Hi, happy new year! This is a longer essay and the second half of it is behind a paywall — if you would like to read beyond the free preview of this and my other paid posts, you can manage your subscription below. Also, a disclaimer that this essay and all of my writing about sobriety is about my own recovery. What works for me won’t necessarily work for everyone else (and vice versa), and I don’t have an opinion on how other folks do their recovery. I just want us all to make it! Thanks for being here 🩷
Today I have three years of continuous sobriety. Three! Years! Clean and sober! That’s 1095 days. So many!
I like to clarify that I’ve been clean too — as in not using any drugs — not only because I attend some NA meetings in addition to AA ones, but also because it’s something to be proud of. I know that for me, abstinence from alcohol would be somewhat less difficult if I could still partake in other mind- and mood-altering substances. I know I can’t control my use of anything that changes my state of mind though, so I avoid everything stronger and more fun than my daily cup of tea.
Three whole years! This past year of sobriety, it started feeling easier. The latter half of 2023 was when I first started having serious stretches of time where being sober didn’t feel that challenging and just felt normal to me. I had the experience of something like sobriety on autopilot for weeks at a time, and that was such a welcome change from how I had felt the previous two years and for the first few months of 2023 too. It’s just on my mind less overall and I’m able to be more present in my day-to-day life. It also feels more casual to tell people I don’t drink, and I can be around alcohol more without feeling as itchy — I actually wrote parts of this at a brewery my bestie works at. I even started having the occasional non-alcoholic beer! I’m sure that writing about my sobriety has helped to normalize it all and helped me process what’s been coming up.
I’ve received so much love, care, and celebration this past year and over the past few years, and I hardly believe I deserve most of it. I’m not fishing for reassurance; this is something I feel deeply, but I know at least I’m not alone in that. Guilt and shame are such common throughlines for folks in recovery. So each of the past few years around my sobriety date — and on so many nights as I’m falling asleep — I try to sit with the immense gratitude I feel towards a large number of friends and sober fellows. Nearly every time I get a little stuck on the fact that I don’t have good enough words to express my gratitude — because “gratitude” never covers the depth or breadth of it — and I don’t know how I can pay it back or pay it forward. And it’s easier to get hung up on those thoughts when you don’t feel like you deserve or have earned all of that support. I haven’t found a good way to counter this; it’s a work in progress, a work in practice. I do know that being someone who can at least try to pay it back and forward now — someone who even thinks about this now — is a gift, and a change, and a good start.
I feel proud of myself for getting through everything I’ve gotten through while staying away from a drink. I wouldn’t have made it this far without AA, and I’m proud of where my program is at. I have a regular service commitment as the Zoom host for my home group’s weekly hybrid meeting. I’m working the steps for a second time. I finished a close read of the program content — the first 164 pages — in the Big Book, as well as the longer writing on each of the steps in the 12 & 12, earlier this year with my sponsor. In our weekly meetings, we’re currently making our way through Drop the Rock, a book about working steps six and seven. I haven’t been going to as many meetings per week as I was at the start of the year, but that hasn’t felt like something I’ve really needed to change. I’m not currently sponsoring anyone, but I’ve been raising my hand to be a sponsor and think it’ll happen when it’s meant to. I believe writing about sobriety here is service in its own way too. I know that my recovery is due in such large part to AA and the folks I’ve met and connected with in the program.
I chaired my home group’s meeting on Christmas Eve, and while sharing I said that I couldn’t have gotten through this year before this year. People chuckled but I hadn’t meant to be funny. What I meant is that I feel like my recovery wasn’t in a place to withstand everything it did this past year before the year started. I don’t think I could’ve coped as well with the grief, the pain both physical and emotional, the big and medium-sized stressors, the rejection, the anxiety, or the periods of loneliness and isolation from this year if I had experienced those to the same degree the previous year or the one before that. That’s not to say those years weren’t hard — I just don’t think I was equipped to make it through this past year clean and sober before the year happened. Maybe it’s that the universe is only giving me what I can handle at the time, or maybe as I get through more difficult experiences I’m gradually becoming more capable of getting through even more difficult experiences. Maybe those aren’t two completely separate things.
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One of my favorite things that came out of this past year is that I’m writing again. (I’m sharing more takeaways from this past year below the paywall.) I wrote a little about this in a recent post:
If you’re reading this, you’re engaging with one of the things from this past year that I’m most proud of myself for. I started this writing project in August, and I can’t believe it’s only been a little over four months! I can’t promise any particular frequency of posts going forward, but I’ve shared eighteen pieces in that time. Close to one each week — pretty solid, if you ask me! Especially considering I haven’t written in years.
I mean years when I say I hadn’t been writing. I thought all that time that it was my mental illnesses, or the medications I take for them, that were blocking my creativity. I was worried I had lost my ✨sparkle✨ thanks to these goddamn … meds that keep me stable and capable of functioning as a person in the world. To get the desire, time, and headspace to write again after having a couple years of sobriety under my belt has pretty thoroughly disproved my belief that alcohol and drugs helped me write and made me a better writer. Like, ok girl, where’s the writing then? I’m thankful it’s something that I’ve come back to, and after years in active addiction I have plenty — to put it lightly — to write about.
Something else I love that has come out of my sobriety overall, not just this past year specifically, is the fact that I’m a better, more reliable friend now. This essay was queued up to be sent out on its own this afternoon because today I am helping a friend with a long-distance move. A few years ago, I was not a girl who would have offered to help anyone move across several state lines; nor could I have guaranteed that I would be able to wake up and hit the road at 8 am and safely operate a vehicle on any given morning, let alone the day after a big drinking holiday. But here we are — it’s New Year’s Day 2024, I’m doing those things, I went to bed before midnight last night, and I’m not massively hungover.
When my friend first told me over the summer that she was planning on moving, I offered to help without even really considering what that might look like. She texted a few hours later to say she was pretty touched by the offer, and I am genuinely glad she took me up on it. Of course I want to help out a close friend with a challenging, stressful process, and make a big transition a little less difficult! Yes, obviously I want to spend a bunch of time with someone who will soon live too far away! Recovery is not just about quitting or moderating something and trying to cope without it; it’s much more about building a new life where, among other things, you can show up better for your friends and loved ones because they really deserve that. All of this work feels worth it for that alone.
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I love that my sobriety date is January 1st, 2021. Of course any day makes a great sobriety date, but January 1st is the best one. 1/1 — the simplicity! It makes it so convenient for reflecting because the themes of a calendar year are tied right up with the recovery themes of that year. For some reason when I tell someone my sobriety date, I often feel compelled to clarify that no, I wasn’t doing a Dry January. Dry Januaries and Sober Octobers are so valid and can be a great way to try out a period of abstinence or moderation! But sometimes I want to make clear that it wasn’t a resolution for me — it wasn’t something I fully knew I needed to do and then made a choice to follow through on. My sobriety happened differently than that.