#15 Nine years of not drinking

On Wednesday night my friend Max, who lives in Europe, kept sending me WhatsApp messages which he does, often, in staccato fashion. Usually it’s pictures of his daughter (“just one more”) or stories about this one time when he was on drugs, etc., but this time he was talking about making it to midnight and while I saw the text previews keep coming through I didn’t open them (I batch). When I saw one that said “Happy happy, Holly! You’re already 9 here” it finally phased me. I realized he meant I was 9 years sober in Belgium, where he is, and then I realized I had forgotten my sober anniversary.

On Thursday, the day of the actual event, I woke up at 5 A.M., made coffee, read the news, drove the 20 minutes to buy two oat milk lattes at the coffee shop where I chatted with my neighbor Paul and his dog Ollie and made weekend plans with Emily Sander. After, I went plant shopping at the nursery, picked up some lawn seed at the True Value, and went home where I mulched and raked and listened to two and one-half episodes of Hidden Brain. Then I had therapy, made a sauté of brussels sprouts and sweet potato, went on a run in the thunder, and unintentionally imploded the relationship I’ve been in for the past few weeks over text. Instead of going to dinner with [redacted] as planned, I watched a French horror film at the independent theater while he slipped the copy I had loaned him of Men Explain Things To Me in my mailbox, an invoice for deer fence I’d bought on his account at the lumberyard folded in half and slipped into the acknowledgments.

There’s a specific sensation one could get, if one is middle aged and rolling up to her rural digs on a dead end road on a day she spent mostly in isolation that she’d rather be celebrating with not just him but all of them, everyone, all the people, or anyone at all, and she arrives not to flowers or a card or any kind and thoughtful gesture but a passive-aggressively returned book and $315.84 invoice. One could despair, especially if she’d put on the good lipstick and was wearing the good suede boots.

That’s the thing, though. I didn’t despair. I made a face that I would have made had I seen this from the cheap seats—there I am alone in the woods on a day everyone forgot, unfolding a piece of paper I think is a love note but is actually a bill. I put my hand to my mouth and gasped and thought about how much richer life is than fiction. How we could absolutely not make this shit up if we tried.

I talked to a few of my close people on Friday, and they were sorry for me but I wasn’t. Years ago, or let’s say all the sober anniversaries but this one, have been marked by progress. What did I learn, how far have I come, who am I compared to who I used to be. And that’s been kind of fantastic and extremely helpful. I love taking the time to consider what I’ve been through and how different I am because often enough I do think I’m still the same stuck piece of shit up to her same old shenanigans, only sober. So yeah, the yearly ritual of celebrating growth and change and who I have become and who I am still becoming and marking it all like a height chart etched into a door frame: I love that. But there’s a double-edge to marking progress, because when you don’t grow in the universally recognized ways (more security, more maturity, more more more) or your life doesn’t match the projections you graphed years previous (marriage, kids, not being unemployed, etc.) it can feel like you’ve done something terribly wrong.

When I say I wasn’t sorry for me, I mean to tell you that I loved it, all of it, and mostly because instead of thinking it was tragic I let myself be amused. I didn’t paint my whole future with the palette of that day or imagine some kind of alternate life I could have that would be better than this one. I went inside and made tea and watched the season finale of Killing Eve. Then I went to sleep.

I wrote an essay in 2017 about not missing the magic of this moment, and in it I recalled a time four years earlier where I was in Rome for the first time, about three months sober from alcohol, still bulimic, quite frankly an exploding mess who had all these ideas about what she needed to be in order to be okay. In that essay—and with perspective—what I remembered of myself in that frame of time wasn’t how fucked up I was or how confused I felt, but this one night where I walked across the city to fetch a charger I’d left at an AirBnb, how I’d taken a wrong turn and stumbled onto the Colloseum, asked a random couple to take my picture. At the time of that walk, I’m sure I felt full of shame and regret and not-enoughness, but from the vantage of a 2017 me all I saw was this beautiful human finding her way. Freud said “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful,” and I have found that is true. In retrospect it’s gorgeous, in real time it’s never enough. I suppose I am telling you, on Thursday, in real time, I found it was enough. Gorgeous, even. Life is so weird, and I think right now what I’m getting the opportunity to do is appreciate that, potentially even think: this is the point.

