one thousand days free

never looking back again

Last Friday I turned 1,000 days sober.

I’ve been happily non-drinking for long enough that I feel ridiculous and self-absorbed calling attention to these ultimately random milestones as if they were still tinged by the same urgency and intensity of the early days, the first 30 days, 90 days, the whole first year, really, where every time I hit a specific day or month count I wanted to shout my excitement from every available rooftop. At first, I mostly kept it to myself. Quitting drinking, and the subsequent slow dawning that I might actually be done with this thing that had kept me low-grade miserable for almost two decades, was a long-locked door finally creaking open. If I sneezed, or turned my attention elsewhere for even a second, or if the breeze blew just so, that door would slam shut, and I’d lose the chance to enter that new room, I’d be stuck forever at the threshold, only ever dipping my toe in, catching glimpses here and there. So I was nothing if not vigilant. And not because I was afraid I might drink, but because this new room opening up had me see that my life might actually be holy, and I needed to be protective, and awake, and also because when you quit drinking you learn really fucking fast who deserves to hear your story, and who is just fishing for some facedown-in-the-gutter soap opera storyline.

People expect rock-bottoms because we’ve been sold the idea that no one would ever quit shy of a life-altering crisis. Because I didn’t have what was obviously a point-to-able problem, because I had never fucked a friend’s spouse or gotten a DUI or <insert any other problem drinking cliche here>, my sense that something wasn’t right meant that there was something wrong with me and not the poison I was ingesting. I got stuck in that story, that room, for over half my life. When I finally quit, when that key turned over inside me and I was able to walk through that door, I felt like Andy Dufresne after he escaped from Shawshank. So you’ll forgive me my maximalism when it comes to celebrating all the soberversaries (and all the overwrought metaphors, as it were).

Sober social media would have us believe that sobriety is bright, clean, linear. That if we drink our lemon water and meditate and get into therapy and find community and strengthen our spines and learn to say no that we will finally be free of pain, which is of course a (admittedly healthier) flipside of the same longing that had us start using whatever we were using to begin with. Getting sober won’t make your life easy nor will it free you from pain; if anything, the pain ramps up, and life gets even messier. At first I tried to manage the mess. I wanted to be pure. Organized. Graceful. Calm, measured, less emotional. Inevitably, I’d fall short. So, I’d double down: Make lists, track calories, count minutes in meditation, push harder at the gym. One morning about eighteen months in I had one of those quiet moments in the shower where lightning strikes and I realized that the same inner voice that berated and shamed me for not being able to drink “normally” was still very much alive, was still very much on high alert, ever at the ready to remind me of what a horrible piece of shit I was anytime I mowed down a whole pizza to myself or procrastinated on my writing or scrolled through Instagram instead of meditating or overshared on a first date or made an honest mistake at work or any number of things that made me human and not, you know, an android.

This quest for perfection was just another escape. Just another way I would forego the here and now to future-trip on some idealized vision that aligned with what I’d been programmed to believe I was supposed to want for myself. This was another exquisite distraction and a great way to never figure out what I actually wanted for my life. As long as I busied myself with endlessly unattainable standards, as long as I applied the same obsessive fervor to managing the messiness of recovery as I did to managing the messiness of my drinking, as long as I tried to squeeze the vast mystery of a human life down into some small and malleable and manageable shape, well, it was not unlike waking up to the ways I’d been bamboozled into believing that booze was delivering me unto a life that was edgy and wild when really it just kept me from making my art and whittled me down to size until one day I looked around and my life had become a small, hard thing.

Getting sober and doing the work of recovery has nothing to do with becoming perfect. It is a daily practice of relinquishing control, of leaning into the mess of being human, which includes cozying up to our flaws and loving—instead of hating—ourselves for them. These flaws are often gateways to rooms with views so beautiful as to be as yet unimaginable. If I’ve learned anything in one thousand days, it’s that the more I can accept who I am, exactly as I am, the more freedom I experience, and, as a surprising side effect, the kinder my inner monologue becomes. Just like everyone else, I want to be loved, and acknowledged, and I want to look good in front of others, and I don’t want to be clumsy and fumbling, and I sure hate sticking my foot in my mouth. And, I spent so much of my life borderline anesthetized that when I quit drinking life felt urgent—it was unbearable to miss a moment more. My desire for myself, for my own yearning and dreaming and imagination, was finally greater than my desire to be accepted by others. And it was stepping past that threshold that my life—my real life, and not my life’s proxy—finally began.

Sobriety is not a prison sentence; it is prison’s opposite, it is a remover of doors, a breaking down of walls, it is exposure and vulnerability and it is creating a safe home within ourselves where we can trust our own desire. If desire is life’s own yearning for more of itself, then learning to trust our desire is to learn to trust life, not as a force that would break us down, but that urges us forward, to become, to show up, to do the work that we are here to do. That only we can do.

Growing up, one of my best friends had two Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs. Their names were Hank and Hannah, and though they were well-behaved, they were huge and we were little and my friend’s mom had a trick for getting the dogs to calm down and stay put. She bought some PVC pipe and connected four pieces to form a square, and when the dogs were inside the boundaries of pipe they knew not to step out. At the time I remember being astonished that these giant beasts would just sit there, wouldn’t even test sticking a paw or a nose out. I’m one thousand days in, and I keep thinking about those dogs. Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine myself inside my own PVC square that no one else can enter, my gentle yet uncrossable force-field of protection. But mostly, I’m curious about all the ways I’m continuing to live inside limitations of my own making. I’m dreaming of keys, and doors, and windows and light, and space and freedom and healing and a whole-world revolution that is wild and joyful and messy and honest as all hell.

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