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

by Laura McKowen

The truth is uncomfortable but expansive. Lying is uncomfortable but confining. You know the difference when you feel it. For most of my life I believed I had to lie to get what I needed.

While lying almost works, just like drinking almost works, neither will ever take us all the way home. While the path may be longer and harder and a little lonelier at times, honesty will always move you closer to love, not further away.

Today I don’t walk around looking over my shoulder, afraid of being found out. I don’t fear picking up my phone or looking at texts or opening my mail. I don’t protect different versions of myself, and I don’t have to keep track of my stories, because there aren’t any — there’s just the one life I’m living.

My mind started to wander, searching for the familiar grooves of worry or scheming or protection to run down, but there wasn’t anything there but smooth spaciousness.

There was the warm sun making rainbows behind my eyelids and my bare feet hitting the baking asphalt and a bit of chewed-up carrot in my mouth. I had nothing left to hide.

Drinking gave me the illusion of connection, though, so when I was drinking with people, as I said before, I felt like we were getting closer. I felt like alcohol allowed us to break down barriers, to slide closer to our truer selves and to each other, closer than we could ever get without it.

“Intimacy is having a kind, compassionate witness to your truest thoughts and feelings.”

And keeping 10 percent of yourself from your partner, or whomever you could trust with your heart, will make you 100 percent lonely.

Sobriety forced a closeness to myself and to life that was at first excruciating. It burned, and it burned, and it burned. But in the ashes from burning all the things I was not, I found her. I found me. And then I could finally be found by others.

People largely misunderstand addiction, and some people — no matter what you say or do or how loudly or for how long — will never really get it.

Before I went through all this, I was only a troubled guest. I was caught up with trying to be good, or else hating the ways in which I was bad.

In this world, my mistakes are as sacred as my triumphs. In this world, the ugly and the dazzling are the same. In this world, there is room for both joy and terror, pleasure and pain. In this world, nothing is too shameful to speak of. Nothing counts you out. In this world, I am already, and always, forgiven. And so are you.

Here’s the dirty little truth no one likes to admit — everyone feels better in the long run when they don’t drink. Not just alcoholics — everyone. Because putting alcohol into your body isn’t life giving; it’s life sucking. Nobody’s life actually improves because of alcohol, even though most people I know would scoff at that — That’s what you think [*wink, wink* *clink, clink*] — and society tells us otherwise ten ways to Sunday.

Isn’t it completely fucking bizarre that we don’t question (and, in fact, highly encourage) regular consumption of a drug that’s more harmful and causes more deaths than cocaine, heroin, and meth combined?

Unless you’re an alcoholic. In which case you’d better deal with it … … quietly… ...over there … …without ruining the party for everyone else.

Life without alcohol grants her greater peace of mind, less anxiety, and a generally more solid, calmer existence.

The typical question is, Is this bad enough for me to have to change? The question we should be asking is, Is this good enough for me to stay the same? And the real question underneath it all is, Am I free?

It just felt so wrong, so unfathomable, to imagine the entire process of sitting down and having dinner and making my way through a conversation without drinking.

In my late-twenties and thirties, I had associated the responsibilities of adult life and motherhood with smallness and tedium.

I met all kinds of men and had salacious stories to entertain my married friends or people at work, but I felt empty and desperate about it most of the time.

Each little step I took to make something mine, every time I owned some small aspect of my world, took care and tended to it, I felt an almost shocking sense of pride.

I wanted to feel genuinely happy for my friends when something wonderful happened to them, or to find that blanketed peace of getting lost in a movie or a book plot, or to feel the simple joy in a meandering conversation, or to remember what had felt so pure and clear about my relationship with Jake at one time, or to even feel enough sadness that I might cry spontaneously, without the help of a bottle of wine. But over time I only felt a few things in extremes — anxiety, shame, and occasionally excitement — and I mistook the vicissitudes for emotional depth.

As I started to thaw out in sobriety, my emotions resurfaced and filled out again. At first, I felt attacked by them — the saying goes that feelings start “coming out of you sideways” when you sober up.

Today, I am astonished by the immediacy of my delight and the readiness of my tears. I used to go months and even years without crying; now, it happens spontaneously when something strikes me as moving, sad, or even beautiful — especially that. I howl with laughter. I feel joy for no reason. Snuggling up to my daughter at night, closing another day with a clear conscience, fills me with a gratitude too thick for words.

One thing you can count on is that there will never be any shortage of opportunities for growth.

Even in the most difficult stretches of these years, I have been humbled just to be here at all. In this way, sobriety has forever changed my baseline: everything difficult is relative to the living hell I once inhabited, so nothing is really that difficult. And everything good is a miracle.

I didn’t know the difference between the cheap, thin drama of a drinking life and the rich, layered texture of a sober one. Which is to say an awake one.

The mistakes and pain and terror can make your bones strong for you, if you allow them to.