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

by Laura McKowen

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” — ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Sun Also Rises

I experienced the relief of mornings without a hangover or regret.

And although sometimes only by a thread, and although I often wanted to scream at the discomfort and unfairness of it all, and although I often wanted to rip off my skin, I slowly started to familiarize myself with the terrain of this new landscape.

When I started to get sober, the big energy burst forth like a tidal wave. It was as if everything I’d been tamping down with alcohol crashed forward, and I began to write as if possessed.

Drinking did something different to me than some people, yes, but everyone I knew was running, numbing, escaping from themselves and their lives somehow.

Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty. — BRUCE LEE

It was so incomplete to me, so unsatisfying, to have only one glass. To have a limit.

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.

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 — it had been clobbering me all day. 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.

In The Divine Comedy, Dante described purgatory as a place where the soul is cleansed of all impurities. It is known as a place where suffering and misery are felt to be sharp, but temporary. This for me was what it felt like to have one foot in the new, strange land of sobriety and the other firmly, desperately, in my old life. This is what it feels like for all of us, I think, when we have only half-decided to own our thing. When we have only half-surrendered, only half-committed to becoming different. We live in purgatory. The pain is sharp.

One of the most counterintuitive things about sobriety, for me, has been how much effort it takes and how it takes no effort at all.

“If you want to drink tomorrow, you can. We can decide that tomorrow. Today, you don’t, though. That’s all.” It was the smallest resolve. The tiniest shift. Almost as if nothing had changed.

“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.

I read somewhere recently that the word addiction is derived from a Latin term for “enslaved by” or “bound to,” which makes perfect sense given how it functions.

She said, “What I didn’t know is that addiction is stronger than love. Until it isn’t.”

However big your hole of regret is, and however badly it burns in there. Whatever you think the worst things you’ve done say about who you are, I can promise you this: you are wrong. But for now, just push off from here.

Because not drinking alcohol isn’t one of those things that generally goes under the radar. People notice. As it goes, alcohol is the only drug you have to explain not using.

The thing is: It’s about drinking, but it’s about so much more than drinking. It’s about feeling comfortable; it’s about distancing ourselves from moments and people and feelings that we don’t want to experience, and bringing closer the ones that we do; it’s about self-medication; it’s about belonging; it’s about taking a little edge off a thousand kinds of discomfort; it’s about status and appearance and sophistication; it’s about sex and desire; it’s about filling in the spaces we don’t know how to otherwise fill. It’s about having something to do with your damn hands.

So when you, a newly sober person, walk into a room or sit at a dinner table, you are not just carrying in your own story; you are shining lots of little mirrors onto other people’s stories, too. Sometimes, this causes a fleeting blip, a tiny disturbance, felt mostly by you. And sometimes, it sends shock waves.

I often think of a quote by Khalil Gibran: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Yes, this is the shape of me today.

Here I am, coming out of my skin.

All because I finally admitted what was true: I was in hell, and I hated that other people could drink and I couldn’t.

It was like walking into a bar for the first time in Boston after they passed the no-smoking law in 2004. I hadn’t noticed how suffocating the air had been before, not until all that smoke was simply gone.

One stranger who understands your experience exactly will do for you what hundreds of close friends and family who don’t understand cannot. It is the necessary palliative for the pain of stretching into change. It is the cool glass of water in hell.

The Pregnancy Principle You are building a new life. The new life you are building comes first, period. Anything or anyone that doesn’t support the new life goes. Nothing trumps the process.

In every big transition of my life — pregnancy, becoming a mother, marriage, divorce, and especially getting sober — I have been gobsmacked by the messiness and difficulty of it all. It can feel like the most basic tasks, things you have been doing since childhood — taking a shower, brushing your teeth, feeding yourself — are new again and near impossible. Time slows.

