Was there any ‘good’ from my drinking days? Perhaps I learned to embrace daily practices: Show up every day without fail. You need it. You’ll feel better.
But now are my practices healthier.
I recently watched a string of videos at 2:00 am about sobriety. I’d woken for no reason and reached for my phone to entertain me. I plunged down a deep, deep rabbit hole.
A series of interviews with famous actors and musicians flickered in the darkness. Each had pulled themselves out of intense drug and alcohol addiction. Some were many years sober, others weeks or months. Each one remarked how much better they felt—the clarity, the weight loss, the energy they had for the first time in years or perhaps ever. None diminished the pain, effort, or daily knife edge they walked to remain on their path.
There’s a picture in most people’s minds of what alcohol abuse looks like. We imagine the raging alcoholic, the rock n’ roll disaster story. Falling down drunk, losing your house, your relationships, your career, driving into a tree, disappearing on your family to go out on benders.
More often than not, it doesn’t look like that at all. It’s far more insidious and quietly persistent.
In one interview, singer John Maher shared that becoming sober is individual. I agree. What works for one person may not work for someone else. In the same way, hearing or reading about one person’s descent into hell isn’t necessarily helpful. ‘How bad things need to get before they turn things around’ is personal.
Some survivors are bedridden, hospitalized, in jail or on the streets by the time they decide to make a change. Some don’t and die. Some take action and thrive.
Some can survive for years swimming in circles. No one succeeds in outrunning alcohol. It impacts you. Period.
As I fretted for five to ten years before I chose to live free of alcohol, the stories that most resonated weren’t the rock n’ roll excesses. I connected to stories of women using bravado-in-a-bottle to fit in, believing the trope, “I’m not funny/sexy without it.” Stories of hangovers getting worse, promises to change becoming more frequent and worries that something bad would happen becoming more acute.
I chose sobriety 5 years ago on April 27th. I was trying to hide my behaviour; I was exhausted, ashamed and didn’t want to be the person I’d become anymore.
Was there any ‘good’ from my drinking days? Perhaps I learned to embrace daily practices: Show up every day without fail. You need it. You’ll feel better.
But now are my practices healthier.
I still reach for the high despite no longer reaching for the bottle. I reach for dopamine from new challenges, triumphs and striving to be ‘better.’
I’ve wondered if I’m trying to outrun my feelings of not being enough. I’m constantly working on self-improvement—learning, trying, exploring. Is it curiosity or curation of a new me? Am I not enough as I am? Or is there always an opportunity to be better—in a good way, in a healthy personal growth way?
I’m conditioned to look for ways to continue to be better, to continue training my mind and heart to be resilient, and to seek experiences from a place of curiosity, joy, gratitude, and positivity. My abundance is internal.
I drank from the cup of my deficits back then. Parched by ‘never enough,’ my heart felt an unquenchable, bottomless thirst.
Now, I drink from the font of hard-won wisdom and seek solace in my true self.
thanku for this. 22 years sober. still undoing the trauma thou.
As a long time fan of The Moody Blues, their album, Long Distance Voyager, came to mind. Their song, 22,000 Days, stood out. (The average life expectancy not long ago - 60 years plus leap year extra days) Such verse is part of what helps me focus attention and energy on today. I’m always grateful for your topics and the effort you make to enliven the subject.