If You Like Piña Coladas…
I miss drinking. There. I said it.
I miss walking into a bar on a Friday evening, still in heels and panty hose from work, and putting my lips to a frosted glass with the same instinct that an overboard sailor uses to reach for a lifesaver. I miss sipping a pinot noir while I prepare a delicious, but complicated meal for my family. I miss going out for lunch, having one fun cocktail, then deciding as a group to “be bad” and have a second, then lunch turns into an all-day brewery/bar hop. I miss standing knee deep in the ocean, sipping on continuous Corona Lights with my girlfriends and letting the alcohol pull more and more secrets out of us (usually about the boys we brought along, playing frisbee up on the beach.) I miss getting three drinks deep and getting the courage to send a risky text. I miss the way being tipsy made me feel about myself. I miss vacation piña coladas, $15 concert beers, movie theater mini wine bottles, secret wedding flasks, secret funeral flasks, secret obligatory-family-party flasks. I miss the loss of inhibition. I miss the way something boring could be made fun with one little liquid adjustment to my attitude. I miss sipping away my self-consciousness.
None of that nostalgia changes the fact that I will never drink again.
I’ve said before that I’m not tempted by alcohol on a daily basis, and that is true. Actually, I never really had a period of sobriety where I was white-knuckle, desperately trying not to drink. I went from not even trying to be sober, to an intense aversion and hatred for alcohol and what it had done to me and my life. That distaste for the poison lasted long enough that it fizzled into my current status, where alcohol is so far removed from my lifestyle that I don’t really think about it. Even now, as I temporarily exist in a house with artisanal whiskey in the cabinet and premade Jell-O shots in the fridge, I’m unphased. I’m content, maybe even a bit proud, that I can camouflage with normal people who do normal people things, like drink in moderation, despite the fact that I come with a massive disclaimer.
Just because I don’t have a constant craving for my kryptonite does not mean that it has gone away for good. Sobriety is a responsibility that requires constant tending, like a hot house orchid. It depends on where you are in your recovery, what you were addicted to, how your addiction and your lifestyle meshed, and what kind of person you are in general, but all of us addicts have our daily chores surrounding the maintenance of our sobriety. For some, that truly does require pouring all of the liquor down the sink and setting the cabinet it was in on fire. Some addicts have to disown friends and family members; you’d be surprised how many young people do meth with their fathers. Others have to change their surroundings entirely in order to disassociate; new state, new city, new hair color, new job— like they are in the witness protection program, hiding from their own vices.
Achieving sobriety and maintaining sobriety are two completely different endeavors. Burning your own liquor cabinet is a step and a declaration. Burning down the local liquor store is arson and a felony. Your methods of being and staying sober have to keep evolving right along with the rest of the world. When you are truly ready to be rid of your addiction, your mentality cultivates an ambition to conquer the temptations that come to you, despite your best preparations to ward them off. Its survival. However, if sobriety is merely something that your family wishes for you, not something you desire in the depths of your soul, then no amount of isolation or preparation will keep you away from your candy.
There is no status quo demographic in rehab. It is the splatter plane at the bottom of a drop zone for every kind of person you could imagine. Still, people find their tribes in any crowd. The young opioid addicts with no intention of staying clean all found each other real quick in that environment. There was a group of about eight children (aged 18 to 22) who kept recycling between the rehab facility, halfway houses, then holding up in a single hotel room off highway 74 with three to six other people and enough Fentanyl to subdue a hippopotamus. I believe that they all tried with at least half of their heart to picture a life without drugs, but the beckoning of a good high and a good time always reached them in their twin bed at Sunrise Sober Living.
I couldn’t judge them. The only difference between them and me is that I drank my deadly sedative. Part of me knew, just like those stoned toddlers, that I would likely drink again, even as I was living in a rehab. Not because I didn’t want to be sober, not because I didn’t care about my family, but because I didn’t have the tools or the mentality to dissect what was really going on in my mind. Nobody said, “hey Kara, you aren’t a drunk because you like drinking. You’re a drunk because you feel the need to disconnect from reality in order to feel safe. You’re a drunk because you only have confidence when an outside substance that diminishes inhibitions is blended into your bloodstream. You’re a drunk because you’ve been implementing alcohol into your routine for so long that, even sober, you have no Goddamn clue how you are supposed to feel ever in any situation. The only time you feel normal, or natural, or wanted, or relaxed, or protected, or human, is when you have a drink.”
Even if one can wrap their brain around those rooted truths, the next step is accepting what you have to do going forward. I just explained that I, and most addicts, only felt human when there was substance in our system. Then the professionals hammer into our heads that “you have to stop drinking. You have to stop using.” Well, why? What’s the incentive? What’s the bigger solution here? They never gave me one. So, I drank about that sadness too.
I had to figure out on my own that the longest, hardest, most fearsome path is the only path to recovery. It’s this: We have to get sober to learn how to stay sober. We have to fester in a clean mind in order to fix the broken parts of it. When I talk about “facing our demons,” I am referring to the terrifying, anxiety-inducing, arduous process of removing our best coping mechanism and relearning how to live without it. The false confidence, the dependency, the artifice of an easy life has to be undone. Our psyche, in its purest form, has to be retaught, rewired, rewound, reintroduced, and completely repaired in order for us to live. Clean.
It seems like common sense, but it really isn’t. When you tell an addict to stop drinking or using so that everything can be clear, we panic. We don’t want clarity. If you remove the silt from the water, we will have to come face-to-face with the insidious things that we’ve been hiding from. That is exactly what recovery is: coming face-to-face with the insidious things you’ve been hiding from. You either defeat them, or learn how to live with them, but be dealt with they must. Sustainable recovery means armoring up for the bad things and fighting your battles in real time, instead of delaying them due to a decade of drunkenness and ensuing hangovers.
Just because I am not tempted by alcohol on a daily basis doesn’t mean I don’t do my addict chores every day. My directive is to stay on a stable mental plain, so that drunkenness never seems more appealing or more necessary to my survival than my sobriety. It used to be a full-time job, now its only part time because it’s working. On the occasions when I think that I miss drinking, what I’m really missing is the nearly instant sensation of happiness that a cocktail or two could bring. Natural highs don’t feel as high as the artificial highs do, but that’s because a natural high comes on slower and lasts a lot longer. Natural highs have roots and bloom, also like a hot house orchid. You appreciate them because you not only worked for them, but because they stick around to be enjoyed. Likewise, you long for them and memorialize them once they are gone. In a brief moment, its easy to think, “I miss drinking.” Luckily, I’ve tended to enough flowers now to know how much I would miss if I were drinking.
