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January 22 - February 9, 2021
Eventually I made it through my first sober weekend in fifteen years, save the nine months of my pregnancy. I had my first sober Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s Eve. I went to a sober Fourth of July barbecue and spent all twenty-four hours of my thirty-sixth birthday unpunctuated with wine. I started to meet a few sober people. I experienced the relief of mornings without a hangover or regret. I put together days, then a couple of weeks here and there.
“Do you ever feel like . . .I don’t know. . .you have something really big inside of you? Something that wants to be born?” A few friends nodded knowingly, asking what I thought my thing was. Once or twice I confessed, “I think it’s writing. I want to write.” But usually that felt too ridiculous, so I’d just shrug and let the question fade into the background again.
meant, Why aren’t we — the collective we, as in you and me — talking about this out loud? Why — if we really want people to feel unashamed, and society to shift its misunderstandings and perceptions of addiction — do we still insist on anonymity and speaking in hushed, unfortunate tones? I didn’t quite buy that the only people who were in trouble with drinking were the ones qualified to be in a 12-step meeting, and I didn’t buy that all my deepest “character flaws” were unique to me as an “alcoholic.” Drinking did something different to me than some people, yes, but everyone I knew was
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Maybe you didn’t get addicted to drinking booze, or taking pills, or trying to go unconscious night after night. Maybe your thing is chasing love, or sex, or being perfect, or keeping your body very small. Maybe you don’t have a thing, but you still feel a deadness inside and there’s a voice that haunts you — it finds you every morning just after you wake, before you remember yourself — whispering, Listen to me. Say yes to me.
This book is the story of how, and what happened next. And I’m telling you the story I share in the pages that follow because I hope you’ll say yes, too. To yourself. To the voice. To all the terror and magic that follow. It is worth it. I could promise, but I won’t. Instead, how about you see for yourself?
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he only knew what I chose to tell him. I hadn’t told anyone the full truth: that despite spending far more days sober than not in the past year, I still found myself drinking quite a lot, and almost always alone; that I hated everything about drinking by then but still didn’t know how to let it go completely; that it made no sense — there was no good reason why or logic to it any longer; that I was terrified, I was angry, and I was so lonely that sometimes my teeth hurt.
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I realized how much I relied on it to soften my experience.
It was so incomplete to me, so unsatisfying, to have only one glass. To have a limit.
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And here is the thing we must know about our things if we are ever going to survive them: We believe we can bury them, when the truth is, they’re burying us. They will always bury us, eventually.
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definitions of sobriety is to be clearheaded. In that way, sobriety is about freeing yourself from any behavior, relationship, or way of thinking that enslaves you and keeps you from being present to life.
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I was still hoping for a third door: another option besides door number one (drinking) and door number two (sobriety). I simply could not fathom that there wasn’t a fucking third door.
Yep
Less like I had let go of something and more like, after all my begging, it had let go of me.
Yes. This.
But when I look back, I think it was the anxiety more than anything else — the jaw-breaking, soul-crushing anxiety that inevitably followed a night of drinking
For so long, I thought alcohol had helped me relieve anxiety — that’s what it promises, right? But somewhere along the line, I realized the equation was actually reversed: drinking alcohol was like pouring gasoline on my anxiety. Maybe I’d feel some relief for a little while, but then — boom — I was spinning like a top. Each morning after was worse than the last.
This
you’re no longer willing or able to fight to keep it in your life.
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whatever killed your spark.”
Recovery is never the main point of the conversation, but, back then especially, it was comforting to hear mentions of it here and there, or a story of what the guest used to be like — because I got to hear them on the other side, where getting sober was now just a part of their bigger story, not the defining and all-consuming thing it was for me. Mostly, it felt good to hear them laugh. I desperately needed to laugh.
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This is how it is done — how anything is done. One moment, then the next, then the next. This is how this book is being written: I type this word, then this one, then this one. The words build sentences. The sentences build a paragraph. A book is impossible, but a word and then another word is not. A lifetime of sobriety was impossible, but a moment of sobriety was not. I was doing it, and I was doing it, and I was doing it again.
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For a minute, imagine a life where you could tell the truth about what it is like to give up your thing. Imagine admitting how unfair it feels — that this comes so easily for everyone else and that it has wrecked you, over and over and over again. Imagine raging over all the pain it has caused you and raging, again, that you have to let go of the one thing that seems to get you through. Imagine being honest about all of that.
“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.
Alma, I was managing a home and the dailiness of life with a five-year-old as a single parent: food shopping, clothes shopping, keeping toilet paper in the house, laundry, bathing, feeding, entertaining, paying the electric bill (and all the others), getting to bed, waking up, organizing, and delivering her to and from daycare and playdates and activities on the weekends.
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I was also a financial nightmare, so things were always getting shut off — my phone, the electricity, my credit cards. I was barely afloat, breathing through a straw.
