The Last Bottle Was One Year Ago
When I was in rehab, I made the mistake of getting close to a boasting narcissist who preached a lot of false information. He told me that people who can stay sober for an entire year are 90% more likely to stay sober forever. My first clue about his utter bullshit should have been the fact that he’d been sober for 20 years and now, at 56, was back in rehab. Using him as a source for comfort and support was only one of the many, many mistakes I would make in early sobriety.
A lot of cliches get thrown around in rehab, addiction therapy, Twelve Step Meetings, and in any other collaboration of recovering addicts. Most of the sayings are entirely true, just overused to the point that they’ve lost their impetus. Still, every once in a while, I will hear a phrase that hits me right where it counts. My favorite counselor in Asheville was a 75-year-old hippie named Craig, who was mostly recovering from alcoholism, but had tried pretty much every substance available to the American counter-culture.
In a group session one day, I admitted that I felt stuck because drinking was the only thing that made me feel “alright.” Craig was quick to correct me.
“No, nothing makes you feel alright. Alcohol doesn’t make you feel alright anymore either. You remember when it did, and you keep trying to get that back by drinking more and more… but that’s no longer an option. You drank all of your happy liquor. Its gone. Forever. All you have now is sad, bitter, angry, fruitless liquor, and its ruining everything in your life that isn’t ruined already.”
That was first, possibly the only, bit of applicable knowledge and logic that I gained from being institutionalized for 60 days.
Just the other day, out of boredom and unemployment, I was watching a biography on Chris Farley. (On an important sidenote, if I die an unfortunate death, please don’t let Gary Busey speak on my behalf). The documentary further proved something that I already knew, which is that a lot more celebrities struggled with addiction than have openly, blatantly, boldly come forward. John Goodman, for instance, who I have always adored, finished his interview in the film by matter-of-factly saying, “I don’t know what to tell you guys. It’s addiction. It just is. I have no idea how I survived it.”
The quote itself isn’t Shakespearean, but something about the way he said it, as it was cutting off the interviewers and putting on his jacket, cut to the bone of what it looks like to live with addiction in your past.
The other quote that stuck out to me was from the great poet, Tom Arnold. It never really crossed my mind that he was in recovery, but I guess you’d have to be high to marry Rosanne… Anyway, his take wasn’t so much on active addiction, but on early sobriety. It was said in reference to Chris Farley’s method of just going cold turkey from time to time and continuing to work in the same environment, be around the same people, and live with the same mental disorders.
“You have to give your brain time to heal. You don’t quit using and suddenly think clearly and rationally. Those kinds of thoughts only come with time.”
Emphasis is put on the big “one year” mark of sobriety, and I’m realizing that the reasons why are as subjective as everything else about the recovery process. No, its not because making it to one year of sobriety makes you 90% more likely to stay sober forever- that’s a bullshit statistic. In fact, most statistics you’ll hear about addiction are bullshit because you can’t apply mathematics to a condition that 100% of its participants have lied about having. Ironically, the addicts who have skewed the statistics by lying are the same ones who try to use the statistics to comfort themselves. Saying, “I’ve been sober a year, so I’ll be sober forever!” sounds and feels a lot better than stating the truth, which is that “no one is safe and there are no guarantees.” Avoiding that kind of damning knowledge is why we became addicts in the first place.
So, as I sit here simultaneously stewing and celebrating 365 days of being completely sober, I am compelled to dissect what exactly this milestone means for me and my continued resolve to stay sober.
For starters, am I proud of myself? Yes. And no. I think I’d be more proud if I struggled more with the actual drinking part of not drinking. I can’t be proud of myself for not drinking in the past year, because not once in the past year have I felt like drinking. I’ve been bitter about not having alcohol as an outlet or a coping mechanism, but only as a concept. The whole “sitting in my car in the parking lot of the liquor store, crying, screaming, praying for intervention and desperately longing for another way to get through the day” song-and-dance was 2019’s high-stakes game. And I lost every round.
I am proud of the work that I’ve done. I’m proud of the habits I’ve developed. I’m proud of the philosophies that I’ve latched onto. There is something life-affirming in how many times I came home from a terrible, menial job last summer, wanting to cry, wanting to give up, wanting to get in my car, drive to Florida, and do that thing I tend to do where I don’t come home for years. Instead, I wiped away a tear or two, and despite being exhausted from 10 hours on my feet already, I would go for a long run. It was partially because of perseverance, but it was more about doing what was best for me instead of doing what was easy. It became second nature to behave that way, and that made me proud.
Has my life gotten better since I eliminated alcohol? Yes. And no. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the ways—scratch that—at the people who have lifted me up when they had every right to just drop me. I remember starting with my new therapist about two weeks after I quit drinking for good and I was… discouraged. I told her, very honestly, that I wasn’t sure what I was getting sober for. I had so many people in my life that I loved, but thanks to my addiction, my relationships with them were awkward and uncomfortable. So, being sober meant being uncomfortable in general around people who also made me uncomfortable. With that in mind, I had no idea what I was hoping to achieve by being in recovery… but it ended up being so much better than I imagined.
