1,000 days sober

on flying solo in the dark

At the beginning of every fall season, a male Great Horned Owl comes to stay in our back yard. I have never seen him, but I know he’s up there, high in a towering swamp maple tree. His distinctive haunting sounds ricochet and echo in the pitch black dark of the early morning.

5:57 a.m. Lying in bed, motionless and thrilled, I hear him.

I imagine his eyes sliding and collapsing in and out of his telescopic vision. He sees things no other creature can see from such a great distance in the dark.

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I guess, technically, I’m standing at the gate right now, waiting to get in. I mean, I know I’ll get in, not because I’m arrogant but just because it’s a fairly safe bet to assume that the last 999 days of my sobriety can likely predict at least the next one.

Tomorrow I’ll hit 1,000 days sober, or as the recovery community calls it: the comma club. I have fantasized about getting into the comma club since my first week of sobriety. I would like to know if there’s a cool jacket or robe they give you when you do this fucking thing.

Because I’ll be totally honest with you:

Recovering from alcohol addiction is the single most monumentally, fundamentally transformative thing I have ever undertaken in my life. And the fact that I am this astounded and inspired by my own stamina, commitment, and devotion to staying with this metamorphosis blows me clean away.

I’m not kidding.

I’m not even kidding a little bit.

I want a robe.

I want a fancy flashy silky hooded robe like the prize fighters wear. I want it wrapped around me declaring my victory over death, my triumph over every single stupid infuriating odd that would have predicted I was down for the count for life.

I want cheers and accolades and handshakes and a medal. I want recognition. I want this world that tried to snuff me out like a wet cigarette to kiss my goddamn ring.

Can I get a ring, by the way? Is there not a ring? Not a ring of any kind for 1,000 days and nights of not sloshing poison down my throat as my reward for surviving the hell that was my insides? Because I come from a place where I used to swallow poison to commend myself for participating in my own abuse.

It was so fucked up, man. It was so fucking fucked up.

And just like back then I could not fathom not drinking for one day, now I cannot fathom drinking for one day.

I didn’t know, though, you see what I mean? I didn’t know then what I know now. Because we don’t get it. We take all these ridiculous quizzes to see if we are alcoholics. To see if we “qualify” for “alcohol use disorder.”

“Alcohol abuse.”

Please. Please tell me what “alcohol use order” is.

Please tell me how much poison is the correct amount of poison to fuck around with.

Please tell me how I know if I abused alcohol. How I know if I hurt its mutherfucking feelings.

Is alcohol crying in a room behind closed doors? Is alcohol put in harm’s way again because I took it too far? My bad. Let’s see what the quiz says. Let’s see if I’m that bad. Let’s see if I “need help” because I can’t seem to drink “responsibly.”

We take quizzes to see if we have a problem with alcohol before we decide to stop drinking but it turns out that’s backwards. The real way to know if you suffer from alcohol addiction is to recover. Recovery answered all my questions real damn fast.

If you wake up every day mystified and ecstatic that you don’t feel sick, as though it were a miracle? That’s proof.

If you are astounded to find yourself laughing breezily at a simple joke on some nothing sitcom you’ve seen a billion times, but suddenly you feel that laughter like the most joyous butterflies dancing in your heart, so touching and sweet that you cry because you didn’t know you could laugh like this with such innocence and ease, with such gratitude, that it ribbons softly around your rib cage and blossoms like a thousand bouquets in your uncluttered, unbothered, unafraid mind?

That’s some real fucking proof.

It’d be frightening if it weren’t so beautiful. No, wait — it’s both.

If you catch a glimpse of your own face in the mirror two years into your recovery, and marvel at the definition, the glow, and the bright eyes, because you can’t believe how lucky you are that this face, these eyes, they are your own.

That’s how you know.

Your sweet kind smiling face smiling back at you just for standing there doing nothing at all but breathing. That smile is all the evidence you need to prove how close you came to never knowing yourself at all. That smile — for no reason, for no one else to see — is the realest thing you’ve ever done, or witnessed, or felt, or allowed yourself to be.

And if you think to yourself: where have I been all my life, every single day for 1,000 days in a row, and you turn around two years and nine months into a journey you still cannot believe you had the shocking amount of courage it took to undertake, and you want — in all of your darkest most secret places —for this feeling of pride, accomplishment, amazement, and soul-melting humility to last for the rest of your life.

If you pray every morning that you get to please, please, please, keep this beautiful, brutal, impossibly affirming life you’ve created, and never ever, ever have to go back to the way it was when you invited alcohol back into your face again and again to smash you in the teeth.

That’s the proof, man.

That’s all the fucking proof you need.

That you had a problem, no matter who would or wouldn’t believe it. That you had toxic blood in your veins and your gut and your hands, no matter who could or couldn’t smell it.

So maybe that’s how it is. Maybe I’ve got the robe, and the ring, and the scars and the muscle and the glittering eyes to prove I’ve been the fuck through it. No matter who can or cannot see it.

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There’s an uncanny energy in the darkness of the autumn season. When I hear my familiar owl friend long before the first light of morning, I imagine his lone flight, swooping silently, precisely, with fierce focus on the hunt of his life.

Every hunt is the hunt of his life.

Pursuing sustenance no other creature can see.

There are certain life paths on which we must fly solo, into our own dark night. No guarantees. No charts, no graphs, no maps. No accolades, no medals, no discernible finish line. We must stay the course and the course itself has to be enough.

We rely on our own instincts, wisdom, intuition, energy, and the majesty of our own bodies, to guide us to what we need.

We must learn to trust ourselves. To learn the terrain.

To keep our own watch.

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Photo by Kevin Goodrich on Unsplash