Sober

I write this with tears in my eyes, knowing I can never go back. It is a painful, gut-wrenching feeling. To know I can’t return to my old ways of numbing.

I have lived without alcohol for almost two years. I have lived without weed for almost six months. Alcohol was admittedly easier for me to kick than weed, because I’ve had enough negative experiences associated with it to prevent me from ever wanting to take another drink again. But weed… weed is another story.

Because THC has only ever made me feel joyful, relaxed, euphoric, and in touch with my body with no “real” side effects, cutting it out of my life has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It feels like I’m living every moment with a stark awareness of all the pain that exists in the world, and I cannot let go of any of it. I cannot forgive myself for my past mistakes (which are PLENTIFUL). I cannot help but overanalyze every interaction, spiraling into an insular world of fear and shame.

Shame over my inaction in the face of injustice.

Shame over how I have harmed others.

Shame over how, without substances to retreat to, I choose to numb myself instead through the cheapest, most available drug of all: sleep.

Ever since I was a teenager, my coping mechanism for Big Feelings has been to lie in bed and stare up at my ceiling, clutching my baby Blankie (which, yes, I still sleep with). Under my covers, I am safe and warm. No-one can touch me. I’m not hurting anyone (except, ostensibly, myself).

But I am not living.

I am retreating.

I am avoiding.

I am escaping.

I am merely putting time between myself and the Big Things outside, which will still be there when I wake.

And, most times when I do this, I’m not even really sleeping. I’m just closing my eyes and feeling.

I am feeling the weight of all I have seen and not done crash over me in tidal waves of regret and despair, like my bed is a magnetic void that draws me to it even though I am not sick and I’m not really tired.

I lie in bed and let the feelings wash over me. I close my eyes and memories surface, as clearly as if I’m living them in the present moment.

Sobriety has made space for my brain and my body to revisit all the monuments of my life – big and small – in jarring, vivid, and unwanted detail. I can’t predict what will arise, but it’s the closest thing I can imagine to time travel.

I recognize what a privilege it is that I have a bed, at all. That I can carve out time for these pockets of feeling, as meaningless as they seem.

But… what if they’re not meaningless?

What if these moments of immobilization-by-feeling are my body’s way of processing all the pain, suffering, trauma, and awareness that I had previously been self-medicating away?

One major lesson I learned while doing intense EMDR therapy a few years ago is:

Feelings hurt, but they can’t kill me.

In one week, I turn “33” (whatever that means). I never imagined my life would be like this, because I never had a solid picture of what my life would be like. It seems as if I spend my days observing, absorbing, learning, trying to understand how to respond, and then processing all of it.

In one week, I will be 33.

In nine days, I am starting a new job: a bigger, more important job than any I’ve ever had before in my life. It’s so scary, that I haven’t allowed myself to feel excited.

And, yet, I said “yes” to it.

Despite all my fears and self-perceived incompetence, I said “yes.”

All this fear of the unknown presses down on my chest, unnumbed, and I recall every Transition that loomed large before me, causing panic.

In my state of panic, the gravitational pull of my bed is too alluring to resist. So I lie there, as if I have no other option, and I hear the voices in my head berate me:

“Of course you’re lying in bed, instead of doing anything. You never do anything! You’re so avoidant; you can’t face reality. You can’t make a decision. You never stand up for what you believe in. You still haven’t learned Spanish or volunteered for that organization or gotten involved in activism. You’re never going to make any new friends because you don’t know how to interact with people, like, at all. So, go ahead, just lie there like a baby. You are a baby. You’re so immature; 33 years old, and you’ve already wasted so much of your life. You might as well just stay in bed forever and wait to die, like in Poulet aux Prunes” (spoiler alert).

I am free, but I have no idea how to responsibly use my freedom because I am afraid. It is fear that keeps me immobilized, along with the hopeless conviction that things can and will only stay the same or get worse. The fear crowds out any room in my thoughts for the possibility of joy, of connection, of community, of action, of change.

Yet, change is all there is. Everything is constantly changing, including myself. It often feels like there’s no narrative through-line in my life to connect my past, present, and future: that my sense of identity is so ephemeral and un-graspable that I am not really a person at all, just a collection of memories and sensations.

I’m learning that sobriety is making space for everything I’ve been and everything I’m becoming: all the roughness, the bad choices, and the harm I have both endured and inflicted.

Awareness is the price I pay for sobriety, and I am grateful I have the resources to make space for my feelings. But I am also moving forward into a new year, a new job, and a new phase of my life.

Here I go, stone-cold sober, into the great unknown.

By Authorship: w:Arthur Edward Waite, w:Pamela Coleman Smith was the artist and worked as an artist for hire. Waite was the copyright holder and he died in 1942. - This image scanned by Holly Voley, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113970866