When I finally stopped drinking on February 8, 1999, I really thought life was going to get easier. At 20 years old, it made perfect sense to me. Drinking and using had caused so many problems in my life that I figured if I could just stop doing those things, the problems would start going away. I had spent the last several months trying to quit almost every day and failing. If I could finally stay sober for more than a few days or a few weeks, I thought I would feel better physically, feel better mentally and probably be a whole lot happier.
Some of that happened, just not the way I expected it to. I’ve already written about what those first days actually looked and felt like for me in What Does the First Week of Sobriety Really Feel Like?. I was shaky for weeks, couldn’t hold a coffee cup at a meeting with one hand for a while, and had this strange blue outline around everything I saw. Physically, I felt terrible.
But those things eventually started going away, and the interesting part is that I wasn’t really paying attention to when they stopped. Somebody else pointed out that I wasn’t shaking anymore. I hadn’t even noticed. At some point the blue outline disappeared too. I couldn’t tell you exactly when because one day I just realized it wasn’t there anymore. Physically, I started feeling better a whole lot faster than I did mentally or emotionally. That was the part I didn’t understand when I got sober.
I Didn’t Realize How Much Alcohol Was Doing for Me
For a long time I thought drinking was my problem. What I eventually discovered was that drinking had also become my solution.
I used alcohol to quiet my brain in all sorts of ways. I worried about what other people thought about me. I worried about fitting in and being different. I was uncomfortable meeting new people and constantly thinking about what they were thinking about me. Alcohol helped me get over that. I could drink and talk to strangers. I could feel confident enough to walk into a room and meet people. I didn’t have to spend every second wondering whether somebody liked me, whether I was funny enough or whether I belonged there.
That feeling of being different didn’t start when I started drinking. I’ve written more about that part of my story in Why I Felt Different Long Before I Took My First Drink. Alcohol just happened to be the first thing I found that could make those feelings disappear for a while.
It worked, right up until it didn’t work.
By the end, I also had plenty of other things I didn’t want to think about. Shame. Guilt. Regret. Failing at college. Damaged relationships. Fear about my future. My parents not trusting me. All the lies I had told and all the things I had done. Drinking didn’t make any of those things go away. It just gave me a way to not feel them for a little while.
Then I got sober and took away the one solution I had for dealing with all of it, but every one of those feelings was still there. That’s what I mean when I say that I thought drinking was my problem, but I eventually discovered that drinking was my solution to the pain of living life. I’ve gone deeper into that distinction in If Drinking Isn’t My Problem, What Is?. At 20 years old, though, I didn’t understand any of that. I just knew I wasn’t drinking anymore, and now I had to feel all the things I had spent years trying not to feel.
Now I Had to Feel It and Do Something Different
I remember standing outside a Young People’s AA meeting really early in my sobriety. I had only been to that particular meeting two or three times, and there were probably only five or six of us there. I was afraid to really talk to anybody. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think they would like me. I was worried about whether I’d have anything relevant to add to the conversation or whether I’d say something funny enough for them to want me around again.
Before I got sober, I had a solution for that situation. I would have had a few drinks. Alcohol would have made me “feel” confident enough to talk to these new people. Now that wasn’t an option, so I was standing there with all of those same thoughts and feelings and no alcohol to make them disappear.
One of them came up to me after the meeting and asked if I wanted to go to dinner with them.
I said yes.
I was still uncomfortable. I was still wondering whether they were going to like me and whether I would have anything to say, but I went anyway. By the end of dinner, I felt comfortable, like I had just met some new friends. And that’s actually what happened. There were many more meetings and many more dinners. Weeks turned into months and years, and some of those people became great friends.
The fear didn’t have to disappear before I went to dinner. I had to learn that I could feel uncomfortable and still go. Recovery started teaching me how to do that in other areas of my life too.
I called my sponsor. I called other people in the program. I talked to the counselor I was seeing. I went to meetings, prayed, started working the Steps and got involved in service. One of the biggest things I learned was to tell on myself. If something is going on in my head, I need to get it out of me before that feeling turns into a dumb action like drinking. I can call my sponsor or another sober person and tell them what’s going on. I can talk about it in a meeting. I can pray about it.
My Higher Power is a huge part of my recovery. I believe He listens when I pray, but I also believe He talks to me through other people and through the voices I hear in meetings. Alcohol had been the only tool I knew for dealing with a lot of life. Recovery started giving me different tools.
I Was Getting Better Before I Realized I Was Getting Better
I wasn’t sitting around every morning trying to decide whether recovery was working. I was busy doing it. I went to a lot of meetings, pretty much 90 meetings in 90 days. I had a sponsor. I was working Steps. I made coffee, opened meetings and cleaned ashtrays—which really shows my age because it’s been more than 20 years since smoking was allowed in most of the meetings I attend. I got plugged in.
Somewhere around 90 days sober, a guy I knew from the meetings made a comment to me. I still see him today, although I can’t tell you his exact words from 27 years ago. It was something close to, “You look happier than when you first came in.” He also commented on everything he’d watched me doing and suggested that maybe all those actions had something to do with the change he was seeing.
I hadn’t really noticed it because I’d been so focused on doing what was suggested that I wasn’t spending much time measuring whether I was getting better. His comment made me look at myself differently, and I realized I hadn’t thought about drinking in a long while. Other people could see changes happening in me before I could see them myself.
I don’t remember some specific moment when I suddenly realized that getting sober wasn’t going to magically fix my life. That understanding happened gradually. What I did begin to realize was that what I was doing after I stopped drinking was changing my life.
Life Didn’t Stop Happening. I Started Learning How to Live It.
When I stopped drinking, I thought life was going to get easier because I thought drinking was the reason life was so difficult. Today I understand that differently.
Life is Life.
Some days are going to be “good.” Some days are going to be “challenging.” Things are going to happen that I have absolutely no control over, and sobriety doesn’t stop any of that. What recovery began changing was how I perceived what was happening and what I did about it.
I used to think life was coming at me. Today I can see that my perception needed to change so I could understand that life is coming from me. How I experience life has a whole lot to do with how I perceive what’s happening and what I decide to do next. That doesn’t mean I suddenly stopped feeling fear, insecurity, anger, shame or discomfort. It means I slowly started learning that I didn’t have to drink to change those feelings.
If somebody I’m working with tells me after a few weeks or a couple of months that they thought they’d feel better by now, one of the things I might ask them is how long it took them to walk into the forest of addiction and all the thinking that surrounds it. It took years to walk into that forest. What makes us think we’re going to walk all the way back out in a couple of weeks or months?
For me, the answer wasn’t sitting around waiting to feel different. I kept doing what was suggested. I couldn’t do everything at once, and nobody can take every suggestion and completely change their life overnight. I started somewhere and kept adding things: meetings, sponsor, prayer, Steps, service, relationships with sober people and talking honestly about what was happening inside my head.
Slowly, things changed. Sometimes other people noticed before I did.
When I got sober, I thought stopping drinking was going to fix my life.
What I eventually realized was that stopping drinking gave me the chance to start learning how to live my life.
Related Video
In this video, I talk about the different phases I experienced after I stopped drinking, including what it was like to suddenly face fear, uncomfortable feelings and everyday life without alcohol as my solution.
Leave a Reply