The Sober Side Effect I Didn't See Coming

'One day at a time' is not just about alcohol. It's about everything.

Photo by Oskar Malm on Unsplash

I don’t ask other people’s opinions about what I should do with my own life anymore. For the most part, I do my deal and go my own way. When I got sober on January 1st 2022, I chose to listen to a very small but rock-solid inner voice which said, essentially: Quit this shit. Don’t explain it to anybody. I knew it was ultimately about owning my own deadly nonsense and also not wasting time with the distractions of guilt, shame, or ego. I knew that the only voice that mattered was my own.

Sounds pretty ballsy, right. There’s no way to explain it, really. It was just a knowing which could not be denied. And following its instruction felt a little bit like grabbing onto my most strong self and standing tall in my commitment to myself, and also a little bit like I tripped and fell suddenly and surprisingly into whatever the fuck sobriety was about to be. I had no idea what sobriety would be like but I knew I belonged inside of it.

Following that intuition, that thing - whatever ‘it’ is - that seems to truly want what’s best for us even when what’s ‘best’ is hard as fuck, harder than I ever thought I was capable of handling, was as calming as it was jarring. I entered a new world, one where the rules of the game changed. In fact, it was an entirely new game. I was playing it but I was also designing it my own way, calling my own shots. And the thing about sobriety is, you choose it one day at a time because, like it or not, that’s all we ever get. Today. What will you do with today.

What I didn’t realize was that along with choosing not to pour wine into my face everyday, I was also choosing - inside of that same choice, day after day - to say yes to my worth and do fuck kindly off to the rest of the voices in my head and around me in the outside world that wanted me to remain trapped in the cycle of addiction. The more you consistently follow your own knowing, the less and less you feel the urge to check with anyone around you for validation of any kind. The more you choose to not drink specifically, the more you choose to not deny yourself in general.

So now, even in matters that do not involve alcohol, I am pretty damn solid in knowing what my values are (integrity, dignity, self-respect, not blacking myself out, etc.) and making life decisions from that place. It is good even when it is hard. Even when it makes me an outlier. Even when people expect me to feel some kind of way about deciding, say, to go to bed early, or quit my job, or not attend the thing I don’t feel like attending, or work harder, or chase the money, or make reels on Instagram, whatever. I simply do not care. The only thing I care about now is staying sober which means not choosing from the outside in, but rather the inside out.

As I sat sipping my coffee this morning in the darkness that comes with waking at 4:37am, the lunar eclipse was happening right outside my front bedroom window. A full blood moon in Taurus, a total lunar eclipse, and a whole bunch of cosmic vibes disrupting our usual programming. When I think about the way I started this year and now where I am in my head and heart as we move closer to ending it, I am astonished at how much radical transformation we can actually handle if we take it slow, if we take it as it comes even with its unwieldy intensity.

There are moments of astounding peace when you go your own way. You realize you are the only one who can choose peace for yourself in any given moment, and so you do. You get better and better at that, in fact, and much worse at following the crowd. And so it goes.

In the front of my house, the lunar eclipse. At the back of my house, the sun is rising up, crimson and fiery, behind the increasingly bare November trees. The universe is wild and free, disrupting our patterns all the while, waking us up to what could be if we pay more attention to our inner spectacular mystery and less attention to society’s pre-written script. And it doesn’t ask a damn soul for permission to shine, to shadow, to mesmerize; to appear or disappear, dazzle or disintegrate.

I pour another cup of coffee and snuggle in to write, as a few wide swaths of soft pink cloud sweep like glittering stardust across an otherwise crystal blue morning sky.