Reflecting on a Year of Continious Sobriety
It’s surreal writing this post.
I’ve written on this blog before about my journey with sobriety (and many posts are subtly sobriety adjacent), but I thought it was worth reflecting a bit on the past year of complete, continuous sobriety and how that experience has changed me. I say “continuous“ because of how committed to absolute honesty I am - it would be easy to say I was “sober“ since over a year and a half ago, but it wouldn’t be honest to the slip up I had last June. This is the longest period of sobriety I’ve had since I was a teenager, and I’m extremely happy to have gotten here and grateful for the friends and family who supported me.
As I was thinking about what I’d want to write about, the main topic that came to mind was what it’s like now. If you last interacted with the old me, now close to more than two years ago before I started this journey, you might have had a very different experience than interacting with the current me now. I’ve even spent a lot of time correcting certain attitudes and motives with many folks from my drinking days with the people I was closest with. This has given me a lot of peace in life, confidence in being myself without any mind altering substances, and a foundation that has built many long standing friendships and relationships. I actually don’t want to shut the door on those experiences because the act of showing up differently going forward has built more depth with the people I care about most (in most cases).
That’s something I’m very proud of because it means that my actions today are an opportunity for the current me to correct any mis-attitudes that the old me might have had (which of course wasn’t ever always all bad, but there were some threads that needed correcting).
On an emotional level, I’m extremely grateful because without the filter of mind altering substances I constantly feel grounded. This is especially important during times of high stress or uncertainty. Over the last year life hasn’t been perfectly “happy“ and I’ve realized I don’t even want things to always be amazing. It’s such a blessing to be able to lose people you love and actually show up in a way that is supportive for family or deal with difficult or intense situations with generally more grace, forgiveness, or understanding. These things happen all the time, but how you deal with them is make or break. No one is perfect, but with a sober foundation I have confidence that I can face the hard stuff and come up with the right solutions. It’s not about always winning but about handling the losses in the right ways, not carrying resentments, and having a little faith that maybe it was all for a reason.
As I get deeper into sobriety, I’ve learned too about how my desire to drink was an escape from some emotion that I didn’t want to be feeling. I think the world builds so much stigma about alcohol but I did it with many other things too. At one point a whole pot of coffee before 2pm was a regular thing just to change the feelings that I was feeling about my first company - no wonder I could sometimes get anxious!
The shift towards experiencing these emotions instead of avoiding them though not only made me stop those behaviors but also helped me show up better and really understand myself. I’d recommend this to anyone regardless of how they identify. It increased my quality of life 10x both because of how much better directed my actions are but also because when you focus on feeling those feelings all of a sudden they don’t feel so immediately intense. I know so many people who do this with every other form of coping. Once you solve that root issue though, the desire goes away and it’s amazing. I would encourage anyone who’s thinking about making a change like this to double down and do it.
Why am I writing about it? It’s been something that everyone important in my life knows about, and although I’m aware of the downsides being public, I’m proud of that fact. It’s also become an opportunity for people who I might know to see an example of someone where this works where so much of the world “works” a different way. In a few lucky cases I know that’s been enough for people I know to make a change in their lives and I think the reward of helping other people make that jump is enough to justify any downside.
I hope I never have to re-own resetting this timeline, but even if I do the lessons carry in so many valuable ways. Here’s to another year!