7 Year Soberiversary

Today I have been sober for seven years, which is nothing short of a miracle given how much I was drinking eight years ago--roughly two bottles of wine a night (but only six glasses if I was on a date and ten glasses if I had nowhere to be the next morning and I was really into Vampire Diaries that night). 

A friend of mine recently asked me how I was staying sober while dealing with stage 4 cancer. Until he asked me that, it honestly hadn't crossed my mind to give in and drink to forget my well-earned worries for a night. I told him that at this point I didn't drink simply out of habit. Seven years of not drinking embeds those neural pathways pretty deep. Nowadays I'm able to live in a house with wine, beer, and whiskey in the cabinets and feel no temptation.

Getting to that point, however, sucked. The first day of sobriety is as hard as every day after it all added together. Anyone who has gotten sober and stayed that way has an iron will, no matter what they may say about themselves (including "it's all thanks to Jesus, my Higher Power." Yeah, right, I don't see Jesus coming down and wrestling the whiskey out of your hand in the middle of a tear-stricken night). 

Seven years ago I was spending Christmas and New Year's with my family at our lakehouse in Missouri. All my favorite people were there which means I was in a room full of PhDs, success, ambition, awards, and Google Scholar hits. I felt like a nobody because I had none of those things. 

So I drank. 

Every day I watched the clock and started drinking cheap wine the second the clock struck noon. One particularly difficult day I started drinking at eleven. My mother gave me a look and I just gave her the stink eye back: "I'm not waiting until noon today." 

The next day as I walked through the bustling kitchen with a freshly topped off glass of wine, my mother caught me by the elbow and said something to me that pierced through all my bullshit armor and excuses and hit me where I needed to hear it. "With your drinking, you are giving up your career, you are giving up finding a husband, and you are giving up having a child. You are giving up everything for your drinking." 

It shook me to my core. 

When Mom released my elbow she went back to her business mashing potatoes, and I had her words ringing in my ear like a gong. I was half-there for the rest of the day, but not because of the box wine. 

The next day I told Mom I wanted to get sober. I don't think she believed me but naturally she thought it was a great idea. I ordered some books on getting sober that would be waiting at my door when I got home. I played with the idea of Alcoholics Anonymous but I wasn't sure because it sounded like an awful lot of work, especially that step where you apologize to all the people you've wronged. Oh hellllllll no, I don't think so. Maybe I didn't need AA; I was smart, surely I could figure out how to get sober on my own. 

It turned out Mom wasn't my only mini-intervention. My favorite cousin got me alone (with a bottle of white wine as a bribe, the clever lass) and told me she was worried about me. I lowered my head and said, Yeah, I know. It's time to do something. I just hope I can. What if it was too late?

When I made it back to Portland I continued drinking for a couple days. The sobriety books lay in a stack on the coffee table, unread. Finally my mother asked if I'd been to AA and I said no. She said, "but you promised you'd get sober." Once again, it was her words that cut through all my excuses: my problem isn't that bad, I have it under control, it doesn't affect anyone else, I never black out so how bad can I really be, I never puke, almost nothing bad ever happens to me, these tremors aren't that noticeable, withdrawal isn't that big a deal. But Mom was right, I had promised her, and I owed it to her to follow through. 

Besides, maybe her words were exactly what I needed to save me from myself. 

After a couple days I decided, okay, it's time to get real. I went online and found a website listing all the Portland-area AA meetings for that day. I picked one that was close by and decided to read a memoir of getting sober until then. At the last minute I decided to go to a woman-only meeting instead that was a little farther away, figuring it would be a little less intimidating. 

Thank goodness I did, because if I had gone to the first meeting I'd found, I might never have gone back to AA. I attended this one a couple months later and it was everything unappealing you see about Alcoholics Anonymous in the movies: dark church room, shitty coffee in styrofoam cups, broken metal folding chairs, and a group of people who looked equally broken. Not inspiring at first glance.

Now I am NOT saying all AA meetings are like this, in fact most are not so don't let my experience deter you, but what I'm saying is that this particular meeting would have scared my already very squirrelly disposition away from AA because I didn't know any better and didn't have the determination or motivation to stick it out and see all the good things about it I later saw. Like how much conviction it takes to show up to an AA meeting when all you want to do is drive to the liquor store. 

Instead, I went to an all women's meeting. It was in a very cozy sitting room in a church, full of couches and fluffy pillows. They lit a candle and greeted me with a smile, their name, and a hug. They were THRILLED to be my first AA meeting ever and treated me like a treasured guest because of it. They gave me a free copy of the AA book. It was as pleasant an experience as I could have hoped for for my first time. 

During the meeting they gave me the coveted and hard-won gold 24 hour coin for my first day sober and told me to keep coming back so I could earn my silver 1 month coin. A few women offered to be my sponsor although I wasn't ready to decide yet because I wanted to see a couple other meetings first. It was thanks to this meeting that I dove into AA as a major factor in my getting sober. 

I attended meetings for my first year and a half. Yes, many if not most took place in grungy church rooms with shitty coffee. That's just how AA is, because that's all they can afford. Their job isn't to pamper you; on the contrary, AA's job is to kick you in the ass and keep you sober, one day at a time. And it works. My sponsors were two of the most bullshit-proof women I've ever encountered in my life. One was a former meth head stripper, the other was a Harvard grad working in finance. I learned a ton from both. 

I became a far better person because of AA and my sponsors, and there's no denying I became a better, less self-absorbed and less selfish person because I stopped drinking. I know my family finds me a lot more pleasant to be around now.

What you can't appreciate until you're out the other side is how much easier sobriety is. You're not always worried about your next drink or your next bottle or FUCK, the liquor store is closed. You don't have to worry about pacing yourself on a first date or at the office happy hour so you don't look like the raging alcoholic that you secretly know you are. You don't make self-deprecating jokes about being a high- (or not-so-high) functioning alcoholic and get nervous when others don't laugh because there's no hiding what you really are. 

My main concern--and main reason for not quitting already (or was this just the lie I told myself?)--was that I was convinced drinking made me more creative. If I stopped drinking, I thought I'd lose my ability to brainstorm and write so well. Never mind that I was barely doing either. Friends pointed this out to me and said if I was such a great a writer as I thought I was, I'd be able to write stone cold sober as well. And the smug bastards were right, of course, because progress on my fantasy book improved fivefold when I stopped drinking. 

What's the biggest truth I didn't know about getting sober? 

When I stopped drinking, I was able to stop hating myself. My Xanax usage went way down, which was no small feat in itself. I realized if I got sober, maybe next year I wouldn't be hissing at anyone who asks if they can have a glass of my box wine because ALCOHOLICS DON'T SHARESIES. 

A journal entry I came across recently that shot me straight back to the time of hating everything about myself was this: "3 a.m. face in hands, whiskey on ice." I remember writing that. I remember how much I was hurting and wishing I could change, but I was convinced I wasn't strong enough to do so. 

Of course that was bullshit. I was strong enough the entire time, I just didn't know it was in me to look at a bottle of wine and choose to pour it down the drain. If I had then maybe today I'd be celebrating my 15 year soberiversary instead of 7. 

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If you want to talk more about getting sober, please email me vixoen@gmail.com. No judgment, full confidentiality. I know I wish I'd had someone to talk to about all this years ago, so really, message me.