Should You Count Your Sober Days?

There's more in that number than you'd expect.

Photo by Syh on Unsplash

Last night, suddenly and out of nowhere, I swore I smelled booze. It was that gross musty beer or stale liquor smell. Like you’d inhale at a dive bar, yeasty or something. Only I was on my couch sipping tea watching Netflix. There was no booze there.

In a dream two nights ago, I was looking cute in a slender gray suit, shooting the shit with some colleagues whilst sipping a light beer. We were in a cafeteria of some sort. I felt chill- even laughed a bit at something someone said. It all felt so real. Even though I do not work an office job anymore. Even though I did not know the people in the dream who made me smile. Even though I sipped that ridiculous beer and thought, also ridiculously: Ah well, so what’s one beer. I’m cute and people like me.

I don’t even like beer. I never did.

Everyday last year I counted my sober days. One day at a time, I watched as they stacked up to an impressive 365 on December 31, 2022. When the calendar flipped to January 1st, I stopped counting. I have a lunar calendar journal I follow, and in the blocks where I used to write in my number of sober days, I just started leaving them blank. Wide open and empty. Each day now a kind of hollow, a kind of free.

Why count? Toward what? Infinity? And what for? Am I going to be one of those people who randomly announces on Instagram: I’m 400 days sober today! And people are thinking: Cool cool cool wtf does that even mean- is that a year and a month? No what is that? It’s like when people tell you their child is 29 months and you’re thinking, Ok that doesn’t compute is he a baby or is he a seven year old because stop with the math. If I were buying your kid a birthday card what number would be on the goddamn front.

I’m ten days (but who’s counting) into what sometimes lately feels like a movie or a docuseries about someone else’s life. Allie Goes Sober: Season Two. The second year of sobriety starts with the culmination of the first, so it can feel a bit like getting shot out of a cannon high, high into the sky toward the brilliant blinding sun, before inevitably falling back down to earth. Eventually, gravity pulls your head and your heart and your brainwaves back down until you hit the ground. Hard. At least, that’s what it has felt like for me. Reality just sort of flattens out in front of you and there are no more ‘firsts’ to get through. No more clearly marked hurdles to clear as you dash forward into the rest of your wide open life.

In my first year, the ‘firsts’ were milestones that anchored me along the path of sobriety. Having never thought I could even make it one day without drinking, one month seemed impossible enough. Then 100 days, then 200, but all the while. I never gave reaching past one year a second thought. Just get to one year, just get to one year, I kept telling myself. After one year, they say, it all gets so much easier.

So I moved from one first milestone to the next like a baby learning to walk by holding on first to the couch, then the coffee table, then the recliner (what would that make me metaphorically speaking, like 16 months? how old is that?). I celebrated each ‘first’ by buying myself a treat which was usually a cupcake or a book (see, sober people are wild don’t let anyone tell you different) and it felt nice, you know. To have a particular nameable thing to be proud of achieving. First Valentine’s Day sober. First Irish wake sober. First wedding sober. First dinner party, beach vacation, bbq, Halloween, birthday, Christmas, New Year’s Eve. In hindsight, even knowing I did all of those things sober, there’s a part of me that still cannot believe it.

I guess after drinking for 22 years, my brain won’t be able to wrap itself around this new reality for quite some time. Perhaps that’s the point of this little piece I am sharing with you today (bet you were hoping I’d get to one, yeah?). That sobriety is about so much more than not drinking. Putting down the substance is one thing- and it is HUGE please do not misunderstand- but what comes after cleaning up your physical body is clawing through the mess of your own mind which has been twisted around an addiction for a long, long time. And none of that is clearly marked. You can count days all you want, but it will not prepare you for what is to come. No math can tell you that.

I’m learning that what sobriety means in year two for me is going to be working through the psychological mind tricks of untangling immature responses to feelings of judgement, jealousy, anger, resentment, rejection, abandonment, grief. All the murky bits that I drowned out with alcohol so I wouldn’t have to feel them. I’m feeling them now, fuck knows. The revelations and ah-ha’s in therapy are coming so fast and furious now that I had to cut back to every other week because I honestly cannot take the overwhelm of this kind of accelerated transformation. It is so heavy. It is so thorough and unrelenting. You have to remind yourself to breathe. I really am not the person I used to be. And this touches every single area of my life and relationships.

It’s a lot. Is what I’m saying. You aren’t sure what will appear, and when it does you don’t know whether to hold onto it or let it go. This is about learning yourself. And yourself is mighty complicated indeed.

‘One day at a time’ is not just about not drinking. One day at a time is also- maybe even more so- about not letting your emotional state overwhelm you to such a degree that you feel trapped. That you feel so scared and skittish and desperate that the only way out of the panic feels like sucking down a drink. The good news is, you can change the way your mind works. You can learn to handle yourself with proper authority and care. And the thing is, this happens over and over a million times, until it starts to ingrain itself into who you are now. Someone who chooses differently. Who is aware and present enough to regulate her reactions, emotions, and needs. It’s all so very grown up.

If sobriety has taught me anything, it’s taught me to slow the fuck down and just manage one day, one evening, at a time. In week one, month one, year one, and beyond. Notice what is coming up for you in the feels department, and just feel it all the way through to the end. Which is not really the end, of course. Recovery is cyclical. You learn, and relearn, and relearn, over and over again. The way you rewire your brain to choose a sober life is by choosing it every day on repeat. It’s a process.

When I asked my therapist about whether the counting of my sober days in my journal was an anchor or a crutch, she suggested that maybe it depends how I was using it. I took that to mean- was counting each day a beautiful reminder of the most important commitment of my entire life, or was it keeping me from living the actual freedom of my new life by not being tied to a number?

To be honest, I don’t know yet.

And with the open waters of the unknown spread wide in front of me and all around, I think I like the idea of a reminder first thing in the morning of what day I’m on. Maybe not an anchor so much as a life raft out in this big open water. So I’ve started keeping track again. In a way, watching the numbers climb higher and higher is like watching something solid take shape, seeing how far I’ve come, and how far I am away from the person I used to be. Maybe that’s why I dreamt of drinking, and smelled a drink like a ghost in the air the other night. There is still a part of my old life that calls to me from far off across the distance of these hundreds of collected days, whispering: Hey girl, you sure?

I think the truest reason I am counting days again is that it reminds me I’m still here. With myself. That part won’t change. I’m 375 days sober today, in fact. And I know most people won’t really know what that means. Me neither. But I do know it’s mine.