expected to, like, really be free of it. And so, I mean, subsequently, it's the only thing I quit permanently because that was such a traumatic experience that I thought, well, I'll never have the strength to go through that again. I'll never be able to do it again. And so, I stayed quit of all things on caffeine.

David Brent Johnson:  Interesting that that's the one thing that you have stayed away from permanently or ongoing or whatever. Yes. And you describe your withdrawals from each of these things and they're very up and down.

Freda Love Smith:  Yes.

David Brent Johnson:  You describe the positives, the up sides, the clarity you gain from no longer ingesting certain things. There are dividends that you describe.

Freda Love Smith:  Absolutely.

David Brent Johnson:  How did you persevere through the most miserable stretches? How did you get through those?

Freda Love Smith:  You know, just trying to keep myself busy with other things. Having really fun books to read that were engaging. Definitely watching a lot of movies. Doing yoga, taking walks. So yes, just trying to kind of fill the time with other things. In some ways, it was helpful to be restricted and a little bit locked down for some of it and especially in quitting alcohol. The bars were closed or we couldn't really go out. I wasn't playing gigs and so there wasn't as much temptation. So, I benefited in some ways from a little bit of a clean slate. And so, I just found ways to fill the time. Also, my first book is all about food and it's partly a cookbook and I'm very much a food person. I love to cook. So, spending more time cooking good food and taking care of myself really, really helped me. And the fact that I quit one thing at a time really helped.

Freda Love Smith:  So, I wrote about this in the book how when I quit alcohol, that whole first month, I kind of hit the sugar pretty hard. I was, like, making a lot of cookies. Again, I wrote about this. When you go to an AA meeting it's, like, cookies and coffee. You know, these are the substitute drugs that you get. And so, I kind of operated on that principle of, like, okay, I'm giving this thing up, but I'll lean a little bit more into this thing and then I gave that up. And so it was this kind of slow process of shedding things. The fact that I didn't do it all at once and didn't do it cold turkey, let me baby myself a little bit along the way.

David Brent Johnson:  Smith ended up quitting other things, her job as an academic advisor and her three and a half decade career as a drummer, even though she found her band at the time, Sunshine Boys, to be one of the most rewarding musical experiences she'd ever had. Quitting those two things wasn't part of the plan.

Freda Love Smith:  It wasn't an outcome I was expecting when I set out to conduct the experiment and write the book, but I hit a point near the end of the quitting experiment where I felt a little disappointed. I thought that this was going to be more transformative. I'm like, I quit all of these things, but I'm still just me and I'm still doing this job that I haven't really liked for a couple of years and still just feeling a little bit stuck and a little bit frustrated. And so, yes, I think I'd hoped to just be this whole new person, more than I realized. And I talk about that in relation to the Lucinda Williams song "Changed the Locks," where she starts of in this sort of conventional lyric about, "I changed the locks." She had broken up with her lover. But then it gets more and more surreal and she ends, like, "I changed the name of this town." Just this kind of surreal, radical transformation and that was kind of my theme and that kind of became a theme in the book where I was like, okay, well, I quit. You know, I don't need tea anymore, but I'm still not living my happiest life and there's a lot of things I'd like to change and my job was the most obvious one.

Freda Love Smith:  I had really outgrown it. It was a very hard job to have during the pandemic, especially. I was ready to move on, but I was afraid to. There was a certain amount of security, the fact that I had been doing it for a long time. I was relatively good at it. There was some things about it that I liked a lot, so it was scary. It was really scary, but I do think that my experience of giving up alcohol, weed, sugar, social media and caffeine, that did empower me a little bit to be, like, okay, well, I can make changes, I can get out of my ruts. I can change my habits. And so, I think it inspired me just to take a good hard look at these other aspects of my life, including my job, including my musical career, which had spanned 36 years at that point, but I had been feeling like there's other things I want to do.

Alex Chambers:  So, yes, just this rush of self-examination of these, like, major, major things in my life that I don't think I could have gotten there without having gone through this process of quitting and withdrawal and distance and space and reflection. So, I quit my job and quit playing music almost in the same month and right on the heels of quitting all the other stuff. So, in a way, that gave more weight to the title of the book too, which is like, yes, like, I quit these things, but then I also quit these big, major, also very life defining things.

