Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm your host this week, Sarah Austin-Ginness. Okay, we have three stories for you in this episode, all about a moment of truth. We're talking epiphanies, breaking points, and big time decisions. First up, Tim Summers. Tim told the story at a Pittsburgh Story Slam, where the theme of the night was fresh.
Chapter 2: What is the main theme of the episode?
Here's Tim, live at the Moth. I was a horrible, raging alcoholic for 25 years. Here's the thing about being a drunk or really any kind of addict for that long. The longer you go on, the less you have to lose and the more you just say to yourself, why quit now? I've already lost everything. I lost girlfriends, a wife, a house, jobs, money, self-respect.
They say that the only way that you can quit is for yourself. I don't know about that, I quit for a girl. Or at least I quit when it became clear that I had one thing in my life that was worth quitting for and that was Stacy.
We had dated all through college and we broke up the last day of college and we got back together 25 years later and it wasn't just being with her but it was also that she was with me before everything went wrong and it felt like it was another chance to be the person I was back then before everything went wrong. I got sober on October 21, 2013. For the first... For the first year, I was sober.
I was sober, but I wasn't drunk. But I wasn't really sober yet. And for the second year, I was finally starting to be clear. And during the third year, I started to ask myself what I was going to do with the rest of my life that I had left. You see, I hadn't had a job since 2011 when I was in a horrific car accident. This is how horrific the car accident was.
At the scene of the car accident, during the two hours that it took to cut me out of the car, I passed my cell phone to a fireman and asked him to call my mom. And I could hear him on the phone saying, I'm really sorry, ma'am, but I don't think he's going to make it. So I asked for my phone back. This is how much of a drunk I was at the time.
When I woke up in the smoking wreckage of my car, my very first thought is, is there any way I can make it back to St.
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Chapter 3: What personal struggles does Tim Summers share?
Louis before the liquor stores close? So anyway, I was trying to think about what to do, how to get a fresh start. And I thought, the one thing that I used to like to do was to teach. A long time ago, I had been a philosophy professor. And I got a tenure track job at Louisiana State, which I lost because of my drinking. But even after that, I did a bunch of adjunct teaching.
But it had been a long time, and I still only had a master's degree. So I was going to need help. So I called my old dissertation advisor at Brown. Let's call him Dave, because that's his name. And I said, would you like me to write a recommendation to do some teaching or whatever? And we started talking. And after a while, he said, what do you really want to do?
And I said, I really want to come back to Brown and finish my PhD. And the weird thing is, I hadn't had that thought in my mind. It just popped out of nowhere. And he said, look, let's do that then. So he took it to the department, and the department voted to let me come back, and he went to the dean, and the dean had his doubts, so he said, do the application, get some letters of recommendation.
I took the GRE over again, almost 30 years to the day after the first time I took the GRE. So he took that all to the dean, and the dean said, no, he can't come back. So I thought, I wasn't that hurt. I wasn't that upset. So I tried, right? But Dave said, look, work with me for a year. Study, research, write. There's going to be a new dean next year.
Let's try it then and we'll have a better case. So I did that. I worked for a whole year. I wrote over 40,000 words. It was the length of a short novel, right? I got new letters of recitation. I went through the whole thing again.
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Chapter 4: How did Tim's relationship with Stacy influence his sobriety?
Dave went to the new dean, and the new dean said, no, he can't come back. He didn't look at the letters of recommendation. He didn't read the paper. He just said, no, he can't come back. It's been too long. And this time, I was really crushed. I mean, it was like a blow to the stomach. I was so upset because I had thought, I'm not even sure I'm really going to do it.
If they ask me to come back, maybe I'll come back. Maybe I won't come back. But now I was crushed. And I was trying to think about why. And it took me almost two weeks to realize why. And that felt almost as bad as the bad news.
Because I realized that I wanted to come back because I thought if I went back to graduate school and I started over where I left off, that it would be like none of that other stuff had ever happened, that the whole 25 years Then I get it back. I started drinking in my early 20s and I stopped drinking when I was almost 50. That's 25 years. It's like I went to sleep and woke up 50 years old.
