A Life Without Alcohol is Possible
Hey Mel,
It’s January 22, 2011. I’m telling you because you have no idea what day it is. You just woke up in your grandparent’s apartment on a Saturday morning wearing your grandmother’s nightgown. Not quite how you intended your Friday night to end up. Yes, that is a hospital bracelet on your wrist as you were there last night, and yes you were handcuffed to the gurney. Why? You’ll soon find out that you were found wandering incoherently by a police station trying to break into cars when two off duty cops found you. In a letter that your grandfather wrote to the police commissioner to thank the officers, you learn that instead of throwing you into the drunk tank, they call your mom back in Wisconsin, scaring the living crap out of her. You don’t remember this at all but together they somehow get in touch with your grandparents who live close by and beg them to take you to Roosevelt Hospital (now Mt. Sinai — that’s important, we’ll get to that later) where they’ll meet you. The officers agree but let them know that you’ll be handcuffed since you are trying to punch them. Your grandparents see you at your absolute worst. The nurses tell them that you won’t need your stomach pumped but you’ll need fluids and to sleep it off under observation. At 6 AM, after not sleeping, your grandparents return to the hospital to pick you up and bring you back to their home where they change you and put you in their bed.
Right now you’re ashamed. You’re feeling something that you’ll later discover is best articulated as, “pitiful, incomprehensible, demoralization.” Sure, you’ve had rough nights before — coming out of a blackout in a subway station in a part of Queens you didn’t know existed or not remembering where you lived to tell the taxi where to drop you off so they just drove around Brooklyn, charging you $400. But today is different. Today, you’re scared. Scared for what could have happened. Scared for a life without wine and the feeling of release it gives you. Scared about what people will think of you if you don’t drink. Scared you’re going to lose your job. Scared you’re going to die.
I know you LOVE to know what’s going to happen in the future — you read movie spoilers so you can prepare yourself on how to react. Normally, I wouldn’t tell you, but honestly? You won’t remember these two days at all. So, perhaps this note will be the whisper of hope you need to meet a basic stranger on Monday, January 24, to take you to a room in a synagogue rec room full of strangers ready to support you.
So, here is what your life is about to look like:
In your first year of sobriety, you learn how to live without a drink. This isn’t just not stopping at the liquor store anymore, but how to react to life without drowning yourself in wine or tequila. A doctor once asked you how much you drank a day and you said 5 drinks as a way to play it cool. Losers drink two glasses of wine a night; alcoholics drink ten glasses of wine a night. You are not an alcoholic. Five is safe. Five, you learn, is not safe. Five is taking the edge off but also blurring the edge so you stop feeling anything. So, you learn how to live without alcohol. You learn that you’re usually vulnerable to use when you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired so you keep snacks in your bag, download a meditation app, text friends, and become unapologetic about staying in to go to bed early. Someone who was a stranger to you on January 21st will spend an hour with you each week to share her own experience on how she got sober. You learn that you have an allergy to alcohol. Where your mom’s fingers swell like sausages when she drinks wine, once you take a sip you lose control and you want, no you need, more. You learn how to show up to work on time, how to own up to mistakes and move on, how to ask the scary doctor for a prescription refill so you don’t skip your antidepressants. You learn that you are inherently valuable, that no one’s opinion about you is important. You learn how to go to a work event without drinking and you learn what to do if you feel like drinking. You learn how to go to sleep without a bottle of wine and four melatonin pills. You start a bedtime routine that you maintain to this day. Your mom will call you every day and you will be annoyed until you realize it’s because you scared her to death and she loves you. You learn how to build, and also lose, friendships with integrity. You can finally order sparkling water at a restaurant without caring what the waiter thinks of you. One day, one hour, one package of peanut butter M&Ms at a time, you don’t pick up any mind-altering substance. What once seemed impossible, becomes your incredible reality.
While in your first year, the only thing you could identify was hunger, anger, loneliness, and fatigue, now in your second year, you seem to feel every feeling that ever existed. You actually have to look at the “How Are You Feeling Today?” poster that hung in your elementary school guidance counselor’s office to help you. Oddly enough, those 30 faces help you identify shame versus frustration versus shyness. You learn how to experience, confront, and accept all emotions — even the painful ones. You start to build self-esteem through esteemable acts. Your experience — your shame, your struggles, your successes — benefit others. You dabble in dating, crush on a co-worker and have your first sober kiss. It was nice.
In your third year of sobriety, you get over your fear of someone breaking up with you and you begin to date like it’s your job. About 25 dates in, you shift your perspective from “how can I get them to like me” to “how does this person fit into my idea of my ideal partner?” You start to think of dating as collecting data on what you like and don’t like in a person. It turns out, an interest in television is a make or break characteristic! You try a year of “yes” where you go to every event to which you’re invited. You meet new friends, you explore new parts of the city, you leave when you’re ready. You save enough money to cross an ocean for the first time and fly to London, a place you have dreamed of visiting for as long as you can remember. You eat scones with clotted cream and pick up drinking tea instead of coffee. You return home and visit your new, perfect niece and realize that you can actually be someone she looks up to.
