We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life

by Laura McKowen

“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living,” and that’s exactly what you’re doing when now is swallowed by projections of forever. Nothing in the future exists yet. But anything is possible right now. Including the thing you think you cannot do.

She explained: When we ingest a drug or a drink, our system instantly floods with an absurd amount of dopamine — from two to ten times the natural amount — causing an intense uprush of pleasure and focus, essentially shortcutting the brain’s natural reward system. That feels really, really good. Then a couple of things happen. The hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for creating memories — lays

down “tracks” or “records” of this rapid sense of satisfaction. So essentially the brain remembers: I can cut straight to the good feelings with this simple little thing.

Now, repeat this cycle a few thousand times, and the brain’s reward and learning functions change significantly. The actual pleasure associated with the behavior subsides, yet the memory of the desired effect and the need to re-create it (the wanting) persists. The normal machinery of motivation no longer functions rationally.

Anne Lamott talks about how at some point in her recovery process, she’d developed relationships with so many people who were invested in her sobriety that she couldn’t just disappear anymore. If she went off the radar for more than a day or so, she’d get calls, or people would show up at her house. She called them “The Interrupters.” I eventually created a crew of interrupters myself. They kept tabs on Laura. They sent texts and called. They kept inviting me to things. They didn’t let me disappear, even when I tried. They kept me accountable, which I eventually learned was a wise and necessary thing, not the insult to my sovereignty I’d once perceived it to be.

And I realized my identification with the community didn’t have to come at the price of my individuality.

Another and maybe simpler word for this is patience. Patience means understanding that you cannot possibly heal everything at once. But, if you stay sober and do the best you can in each moment, you can and will eventually get to a different place. Time itself is a healer.

All improvements, transformations, achievements, liberations; everything you want to change about yourself and your life; everything you want to make happen, any obstacle you want to overcome, any crisis you must survive — the prerequisite is being able to allow yourself to feel whatever it is you feel and not pretend to feel something you don’t. — AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS, This Is How

Being anywhere where people were drinking was like sitting in the same room with the lover I still adored but who no longer loved me and watching him fall for someone else. It was torture.

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Yes, this is the shape of me today.

This is what I started to do and what I suggest you do, too. Tell people you have no idea what they can do to help, but to keep asking, please — until you tell them to stop asking, of course — and that if you can think of something in the moment, you’ll tell them, and if you can’t, you’ll tell them that, too.

Pregnancy is both an act of choice and an act of allowing. An act of power and an act of surrender. Sobriety is not different.

I discovered that the simple act of being willing to drink in high school put me in closer with the boys — Look, I’m a fun girl! Alcohol magically and swiftly rearranged me into whatever I hoped to be: a flirtatious, less self-conscious, outspoken, possibly even sexual version of Laura. And even though I was still too young to drink openly, I didn’t think anything of doing it — it seemed like an eventuality, anyway. My family is a family of drinkers. Our culture is a culture of drinkers. When I looked around me, I saw people drinking. I watched my parents interact with their friends, the people they dated, and later, their spouses, and alcohol was always just there, like milk in the fridge or soap in the shower. To me, it seemed like an inherent part of the adult picture of social interaction and intimacy.

But part of my withholding was about me wanting to keep a fire door open. I still wanted an out to keep drinking, even if it was subconscious. As long as people thought I was generally doing okay, they would leave me be and not watch too closely.

when I drank, I felt severed from the basic goodness in myself, from a larger current of possibility and ineffable beauty and truth. To me, this was the most painful reality of drinking: the deadness, the flattening of my spirit — although I had never articulated it that way.

In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it: They didn’t do it. They just didn’t do it.

People who stay sick choose to keep blaming. They stand firmly in their anger and resentment and call it a revolution. They bristle against this kind of work because they view it as an affront to their sovereignty. They don’t see that humility is not an admission of weakness but a result of knowing exactly how powerful you are.

You are granted all the love in the universe simply because you exist, not because you are good. Love was never yours to lose — you cannot lose it. It will never let you go.

What this all boils down to, I think, is a message of belonging. To a love bigger than anything you could possibly fathom on your own. An impossible, intractable love. An indestructible one that exists inside you. Right now. Always.