Sobriety is great until you feel things

I don’t drink anymore. I just raw dog reality and cry like a pretty little bitch x

I gave up alcohol. Now I’m grieving the version of me that could drink and disappear.

I, for the most part, really enjoy my life. I like my home, my job, my routine. I like my friends, my colleagues (mostly 😅), the people I say hi to in the park but only know their dog’s names and not theirs. I like the aspirations I have, the goals I’m chipping away at every time I manage to stick to my time blocks. And after years of emotional turbulence, economic instability, familial volatility, life now feels like sleeping on a spenny memory foam mattress — soft and firm in all the right places.

So when shit hits the fan, it pulls me into a void. All the lights are off. And my eyes are drawn to the only source of light I can see — my red-hot pain, pulsating against the shadows that have engulfed my existence. It's like the universe poured a vat of darkness down my throat, and the warm glow I felt inside is no more. It's gone.

794 days ago, I would have poured my own version of warmth down my throat and immediately felt it dilute the darkness. But I can’t do that anymore. I have to find comfort in the abyss enveloping me.

It's like going to see your dental hygienist. You know it’s going to sting, but you lie there and let it happen to you. As the curette hooks along your gum line and you wonder if the metallic taste in your mouth is your blood or the tools, you just wait for it to be over.

You have to feel it. Move through it.

That’s what sobriety is like. Instead of the temporary reprieve of artificial dopamine courtesy of our worst friend, alcohol, I SUFFER. And honestly? It’s so fucking shit because I don’t wanna feel hella sad. My sadness is LONG LASTING.

It takes a lot to upset me because I don’t care about a lot of things. One benefit of getting older is the declining rate at which you care. But it also means the things you do care about are highly concentrated. Like pouring a rum and coke that’s 95% rum and 5% coke (I hated mixer — in my mind, I might as well have added water).

Back to my point: being sober doesn’t make me serene.

I’m not living on some higher plane of existential thought where I submit to the universe and find meaning in all the discomforts of life. Fuck no, friendo. I feel EVERYTHING. All the jagged feelings pricking my skin like the little pricks they are.

You might be thinking, “Boo-fucking-hoo bitch. You have to feel your feels. Cry me a river.”

Well, I just fucking might, Sandra. Because I FEEL EVERYTHING.

There’s part of me that will always miss the ease of making my despair vanish. A couple shots and BAM — the lights are back on. And I feel something that resembles happiness. That type of respite is needed for the human condition. Especially in 2025.

I’m obviously not advocating for drinking, but feeling everything all the time with no tool other than move through it? That shit gets tiring.

Yes, inner strength. Yes, big picture. Yes, play it forward.

But sometimes I just don’t want to. I want to take the easy road, not the high road (insert joke about getting high lol).

For the most part, being sober is automatic. I don’t have to think about it like I did in the early days. If my routine gets fucked or I’m not occupying myself, I’m not about to spiral into cravings and desperately whack at my phone to find a meeting.

But when life lifes? That’s when it switches to manual. Because despite being 794 days sober — which, after six years of manic drinking, feels like a lot — when pain and discomfort hit, my brain still tries to protect me. And I taught my brain that alcohol was safety. That it took the pain away (before making it worse).

But alas. I don’t disappear into the bottom of a shot glass anymore.

I ache. I swear. I ugly cry (jokes — I look pretty when I cry lol). I write weird essays like this that are barely coherent and only loosely resemble structure.

I sit. I process. It is fucking exhausting. And sometimes, I just want to say fuck it.

But no.

It’s easier to choose sobriety every time forever
than to feel reprieve for fifteen minutes
and chase those fifteen-minutes
forever.

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