What does it feel like to be crushed beneath decades of writing addiction?

What does it mean to be pinned down for decades by some vast, crushing force, an unmovable, soul-flattening monolith that convinces you of your own helplessness? More importantly, do we even want to be free from it, or is that liberation its own special kind of agony?

This takes me back to 1970, watching Adam-12, one of my favorite TV shows, though I only remember one episode. A man was trapped under a fallen telephone pole, the weight pressing into his ribs. When paramedics arrived, they informed him they’d be using a crane to lift it off. “Funny,” the man remarked. “I don’t even feel any pain.” The paramedic’s response? You don’t feel pain now—but once we lift it, you will.

That moment lodged itself in my brain like a splinter. Because, really, what is breaking free from an addiction if not having a telephone pole lifted off your chest? You think you’re ready for freedom, but then the weight is gone, and suddenly, every nerve in your body starts screaming. You had learned to live with the oppression, adapted to its limits, made peace with your own captivity. And now, you have to face everything that weight once shielded you from—all the wounds you ignored, all the realities you deferred, all the choices you never had to make because you were conveniently immobilized.

That’s where I am now. My recovery means staying in my lane, so I have to admit that I will never write A Confederacy of Dunces. I don’t have the genius to write something like The Ginger Man. I won’t be crafting an autofictional masterwork à la Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom. What I do have is a lifetime spent crushed under the telephone pole of writing addiction, a weight that once gave my life structure—even as it kept me from actually living it.

So, I had to be the crane operator, the paramedic, and the doctor all at once. I had to lift the damn pole, endure the pain, and figure out how to move forward. 

Lifting the telephone pole off my ribs did indeed hurt like hell. By the time the 2024 Thanksgiving rolled around, I could feel the weight of grief like an overstuffed holiday plate. I’d said goodbye to my mother during the pandemic, standing outside a nursing home window and offering her love through a mesh screen, as if I were visiting someone in solitary confinement. Two years later, I watched my father—a proud infantryman in his day—fade to 130 pounds, his body surrendering to cancer. Since their passing, the world felt quieter, smaller, like someone had dimmed the lights without warning.

So, when hosting Thanksgiving fell squarely on my plate, it wasn’t some Norman Rockwell fantasy. It was more like getting crushed by a baby grand piano dropped from the second floor. And instead of gracefully stepping aside, I just let it hit me—because honestly, moving felt like too much effort.

The guest list wasn’t exactly daunting—just my perpetually single brother, whose dating apps seemed better at generating cautionary tales than romantic prospects, and two of my wife’s teacher friends, both middle school band directors still recovering from clarinet-induced PTSD. The conversation was polite, though it had all the flavor of plain oatmeal.

Stuffed to the gills but somehow still shoveling pie like our lives depended on it, we trudged through the ritual of TV show recommendations. Each suggestion was delivered with the gravitas of a public service announcement—skip this series at your own peril. Apparently, failing to watch that one obscure, eight-part masterpiece would leave me culturally destitute, wandering through a desolate landscape devoid of punchlines and plot twists.

Honestly, I enjoyed the company. The real villain of Thanksgiving wasn’t the guests—it was the dishes. The endless scrubbing that left my hands raw, the dishwashing marathon that stretched into eternity, the mountain of dirty plates multiplying like gremlins in the sink. That’s where the wheels came off.

My wife, meanwhile, glided through the chaos like some kind of culinary sorceress, humming softly as she orchestrated the entire meal with the grace of a Michelin-starred maestro. She didn’t grumble. Not a single passive-aggressive sigh escaped her lips. She was the picture of serene competence.

I, on the other hand, hovered around the kitchen like a useless NPC in a video game—occasionally moving a plate from table to sink and acting as though I’d just conquered Everest. At one point, I genuinely felt winded after rearranging the silverware. My contribution was so meager it felt performative, like a child pretending to be tired after “helping” Dad mow the lawn by pushing a plastic toy mower ten feet behind him.

Somewhere between rinsing the roasting pan and glaring at the pile of silverware, it hit me—I was teetering on the edge of a Mope-a-saurus moment. The only thing preventing my full transformation was the vague sense of shame that my wife, who had just cooked for hours, wasn’t grumbling about the aftermath. That’s when you know you’re in trouble—when someone else’s superior competence and good cheer makes you feel like a defective appliance, sputtering through life with a flickering power cord and a weak motor.

The lethal cocktail of self-loathing and forced sociability had drained me to the marrow. By the time the guests finally took their leave, I should have collapsed straight into bed, preferably into a coma-level sleep.

But as a writing addict, I stayed up deep into the night and wrote a book proposal. 

Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide

A Memoir of Grief, Dysfunction, and the Existential Terror of Dishes

Author: Jeff McMahon, recovering member of Write-a-holics Anonymous, part-time Manuscriptus Rex, full-time over-thinker.

Overview:
The holidays are supposed to be about gratitude, togetherness, and the warm glow of familial love. But let’s be honest—Thanksgiving is a psychological endurance test wrapped in a turkey-scented mirage of Norman Rockwell propaganda. You either come out of it spiritually enriched or barely clinging to sanity, drowning in a sea of gravy-stained regrets.

This book is for those of us who, instead of basking in holiday joy, find ourselves staring into the abyss of mashed potatoes, contemplating the futility of existence while our hands prune in dishwater. It’s for the people who, somewhere between the third helping of stuffing and the forced enthusiasm over TV show recommendations, realize they are hurtling toward their final transformation: a hollow version of their former selves.

Through dark humor, painfully relatable anecdotes, and some uncomfortably personal self-reflection, Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide will navigate the holiday’s perils—family dysfunction, grief-laden nostalgia, the crushing disappointment of dry turkey, and the passive-aggressive Olympics that inevitably break out over pie. Along the way, I’ll explore the psychology of holiday meltdowns, the delusions of tradition, and why washing dishes can trigger a full existential crisis.

Target Audience:
This book is for:

• Burnt-out hosts who wonder why they agreed to this in the first place.
• Perpetually single siblings trapped in the “Any Special Someone?” interrogation.
• Grief-stricken folks realizing the empty chairs at the table hurt more than expected.
• Introverts who barely survived the social gauntlet.
• Writing addicts who turn all their misery into book proposals.

Tone & Style:
Think David Sedaris meets Kitchen Confidential with a side of A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s part memoir, part cultural critique, and entirely fueled by existential dread and too much pie.

Managing my anxieties over Thanksgiving, I had conceived a preposterous memoir, a premise clearly more suitable for an essay than a book, but I couldn’t help it. Conceiving of these “comic memoirs” and providing a book proposal was a compulsion. Stopping one addiction didn’t make my compulsions disappear. They simply rerouted, popping up in new, mutated forms, like a literary game of whack-a-mole.

Now, instead of writing doomed novels, I found myself obsessing over my own struggles, crafting fractured hero tales where I was the comic fool, perpetually failing forward, stumbling through existence like a man who just had a telephone pole yanked off his chest—and is still waiting for his ribs to stop throbbing.