The last time I took a drink was September 10th, 2021. A few days later, someone told me that there’s a debate as to when your ‘sober birthday’ is—some say it’s the last day you take a drink, some say it’s the first day you get through without one. Given that the latter was going to be the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I opted for the tenth. (Of course, now today is analogous with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, so I guess I just have to live with that.)
It’s difficult to write about sobriety for any number of reasons. For one, if you aren’t an alcoholic or an addict, there’s simply no way to understand it. I could talk about chemistry and obsession for pages and it wouldn’t clock with someone unaffected because there’s nothing like addiction within the rest of the human experience. To put it plainly, most people can have a drink to unwind at night. If I had even a sip of wine tonight, it would take a miracle for me to ever stop. The only way for me to stop drinking is to never start.
So it’s been five years and I still don’t really know what to say about it. Everyone has a different battle with this thing, even sober, and mine has not been particularly easy—partially due to other mental health issues, and partially due to the fact that I have this notion that alcoholism is this illness like cancer that just is supposed to filter out people over time. Keep nature balanced somehow. Maybe alcoholics are supposed to just live hard and fast and not see the second half of life. Maybe I’m spitting in the face of nature right now.
I know plenty of people who fucking love sobriety. They’re all smiles at AA meetings and they have found a new lease on life. It’s proof that the 12-step programs work. I go to meetings because they help me not drink, but I have certainly not found any sense of joy in living through listening to and sharing stories. I make sure to not bad-mouth AA or anything like it because I’ve seen it help enough people that I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone who might need a program from trying one out. The flip side of that coin is, though, when everyone around you seems to be feeling better and better all of the time while you don’t, it makes it harder to think that life is more worthwhile without a drink in hand.
Anyway, I don’t know. Every year around this time I go through the same struggle. I still don’t feel like myself anymore, and with each passing year, the idea of existing as a stranger in my own body and mind is more difficult to deal with. This is the one life I have, after all. I want to spend it how I want to spend it, and now most of the way I live is for how other people want me to be. People in recovery say, Don’t leave before the miracle happens, but I don’t believe in miracles. Everyone congratulates me and I really couldn’t care less. This feels more like condemnation than living, and I’m not getting any younger.
However, I do know these are largely selfish and self-destructive thoughts. Most days it’s about trying to find reasons to care. I’m a person who lives for the full experience of being alive and nothing allowed me to feel the entire spectrum of emotion quite like a drink. It’s a double-edged sword because that extreme also replaced every relationship, subdued every ambition, and deviated me from any direction I was trying to take my life. The fact I thrive in chaos really helped, but for the most part, everything was a mess. I get it, but I also prefer it. Five years in and it has been the worst half-decade of my life, at least in terms of the things I care about. But people say I’m ‘doing better.’ I just don’t believe them.
