Life is a gray area. Hell, even the word gray can be spelled more than one way; grey, graey, g®æ¥ and you get the idea.
I have been sober for nine years today. It's kind of hard to believe how quickly it went by, but I'm really happy it did.
Occasionally, my friends will ask why I stopped because they don't remember me as someone who had your typical problems with alcohol or other substances. It comes as a surprise to some that you don't need to be a fall over drunk and completely self-destructive to feel like you need to hang it up.
Right before I turned 30 I was miserable: relationships, career, accomplishments, friends, all of it. I thought about killing myself more often than one should. Drinking, even though it wasn't something I did to a Leaving Las Vegas degree, wasn't making me happy anymore. It was starting to add to my depression and anxiety. I knew if I had to act soon. I wasn't sure I needed AA, but I kept my mind open. It has done a lot of good for a lot of people.
I decided to go solo for a couple months. About six went by and I was feeling good. A fog had lifted. I knew I still had to be careful and do a lot of work on myself in order to stay on the right track. People would say it won't work if you don't do the program. Well, for me it is working. For me. There are options. Again, g®æ¥ area.
I learned about this spectrum over the years firsthand and through talks with friends and strangers. Also, this amazing piece in The Atlantic. Not everyone needs to become the town drunk in order to quit drinking and not everyone needs to be locked down in rehab and attend meetings for the rest of their lives if they do. Some people just need to grow up. Some people need the structure of meetings and programs. Some people need therapy. Some need a combination of all those things. And all of that is fine. We're all trying to get to the same place. If we show each other there's more than one way to get there we all win.
If you’ve ever considered stopping or long pausing, freezing, completing, or whatever you need to call it to make it sound manageable, just try it out for a month then consider another month and then another. The bars and the parties and the booze aren’t going anywhere. If you quit for a year or 5 years all that shit will still be there and you will not have missed out on a single event. The one thing none of us will get back is time and that for me has always been a motivating factor for everything I do. I don’t miss the bars or the parties or the anonymous casual sex because after a while it became a broken record. The last nine years have been filled with a lot of firsts and cool experiences that I hadn’t realized were taking a backseat to bad habits, bad time management and zero self care.
As for this year long shutdown, I wish I had an inspirational tale of struggle that brought me to the brink, but I don’t. But that in a way, is the inspirational tale because nine years ago I decided to help myself prepare for situations exactly like this one. Had I been using or a year or two sober, this pandemic year would have been an absolute nightmare that I honestly might not have made it out of in one living, breathing piece.
My life is infinitely better now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still miserable in that artistic, perpetual existential crisis sort of way, but I can’t imagine how much worse I’d be if I hadn’t gotten sober. Life is hard no matter what, but at least nowadays I’m exploring the darkest recesses of my psyche with a floodlight instead of a candle. So if anything, just try something new for a year. Day one of anything is the hardest, but it gets easier and more manageable. I promise.