Each year since getting sober I’ve written an essay to commemorate the anniversary and to capture the essence of where I am; it’s the one of the few things I ritually do. That also means when I return to writing my annual piece each spring I revisit those past works. It can be a little cringe-inducing until I remember that each version of myself has gotten me here. I know what I know now, believe what and behave how and live like I do because of all of the hers that came before me. This year, what I want to remember is that I was tired and listening to that instead of running harder. I want to remember that my life looked nothing like I imagined it would, and at the end of a hard year in which I felt I totally lost myself, I somehow ended up knowing myself more. That in a year choked with self-doubt, fear and loathing, where I felt most days I had the calm of a chainsmoking meerkat, that out the other side of it came a person who could find more meaning and contentment in less than she’d hoped than she’d ever found in the abundance she thought she needed.

I have told myself for years now things like, It’s all working out for you or It’s happening in the perfect time, which has always been really helpful and reassuring. But the thing is those sayings are still repeated in order to soothe what isn’t here, what’s wrong. I suppose I am saying I still believe those things, I just think now I know that this right here is proof of that working out and not the hill I have to climb for it eventually to.

Here’s to us.

(You can read some of those old pieces here, for paid subscribers only. 8 Things Right Now at 8 Years Sober; Celebrating 7 Years of Sobriety in Quarantine; What it Means to Turn Five Years Sober; Four Things Right Now at Four Years Sober; 103 Ways My Life Improved Without Alcohol)

Free and paid subscribers of Recovering get the same exact content. Paid is for those who’d like to offer financial support, and be patrons of this newsletter and my work.

Ten Things Right Now

1. This essay by hero Marlee Grace about how they don’t meditate, this instagram post they posted to share said article where many insisted they do in fact meditate and simply don’t know it, and this hot take response.

2. I’ve been obsessed with these anti-personal development missives mostly because I get the sentiment? My favorite so far, which I’ve already shared but it’s worth re-surfacing, on the rise of #girlloser.

3. “This was a woman still working in a world that was barely functioning.” (I suppose this week has a theme.)

4. A friend recently told me they expect to relapse at some point because everyone does. Another friend told me it’s absolutely not an option for them, that if they have one drink they will die. I thought both of these comments were interesting, insomuch as it tells how we each work with our own belief systems and realities to abstain, if abstinence is our goal (or you know, only way to not die). I personally am not afraid of drugs or alcohol or relapsing—like I don’t think about it in a way that terrifies me. I just know, no fucking way I’m going back to that and the baseline of my existence is “do anything but get high.” Here’s an article on relapse in Mic.

5. This podcast on dealing with unfathomable loss. I loved how the interviewee, Lucy, at the outset of working with her grief, told herself that her only job was to grieve. That was it. This isn’t different than how I felt and acted about getting sober: This is your one job. Hearing her tell herself that at the beginning of her grief got me thinking about how over the past year I didn’t tell myself that my only job was to live through this; I told myself I needed to maintain my relevance and earning potential. That’s putting it a little harsher than I deserve, but it does make me wonder about how if we understood when we were going through extreme loss or confusion that it was our only job to survive that—if we let all the real life things take a number and told ourselves that just living was enough—what that could mean for us.

6. This piece on VR and gaming as a cure for addiction, this report on the therapeutics for alcohol addiction which identifies a whole bunch of pharmaceutical companies as key players, and the classification of hangovers as a disease, all have me thinking about treating the problems that cause addiction in the first place as the solution.

7. I’m painfully obsessed with the Elon Musk buying twitter thing, even though I don’t use Twitter or care about Elon Musk.

8. I’m reading an advanced copy of Rina Rapheal’s book, The Gospel of Wellness, and frankly, in love with her newsletter. (Still, a theme.)

9. Currently reading Afterparties [public library] by Anthony Veasna So, who passed away in late 2020. His book was published in 2021 posthumously. I read this essay from n+1 last spring that I’ve returned to a few times. I saved Afterparties for a treat and it hasn’t disappointed.

10. This playlist I auto-generated from Sam Ronson’s Built This Way that is capturing my third-grader aged sober mood.

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This week on Quitted

The first of a two-part series with my internet friend and sober buddy Africa Brooke about quitting self-censorship.

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