Getting Sober

Feb 27, 2014

Getting sober is a deeply personal and incredibly hard decision to make. I have never met anyone who quit because they were bored. Almost every person I have worked with since 2014 stopped because they were going to die.

Addiction is never just drinking too much or using too much. Addiction is pain. It is unaddressed trauma. It is mental health pushed down for so long it begins to rot inside of you. It is a physical dependence that will try to kill you before it ever lets you go. It is a brain that has forgotten poison is poison and continues to look for it long after we stop.

The truth is only a very small number of people who choose recovery make it out still sober. That is the heartbreaking reality. But it does not have to stay that way.

Addiction grows in families that carry pride but avoid truth. It grows when we look away as loved ones slip into the darkness they already know. It grows when the addict stops loving themselves and then cannot feel the love of the people who are fighting for them. We all play a part in the way addiction spreads through generations.

Look around our country. Alcohol is everywhere. It is advertised, normalized, pushed at every turn. I cannot even order food without being encouraged to add liquor to my cart. I have not bought alcohol in over eight years, yet it still follows me. The world is soaked in it. When you think about how many families and lives have been destroyed by this one substance, it is overwhelming.

About fourteen years ago my time was running out. I had become everything about my mother that broke my heart. I barely knew my kids. I convinced myself they were better off with anyone but me. I had almost drank myself to death in front of people my entire life. There was never going to be an intervention. And even if I did get sober, the holidays back home would have destroyed me. My hometown triggers every alarm in my nervous system. I knew I had one chance and that was it.

After a bender I barely survived and a failed suicide attempt, I made the hardest phone call of my life. I called my oldest daughter. She was in her early twenties and pregnant with my grandson. I asked her to take me to detox.

She arrived within an hour.

The drive was silent. Early morning. I was drinking at least eighteen beers a day and shots on the weekends. I am a small woman. I knew detox would hurt, but I had no idea how deep the addiction had sunk into my bones.

I had been running my whole life. Running from fires I did not start and from fires I created myself. I was a tornado. My chaos touched everyone. My kids, my friends, my partners. No one left my life better than when they came in. My mother lived the same way. Same patterns. Same destruction.

But my grandson was coming. My youngest daughter was slipping into addiction. And I knew if I did not do something drastic, our family would repeat the same painful story for another generation.

So she took me.

Seven days of detox. Seven days of hell.

Pain.Seizures.Trips back and forth from the hospital.

Vomiting

Shaking

Crying Sweating through every sheet they had. On the seventh day something in me finally let go. Not my body.

The addiction.

Then came treatment.

Thirty days.

I spent a month with strangers. I had never felt so small. But I knew I was all in. I took every class seriously. I wanted to understand my brain, my trauma, my patterns. I wanted to undo the damage. I wanted to be able to look at myself one day and not feel shame. Recovery was not optional for me.

It was survival.

If I did not stop drinking, I was going to die. My children would be left with the fallout just like I was left with my mother’s.

I slipped many times in the first three years. Over time the slips became less frequent.

Then farther apart.

Then they stopped.

It has been more than eight years.

My life is not perfect, but I am sober. That is what counts.

Because my kids see me.

My grandson sees me.

My community sees me.

They are watching.

This ends with me.