Doing Life Sober

Struggle and sobriety

Right now is a hard time for me personally. I’m having the same old troubles with my mom, my youngest is struggling with high school. For the first time in a long time I had a moment when wished I could drink so I didn't have to feel. I’m saying that out loud here because it’s good to tell the truth. I wish I didn’t have to deal with being part of other people’s behavior, that it didn't affect me. That I could just plunge my head into the proverbial sand and ignore it all.

I quit social media a few weeks ago because I felt like my brain had been taken over by a parasite, like my thoughts were no longer my own, instead they were being generated and cultivated by the relentless and unsatisfying scroll. I felt afraid that I was losing myself and my original ideas, and if I wasn’t careful I wouldn’t remember who I really was anymore.

It’s interesting to see how quitting social media coincided with my personal hard time- how the things I’m struggling with are getting my full attention because I don’t have my scroll to distract me. I’m also curious about how wishing I could drink relates to it- I quit social media and drinking offered to step in. Really?

I remember back when I first quit drinking I watched an Intervention about a man who had been sober for almost twenty years and went back to drinking. I felt disillusioned, shocked like a newly sober person would be. It felt unreal that you could be sober for almost twenty years and then drink again. I wouldn’t give up, I won’t, and I need to say it out loud that I wanted to drink this week for the first time in years. I watched Daisy Jones and the Six recently and I felt the depicted self destruction acutely- the pain and relief of it. It was strangely triggering. Then life got hard, like life does. After almost eleven years the urge is really still here. Of course it is. There’s also many years of sobriety and recovery here too, and I want to recognize that.

I started writing Soberbia almost eleven years ago as a way to stay accountable to my sobriety, and I still need that accountability, I still want it. I quit forever, and I’m accountable forever. It’s funny how you don’t know until you know. How I see the things that stepped in place of my writing, my living life. How the supportive things I’ve set up show up when I’m willing to see them, willing to look beyond the coping mechanisms and actually deal with my life and do my work.

It’s weird how you can’t get too comfortable in your recovery, and also comforting in a way. It’s weird how things lined up to show me I can deal with discomfort, and pain without an escape hatch. I can feel and hurt and struggle and not have to numb it at all. There’s nowhere to run, and no need to either.