Years ago, when I was trying to get sober for the second time, I ordered a sparkling water when I went to dinner with friends of a friend. I had not told anyone I was trying to get sober, nor that it was my second go around, instead disguising it once again under the ruse of doing the Whole 30 and “feeling, like, really good!” I wasn’t ready to admit to myself, let alone my friends, that I thought I might have a drinking problem.
We’d gone to a place famous for their margaritas and, as my singular bubbly water was placed down amongst the multiple frothy pink drinks, a girl I’d never met picked hers up, took a large, foamy sip through her straw, then stared dead into my eyes and asked, “So, what’s your deal?”
This is, admittedly, an insane way of asking about someone’s life and my old roommate, also present at that dinner, and I joke about the phrasing even now. I surface-level answered the question — “I have two brothers, I was raised in Idaho, I’m an art director” — skipping completely over the deeper dive she’d clearly wanted to go into about the alcohol, but later that night, I was still thinking about how flustered it’d felt to answer. What was my deal? Why was it so hard to tell people my relationship with alcohol was different?
Unsettled and unprepared to have those conversations, I resumed drinking again.
I have been sober now for three years. I am incredibly proud of that. When I first announced, 100 days in, that I was no longer drinking, I think a lot of people were surprised — from the outside, I didn’t seem like someone who had an alcohol problem, but the fact that I considered it was becoming an issue makes it a problem all the same. It’s not that I was drinking by myself every night because I was not — in fact, I rarely drank during the week and never alone in my apartment. I was more of a social drinker. If I was out and had one drink, I wouldn’t be able to stop… I didn’t want the good time to end. When a night out with friends would be reaching its intended close, I was unable to make myself get into a cab home, instead posting myself up alone at the bar to see what adventures awaited me.
And, adventures always awaited me. I’d end up deep in Bushwick at a late-night death metal show because someone I’d talked to once at a tea shop sent a text to come through. I’d get kicked out of a bar because the dude I’d met up with after my friends left a party decided to steal a drink and get in a fist fight with the bouncer. I’d leave my phone or wallet or sometimes both in the back of a cab so late at night that it was actually early morning and, instead of being concerned, would grab a bodega coffee and watch the sunrise alone on the East River as I sobered up, certain my belongings would somehow come back to me. (And, somehow, they always did). Even when I went to a bar during the day, like on a casual Sunday afternoon to work or read, I’d find myself at a different location 12 hours later, tucked in a booth with the bartender from the first place. When people ask why I am sober, my go-to joke is that I firmly believe everyone gets an allotted amount of “alcohol-fun” hours and I ran through mine too fast on late nights sitting on barstools in my early twenties.
Because of this, I dated a lot of bartenders. (Dating bartenders during this time in my life was not only fiscally responsible, but it allowed me to disguise the absurd amount of time I was spending after hours at bars as romantic — “It was just us still there as he was closing up and he turned on the music for us to slow dance behind the bar at 5 a.m.!” — rather than concerning.) Because of this, I have contacts in my phone of people I have bonded with, people I have told my biggest secrets to, people I have cried with, people who I have never seen again. (It is hard, in the light of the next day, to take seriously a text from “Anna Cookie-Emoji Star-Emoji Milk-Emoji” or “Caleb SavenumberPlease.”) On a barstool, I was able to faux-connect with these strangers I’d met on those late nights turned to early mornings, but in my real life, I was having such a hard time being genuine with the people who actually loved me. I was so hyperaware that my relationship with alcohol was different and so committed to not having anyone find out that, instead of being fully present to a conversation I’d be having with a friend at dinner, a significant part of my attention would be turned to if I was drinking too fast, if I was drinking too much, if the server was going to come over soon to get us another round, if the person I was with realized the mental gymnastics I was doing, if the person I was with realized it was a problem, too. During the pandemic, closed off from the social aspect of drinking and only being able to interact with everyone I loved on a tiny, little screen, I’d realized — not for the first time, but for the first time that stuck — that I needed to reprioritize my energy and, in October 2020, I took my last drink.
I have been writing on the Internet for a long, long time. There are drafts on the backend of this website dating from when I wasn’t even legally allowed to drink and yet, even then, I was writing fragments of paragraphs never finished exploring my relationship with alcohol. Drinking has always felt different to me than it does for other people — I’ve known that since my very first college party, when all the anxiety I’d unknowingly felt my entire life disappeared into glitter with that first sip of an unknown blue substance. The 18-year-old version of me didn’t know how to put that feeling into words — the 31-year-old version now barely has the vocabulary — but I knew what I was experiencing was not the same as everyone else in that dorm room. I could feel myself becoming a different person whenever alcohol entered my body and it makes me sad now, seeing those unpublished posts dating back to 2012, knowing that I thought it was better to be the falsified, intoxicated version of myself for so long.
Being a sober person was harder for me this year and I didn’t know why and that was terrifying. There were so many more resources than when I’d started! I’d done it for so long! Every single one of my friends is supportive and some of them are even sober now, too! I’ve attended multiple weddings, multiple birthdays, multiple dates, multiple bottomless brunches and been fun and fine! Good, non-alcoholic beer was everywhere! There’s literally a non-alcoholic liquor store IN my office building! And, yet, for the first time in three years, I’d find myself actively craving the feeling of having a shot of tequila burn down my throat, an actually psychotic daydream because I don’t even like shots — I, famously, would pretend to take every shot with Zach and Serria on those late Barfly nights, but instead, would throw them over my shoulder, a thing the bartender there asked me to please stop doing as a stipulation for us going on our first date because he liked me and thought I was cute, but was sick of knowing he’d have to mop the floor extra hard every time he saw me walk through the door.
This was also wild because I knew my sobriety was the only thing keeping me actively together when it felt like all the other factions of my life were crumbling. I didn’t have control over so much this year — my health, my relationships, my environment — so when I had those intrusive feelings, those thoughts that I don’t know, maybe it would be different, maybe I could just have one drink, I’m thankful that I was able to keep steady and remind myself how far I’d come, how much happier I am now. Many times this year, I kept returning to a paragraph written by my old co-worker, Sam Lansky, in an essay he wrote on his ten year anniversary of being sober:
“This is the great obsession of many sober people — this idea that a day will come when they will be normal, when they can drink or use normally, and actually, what if that day is today? And so they go out, after minutes or after years. Once I asked a sober woman I admired about this — the possibility that someday I might be no longer in recovery but recovered such that I could drink or use responsibly — and she said something that I think about often, even daily.
She said: What if it’s not about whether you can or not? What if it’s about choosing to experience life not heightened or dulled, not amplified or quieted, not harder or softer, but exactly as it is? What if it’s about trusting that when life is joyful or miserable or thrilling or boring, it is that way because it is supposed to be, not because it needs drugs or alcohol to make it more fun or more tolerable? And what if you get to be present for that—for all of it?”
I recently went out with some friends in a city I’d never been in and as the night started naturally winding down, we switched into the groups of people who were going home and those who were going to stay at the bar. As I was getting into the car to leave, I saw this grey, ghostlike blueprint of how my night would have gone four years back. I would have stayed, regardless of who else was there, confident I’d make new friends, confident I’d find my way back to the hotel somehow. I would have not been willing to let the night end, not been willing to stop having fun, even if that fun was dangerous, even if that fun was fake.
Despite knowing that, getting in the car to go home is harder. For me, it might always be harder. But, I’m happy to know that now, I can do it. I’m happy to know that now, I know it’s worth it.