24 Years Ago Today

I was 21 and after work, I had gone out with some friends. A girlfriend of mine was turning 21 and we wanted to celebrate with drinks. I remember what I was wearing and the bars we stopped at. This night wasn’t much different than any other besides the fact that on my way home I got pulled over and was made to do a field sobriety test.

I was way above the legal limit and even though I almost made it home, I didn’t. My car remained on the side of the road and I was handcuffed and put in the back of the police car and taken down to the station.

I was inebriated but also scared as hell. I drove drunk all of the time. I had no reservations about my ability to drive while blacked out, or barely able to see the lines in the road. I was fortunate that this was my only run-in with the law.

I was court-ordered to AA meetings and treatment.

And long story short somehow it stuck. I celebrated 23 years sober in February. I am 45 years old and stopped drinking officially 6 months into my 21st birthday.

Do I believe I was an alcoholic? Yes, I do. For me, drinking was a way of life. It was what I did to escape my feelings of lack and hide my inadequacies. I felt inferior and alcohol and drugs gave me a false bravado. I didn’t know how I could exist without drinking and going out with my friends, but God had other plans for me.

My friends had to change.

Early in recovery, I met a guy that I had partied with once before. I actually met his brother at a bar the night of my DUI. We connected and I found myself pregnant at 8 months sober. Our son is 22 and has never seen either of us drink.

We broke this long cycle of addiction and childhood trauma. Where our parents stuffed and self-medicated we became abstinent and healed.

I am not patting ourselves on the back and negating that there is something larger at play here. I believe that it is something like the evolution and timing were pre-ordained. We were the ones ready and willing to do the work. I do believe it had to stop with us, and I am thankful we get to be the cycle breakers. There is so much generational trauma rolling down onto us and when we get to stop and say, “this stops with me," it is pretty profound.

Our lives were spent chasing our next high, we tried to escape the way it felt to live in our skin, but after taking away alcohol and drugs we learned to live "life on lifes terms," as they say. We learned to rely on a power greater than ourselves and we learned to reparent those parts of us that had been wounded and afraid.

It truly is a gift to walk hand in hand with our creator. It truly is a gift to wake up without a hangover. It truly is a recovery-not just in abstaining from drugs and alcohol, but recovering who we once were. What we were before the adults told us who we should be and before the substances darkened our senses and vision.

The privilege of getting to parent with all of my faculties in place and never having to have been that hungover mom that I grew up with have made my life journey come full circle. I don’t want to make this sound easy. I believe it’s easier than the alternative, but this shit is hard. Living a life that is completely sober, feeling all of our feelings without drowning them out, and reaching for another one is hard. Working through feelings, fears, and emotions without reaching for a cold one can feel brutal, but we keep trudging forward one day at a time and eventually find that freedom we were seeking on the bar stool or at the bottom of our glass.

Abstinence from substances gives us a clear vision to see, hear and feel it all. It’s not always good. Sometimes we wish we had blinders on because like Glennon Doyle says, “I understand now that I’m not a mess, but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often. I say, ‘for the same reason I laugh so often — because I’m paying attention.”

We might even feel insane sometimes and wonder if we are the only ones who feel “this much.” I think when we are free of substances and distractions we are extremely feeling people. It can feel uncomfortable at first when we have spent our whole lives avoiding intense feelings at all costs. It can feel scary to sink down into a feeling and think we may never rise back up to the surface.

I know I avoided feeling for years for that reason. I thought I would never come back from my emotions. I would be bogged down into the mire of intense emotion and never be able to come back to reality. I would be hospitalized for sure. How can I feel intense feelings and be raising children and trying to do this life all while keeping my face pretty and my house tidy at all times?

What we don’t deal with waits. It is patient and waits and waits until we are ready. They say the only way out is through and I have learned to believe it. We can’t walk around our hurt and heartache we must tackle it full-on. We must run towards it. Trust me it will cower. It looks big and scary now but when we face it and shine our light on it, it has no choice but to bow down and say mercy. We are more powerful than our past shame, regret, negative choices, and trauma. We can find someone we trust to hash it out with, but above all, we have to stop running from it. We want to live a life of freedom and these hurdles seem huge, but when we get closer we can see they are just little bumps in our road to happy, joyous, and free.

For years I rehashed in my mind all of the disloyalties of my past relationships and how people had done me wrong. Those people were either dead and gone or had no idea how they had affected me. They were renting space for free in my head and bringing me down. I had to learn to release and let go. I had to have the courage to change those old tapes in my mind and learn to stop and acknowledge the lies that my brain wanted me to believe. My poor brain had these worn pathways that just kept getting deeper and the grooves in those pathways were easy to navigate, but I need to plow new roads. I needed to have new reactions to the same old situations. I needed to stop and take account of my actual life and not the one that was made up in my mind. I needed to stop and look around.

Awareness is the first step towards change, right? As they say, if it’s not broken, don't fix it but for many of us, our minds are broken. My Psyche was broken. It took helpful people who shared with me the tools they had learned; therapists and other path pavers. I had to be willing though. I couldn’t change if I was determined to stay stuck in my old ways.

A caveat to this is we need to find the right people. We don’t need fix-it people. We need trustworthy, safe people that will listen and hold space for us without trying to find solutions. The solutions in themselves are sharing and feelings are seen. The most profound thing a therapist ever said to me was, I am sorry that happened to you. She heard me. She validated my pain and I felt heard and seen for the first time.

We need to learn how to listen without sharing our stories. We need to learn how to validate others’ pain and in doing that we are just showing up. Many of us emotionally can’t be present for others because our own pains are too great we make it a comparison game. We don’t want to believe that anyone has had it worse than us. But we have all had our own fair share of unfairness in this life. We are all trudging a road that seems uneven and rocky at times. We all desire to find someone who will just listen and be present with us. It can be hard to find and even too expensive these days to find a therapist. I was lucky back then to find someone who would work with me. Luckily now there are many support groups online and quit lit books about people’s personal narratives, their stories about getting clean, and uncovering the rubble. This journey can feel lonely. It can be isolating. We may miss our drinking and party friends. We may miss our best friend the drink itself, but we can overcome.

Keep reaching out and looking for your people, we are here waiting with open arms.

It is less daunting than it feels right now. There is hope. Take that first leap into a new life.