In your fourth year of sobriety, you go on your last first date. You meet the love of your life while eating pizza in your sweats and getting in an argument about something stupid. Later, you kiss him on the first date and melt on the corner of Houston and Bowery. You read poetry because it’s the only medium that can capture your BIG feelings. You figure out how to be in a relationship without alcohol — how to have a conversation, how to share space, how to trust, how to be vulnerable, how to believe him when he says he loves you, how he chooses you.
Your fifth year of sobriety is your hardest yet. Your uncle suddenly passes away. You go to doctor upon doctor to figure out why you have intense stomach pain that eventually lands you in the hospital. You get bed bugs. You don’t love your job and you’re not getting far in interviews. You wonder what else could possibly go wrong! The odd thing is, though, that you don’t want to drink. You don’t want to numb the pain or drink to forget the bad days. People tell you that “this too shall pass” and you believe them because what else are you supposed to do? And you know what, they’re right.
In your sixth year of sobriety, you get married. Remember when you quit your first go at sobriety in 2010 because you wanted to have champagne at your wedding, despite the fact that you were extremely single? You couldn’t imagine a wedding without a glass in your hand — you actually thought you figured out how you could get married without blacking out (a careful balance of Adderall and champagne, obviously). Well, after the ceremony you hold a glass but it’s filled with sparkling cider and you don’t care at all. You don’t want champagne, you don’t miss it. You want to remember the whole day, every moment, every breath. Four days after the wedding, a racist, sexist piece of shit is elected president casting a shadow over the country and you won’t drink then, either.
In your seventh year of sobriety, you will be ready to investigate your heritage. Sure, you have it memorized since people always ask (Half Chinese, quarter Italian, English, Irish, and Dutch). But what does it mean — especially the Chinese part? You realize you’ve been ashamed of your Asian background all your life. It made you different, weird. You were public about wanting to change your last name since when people heard it they always asked questions. In college, you were aghast when the Chinese Student Association asked you to join their group, regardless of the fact that you wrote about being biracial in your admissions essay. So you go to therapy and you start to read about the history of being Asian in America. You still have a long way to go, but you make progress.
In your eighth year of sobriety, you worry that you won’t be able to get pregnant because of the abortion you got after a blacked-out one night stand in 2009. Shame trickles back in again, but you talk through your fears and one day you realize you’re pregnant. Morning sickness shows up for you as nausea so you basically feel hungover for four straight months. It’s the weirdest deja vu and luckily it fades away. Then, at the end of the year, in the same hospital where you were handcuffed to a gurney in 2011 (renamed from Roosevelt to Mt. Sinai), you give birth to the most beautiful perfect child. You name him after the man who saved your life that day.
In your ninth year of sobriety, you’re finally ready to face your body image issues. Despite your body performing a miracle of growing, birthing, and now feeding a new human, you are disgusted when you look in a mirror. You walk so much to try to work off the weight you sprain your ankle. You’ve carried the weight of the words “thunder thighs” that a classmate called you in fifth grade with you like a rock on your back. One day, you realize that you just can’t carry that rock anymore. You don’t want your beautiful son and incredible niece to ever feel the shame that you feel — or learn it from you. Coupled with postpartum anxiety, you fall to your knees, finally ready to turn over these ideas that are no longer serving you. The tools that you learned in your first year of sobriety return and save your life again. You let yourself be vulnerable and scared. You stop trying to control. You ask for help. You help others. You meditate. Slowly, you learn to love and appreciate your body. Then, after thirteen years in New York, you move to California, a wish of yours since you were ten. With a family you always dreamed of and love more than you knew could be possible, you live among palm trees and sunshine.
Now, you are heading into ten years of sobriety…of life. You are unemployed in a new city. Your fears are now over whether your kid is eating the right food and your resentments only really register if your husband leaves his socks on the ground. But you are grateful you have food to feed your child and a home where your husband can leave his socks. Your mom no longer worries about getting calls from the police in the middle of the night. You feel freedom. You feel happiness. You don’t regret the night you spent in the hospital. It got you here.
No one has sent you a note from the future telling you what your next ten years will bring. However, you don’t need one. If you’ve learned anything, you know that it will all work out in a way that not even you — with your thousands of schemes, ideas, and lists — can imagine. There will very likely be struggles and sadness, but there will also be joy and laughter. It won’t be easy, but it will be easier. It will not be perfect, but it will be what it is, which is itself perfection. You have sobriety — a foundation upon which you will continue to build a life beyond your wildest dreams.
Now, get out of that nightgown, drink some water, and get ready for your life to begin.
It works. I promise.
Mel