The Instagram culture we live in doesn’t help. All the sparkly, shiny images of people #livingtheirbestlife #soberAF can make it look like sobriety, or any other significant transformation, is an instant reality. We don’t see the daily fight — the thousands of tedious, unsexy steps — it takes, day after day, to really heal and become new.

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t edged as close to disaster as I did. It doesn’t matter if no one has ever commented on your drinking or no one believes you when you say you have a problem. As they say, it doesn’t matter how much you drink, or how often, but what happens to you when you do. If something is keeping you from being fully present and showing up in your life the way you want, then deciding to change that thing is an actual matter of life and death, you know? It’s the difference between existing and actually living.

She was putting all these things, without even realizing it, above her sobriety. Above this new little life growing inside her.

But then, eventually, I came to realize that this is what it really means to be alive — to not look away from any of it — and that all I was really doing before was pretending: floating through my days half-numb, half-involved, half-awake, thinking I was really living when in fact I was missing it all.

“Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?”

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.

If I can just stay like this … If I can just stay like this … When I think about those words now, they sound so simple and innocent, like something out of a Disney fairy tale. But they were a siren song. Like the passing sailors lured to their deaths by half-bird, half-woman creatures singing an irresistible melody, I truly believed alcohol would carry me and protect me. And I chased this idea for the next twenty years.

Others have been told by their partners that they don’t have a problem and just need to chill out, cut back, “stop being so dramatic”; and the subtext they hear is: Don’t change. I won’t like it (and I might not even like you) if you do.

I nodded, unable to say anything yet. I was ashamed — just so steeped in shame all the time then. It never left me, and it was like he had pulled back a curtain and there I was, naked. And it wasn’t that I felt judged by him; it was that I didn’t. It was the kindness that broke me.

But the reason I bring it up at all is to show you how common it is — how totally Saturday morning and casual it is — for us to be loved without even knowing it.

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.

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. In telling the truth, I was surrendering control with the hope that it would lead to something different. I hoped it would lead to something real.

I’d go, “Hold on! That was a lie! Where the hell did that come from?!” and we’d laugh. “Let me try again,” I’d say, and I’d pick up the ball and begin again.

She instructs you to do thirty minutes or three full pages of “automatic writing” each morning. Cameron herself is in recovery and found that this process was tremendously useful in not only clearing the subconscious but also boosting creativity. It’s something I’ve now done for years, and I swear by it.

I wrote about being concerned about my drinking as far back as college — it is a theme in almost every entry for fifteen years — and yet I never verbalized it or spoke about it with anyone. All along, I knew.

Things like approval seeking, people-pleasing, not voicing my opinions, and avoiding conflict at any cost — these were all dishonesty masked as something sweeter and more socially acceptable.

I pretended not to be bothered by things that bothered me. I overextended myself. I acted like I wanted things I did not want. I said no when I meant yes, and yes when I meant no. I took responsibility for other people’s feelings and for their lives. I anticipated their needs. I protected them, often by sacrificing myself. Fuck, I even pretended to like people I actually didn’t like, because I either was afraid of them or thought I needed them on my side to be okay.

I basically tricked people into meeting my needs, and I called it being kind, being nice, being easygoing and loving, all the while growing increasingly resentful and spiteful until eventually — and inevitably — I would erupt and blow them out of my life forever.

I can see this play out now sometimes with my friends. I can see the kids growing anxious when the drinking escalates.

Even when it’s normalized, even when nothing “bad” happens, they can feel it when our presence begins to slip away. They don’t like it.

Amends are a very tactical, purposeful acknowledgment of the way your behavior may have affected someone, a general statement of your wrongdoings, and a commitment to proceed differently in the future.

What I want you to take away from this is not that you must do amends, but that — if you truly want to live with peace in your heart and be free of the burdens of the past — you must be brave enough to be willing to look at yourself honestly, clearly, and without reservation.

I am the only one responsible for my experience.

People who stay sick choose to keep blaming. They stand firmly in their anger and resentment and call it a revolution.