sobriety

The first year of your sobriety will be hell.  Trust me when I say that you will initially go through some kind of withdrawal, even if you were never a hard-core addict. Your body will feel tense, anxious, and pain-ridden. Your mind will scramble and crawl, looking for a place to hide. You will want to be anywhere but here. You've not had the experience of living inside of your own body, your own mind for a long time. The desire to leave may manifest as the purchase of plane tickets to somewhere warm, somewhere remote.  You may try to move out of state, or look for a Peace Corps volunteer job. You are looking to move, to hide, to escape the physical and emotional realm of now, because you’ve never really been here.  

You will wonder how you are going to fit into this puzzle of a life now that you aren’t numb like you once were.  You will survive your birthday by getting into a hot bath and praying for another year to pass.  You will survive the anniversary of your mother’s death, and mother’s day, by holding your breath. You will start to see people as deluded and shallow, and wonder if anyone has fully considered the consequences of their lives here on Earth.  You will have weeks of elation, as you realize that yes, you love birds, and wow, you’re so glad you didn’t have children. You will have weeks of deep sorrow, missing your first boyfriends, innocence, Vespa scooters, the bakery.  Why did you let alcohol get in the way of that? 

You will go to recovery meetings. Maybe you will try AA and hate it because it sounds so fatalistic, and besides, you aren’t a Christian anyway.  You will find Refuge Recovery and find it intriguing, as you meditate with thirty-three strangers in a yurt on a winter night, tears falling down your cheeks while you let all kinds of pain well up from the deepest darkness.  You will realize that you can't relate with the recovery scene because it stops with getting sober.  Do these people think they are acquitted from living life just because they got sober? You didn't stop drinking to get sober. You stopped drinking so you could live more. So you could stay put, stay with people, stay with yourself, stop hiding.

You may consider the idea that, since it’s been three weeks, or two months,  or six months, you can have a glass of wine tonight—something to help you sleep, just tonight.  But you won’t do it.  You know you can’t.  You will go to the gym at night and run on the treadmill, trying to escape your feelings. You will listen to podcasts, read self-help books, meditate, cry, cry, cry.  You will feel more alone than you have ever felt in your whole life. 

You will break up with people. You will quit your job, start a new job, quit that job and begin to wonder how you ever got through graduate school.  You will lose weight without trying. You will eat more, eat less, start an exercise routine.  You will make enemies; and your friends who you used to drink with will stop calling, stop inviting you anywhere. People you loved will not understand why you aren’t drinking. They will tell you that you weren’t an alcoholic, so why not just have a beer? It’s spring training, and everyone loves beer with baseball....  You will stand up for yourself, but this will look loud and ugly.

You will feel resentment for your childhood, the way you were raised, the way your mother abandoned you so she could move into a shack and drink her life away in the desert while you were a girl, trying to understand the world without a mother. You will begin to understand the painful truth about why you are so afraid to trust people.

You will stop going to parties, and you will dread family functions—these were only previously tolerable when you had a beer or a glass of wine in your hand. You begin to realize that what you most liked about those social functions was the opportunity to drink with people, to feel the warm glow of alcohol encompass your mind and your body with the comfort of knowing that you were doing this with other people, rather than alone. You will dive into literature. You will fall in love with Augusten Burroughs. You will read Pulitzer Prize winners and catch up on the classics.

You will question everything you ever did. You will wonder what a sober relationship would be like.  You will break a few more hearts. You will try dating but realize how much more intimate things are now that your mind is crystal clear, and you will leave people.  You will wonder if you have any friends at all because now you aren’t drinking with them.  You will start to seek therapy for some of the childhood trauma that you are beginning to uncover with your now-awake mind and memory. You will cringe. You will cringe at your past, at all of the pain you felt, at the pain you learned to cover, and all of the pain you caused yourself and others over the years. You will cringe at your mistakes and wonder how you made it this far, how you are alive, why you aren’t in jail for drunk driving or manslaughter. You will begin to doubt your ability to maintain a level head.  You will have nightmares about drinking. You will begin to warm up to your sober thoughts, and you will dream about drinking, waking in a cold sweat, so glad that you are only drinking in your dreams, and you didn’t let one sip pull you back down. You will mourn the loss of friends.

Then...

When you hit the eleven-month mark you will start to see a glimmer of starlight. You will see that you nurtured this little ember inside of your life, this little warm place, a new little fire of perspective and clarity.  You will go to a family beach weekend and take lots of naps. You understand that people are exhausting. You are finally clear-headed enough and out of the fight-or-flight mindset enough to see that you never learned how to be with people. You want to be around them, to hear their voices and laughter in the room, but you don’t know how to sit across from them at a table and play cards. You don’t know how to make small talk, or carry on a conversation unless it is about work, or horses.  You take a blanket off the bed, carry it to the living room and fall asleep by the fire while your brother and sister and father enjoy each other’s company.  You aren’t there yet. You’ve only been alive for 11 months. You still need time to learn how to communicate.

You’ll get there. You’re just getting started.