Reflections on Sobriety - 1 Year

I have this unquenchable longing for something. I don’t know what it is. But it’s ever-present and when I get close to it I almost break for wanting. It’s been this way my whole life. When I drank, I felt like I could almost reach out and touch it.

I had my first drink at 13: Barton’s vodka straight out of the bottle. It felt like fire and freedom and the old me, the fat-anxious-studious-weird-outcast me, melted away with every swig. That winter at 16 when my dad had cancer I would sneak gulps out of the bottle, languor and try to write, try to sketch, try to find that indomitable something that was always just over the horizon. My psychiatrist kept rotating my meds. I kept waking up at 3am to do pushups in a darkened room.

Drinking felt like I was padded around the edges, blurred, suspended in quiet. It dulled the ringing on the fringes, that desperate crackling that crept into the edges of my vision. Self-doubt, anxiety, malcontent, emptiness. I felt like I could see the world in ways others couldn’t and I hated it.

Starting college at 17 was an unbridled disaster. More than one person called me “Oops, she blacked out again.” I just wanted to be less lonely. I fell in love at 18. He didn’t love me enough to stay. At 20, I lost my virginity to a friend who raped me, almost unconscious, in a park in the dirt. I left a part of myself buried there under the leaves. I found solace in whiskey. It told me I’d find a rewrite of my own story in the bottom of some bottle. Waking up half-clothed in the front yard, naked on a mattress, face-down on a porch, in my own bed, slick with vomit, I was desperate to keep searching.

My 20s were a blacked-out blur. I built a successful career against the odds, but drinking three bottles of wine and sobbing on the couch every night, passing out and doing it all over again, started to chip away at the shaky foundations I’d shorn up. I totaled my car. I lost friends. I lost belongings. I let myself get used. I used myself. I threw myself into every unsafe situation I could find, just to feel something, to touch something I couldn’t define. It was a compulsion, I hated it, I hated being without it, I hated myself.

One morning, sometime after my 30th birthday, I felt hungover in a way I never had before. I couldn’t keep anything down. I felt out of body. I felt like I was dying, the real way, my organs folding on themselves and my heart thrumming so loud I could see myself with clear eyes, see a lost child wearing a sad bloated mask, grasping at something in the dark.

I honestly couldn’t tell you the date - I don’t know when I put down the bottle. But I’ve been sober for about 1 year and I can confidently say, now: I drank because I felt that if I drank enough, or in the right context, someone would lift me up and sweep off the ashes of my old life. What I failed to realize is that if I stopped drinking, that someone could be me.

Sobriety has felt like a year-long exhale. I’ve had to look at myself, peeling back the layers of hurt, and hold my own gaze. The crying couch days have had to be crying couch days - no wine. Picking myself up felt slow and unsure and then the slow faded. My body and mind are capable of what they were 17 years ago - at first a trickle, then rushing back. I feel sharp, vital. I feel clean.

When I look at the moon now I feel the longing wash over me like an old friend and embrace the unknowing, and I see the memories of my life, and I feel the future, and I hold it all in one, myself, my soul. And I do still cry, and I’m still a little fat, and I’m odd, and I do see the world differently, but that self is the glorious something I’ve been chasing all along, and her name is Happiness. Some days I think I’m almost close to shaking her hand.