The Last Time I Drank, Everything Was Horrible and Possible

You can do it. I can do it. We can do it.

Dear Beautiful Friends,

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Hill and White Shell

I first wrote this piece when I was 20 years sober. Today is year 27, and the gift of sobriety will always feel magical, mysterious, and mischievous.

I got sober in 1997, when admitting to having a drinking problem, and being an alcoholic, carried quite the Stigma. I knew of ONE sober person. I placed a long-distance call from Seattle to NYC (hi/thanks Sean!) to ask about what the hell I was in for. I felt shy and scared to tell my friends and family. I skulked in and out of AA meetings, hoping not to be seen by someone I knew from the “real world.”

These days, I howl with glee every time I read a social media post of someone’s new sobriety, followed by a long string of “me too” comments. It seems like such an exciting time to consider a new way of life: more types of gatherings and meetings, sobriety conferences, online and coaching groups, being out and vocal about it, so many beautiful books, and illuminating interviews that capture life after the drinking turbulence.

If you’re experiencing hopelessness, discouragement, pain, and confusion for yourself or someone you love, this one’s for you, for all of us. We are life in motion; so much is possible.

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Twenty-seven years ago, there was a Friday the Thirteenth. A friend invited me to a boating party at Seattle’s Shilshole Beach on a blue-sky evening. I think I was wearing white pants. There was wine, there was beer, there was god-knows-what-else. Maybe a bit of pot. Whatever was there, I had it all—over twice the legal limit. And then I got in my car. In the middle of a blind-drunk drive home, I pulled into a neighborhood grocery store because I had the munchies. I stumbled out with my goodies bag and the police were waiting for me. A U.S. marine had been driving behind me and called the cops.

I was placed in the back of a police car. I remember crying in the backseat of that car, but as a blackout drinker, the rest of the evening remains fuzzy. There may or may not have been handcuffs. There may or may not have been a trip to the police station. To this date, I am unsure if I’ve ever been to jail. In the hour before the birds started singing I was dropped off at my apartment on the corner of Mercer and 12th, by an office I remember as kind and exasperated. I made pasta and went to bed. A few hours later I woke up and knew, I just knew:

I was done.

For that entire day, I combusted into hard sobs each time I realized how easily I could have killed or seriously hurt someone that night. The fact that I didn’t, made me feel like the luckiest person in the world. Also, this image appeared: a god-like, Zeus-ian figure*, poised in the clouds, with a message:

Final warning, final warning. Next time, you will not get away with this. 

I believed it, and I was ready to do whatever it took to prevent a “next time.”

*A tad patriarchal and all, but it was 1997 and part of my recovery was a journey into the feminine. Being masculine was easier.

On the morning of June 14, 1997, my drinking days were over.

I was 33. I thought I was too old to “start over.” This makes me laugh hysterically today. What a beautiful ripe number. In time, I came to see how every age is a perfect one to start over. I’ve seen people have amazing do-overs in their 50s, 60s and 70s.

The first year was heartbreak.

I opened, shattered, and cracked all over the place. I was ready to own myself and my actions and take responsibility for the wreckage I caused, and how it might have affected others and my own development. Ow. Ooooh. Ouch! Achy-breaky moments poked and plucked at all corners of my ribs. I went from being a stoic, non-emoter to someone who cried walking down 3rd Avenue on the way to work. I cried at work, too, sitting in an open-office environment an arm’s reach from co-workers. I cried while driving. A lot of driving and crying. The gush of tears wasn’t always from sadness. An emotional ice age was melting and releasing itself through my eyeballs. The tears just kept coming and coming, I couldn’t do anything about it, so I let it be. It was a relief and nobody noticed.

What made the hard part of early sobriety endurable was how endlessly fascinating it all was — this transformation business. Since I went to treatment and AA, I had the opportunity to watch others go through their achy-breaky awakenings as well. I was part of something, rather than the lone wolf slinking around town and roving from group to group without staying anywhere too long. Sobering up is a bit of a crazy-making sensation, and being part of a recovery community kept me from losing my mind.

More to the point and maybe even more important was this: I was more comfortable being OK with the possibility that I might completely lose myself. At least I wasn’t alone.

Thankfully, I was spending time with people who were willing to share their shape-shifting stories and laugh at their most embarrassing actions. They nodded with understanding and a smile when I admitted to the most secretive acts or desires I’d harbored while drinking: intimacies with people I should not have shared two sentences with. Fantasies of talk-show fame for doing basically nothing. One day at a time, other people’s stories were letting me off the hook and connecting me to the human experience. I wasn’t alone. I began to breathe.

The world opened up in extraordinary ways. It was hard and scary and magical and creative. I broke down and grew up. I met my shame head-on and survived it (and this work continues). I wrote poetry. I did triathlons. I had friends, family and communities without whom I couldn’t have endured the psyche-breaking transformation. I learned how fortunate we are to need each other. I need you. And you and you. So hard and so badly and so happily! Thank you, thank you thank you.

“Recovery happens in community,” a wise friend said. Truth. When I found a Masters Swimming group, that also became (indirectly) my recovery community.

So many of us have a defining moment in life, a cracking open that gives birth to a New Way of Being. I have mine. You have yours.

Something happens. You stop. You turn. You open, accept, and dig down deep to recover and heal and grow up and out into yourself and the world.

We all have an amazing capacity to transform ourselves. So much is possible.

I can do it. We can do it. You can do it.

As humans, we are made to create and connect. That means burning down the old barn of unwanted habits and creating something new for ourselves: experiences, vats of resiliency, fun relationships, new ways of seeing and being. Anything. Anything you want. We are made to flourish.

In what might at first seem horrible, everything is possible. There’s a road out, and beautiful people to travel with.

Believe it.

Getting-Sober Reads I Loved

• Kristi Coulter
  ’s memoir Nothing Good Can Come of This is a sobriety memoir for our time.'

• When I got sober, I saw myself in Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: a Love Story and felt less alone.

• Sari Botton
  and
  The Small Bow
  ’s “Ask A Sober Oldster” with author Claire Dederer is mind-blowingly beautiful, insightful, and gave me some fresh ways to think about this drinking-non-drinking journey.