My Sobriety Ruined Everything

In a culture that thrives on illusion, clarity kills.

Photo by Ömürden Cengiz on Unsplash

I sip my coffee and stare out the window of my writing room into the vast darkness of (very) early morning. It is 5:13am. The sun will not rise for another two hours. Yet here I am with my brain lit up like an airport runway at midnight, flashing and endless off into the distance. A string of ideas, visions, fears, dreams, prayers, poems, to-do lists, neuroses, and caffeinated fantasies blinking on and off inside of the grayish translucent fog. Perhaps not the finest choice of analogy. The coffee hasn’t yet kicked in, forgive me. In a way, I’m new at this.

Not new at the writing, I’ve been doing that for quite a long time. Not new at living, fuck knows. But new at living with this sense of new found freedom to be who I am and make the choices I deeply desire to make. I quit my corporate day job just last week. The work that had been dragging my soul over what felt like shards of broken glass in the streets for so very many years, the position I clung to like my life depended on it. I severed ties. I killed it off. Me. Me the woman who used to paralyze myself with panic at even the thought of walking away from what was killing me.

Sure, I knew it was killing me. Yes, I suspected living a life I wanted to murder maybe possibly kept me trapped in a cycle of addiction to alcohol as a reckless but seemingly innocent solution to a problem I couldn’t understand was so much bigger than I was. I didn’t understand at the beginning of my recovery that my addiction had as much to do with my individual self as it did to do with living inside of a culture which is constructed specifically in almost every conceivable way to keep a wild, creative, spiritually awakened woman quietly, crushingly, stupidly numb.

I am a full ten months sober today. Last night I had a dream that I was taking sip after sip of a stiff martini, trashing my beautiful sobriety like it was nothing. It was some kind of fancy affair, I was in a floor-length black dress. I remember looking across the cream colored linen-lined table at my husband in his elegant black suit, wondering why he got me the damn cocktail and then also wondering if he could see me drinking it right in front of him. If I was hiding in plain sight doing the thing I should not do. If I should keep going or stop. I’d already ruined everything, after all.

The drinking dreams have increased. In my waking life, the random cravings hit me lately not just like I want to slug down bottles of wine but like I want to dive entirely into them, my whole body and soul, spirit and mind. Soak everything. Drown everything. Make absolutely every single thing inside and out disappear.

We were at a popular local restaurant the other evening enjoying their daily special of a $5 bowl of mussels in white sauce when my gaze caught the waitress across the round bar, picking up a tray of three full glasses of chardonnay. I’m talking about full to the brim like the local dive bars give you at happy hour. It’s so fucking shameless it’s downright comical in a sick kind of way. The golden nectar sloshing around the rim as the young waitress made her way to a nearby table.

Why. Why, why, why, why the fuck can I not just have one. One! Why me. Why not. Fuck.

Such is the addiction. Such is the mind and its obsessive ways. I know this and ten months into sobriety I thought it would be less intense but I’ll be honest: it’s worse. The craving is electric, loud, screaming, and shocking in its sudden onset. The difference is, though, it passes quickly when I acknowledge and then ignore it. In the early months of my sobriety the cravings were like long cringy screeches, nails down a chalkboard that took their sweet ass time clawing through each of my desperate little veins. So it’s better now. And worse. Which makes no sense. And so it goes.

The way you imagine quitting a thing is different than actually doing it. Quitting drinking and quitting my job may seem like two separate affairs. But I’m starting to see in glaring detail how deeply they are intertwined. We fall into addictions often through innocent errors in judgment. We need to fit in, we need to do what is expected of us, we (are taught to) want to do right by everybody else so we can blend in, be congratulated, be cool, “be good” so people can “be proud.”

For a long, long, gruesomely long time, it all just makes sense. As long as we need approval and acceptance and accolades. As long as we can convince ourselves that the way the world decides what matters is not just the correct way but the only way. We tell ourselves things are going along fairly well - except for the soul crushing thing with the broken glass shards and what not - so we better not fuck it all up by being honest. As long as you can deny your own desires and dreams, you won’t ruin the party for everybody else. You won’t upset anyone or challenge anything. Heaven forbid you “be difficult” or make things “awkward.”

But the thing about sobriety is that it clarifies a hell of a lot more than you ever expected it to. As you begin to get clean and clear and the brain fog dissipates, so does the illusion of what you used to think you had to build your life around. The expectations of a society not constructed with your wellness or safety in mind, let alone your laughable and inconvenient quest for self-actualization. It turns out there’s a lot more to get sober from than just the alcohol. There’s an entire culture full of acceptable poisons we drown ourselves inside hoping no one else can see our pain. Assuming there’s no way out so we might as well swallow it down.

But I’m in it to win it now. Sober for life means this shit is just getting started. The discomfort. The disruption. The commitment to being true instead of covering up. This naked, raw, exposed feeling.

I pour another cup of coffee and watch the first rays of the rising sun reach softly through the wooden fence which lines the back of our yard. Silently, alone in pajamas in my dark kitchen, I thank the god of my own understanding for how far I’ve come. And as the blazing orange and velvet golden leaves cascade down in slow motion from the very top of the tallest distant trees, I marvel at how far and how much my new eyes can see.