Then & Then & Now: Sober Birthdays

My first, my second, and my 12th sober birthdays.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Sober Birthday or: How I Remembered Every Bit About Turning 42

I celebrated my forty-second birthday this weekend. It was my first one sober in about twenty humpfh snerf years. It was one of the best times I've ever had. Ever.

We ran. We camped. We laughed- a lot. We slept on creaky loud cots, and it was cold in the morning. On my birthday I woke up and stood outside cooking eggs and bacon while shivering and drinking delicious coffee. It was awesome.

Y'all, camping has always been a drink fest. You know- you get there, start to unpack the car, crack open a cold beer. Slowly get wasted. Wake up hungover in the morning annoyed at the kids and the outdoorsy-ness of it all. Maybe you lost the keys to the car somehow when you were trying to hide them so they'd be safe before you passed out and now you're dying of thirst and all the water is in the car. And you're miles from a locksmith and the campground host isn't around to call since you have no cell phone service. And you're still dying of thirst, and the children are confused and hungry.  But then you finally find the keys right where you left them. I mean, that could happen. 

So....once again, sober was so much better. My oldest and I were walking to the bathroom together and he grabbed me and looked up at me and said in his sweet way, "I just love you mom." like he does when he really does just love me, and all is right with the world. I was there for everything: not concentrating on how much beer was left, or if it was too soon for another sip of the sipping tequila. Not wondering if we should open some wine. Not wishing it was time for the children to go to bed so I could smoke cigarettes and stop worrying about them and get drunk. (Like I wasn't already well on my way....)

I laughed so much.

I said, out loud, how much I loved people. How much it meant to me that they were there to celebrate with me. I called a friend to thank her for the flowers she gave me instead of texting her. I said "Thank you so much, this meant so much to me" to another friend who brought cake. I was so grateful to my husband who did almost all the packing and unpacking for our trip. I hugged my mom and dad and told them while I looked at them how wonderful it was for them to share the weekend with me. All of that was very brave since I love a lot, but not out loud.

I also said out loud to myself how proud I was of me. I hugged and held my sweet sober self and cried some with all the gratitude and joy sobriety brings me. I forgave myself my past more. I turned forty two. And I will always remember every sweet little bit.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Happy New Year!

Tra la! Yesterday was my 43rd birthday. I have been back to back birthday sober for the first time since I was about twelve. How cool.

I have been thinking about the past year- how my birthday last year was really just wonderful, how I was in a really gooood space then, and then just six weeks later I was dumped in a depressed place that I didn't leave for almost six months.

I have lived a year. I lived it- I felt it. A year. It has been amazing and glowing and full of too much of me. There have been so many times when I wanted to stop recovering and just shut the hell up in my head for a while. I don't think recovery ever stops, but I do think there can be peace and quiet with a lot of praying and practice.

This birthday was sort of plain: There was oatmeal and homemade cards for breakfast. I did laundry, made asparagus salad. My parents came for lunch and my dad made me a cake and a pie. We had a tentative peace. My husband took a nap and went to work. My youngest and I sat on the porch and started making a wind chime. Soccer practice. Scrambled eggs and toast for dinner. More cake. I'll write and then go read and fall asleep. I already washed my face and flossed. Woot woot!

There's something about this plainness that is deeply satisfying. I am not drunk and confused. I am not spending a load of money getting wasted. I am just here, by myself, on my birthday chasing nothing. It's so exciting to just be still. To feel what it means to be content. To sigh a sigh of settled.

I have learned some things this year. In no particular order:

1. I like to love and be loved. I am getting better and better at saying kind things- brave enough to speak up and tell people how much they mean to me, or to say thank you. Brave enough to risk getting hurt. Brave enough to be OK with it. Brave enough to not second guess myself all the time, to just say it like I say it not the way I think someone wants to hear it.

2. I am also so much better at asking for help. When I feel like I can't instead of saying "No, oh no why me I can't I can't" I say "Help me please" and then I close my eyes and free fall. Someone always catches me. ALWAYS.