David Brent Johnson:  Something else you talk about giving up in the book and it's a different kind of giving up. I don't want to say that you quit being a mother because it sounds like you just decided to abandon your children.

Freda Love Smith:  Yes, right.

David Brent Johnson:  Adults that they may now be. But what you're addressing in the book is that it's more like a letting go of the role of a parent because both of your sons are now out in the world in one way or another, and yet this is also occurring at the same time. There's a hilarious moment in the book where you talk about how a friend had once told you years and years ago that you'll really know that your children have completely left the nest when they go on their own cell phone plan. And there's a point in the book where your older son Jonah, tells you that he's gotten his own cell phone plan.

Freda Love Smith:  Exactly, yes.

David Brent Johnson:  And you were like, Jonah, you've made it!

Freda Love Smith:  Yes. This is it. This is the moment.

David Brent Johnson:  It's a wonderful moment.

Freda Love Smith:  Yes.

David Brent Johnson:  But I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about how that kind of played in this whole process, too.

Freda Love Smith:  That's another surprise from the book, because I didn't set out to write a book about the empty nest years or about middle age, but I definitely very much landed in that place where I realized, like, oh, a lot of what's going on here is this mid-life reckoning of realizing that for these years I've been a drummer, for these years I've been an academic advisor, for these years I've been very habitually using these different substances. And for all these years, the care and feeding of children has been this huge part of my day to day life and it isn't anymore.

Freda Love Smith:  So, yes, I landed in a place where I realized this is very much about my mid-life. Of me thinking, okay, I have been this person, I have done these things. Can I take a moment to think about, okay, well, what do I want these next years to be about? What do I want this next stage and is it worth entering this stage, entering these years, somewhat deliberately and consciously thinking, like, okay, what do I want this next part of my life to be like? And it's ended up being incredibly valuable and powerful for me to reflect on that and to not go into it unconsciously. To not go into it on automatic. To not kind of just sleep walk into this next phase of my life, but to really think about it as an exciting time and as a time of creative potential and possibility. And so, the chapter called, I Quit Motherhood, which obviously, I don't really, was kind of a joke, the title itself. But it's also, like, yes, but there's some truth to it where I'm not as occupied with my children while also, of course, loving them as much as ever.

David Brent Johnson:  You weren't telling them, Jonah, Henry, don't call me anymore?

Freda Love Smith:  Exactly.

David Brent Johnson:  We're done!

Freda Love Smith:  We're done here! Yes.

David Brent Johnson:  It's been great. Good luck.

Freda Love Smith:  Yes. Good luck. Yes.

David Brent Johnson:  Write from time to time. You've got my email.

Freda Love Smith:  Right.

David Brent Johnson:  Yes, yes.. This kind of takes us back to the bad news bears epigraph of the book, but do you feel like you've now quit quitting?

Freda Love Smith:  Yes.

David Brent Johnson:  Or do you think there may be more quitting down the road?

Freda Love Smith:  Well, I did just quit biting my fingernails and it's something that I do actually mention it in the book really quickly, but it's something that I've been trying to do since I was five years old when my grandmother gave me this Tinker Bell manicure kit. It was like this little pink kit with nail polish and she gave it to me because she noticed that I bit my fingernails and she's, like, "You shouldn't do that. That's a terrible habit." And so, I was, like, okay, yes, I've got to quit biting my fingernails. I was five. I was like, I've got to quit, but I never succeeded in doing that. But I have recently done that. I quit biting my fingernails. So, I think I'm not through with quitting yet. I think that I found that quitting is actually like really interesting and really fun and that it can be kind of a playful form of self-discovery. So I think it might be a lifestyle.

Alex Chambers:  Freda Love Smith's book is, I Quit Everything: How One Woman's Addiction to Quitting Helped Her Confront Bad Habits and Embrace Midlife. It's published by Agate Publishing's Midway imprint. She spoke with WFIU's David Brent Johnson and you've been listening to Inner States, from the studios of WFIU here in Bloomington, Indiana. The Inner States team is me, Alex Chambers with Jillian Blackburn, Avi Forrest and Jay Upshaw. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge. Special thanks this week to Freda Love Smith and David Brent Johnson. We're gonna end with more music from Freda Love Smith's final band, Sunshine Boys. This is, "The Beginning." Until next year, I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks as always for listening.