Clarifying My Sobriety
Without explicitly saying I was ‘sober’, people offering me a cold one were free to interpret my qualified response any way that worked for them. “You still on that no-beer diet?” was my favorite from work.
Originally written in 2017
A couple weeks ago, I declared it the one-year mark of going sober, and on social media, it was the first truly public broadcast I’d made to friends and family of being so. My mom sent an email soon after, of love and congratulations, but also seeking some clarification. This was my response.
When I told you about stopping last fall, a couple weeks into it, I may have only been thinking about using the word ‘sober’, and only to myself, if that. It was really just something I needed to try and stop and go without for a bit, and see how I felt with the difference.
A friend of mine had stopped a few days earlier from when I did, and she was counting the days with Instagram posts. So I also started counting days, to myself, for a while. I adjusted to always carrying a water bottle around with me. I picked up Anna’s seltzer habit, and we re-filled our beer fridge exclusively with Polars. I started confronting my shyness, anxieties, and general terribleness at conversations with acquaintances and coworkers, without social lubricant. (It’s still a work-in-progress.)
At some point in the first few months, I lost count of the days, and started noticing that my Tums intake had diminished precipitously (despite the election results). I assumed my growing regular heartburn in the last several years was just the start of my reflux inheritance from you. Never underestimate the esophageal havoc possible from alcohol consumption when respectively working and partaking of both the startup and craft beer cultures.
It was probably somewhere in the first six months that I started saying “sober”, at least between Anna and I. It wasn’t until this week that I made it official. Partly, I didn’t want to jinx it. I wanted to go a year without before sending out that editor’s erratum to make my intentions clear. Without explicitly saying I was ‘sober’, people offering me a cold one were free to interpret my qualified response any way that worked for them. “You still on that no-beer diet?” was my favorite from work.
More to the point, I wasn’t sure about being sober, by name, because I really wasn’t certain for some time about the answer to your question: am I an alcoholic? This whole process was self-directed, so I’ve only as much insight as is possible from talking to myself about it. The most prominent piece of outside wisdom I used came from Infinite Jest, where multiple characters in first-person voice were going through various stages of addiction and recovery. It was quite mind-opening when I read it a couple years ago, so much so that it was forcing me to self-examine, before I was ready to do so.
Because of that book, I’m tangentially aware of ‘bottoming out’. I’m not sure that’s what I had, but I think I’ve started to understand that such a terrible moment isn’t a requirement to neither having a problem nor start recovering from one. I drank too much at a work party, despite it being the day before the start of my Mount Washington hike. I was hungover the next morning, for sure, but it felt so much more like I was poisoned.
On that whole trip, I thought about trajectory. About genetic predisposition, about how one beer after work became two, how bottles became pints, how bourbon became the new beer. How a taste becomes a hobby, then a regular habit, then a daily dependency. I had a problem, and it was leading me to Alcoholism.
There’s analogies to be made between all this and the painful, tiring steps on the trail leading to beautiful mountaintop views, but I’ve got to go make tacos.