Apparently, the people that know me best saw the massive change in me long before I did. I felt shaky, and skeptical. I remember the first time that my brother-in-law asked me to babysit my nephew. I thought it was a little trial or test, and maybe they’d make a 20-minute run to the grocery store to buy mangoes. If they came back and Steele was still alive, next time they’d go to Whole Foods and spring for a 30-minute trip. Instead, they drove out to a winery in the foothills and left me with Steele for almost 4 hours. They were correct. Like I said, the people that I love know me better than I know myself. My brain had already begun to heal. Drunk brain me didn’t care if I was trusted with Steele, because I didn’t deserve to be around him anyway. Sober, healing-brain me spent 4 hours with the little guy and I got it. I was done. I knew what I was fighting for—and it only made me want to fight harder.
Has my sanity been restored? Hah. You mean the sanity I didn’t have even before I became an alcoholic? No. By nature, more than by choice, my thoughts, actions, and determinations have become more aligned with the textbook definition of “sanity.” Accepting that I have a complete and utter lack of control over 99.9% of the things that happen to me and around me is a big part of being sane. I can fasten my seatbelt and remain alert, but my pivotal participation stops there. Living honestly is a big one. People—not just addicts—lie. A lot. About shit that doesn’t even matter. We lie about cancelled plans, we lie about how much we spend shopping, we lie about why we’re late, we just lie. It takes just as much effort to say “I didn’t want to go, I spent $200, I was reading Buzzfeed on the toilet and lost track of time,” as it does to say, “I’m not feeling well, it was only $20, and my meeting ran late.” Why not go with the truth instead of the excuse? I mean, don’t get me wrong, the truth is often humiliating, but at least it contributes to your credibility.
I haven’t yet been bitten by my over-willingness to tell the truth, but I do believe today might be the day. Due to the repetitive nature of Twelve Step Programs, I can tell you exactly how tonight is going to go down—I’m going to go to a meeting a 7pm. Fast forward through the recitation of the rules, readings, and sharing of other members. They’ll ask if anyone wants to “give up the fight and take a white (chip).” Usually no one does. Not in this meeting, anyway. They go down the line: 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months, 9 months, 1 year… I’ll raise my hand. Everyone will applaud and congratulate me. Then, someone will ask me “How. Did. You. Do. It?”
I will begin to panic and sweat profusely.
I can lie. I can whip out a slew of the regular cliches and tell them that I “relinquished control to my higher power, worked the steps, and took it one day at a time.” That’s bullshit and I hate bullshit. But the truth—my truth-- … its not great. I’m not sure that I have the balls it takes to say in front of a crowd of mutual alcoholics that I’ve been sober for a year because “it started out of spite, to prove to myself that I could do it. Then it became a desperate last grasp to keep my husband from leaving me and the not drinking just went along with the incessant running, juice cleanses, never eating, and throwing up the few things I did eat. I got used to not being hungover in the morning and I liked it, so I kept doing it. Finally, my sister started speaking to me again and I wanted to keep her around so that drove the continuation of being sober. Then enough time had passed that it would have been a waste to go back to drinking so that pushed me forward. Plus, everything in my life was completely falling apart, I was constantly miserable, I scream-cried at my windshield so hard and so often that I started spitting up blood from the back of my throat. I went back and forth on the idea of putting a gun in my mouth, but that would be quite rude considering everything I had already put my family through. I switched medications 10 times before finding something that sorta worked and things evened out. I can’t tell you how the Hell I made it through that time period, but I did. Eventually, I realized that if I could survive all of that sober, I could get through anything sober. Then, boom. A whole year down.”
Yeah, I definitely can’t tell that story to people who might be teetering on the edge.
If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that two things can be true, even if they seem contradictory. You can feel miserable and loved at the same time. You can be lost and also have a driving purpose. You can have piles of questions and piles of answers and none of them match up to the others. You can develop a superhuman amount of strength from being at your absolute weakest. You can do something the wrong way for the right reasons. My method of getting sober is clearly not one for the instruction manuals, but it worked. Not because of luck, but because of “why.” Why have I been sober a year? Why was drinking not an option, even when my other option was death? Because I didn’t want to hurt the people I loved anymore.
If I were left to my own devices, I wouldn’t give a damn about my own life. I’d likely be in a ditch somewhere with no clue to the whereabouts of my pants, wallet, glasses, or cell phone, but tightly cuddling a bottle of vodka with the top against my lips and the bottom against my heart. I’m not alone, though, and I never have been. I have great people. Wonderful people. People who, to their own detriment, love me a lot. There was a learning curve for an anxious, depressed, panic-ridden, person who only knew how to be either drunk or inadequate… but I’ve got it down now. Because they’re worth it.
That will be my answer tonight. When I get to proudly announce that I’ve been sober for an entire year and I am asked “how did you do it?”
I’ll say, “when you have the love and support of great people, you can do anything.”
