It’s been just over 4 years since my last drink.
And what amazes me most is that I don’t miss it at all.
Which is something I find myself marveling at.
Not that I’ve managed sobriety, but that it’s been so easy after what felt like a lifetime of alcohol dependency and the identity I tied to it.
The first time I got drunk was in the sixth grade, and I was pretty much off to the races after that.
I wasn’t a casual consumer; I was a drinker.
I’ve blacked out more times than most people have probably been drunk, I’ve coughed up blood, and I’ve crashed my car more than once; thank god no one got hurt.
I’d watch as I’d raise an empty spoon to my mouth because my shaking hands disposed of all the cereal.
Drinking was my escape, and I loved it.
It was an escape from the skin I hated wearing; it was an escape from the life I said I wanted, yet needed to escape from.
It was a temporary reprieve from being me, and the fears, and the perfectionism, and the shame that flowed like a perpetual spring from my raging unworthiness and inadequacy.
It was a moment of freedom where I could peel back the curtain and allow a little of my genuine self to be free without fear of judgment and reprimand.
Alcohol was a warm, soothing world, where I’d feel comfortable, if only for a little bit.
Even hangovers, as brutal as they became, were escapes; they dulled the reality of life and my role in it.
And I left that world behind with ease.
My journey to sobriety began when I first noticed the escape I craved transforming into something I feared.
The alcohol entered my bloodstream, and the slow drift of leaving myself behind would begin.
But I no longer welcomed it, I didn’t want to drift, I wanted to stay.
I didn’t want to disappear anymore.
I’d beg for it to stop; it never did, and I’d have to endure hours of separation before I returned home.
The moments away became the moments I dreaded.
It’s interesting to me because my life at the time was a struggle; I was just out of prison, trying to build a new life, trying to find my way.
I was navigating the shame underlying the terrible decisions I made and who I allowed myself to become.
I was writing “Blank Canvas” and reliving the worst moments of my life over and over until I felt them happening in real time.
I had a mission to help one person, and I couldn’t help anyone if I couldn’t get to the truth.
The truth wasn’t in the words but in the feeling behind them.
The sound of the gavel reverberating through the courtroom, tearing the fabric of my life in two, the cold steel of the handcuffs burning helplessness and hopelessness into my skin.
I was scrambling to get solid ground under my feet and doing work I’d spent a lifetime running from, and stuck in the limbo between identities.
Looking at it now, the pre-prison version of myself would have desperately wanted to escape.
But I didn’t want to anesthetize my life any longer.
I was done running, I was done hiding, I was done being the warden of the prison of my own design.
I wanted to feel the pain; I wanted to experience the shit; I wanted it to wash over me, to crush me if it had to, because I wanted to feel it.
I owed it to myself to stop running from myself.
I owed it to myself to stare the worst version of myself in the eyes, the version of myself I wanted to kill, as I planned how I’d take my own life.
I realize now I only wanted to kill him because I didn’t know how to love him.
I can’t express or embody love when I’m running away; it’s impossible. The very act of running from implies there’s something bad and terrible to run from.
I can’t run from my emotions and myself; I might as well have tried to escape my shadow on a sunny evening.
I must, and it’s a work in progress, allow myself to experience it.
To honor the experience for what it is, a part of life that makes life meaningful.
It’s not an easy journey; I still catch myself running until I remember to stop, and then I have to choose: do I move toward what I ran from?
There are some things I haven’t moved toward yet, and others I have.
Grace and self-compassion, two words I’m not sure were in my vocabulary when I was consumed by alcohol, have been my steadfast companions.
Walking away from alcohol has been one of the easiest endeavors I’ve ever done.
I’ve been afraid of writing that sentence.
Afraid for the people who struggle with sobriety every day, every minute, every second. I am sorry if that’s your struggle.
But to hide my experience is to deny my experience, and maybe that denies someone who’s struggling a new path they didn’t know existed.
I’m not a stranger to the struggle; I know that feeling.
I know it from when I was drinking, and I’d have these brief moments where I’d contemplate giving it up, and the shame, the fear, the dread, and the sheer impossibility of it would vaporize the thought.
The alcohol would continue to flow through the doorway of fear.
But not now.
I find sobriety easy.
I don’t focus on not drinking.
I focus on creating a version of myself and a life I don’t need to escape from. I focus on discovering the comfort in my own skin and ever-evolving layers of truth.
I live my purpose, expressing my creative self both on stage and on the page, and I get paid for it.
When I drink, I can’t find the words, and I can’t embrace the feelings I need to express to help that one person.
No escape is worth that.
I focus on filling my emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical buckets every day to the best of my ability, and if I stumble, those two words I didn’t know before come to my rescue.
Grace and self-compassion.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t want to tear my skin off and burn it at the stake of my raging unworthiness and inadequacy.
The idea of alcohol repulses me. Not for others; knock yourself out, you do you. I don’t judge.
Where I find myself right now is experiencing that delicious escape I once craved as a poison I happily avoid.
Life is no longer about running away, but a consistent journey back home.
And that home is ever-evolving layers of my personal truth.
And sometimes the truth is ugly and devastatingly painful.
However, the truth is never lacking; it’s never broken or fragmented.
Our truth is whole, and always will be, just as we are and have always been.
Not despite what we’ve endured, but because of it.
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