I woke up in the community college parking lot after teaching my first class of the day. My hangover made every thought searing and raw, like I was walking on blistered feet. I had gone out to my car to rest, but managed to miss teaching my second class. I opened my eyes to find some of my students standing there, pointing. They were a little bit amused, but mostly just pissed off—like a lot of people in my life. I was regularly experiencing the sad, exquisite pain that only closet alcoholics can appreciate. Hearing the world come alive outside your window at 6 am while you’re still wide awake, drunk and alone—newspapers thrown onto lawns, cars starting up. Each day I felt less like a human being than a MacGyver gadget held together with duct tape and bubble gum.
So I was thrilled, for all the wrong reasons, to take the first step. I knew well before I ever set foot in the rooms of AA that I was powerless over alcohol, that my life had become unmanageable. When I first became sober, it was accompanied with a perverse joy. Maybe now I’d be able to blame all of my problems, bad decisions and poor patterns of behavior on “being an alcoholic.” I planned to be just as cunning and shrewd with my sobriety as I’d been with my drinking.
I hoped people would forgive me at once, collectively giving me that slow-clap you see in the movies. It’d give my messy past some clean borders and context. Admitting to a decades-long drinking problem would also mean quickly explaining away all my character flaws. I could pin it all on the booze. Of course, this wasn’t the case. Not even close.
Because alcohol wasn’t the problem—I was.
Drinking put all my worst personality traits through an Instagram filter from hell—prettying up all of my problems, making bad choices look stunning. Liquor created issues, sure, but it certainly didn’t create who I was. Before alcohol, my life had always been unmanageable. I gossiped about friends, I overslept through my work alarm, I routinely flaked on dinner plans. I’d always been self-pitying, jealous, insecure, petty, argumentative, easily wounded, defensive, angry, afraid and incapable of letting things go. None of this was new. Pinots, Popov and pale ales were just gasoline on the campfire. I suddenly felt entitled to my feelings, developed an unjustified swagger and could rationalize everything with, “Well, I was drunk.”
If I’m honest about being dishonest, the truth has always been the real issue for me. Lying is, by far, my biggest character defect. For as long as I care to remember, I’ve been more confident and faster on my feet when dealing with the world through lies, half-truths and omissions. Lying was a reflex. It made all of my basic, passing interactions with people—acquaintances, post office clerks, airplane seatmates—light and tolerable. I just wanted to go through life without any real investment or judgment. It kept me fleeting. Like a permanent background actor in other people’s lives, quickly exiting the scene.
When my grandfather used to ask me how I was doing, he’d joke: “And never mind the truth—just make it interesting.” I took this as life advice and ran with it well into my thirties. I used to find comfort in being dishonest. Half the time, I didn’t even feel like I was lying. The truth never sounded as good as what I made up. I figured a fictionalized version of me was always going to be better than the real me. Still, lying is the emptiest transaction you can have in life. It’s counterfeit money handed to people you don’t really respect. Yet, alcohol somehow made this acceptable to me. It caused consequences to dissolve in my brain, like I was always living on the holodeck of the Enterprise, where nothing was real, nothing had any weight.
Now, two years into practicing honesty in sobriety, I have a new problem. I genuinely struggle with simple questions about who I am and what I like to do. Brain-teasers like “What’s your favorite movie?” or “What interests do you have outside of work?” stump me. Until very recently, I had no idea why. Then it hit me: I have absolutely no idea who I am. As a truth-fearing alcoholic, I made up so many things on the fly that when I erased the booze, I also erased most of who I was. I have to pre-load the chamber with actual answers, which is downright embarrassing. I literally have to tell myself to remember that I love the director’s cut of Almost Famous and that I find cooking therapeutic.
Today, I have to own who I am. I am an alcoholic, but drinking doesn’t excuse past decisions and behavior, although it certainly robbed me of the ability to make better choices. The point of my sobriety isn’t to simply not drink—it’s to throw light on all the shadowy parts of my personality so I can make them better. Alcohol twisted and distorted the ugliest parts of me, destroying more relationships than I care to count. It eventually left me with a mile-long list of things to apologize and atone for. Missed deadlines, never-started projects, lies giving people false hope and expectations, stolen kisses with others’ girlfriends. At this point, they feel like the actions of a complete stranger, but I can’t entirely blame the booze. It all started with me.
Today, I’m less like a MacGyver gadget than a toddler’s toy—straightforward, simple, single-purpose. What you see is what you get. That’s the real relief I’ve discovered in AA. I might be boring as hell without alcohol, but at least I don’t have to remember which lies I told. For the longest time, I wrestled with whether I was a bad person who did good things or a good person who did bad things. The answer really doesn’t matter. In sobriety, for the first time ever, I’m just trying to be an actual person.
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