When I first got sober, I had years of life to recover and countless apologies to make. I’d put a few months of sobriety together and was starting to feel like a human being—almost for the first time. They say that when you start drinking, you arrest your brain development. It simply stops growing or maturing, soaking in a bathtub of booze. I guess that explains a lot of the “teenaged” decisions I made into my late twenties and early thirties. In early sobriety, I could finally feel the gears and rotors starting to lurch forward in my head, creaking into motion. I wanted to tell anyone within the atomic-blast radius of my drinking that I was on the road to recovery. I was dying for people to know that I’d finally gotten my shit together. It was a special kind of joy that I wanted everyone to understand and hear about. I hadn’t felt anything in so long that I couldn’t help myself from sharing.
Late in my drinking career, I couldn’t understand why my hands were shaking all the time, so I went to the doctor. By this point, I’d put my primary care doc through all kinds of mental gymnastics, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. He was a kind, soft-spoken man who regarded me with the sort of pity you give someone who can’t figure out the self-checkout line in a grocery store. To this day, I’m not sure why neither of us ever put two-and-two together about my alcoholism and my physical problems. I brought him so many symptoms it wasn’t funny: gout so excruciating that I couldn’t my put shoes on without crying, brain-racing anxiety and terrific stretches of insomnia. He gave me a battery of tests: electrophysical nerve tests, a CT scan, a stress test where they inject you with radioactive dye and have you run on a treadmill. Then a simple blood draw came back revealing that I was punishing my liver on the regular and I started to cry in the room. I’d been discovered. I admitted that I was killing pints of vodka and hiding wine bottles around the house. He looked relieved. This was the missing puzzle piece.
When I returned to his office, weeks later, sober and (relatively) happy, he nodded as he listened to me, reviewing my chart. I was riding the pink cloud. I started to tell him all about the wonderful world of sobriety as if it was a Brigadoon lined with gold and wonder. I talked a mile a minute until he cut me off.
“I get it,” he held up his hand, half-smiling, ballpoint pen entwined between his fingers. “I understand.”
And with that, I realized that not everyone cared about my sobriety. I’d put this poor man through two full years of detective work, when all I should have done was admit that I was drinking all the time. It never occurred to me. There’s a unique sort of weariness that comes with hearing someone talk endlessly about something everyone else has figured out. It’s like hearing someone who just arrived to the party hours late after finally finding the address. Everyone else got there just fine.
It’s been a common theme with my sobriety. I’d forfeited so many chances and opportunities without even knowing it: jobs, relationships, happiness. I just coasted through life, operating on a sad sort of autopilot. These days, I’m less impressed with my ability to stay away from the bottle than I am distraught by how long I was checked out from reality. In early recovery, I found myself with a life half-lived, if lived at all. But when it comes down to it, not everyone cares. Most people don’t. Getting sober isn’t about hugs or congratulatory emails. It’s about living rightly. That’s enough of its own reward.
And yet, I kept trumpeting what it’s like to be sober—what it’s like to be taking everything in instead of keeping everything out. I continued putting messages out on Facebook, telling co-workers, friends and family. Truth of the matter is: the people closest to me didn’t necessarily want to hear about it. I’d put them through so much that it was a relief, yes, that I’d stopped drinking. And with that came a wave of positives: no more lies, no more excuses and a sort-of guarantee that I’d show up when I said I would. I suddenly had a memory, too. I wasn’t living in a world of no tomorrows where my promises evaporated as quickly as I spoke. It had hurt whenever someone pointed that out, too, but I just drank the remorse away. One of my best friends (and most ardent day-drinking buddies) Cole used to criticize my lack of follow-through with a matter-of-factness that cut me: “It’s not that I don’t believe you want to do something. I just know you won’t.” In the end, no one really cares what I used to be like. They care what I’m like now.
Whenever I get annoyed with someone who’s taking forever getting to their point, I have a habit of mentally twirling my finger: Okay. Let’s wrap this up. That’s what it must be like to listen to me talk about getting sober. I imagine everyone who’s still around after my whirling-dervish days of drunkenness just wants me to wrap it up. It’s time to move on; it’s time to get living. Congrats on not being a monster anymore. It’s a great lesson for an alcoholic like me: stop expecting people to pat me on the back for doing the right thing. I shudder to think about the things that came out of my mouth while I was in twilight. Every once in a while, a memory will come to me like a long-forgotten dream, like that time I drunkenly asked a friend’s dad, a Vietnam veteran, how many people he killed. Horrible. Now, when I talk, I’m not thoughtlessly hurtling forward with an idiot’s velocity, free-associating what to say next. I’m taking tangible steps in life and actually following through. After all, sobriety is about moving forward without expectation—not looking back on the part of my life I spent not moving at all.
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