The Ghosts of New Year's Past

Recovery is never linear—don't let anyone tell you it should be.

Note: My sobriety birthday is January 24th, 2008. On a whim, I decided I should try to get 1000 subscribers by that date—around 300 in the next month. It is a totally arbitrary and possibly ridiculous goal; I will be completely fine if it doesn’t happen, but if you know of anyone who might be interested in this newsletter, please share it with them. If you appreciate Ask a Sober Lady and are in a position to upgrade to a paid subscription, please consider doing so. I will always keep this newsletter free and the advice accessible to all.

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Sometime in the afternoon on New Year's Eve, 2007, I was at a Safeway in Oakland, buying a bottle of vodka with my friends for a party we were supposed to go to later that night. I was 23, and my friends felt like a safe haven from my family, who, over the Christmas holidays, had come face to face with how bad my drinking had become. I admitted nothing, of course, but I didn’t have to. Blackouts, the ever-present stench of booze, drunken escapes from the police—the picture of ‘normal’ I was so desperately trying to maintain was disappearing as quickly as an ice cube on a sidewalk in Phoenix in July.

But I still had my friends at least partially convinced that I was okay. Then, a few things happened. First, we climbed back into the car in the Safeway parking lot, and before my friend turned on the engine, I unscrewed the bottle cap, put the rim to my lips, and drank. I didn’t even think about how it would look. I just knew my parents had gotten very watchful over their alcohol, and my body was screaming for relief. I remember my friend—let’s call her Alice—looking back at me in the rearview mirror like I’d flashed a cop.

“What are you doing?” she said.

I shrugged and feigned a laugh. “What? It’s New Year's Eve!”

This was, in the strictest sense, true. But it was also close to noon on New Year’s Eve, and none of the other girls in that car had planned on touching that bottle for hours. I saw how it unsettled them—felt them pondering the reality that there might be more to my story about overprotective parents unnecessarily concerned about my alcohol intake.

Things went downhill from there. I never made it out that night. I drank most of that bottle alone and passed out on my friend’s couch hours before we were all supposed to meet and get ready together.

Twenty-three days later, I was in the hospital and, shortly after, rehab, but that New Year’s Eve marked a point of no return. It was the end of a facade I’d been trying to maintain with the people who knew me best. I was not okay, and the people closest to me knew it.

Now, when I go back to my parents’ house for the Christmas holidays, these ghosts are unavoidable. Even though it was more than a decade and a half ago, and my life is vastly different now, there are echoes of my past etched in the familiar spaces. This drawer is where I used to hide bottles. This couch is where I sat when I pretended I didn’t know how to use a breathalyzer. The walls of that house watched me be the world’s worst magician, trying and failing to be a master of illusion, showing my hand more egregiously with every attempted trick.

Even though I’m very open about this part of my history, I don’t love reliving it. I don’t love reliving it deliberately here, and I don’t love causally reliving it when I’m home for the holidays. But there is value in looking at a past we may not love remembering. People, places, and things from your past can be unexpectedly triggering—even when you thought you were prepared.

There’s an oft-repeated saying in the recovery world that I’ve always disliked: relapse is a part of recovery. I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly why it bothers me so much. I like that it takes an anti-shame stance toward relapse and accurately frames recovery as a journey with fits and starts. But it also feels overly broad and a tad defeatist. Relapse hasn’t been a part of my recovery, but that also doesn’t mean my recovery has been easy.

What is true is that recovery is never linear. I don’t know a single person in recovery who got sober and thought, ‘Wow, every day is easier and better than the last.’ Recovery can’t be like that because humans aren’t like that. We have pasts and mixed emotions and complicated relationships, and all of those things can arise at weird times and make us feel like we’re in a campy time-travel movie.

What I’m trying to say is that recovery isn’t always easy, but it doesn’t have to be easy to be possible. It definitely won’t be linear, so don’t let anyone tell you it will be or should be. So much of my drinking was rooted in trying to escape discomfort—the feeling that I was always a little bit different, a little bit defective, a little bit worse than everyone else. The only thing that numbed those feelings was alcohol. When my drinking led to all the mistakes, accidents, and fuck-ups that it did, I felt like I had proof that I was right all along—look at the damage I caused! Who could do all that but a massively defective human being?!

You do not have to be at peace with your past before you get into recovery. You may not be completely at peace with your past a decade and a half later! Finding something triggering doesn’t mean you’re doing recovery wrong; it means you’re a human being alive in the world. And yes, relapse can be a part of recovery, but it doesn’t have to be. Let the mask of togetherness drop. Talk about things when they get uncomfortable. Reject perfectionism whenever possible. Try and try again. Just because you can still see the ghosts of your past doesn’t mean they’re there to haunt you. They might be there to remind you of how far you’ve come—and how far you have to go.

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