How I Came Out as Sober
How I Came Out as Sober
And what I realized one year later.
What you are about to read is the exact post I shared on my original blog one year ago, almost to the day. I had been writing forever (actual time: fifteen years) but when I first got sober I didn’t have a handle on how my sobriety was changing me and my own creative expression, how it was ‘waking me up to myself’ in so many ways. I had titled the post “Fairly Certain I’ll Regret This” because it felt like an out-of-body experience to be sober at all in real life, but then to come clean about it to my beautiful readers, well, I felt strange. Like I was still the old me but was trying on the new me in public for the first time. I was afraid I would sound like an asshole. A fraud. A liar. I had spent years writing a lot about drinking. It was part of how I set the mood in so many scenes, so many stories. What I realize now, after reading through the below post again a year later, is that I had no idea what I was getting into when I finally chose to confront my decades-long addiction to alcohol. And that in so many ways, that innocence (cluelessness) was a blessing. Sometimes not knowing the whole way forward is for our own protection. So if you are just starting out in your sobriety, please just know what you are doing is a monumental seismic shift in your whole way of being. But at first it just feels bonkers. But also, if you just take your own precious hand and walk through it one day at a time, you really are gonna get farther than you ever dared to dream possible. As lame as that may sound, it’s entirely true.
Fairly Certain I’ll Regret This, original blog post: January 26, 2022 (26 days sober)
So this is not my "usual" content whatever the fuck that means. I am a storyteller and so far all my stories were written by someone who was struggling mightily to control alcohol and was not doing great in that regard let us just say. I wasn't the worst. I wasn't the least worst. And I don't want to be a motivational-self-help-self-care whatever the case. Because I don't want to preach or sound preachy, the very thought of that makes my skin crawl and my stomach turn.
I don't want that. I just want to write. Just fucking write about the little bits of life that elude or escape most of us on a daily basis. But now I am sober. I am fucking sober and I want - no, I need - I need to sit with this reality for a minute. Let it really sink in. I have gone through so much to get to twenty-six days which probably sounds quite extremely melodramatic, right, and the hilarious thing is that I get that. I get how if I were reading some shit like this from a blogger I trusted to never be . . . I don't even know.
I do not know yet why this feels so jarring, so 'off' and yet also so beautiful and true and healing and mind expanding, soul expanding. It is all-consuming these days I guess is the thing. When you have an addiction, when you are in it, you can't see it from the outside the way you think you can. Your perspective is warped and you tell yourself things that are lies and even though part of you knows they are lies there is another part of you fully convinced they are the truth. You will rail against reality tooth and nail.
You don't have a problem. Ok you have a little problem but it's not as bad as so and so other person's problem. Ok so maybe it's a big problem but not every day, like not all the damn time, so don't be overly dramatic. Keep it together, you know what I mean, you can hang you just have to be stronger, stay more vigilant, etc. etc.
But then enough scary shit takes place at your own trembling unsure hands and then somehow stars align and this and that fall into place and you start to wake up a little bit. And you don't think you could ever possibly make it through one single day without your precious fix. You are one hundred percent certain one day without it will kill you dead. But somehow it doesn't. And then neither does the second day or the day after that and then you turn around a month later and realize you have effectively blown up your entire life and everything in your little world you thought you understood or had a handle on. Nothing feels the same. And it is frightening and astonishing and very, very surreal. But the trouble is - you like it. You very much like yourself in ways you never thought you could or ever would.
It is fucking insane how we can make decisions that literally bring us back into closer communion with our deepest selves (Jesus Christ, I just said communion someone please send help) and at the same time we worry that making such monumental decisions will cause people to judge us or worst case, to abandon us altogether. The worst of it, tho, thinking about it now out loud, is the fear that somehow my edge was in - not the bottle - but in whatever it is about me that caused my addiction. Who am I if I am not so anxious. So cynical. So adorably broken. So fixated. So obsessed. What if what fucked me up also made me magic. How fucked up is that.
I'm fairly certain I will regret having said all of this out loud and posting it in the wilderness of a public domain. The trouble is I can't seem to not say it. It's like I am in this new wobbly place where I can't keep things inside that are bursting because if I do they will eat me alive. But maybe, quite possibly, holding back is not the way to go. Maybe if you just go on ahead and pour the poison down the drain that is your former life, you can lift your tiny head up to the wide, wide sky- and sing.