Back when I was starting to circle the drain with my drinking, a lot of people were on to me. I could feel them closing in, studying me at a distance like the feds zeroing in on a mobster. They were just waiting for me to make a public misstep. I could feel the noose tightening. One of my friends even dared to suggest that I was kinda, sorta, maybe, probably “alcoholic.” That was a word reserved for people who lived under bridges—not me. I promptly unfriended him on Facebook. Near the end there, though, I was hiding six packs of beer in my barbecue grill, routinely sweating out booze in work conferences at 9 am, and texting my wife things like “I just left the bar” when I’d really just ordered another shot. I was smart enough to know that I had to go in the opposite direction. I needed to get everyone off my back. I just figured I could get sober by asking for help, even when I really didn’t want it.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I had to make a real show of trying to get sober. I made big productions out of coming back from the grocery store without beer, wine or booze on the receipt. (Not that I couldn’t have simply purchased those separately and thrown that receipt away.) I expected ticker-tape parades every time I went out to dinner with friends and didn’t order a drink. I’d grit my teeth as they ordered pale ales or glasses of cabernet, but I screwed on a calm face for my wife and pretended that I was okay with it all. Inside, I was an insane rage monster, twisted up with resentment. I felt like I was being punished. But, goddammit, people needed to notice that I wasn’t drinking. I was paying a price and so should they. But no one noticed. They only noticed when I did drink. So I went underground. I started drinking on the sly, telling everyone that I was sober and that I’d figured it all out. Getting sober wasn’t so hard, I lied to people. I’d even convinced myself that it was okay since I hadn’t tried to get sober for me—I’d done it because other people wanted me to.
Because I’m an alcoholic, I cut every corner imaginable. If there was a shortcut, you could sure as shit find me taking it. If I could make people think I was sober and still reach alcoholic bliss, that wasn’t cheating. That just meant I was smarter than everyone else around me. Of course, you can’t sustain that sort of charade for long—especially when you’re dealing with booze. Drunks aren’t the most meticulous people on the planet. Details get fuzzy and things get overlooked. Very often, I’d forget where I’d hidden my half-drunk pints of vodka, which simply turned my house into the world’s saddest version of The Hunt for Red October: my wife and I silently circling the house, not speaking, but both keenly aware that there was something lurking in the dark. In the end, it was just a matter of who’d find the bottle first.
In those months—a time marked with vast stretches of unemployment, unpaid bills, blistering hangovers, and barely enough money for diapers but always enough for beer—I hadn’t really wanted to get sober. I just wanted to outwit the bottle. And whenever I asked for help, the people I asked could smell the half-heartedness as readily as our sons’ daycare smelled Miller Light on me at eight in the morning. People I met in the AA rooms could sense that I wasn’t really in it to win it. I was a sobriety tourist. Now that I’ve been sober for a few years, I can sense that same thing in other people, too. You can hear it in their stories: the reservation, reticence and not-quite-there frowns. I’m really talented at parroting other people. At the start, I took every AA slogan I heard and boomeranged it back in the very next meeting I’d attend. I figured if I repeated those things enough, it’d sound like I was really committed to the whole sobriety thing and not planning on driving straight to a gas station afterward to buy beer. One morning, I was bombed out of my mind and texted someone I’d met in treatment, asking him to be my sponsor. The answer quickly came back: “No.” That’s not supposed to happen, I thought. If I hadn’t been so drunk, I’d have been offended.
A few years ago, I threw myself into training for a Tough Mudder event—you know, the one with all the fire, water, mud and, well, electrocution. (We alcoholics are good at extremes.) I’d destroyed my body with drinking and decided this thing was a good goal. I hired a personal trainer, got cracking on the training and several months later, crossed the finish line battered and bruised. (You get a free cup of beer after you cross that same finish line and part of me still wonders if my training for that event wasn’t a long play to get that beer.)
So how was I able to do this? I really wanted to get in shape. I wanted to slim down and I set my mind to doing it. Well, the same went for sobriety. When I finally wanted it, I figured out how to get it.
Not long ago, I got a text message from someone I’d met in treatment. He was reaching out because he needed my help. (I was apparently the only sober cat he knew.) He’d gotten himself into some legal trouble—kids, ex-wife, drugs, the whole nine yards. He lobbed desperate messages at me for a while but it became clear that I couldn’t help him. He’d given up the pills but not the bottle. It was kind of like one of those World War II movies where two crewmen are in the bowels of a sinking ship, water rising, and they have to close a hatch between them. One person’s going to survive and one’s not. But they’re staring at each other through the glass. It kills me, but the truth is that I can’t get anyone else sober. No one could do that trick for me, either. I just have to remind myself that I can’t fix everyone I meet. I’ve driven hours to drag someone to an AA meeting and all that did was put miles on my vehicle, not that person’s sobriety.
Saying you want to visit Australia isn’t the same as budgeting, planning, and saving for that trip. When you’re an alcoholic, words come easy. That’s pretty much all you have. But when you genuinely find sobriety, you also find that you don’t need many words at all. At that point, there’s not much left to say.
It’s when you stop talking that sobriety actually starts speaking to you.
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