I mean, it's a lot of time to lose. It's a bitter fucking pill to swallow. When I first got sober, this guy Crispy said to me, if you want to stay sober, Tim, you have to stop sitting around trying to have a better past. Now, first of all, if you're taking advice from a guy named Crispy.
But second of all, I hadn't even managed to take Crispy's advice because here I was, still thinking I could just have it all back. But then something unbelievable happened. When I had been preparing to try and get back into Brown, David said, why don't you apply a few other places? And I really wasn't into it, but I did it and blah, blah, blah.
And I got an offer from the University of Iowa to come there to study next year with full support, even student health care. I might be the first person ever to go straight from student health care to Medicare. It's not Brown, but Brown just felt like an attempt to relive the same thing, and this feels like a fresh start. So I'm going to Iowa next week.
I don't know if I'm going to go there next year, but hopefully. Thank you. That was Tim Summers. Tim has told over 45 stories at Moth Slams. He writes a monthly column for Three Quarks Daily, and he's finishing a novel called Call Me Max, which is a comedy about the devil. He was also Prince's bodyguard for one night.
Just after Tim told this story, he accepted the offer of admission to the Ph.D. program in philosophy at the University of Iowa. But most importantly, he says, he married Stacy, the girl who saved his life. To see photos of Tim at school and on his wedding day, head to our website, themoth.org. Hey, psst, you didn't hear this from me, but Normal Gossip is back for its ninth season.
Join me, Rachel Hampton, as I share the juiciest gossip from the real world with some very special guests. This season, we're bringing back some old friends, a Radiotopia buddy, and for the first time ever, a Nobel laureate. That's right, we have Malala on season nine. Normal Gossip is out on all your favorite podcast platforms.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Tim face in his journey to return to academia?
I was coughing up blood in her toilet. So she called 911. I got in an ambulance. I called my parents. I texted my sister to tell her that I loved her because I didn't know if I would be alive when she read that text. So when my doctors at Stanford called me in Seattle and said that it was time to be listed for a transplant, it sounded like a pretty good option.
I couldn't walk around a block on four liters of oxygen. And so I was listed at Stanford. And usually, once you go active on the list, you wait for a year, three years. I had friends who are still waiting for transplants. I waited 28 days and then I got a call at 7.50 a.m. I was woken up and went through a checklist with a Stanford employee who sounded more nervous than I do now.
No, I didn't have a cold. No, I hadn't received any recent blood transfusions. I could be at the hospital in two hours. So we threw, my parents and my sister and I threw stuff in bags and got in the car, drove to Stanford. We got there at 10 a.m. and they said that my surgery was scheduled for noon that afternoon. So we thought, okay, this is happening.
But I didn't go downstairs, I didn't get wheeled to the operating room for until 8 p.m., so there was plenty of time for friends and family to arrive, for my dad to do the last IV medication pump change, and for us to spend a lot of time thinking about the people who were grieving while we were celebrating my new chance at life. When, by the time I went down to, downstairs,
I had 10 people to say goodbye to. We were walking in a parade of my hospital bed. And then my parents waited outside the operating room doors with me. And I chose that time to go over
my last wishes with my mom to give her my social media passwords and discuss where donations should be sent in the event of my death, like how they should have a party instead of a funeral, just normal things you talk about with your 23-year-old daughter. In the operating room I ended up waiting two hours because the organs were stuck in traffic.
So the anesthesiologist asked me what kind of music I wanted to listen to. So I should also say my heart rate was normally about 60 beats per minute. That day it was 130 beats per minute and I could not calm down. So I was like trying to do some drawings to calm myself.
I don't trust myself to choose the playlist for a party at my house, so choosing the Pandora station for a room full of people tasked with keeping me alive for the next few hours was a whole new level of terrifying. And it might be the last thing that I listen to. So stressful. Heart rate probably went up.
But I chose Blind Pilot, and the only complaints coming from the room were about the anesthesiologist's lack of a paid subscription. We listened to ads between songs. Then around 10 at night, they had visualized the organs. The surgeon said it was a go. They called my parents and said they were putting me under.
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