3. Recovery is annoying. Sometimes I want to wash my hands of the whole thing- not that I want to drink again, but just stop all this getting better. Ack! Alas. I know that when I'm feeling the most cocky and un-needful of my recovery is when I need that sucker the most. And so I sort of make myself go back into the water even though I am so prune-y and over it.

4. I am getting used to praying. This year is the year I connect to my spirituality. I know I have always been connected, but it's sort of like God and friends have been waiting on the porch and I'm sneaking a peek from behind the curtains. This is the year I throw the front door open wide and say "Come on in. I wasn't sure if it was you or a murderer burglar. My bad. But now I recognize you. Welcome."

5. I can do hard things and not drink. I can deal with what life hands out. Good and bad. There are so many reasons to drink. There are so many reasons not to. 

6. I am an aholic. I'm an alcoholic, a thinkaholic. I am a my wayaholic, a cookieaholic. I am an obsess about my weightaholic. All of it is the same pleasure feeder in my brain: too much thinking about how much I totally suck and not enough of the pleasure of being just the me I am right now this minute today. I'm practicing. It baffles me how I fight and box myself into corners of sadness and despair. How I am totally fine, but I can wend and wind my way into feeling never ever good enough as fast as you can say stop that. I think that most of the battle against being an aholic is just putting down the weapons and maybe holding hands with yourself instead. I think I'm a yellow belt in this. But someday I'm going to really be kicking some serious ass. And it won't be my own.

7. I believe believe believe with every bit of my big grace full heart in as many chances as it takes. People write to me and say things like "I keep going back" and "You must think I'm so wishy washy" and "Why can't I quit". Me too, me too. I was there for twenty years: wailing and excusing myself over and over again- making those early morning promises and then getting drunk that very same day. For years. I remembered this morning that I made a video of myself a few years ago telling myself not to drink. I remember watching it and drinking anyway. I think it takes a huge amount of courage and divine intervention to make a roadblock strong enough to withstand the temptation of the booze exit. I think everyone has it. I still sometimes scratch my head at why, why that one morning I woke up and had that inner earthquake that changed my lines forever. I do know this: I really deep down believed that day if I kept drinking I was going to die sooner than I wanted to. And that I was going to die alone and miserable and when I did I was really going to hate it. I could see my bloated lonely self in a dingy apartment full of longing and regret and I stood up inside and said "FUCK THAT". Forever without a drink seems like a damn long time. So does spending a lifetime in a living hell. I believe you have to keep on giving yourself chances until you realize how worthy you are of being sober. That you have to get to a point where all the finger pointing and blame becomes being exhausted enough to try actually caring for yourself.

8. I am much happier when I am not judging anyone. Not the bitch in traffic, not the person at work who makes me nuts. And especially not myself. Reminding myself that we are all doing the best we can helps me so much. Some days it's enough that all I did was not drink. Pretty much every day is that, and then some days are more magical than others. But I am alive and sober and so those two things make me innerly beautiful which makes me gorgeous all over. And I tell myself these things so I will believe them because they are true. They are true about you, too.

9. The biggest thing I have learned is that being sober has metamorphosed me into the woman I was always supposed to become. It has been ugly and sad and hard. It has been me, cheering myself on even when I wanted to give up and hide forever. It makes it nonexistenly important that I'm not rich, or skinny, or the best one of these or those. Sobriety has made me the best at me. It has given me what I looked for in the bottom of bottles and could never find- myself. I am who I am supposed to be.

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Living a Year

I wake up early like usual on my 53rd birthday. The big picture of my 52nd year floats into my mind like a feather. It holds two improv classes with live performances at the end, a two week trip out to Taos, New Mexico to visit my long time best friend, a new job, paying off my car, getting diagnosed with ADHD in the last few weeks, right at the end. It has walk after walk with people I love, buying a new couch we all love to hate, switching to therapy every other week. There was anxiety, and depression. An awful experience at Thanksgiving with my mom that ended up bringing us closer. Trying trail running again and deciding that I might be finished as a runner. Sobriety and recovery in the eleventh year.

