How My Sobriety Sparked a Larger Evolution

Most days sobriety feels like the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself. It feels like freedom, strength, pride, clarity. It feels like a renewed sense of purpose — of life. Most days it feels like solid ground; a constant I can count on.

But some days it feels like deprivation. It feels like missing out — on fun, on fitting in, on a carefree state of being. It feels like isolation. It feels like anxiety and sadness. Whether it caused pain when the high wore off is irrelevant at the moment when I feel a yearning for what once made everything feel so easy.

It is often hard not to focus on the deficit. Perhaps that’s human nature; perhaps that’s simply my nature.

When people seem surprised that sobriety now occupies so much of life, this is what I try to explain to them. Despite my pride and dedication, I still have to make a conscious effort nearly all of the time to pull my thoughts toward gratitude and away from what I’ve lost.

As exhausting and frustrating as it sometimes is, though, the effort required to refocus on gratitude time after time is the same effort that has turned my sober journey into a much larger voyage. The work required to understand who you are drunk vs. sober and what led you to this exact point in time cannot happen in a vacuum. The introspective microscope begins to require a wider lens and leads you to assess all areas of your life.

When I say that I am gratefully sober it goes beyond the absence of alcohol.

I am grateful for the focused reflection that ensued after I quit drinking. In order to build my defenses against the allure of alcohol, I had to better understand my relationship with alcohol. The hours I spent reading about other people’s journeys, listening to podcasts, journaling, and taking meditative walks all helped me unveil the many layers of self-harm that included and coincided with excessive drinking.

As I began taking a closer look at my drinking, I began to see the other trends. I noticed the body issues and insecurities, I saw my poor regulation of emotions, my lack of care and effort toward keeping up with appointments and medications for my anxious and depressed mind. I examined the choices I had made out of complacency, practicality, and fear, and with that, I worked to reframe how I relate to my career, my priorities, and my ambitions.

Drinking was one cause of the abuse of my mind and body, but there were a number of other reasons as well; and, as I repeatedly showed up to do the work I uncovered more ways I could improve other aspects of my life — more ways I was currently failing to love myself fully.

I am grateful for the clarity and reclaimed space I now have to focus on growth in other parts of my life. Yes, I am grateful to be free of the embarrassment, the fights, the hangovers, but I am equally if not more grateful for the revolution it has started.

Before I quit drinking I didn’t think I was capable of doing hard things, I didn’t think I had any willpower at all.

After years of failing to moderate; failing to cut back on my drinking or limit myself to ‘two drinks when I go out’ or ‘weekend nights only’ — I had taught myself that I was a failure. That I was incapable of sticking to anything or changing my own life.

I know now that in reality, I was in the throes of an internal crisis. I was failing because I wasn’t looking at the bigger picture.

As time was freed up from the drunk to hangover cycle I reconnected with the old ways I filled that time. I began writing more and carving out more time to connect with loved ones — for the first time in years I was keeping up with their lives, showing up for their sadness, honoring their accomplishments; I was being the friend and support system I’d longed to be but assumed I was not a good enough person to embody. I laid in the sun, I redecorated our home, I colored and watched movies and read books; I re-engaged with hobbies I’d long forgotten and I experienced current hobbies while sober for the first time in years.

I am grateful for the restoration of my confidence; the assuredness I had long forgotten but always possessed.

There were many things that fueled my drinking to excess, but a primary contributor was the shame and fear I felt about my inability to relax — to be easygoing.

I have been an over-thinking, over-analyzing, over-feeling person for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I was often told that I made things harder for myself. That life didn’t need to be so challenging.

I looked at my mom, my brother, my best friend, and I saw the way they lived in the moment. The way they let life play out without feeling the urge to dissect every exchange, every instant, as to better analyze the many facets and subtexts, and, at that time, I longed for that.

What I realized in sobriety, is that what I wanted was to be more palatable. I didn’t want to be easy for the sake of easing my own mind. I wanted to be easy so others would like me, would want to include me, wouldn’t feel put off by my intensity. In the presence of drinking, there was an absence of all of the ways in which I was ‘too much’.

But, the act of being sober is in its essence not easy. You become the person who people are hesitant to invite to things, you become the person who forces every bartender and waiter to think outside the box to accommodate your mocktail order — you become a person who must, whether it terrifies you or not, take up more space.

As a sober person in our society, you have to advocate for yourself, always. You find yourself declining drinks or shots and then having to explain why. You reach a point in the evening when you are tired and ready for bed and have to confidently assert that it’s time for you to go.

You have to relentlessly protect yourself, your feelings, your strength, and your sobriety, and with that comes the refusal to put other people’s needs, perceived or real, ahead of your own.

You have to learn what situations you feel comfortable in and what situations you need to avoid. You have to break up with friends who no longer serve you and your journey and you have to say no and decline invitations — a lot.

While all of those behaviors are difficult to adopt and can feel like loss and pain, they ultimately lead to freedom.

Suddenly, more than ever before, you are speaking up for yourself. You are fully attuned to your needs and what you want. Once you embrace that your life, and you — at your core — are changing, you feel free to go to bed at 9:30 pm with a cup of tea and your favorite TV show on. Especially on a Saturday night.

You feel free to say no when you want to, and if they’re good friends they understand that your sobriety comes first and they continue to invite you despite the fact that you’ve declined the last several invites.

You learn who is there for you, who will support you when it feels too hard, who will celebrate with you when you reach 30 days, 60 days, 1 year, and all of the other milestones in between. You learn how to have fun at parties, at bars, at dinners out, without the aid of alcohol and you learn the point at which fun stops being had.

So, yes, sometimes I mourn my drinking days. I wallow in my feelings of “why me?” I think myself into a mess of anxiety and regret and cry over the confusing blend of memories forgotten in a drunken haze and drunken memories I will now never make. But mostly I am grateful.

Grateful because, for me, sobriety is synonymous with the reflection of what was, the reclamation of all that I had lost, and the restoration of my truest self.