I’m Spread Really Thin in Sobriety—And I Love It

There’s no greater confidence-booster than walking into a conference room, bright and early, only to be greeted by a roomful of colleagues who comment in unison: “You look tired.” I usually trust a half-gallon of coffee to sand off my morning edges, but it doesn’t always do the trick. More often than not, people see through my fake excitement and energy. And truth be told, I’m frequently as exhausted in sobriety as I was with my worst, most brain-blistering hangovers. While I don’t sleepwalk into work anymore, dead-eyed and praying that no one talks to me until at least 11, I’m often reminded of those mornings. I can feel myself pulled in a million directions—the great tidal pull of parental responsibilities and work obligations and all the nonsense I squeeze in between it all. And it’s genuinely comforting to me. I love the dizzying sense that it might all come crashing down around me at any given second—mainly because, in sobriety, I won’t let that happen.

In my drinking days, I couldn’t be trusted to consistently tell you what your first name was, let alone show up to work, meet deadlines, manage employees or pack my kids’ lunches. Now these things are just all part of the everyday blur that I desperately avoided for decades. Back then, if it remotely resembled a routine, I was out. No way in hell was I doing something two days in a row. My idea of following through was doing it once, just to demonstrate I could do it. I cooked the kids breakfast yesterday morning. Isn’t that good enough? When I wasn’t hiding screw-top bottles of wine under sinks or forgetting where I’d put that last pint of cheap vodka, I’d turned overextending myself into something of an art form. I thought nothing of triple-booking myself with friends on a Thursday night. I agreed to absolutely anything. I said “no” to no one. As a result, I regularly found myself up at 2 in the morning, polishing some friend-of-a-friend’s-sister’s cover letter with one eye open. It’s just what I did. I crammed my days and nights with nonsense. I let everything in. Nothing got screened out. When you drink as much as I was, you’re hurtling forward with zero direction. I didn’t care where I was going—I only cared about the velocity. I was terrified that if I slowed down, I’d suddenly realize just how miserable everything actually was.

Oddly enough, getting sober didn’t turn me into a quieter, more careful person. I really thought that I’d find comfort in a regular bedtime. I fully expected to embrace boredom. After all, early on, that’s sort of what I thought the whole 12-step deal was conditioning me to think. That’s all I saw and heard: normal people talking about their everyday existences. Showing up, clocking in, clocking out, reading the Big Book and going to bed. I was pretty blind to the fact that there were dozens and dozens of fully fleshed-out, rewarding lives around me. An AA room is kind of like surrounding yourself with pencil sketches. You’re not getting the full picture. Quite frankly, I couldn’t stomach the thought of being one of Those People. Bland, flat, predictable. I could feel sober life starting to dull me. I coveted my chaos, dammit. I was so used to excuses, lies and irresponsibility swirling around me that I may as well be living in a Mad Max movie. I’d convinced myself that it was the only way I truly felt alive, like someone who steals just for the jolt of getting away with it.

That’s not what sobriety’s taught me, though. Now that I’m clear-headed (though occasionally bleary-eyed), I can channel chaos. I can harness it. I’m capable of things I only thought I was accomplishing. For so long, I’d convinced myself that I was infinitely more organized, more competent and more reliable than I ever actually was. If I delivered on a promise, I expected a goddamn parade. It wasn’t until I stopped getting promotions or being handed big projects at work or wondering why I wasn’t getting responsibilities that I realized I was incomplete. My life was one of those sketches that I feared so much in those early days of AA. Absolutely nothing was filled in. The chaos blinded me to the fact that I wasn’t accomplishing a single thing.

I’m still guilty of committing myself to too many things, letting too many projects weigh me down and staying up way too goddamn late to deliver on something. I say “yes” one too many times when I shouldn’t. I still find myself awake at 1 am, cursing a favor that I agreed to. But I keep doing it because it makes me feel alive in all the ways I thought drinking gave me life when it was really robbing me of being present. I’m proving something to myself—I genuinely enjoy the feeling of accomplishing something. It’s a novel concept: 1) Agree to Do Something; 2) Do Something; 3) Finish Something. I don’t have time to look back on anything. I move forward with the same exact velocity I did before—only now it’s not with blind, aimless urgency.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop overextending myself, but that’s because I feel like I’m making up for lost time. In fact, I remember so little of my past, it’s as though I wasn’t even there for half of it. I wasted way too much time being Really Busy with being Really Busy. Being sober is a lot like taking all the jagged pencil strokes of my life and tracing them with deliberate ink. I’ve left so much unfinished in life that I can’t color everything in fast enough. If I’m lucky, I’ll actually leave something behind that will last.