The thing that stands out the most though, the most important feather of them all, is that 52 is the year I became willing to hurt, and willing to be with that hurt. And by being willing to that, I became willing to feel joy.

Avoiding pain has been as natural as breathing for me as long as I can remember. Not avoiding physical pain, emotional pain. Slowly but surely, year after year, I figured out how to shut down things that hurt. My mom yelling at me, my dad’s anger, not living up to my potential, living at the edge of belonging but not finding how to drop in. Many people have a person that made a difference for them- that one teacher, that one sports coach- but me? I did not.

I did not. I soothed the unrelenting ache of feeling confused and all alone in the world by teaching myself to not feel hurt. That turned into shutting all feelings down. Psychological numbness. When I discovered blackout drinking at 14 it gave me chemical numbness, but it also created terrible shame and dreadful situations that drastically increased my reasons to numb.

These two methods of numbing kept me alive. It was how I got through day after day of being in the world accompanied by the unshakeable feeling that something was wrong with me and I didn’t know what I was doing. Everyone knew the secret to life except me- and because of who I was no one wanted to tell me. I had to anesthetize myself or I would have collapsed, had a breakdown. Or worse.

I became a master of detachment. I became addicted to blackout drinking. I spent almost three decades practicing and perfecting being numb.

Then I quit drinking, and that started me on the path of reanimating myself. The act of removing chemical numbing immediately gave me some feelings back. I felt clumsy, awkward, and out of control. That meant I took two steps forward, and one step back. Feelings were still scary. Even though I didn’t drink anymore, I still didn’t know what I was doing. The pain wasn’t gone because alcohol was gone, and it was a lot, hard to handle, bigger than me.

I wish I’d had someone with me who knew how to help me handle my big feelings at any point along the way- someone sturdy enough to stay stable when my feeling winds blew strong, who could help me understand my gale force feelings and how to hear, soothe, operate, and tame them. Someone who knew how to gentle the wildness of my inner life. A voice in my ear that encouraged me, believed in me, knew I could do it, and told me all the secrets of life I wanted to hear. But I didn’t have that someone else, so that someone else ended up being me.

I have spent the past 11+ years deeply immersed in self help, therapy, personal growth and development. When I quit drinking I wanted to quit drinking, but more importantly I wanted to heal- heal enough that I could have feelings again. And then after that, heal enough that I could feel my feelings, manage, and regulate them. Use them as trusted sources of information for how to live my life. I wanted to be able to be bigger than the pain, the boss of it, to know how to feel it without believing if I did I would never be okay again.

My 52nd year was that year. After a long time, I have healed enough to feel, manage, and regulate my feelings- and use them as information. I can honestly say I no longer need to numb to avoid hurt, because I no longer need to avoiding hurting. Instead, hurt and I, we are companions now. Hurt won’t take me down, it doesn’t want to defeat me, it just needs me to know things, to feel the fullness of life. It has wisdom to share if I can be with it long enough to understand the slow language of pain.

Because of my willingness to feel hurt, I found joy in a way I’d not known before. This joy feels like the way the light looks after a rainstorm, it isn’t boisterous or bold, it is luminous like the moon or a smile. Steady. Sturdy. I think hurt and joy walk hand in hand, each of them with things to share if we are willing to be patient and be with them. I thought numbing would make life easier. I was wrong. Numbing made life numb.

All these feelings, it’s not easy, and that’s cool, I like it. I like experiencing what it’s like to be alive, having reactions and responses, being moved by the act of living. Because I no longer numb, I can manage the amount of hurt I feel because I can feel when I’m feeling too much and hit the brakes, I can feel when I can let in more and go deeper.

I’ll tell you my secret: Find support. Surround yourself with people who believe in you. Know that if you start crying, you will stop crying, you won’t cry forever. Take your time. Keep working at it. My therapist asked me “Where did your tears go?” for seven years until I finally got the auto-tear-stopper coping mechanism to let me take back over this year. Hurt is not the enemy, and it is not weak, bad, or wrong. Hurt is wisdom- my wisdom, your wisdom. It is not something to withstand, it is something to stand with.