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I’d been using alcohol to hold things up on the back end for so long — and even though it had only made everything far worse, it offered the temporary illusion of escape and control.
Yep
I wonder if this is what so many of us need when we think we need to get our shit together — to let it fall apart instead.
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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. Next, the amygdala, which is
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All the “positive” memories of drinking flooded back, my brain was set in motion, and there it was: an intense craving even though the pleasure of drinking had long gone.
addiction is stronger than love. Until it isn’t.”
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Listening to certain music (you know, like the music you and your ex loved together)
Huh
As Freud wrote in a letter to his fiancée, “How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.”
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They helped me get my first thirty days of sobriety; then later, in my third year of sobriety, doing the steps saved me again. And — all the while — I didn’t buy into it all. I still don’t. It’s okay for things to be complicated. That’s what I want you to hear, maybe more than anything.
I loved any redemption story, and that would have been true — but in those voices and stories I recognized something specific about myself. I wanted to know every little detail of their inner lives, their missteps, how much they drank, and when
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So, underneath any junk I may have about AA, there is that night, and all the other moments I was carried, impossibly, and there is the lesson that I will never lose and that will contribute to my life and my peace inextricably, forever: put yourself in a house where the truth is told. I don’t care if it’s in the rooms of AA or somewhere else.
Even if you are the kind of drinker whose damage has largely been internal — the insidious rattle of anxiety, the slow disintegration of your connection to people and things, the undertow of regret that you might not be living as you could — it can be tough to stay afloat when the tides of what you have repressed begin to roll in.
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I never noticed how everywhere drinking was until I stopped doing it. I’ve heard other friends share this sentiment unrelated to long-term sobriety. When trying a Dry January or a Sober October, for example, people will often comment on how many times in a short thirty-one-day period they had to say no to alcohol in order to abstain (to which I kind of want to say. . . yeah, no shit). Drinking, plans for drinking, casual references to drinking, jokes about drinking, memes about drinking, advertisements for drinking were everywhere — are everywhere. We live in a culture that drinks by default,
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Ha! Yes.
I never noticed how everywhere drinking was until I stopped doing it. I’ve heard other friends share this sentiment unrelated to long-term sobriety. When trying a Dry January or a Sober October, for example, people will often comment on how many times in a short thirty-one-day period they had to say no to alcohol in order to abstain (to which I kind of want to say. . . yeah, no shit). Drinking, plans for drinking, casual references to drinking, jokes about drinking, memes about drinking, advertisements for drinking were everywhere — are everywhere. We live in a culture that drinks by default,
...more
Ha.
it’s about filling in the spaces we don’t know how to otherwise fill.
In my family, the drinks flowed a little more freely and often than in most.
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I fought this hard, and maybe you’re fighting it, too. I didn’t want to find new people. I didn’t think they would measure up at all. I didn’t believe I needed it. I was, of course, very wrong.
When I started saying no to almost anything extra and just flowing with what my body needed in the moment, I felt such tidal relief. It was as if I’d unlocked some magical hidden secret of the universe. My body practically wept. I
Yes this
Denying works for only so long; eventually that shit will come out, and it will be ugly.
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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.
half-bird, half-woman creatures singing an irresistible melody,
Lol wrong. have woman half fish (mermaids) not harpies
But the reality is, any relationship built on a foundation of partial inebriation is a lie,
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I never considered myself a liar. In fact, I prided myself on being a fierce confronter of the truth, especially if it wasn’t pretty. I was always willing to “go there” with people: to look at the harder parts of life, talk about your crippling depression or your family’s bankruptcy or your sister’s addiction to painkillers. Small talk bored me. I wanted to get to the heart of things and look at what was really going on.
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This is the dilemma of dishonesty. In order to keep one lie going, you have to tell more lies. Eventually, you will paint yourself into a place where winning is impossible. Even if the lies are never found out, you begin to rot from the inside out. The deception contaminates you. And then it contaminates your relationship.
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If I thought that a lie would improve your opinion of me or create a connection between us, chances are that I would say it without even noticing until after the words had left my mouth. I also started to notice how paranoid I’d become, how prepared I was to lie at any given moment. When I saw Jake’s name come up on my phone, got a text from a friend, or went to check my Facebook messages, dread would automatically fill my throat, even when there wasn’t an obvious problem. What does he know? What am I going to have to explain? What is my story?
E.
Still drinking every few weeks was still drinking. If I wanted to stop drinking, I had to actually stop drinking.
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Lying and withholding is the cheapest, easiest way to control others. You control their perception, control their response to you, control who you need them to be.
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honesty will always move you closer to love, not further away.
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Naturally, then, when I stopped drinking — and this is something I hear almost universally — I felt a loneliness like never before. There
not me
