We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life
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I remembered something else a sober friend said to me: “If you want to drink tomorrow, you can. We can decide that tomorrow. Today, you don’t, though. That’s all.”
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This isn’t true because I said, I will never drink again. It’s true — at least in part — because I said, I will not drink right now, no matter what,
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Not because I was committed to forever, but because I finally realized the future was built on a bunch of nows, and that was it.
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I’m saying you can drown in “forever” whereas you can wade into “right now.”
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But it’s critical that I first give you permission to forget forever, because on that day, letting go of forever meant everything for me.
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“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.
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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.
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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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“It’s the absolute worst. But you need to know, you can push off from here. You can leave all that behind.”
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Even if you make solid progress early on, it is so easy to become overwhelmed again, to say another “fuck it all,” to figure you can just begin again at some elusive, illusory date in the future, when you’re stronger and have more resolve.
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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.
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I can’t do this, but something inside me can.
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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.
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no matter what you have to face, life doesn’t stop and wait for you to get comfortable first.
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“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
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I finally admitted what was true: I was in hell, and I hated that other people could drink and I couldn’t.
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I bowed out of anything that felt like it was an affront to what I needed most, which was safety and space and the simplicity of just being without having to fight so hard against the tide.
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It was disorienting and scary to be in this messy, in-between place of not belonging and not knowing what to do to make it better, but admitting that I didn’t know brought the tiniest sliver of relief.
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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.
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In hindsight, I can see this so clearly as a screaming indication of my inability to just be with myself. Without constantly being in motion, making plans, finding validation from the outside world, and, of course, drinking, I was thoroughly uncomfortable and on edge.
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I wondered how many things I did every day that I didn’t really, actually want to do. I wondered how long I had been hurtling forward unconsciously, propelled by the fear of what might happen if I stopped.
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I found this to be so frustrating and unfair, because it seemed like now that I wasn’t drowning myself in wine every night, life should automatically be… easier. Better. My body should feel like a demigod’s. I wanted the energy to do all the things lighting up my brain: write more, start a podcast, start my book, fix up my apartment, clean my car, paint my bedroom, find a boyfriend, live — but most days, I could barely make it through the afternoon without crying.
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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.
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There’s a term for these phases of life in biblical and psychological terms: liminal space. Limen is a Latin word that means “threshold.” It is the time between the “what was” and the “next,” a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing.
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“where we are betwixt and between. There, the old world is left behind, but we’re not sure of the new one yet… .Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible.” He says, “If we don’t find liminal space in our lives, we start idolizing normalcy.”
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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.
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“Girl, don’t forget that you are saving your life — it should be hard.”
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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.
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You learn to listen to what your body is telling you and respect it. Almost worship it. Revere it. Because it is helping you, growing you, changing you, saving you. It is growing your new life.
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But who you were drinking is not why I loved you.”
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When you give up something you’ve relied on as heavily as I relied on alcohol, even when that something is actively destroying your life, it is a true loss. You can’t deny that, and more importantly, you don’t have to.