When Your Sober Story Changes - And It Will
Recovery is mostly big changes you don't see.
Be careful that when you tell your story, you tell it only if you want to, and you tell only people who deserve to know it. Because you could share your story and someone could take it, and run with it, and you’ll never see it again the way it really was.
I’m so far away from my last drink that I can’t even see it in the rear view mirror of my own mind. I’m so far away in my heart from where my heart used to beat, strangled in poison and the way headaches smelled like sickness and trash from the night before that I couldn’t remember.
I saw how a lot of other women, brave women, were telling their terrible stories of addiction and so I told mine, too. And it felt very good to do that, to get it all out. To scream inside the words and let them go. It is good to tell your story (says the writer who doesn’t know any other way, sipping her coffee by the storm-sky window).
But now. Now things are different. I am different. I am so much myself that I’m not myself at all anymore. My husband and I don’t fight. I go to bed when I’m tired. In the early mornings (when I wake up it is always early—I slept in on Sunday til 6:22am and smiled at how cute that was), I smell like clean linen, fresh shampoo, and the soft summer breeze. And it isn’t even summer yet, but everything I’m made of now is warm and of the sun.
My story, my story, what is my story? It used to be so different and now it’s so new I don’t know where to even begin. But I can tell you this one thing for sure: It is changing and it has changed already. I’m sorry, I guess that’s two things crumpled into one. I went for coffee in a cafe on Saturday at happy hour. That’s the picture up there that you see. Nobody was there, just me, my husband beside me, and the two young baristas behind the counter.
The coffee was strong, hot, black, and delicious. It tasted like heaven, if heaven were up to me.
Nobody was there. Nobody was anywhere all around. Even my love was static in my mind, on his phone, in an alternate universe. We were two planets, orbiting. Outside on the street the bars were filling up with locals, college kids, coming straight from the record stores and dorms. I guess some stay past the semester close. I guess some stay in the same story for longer than others.
There are so many stories to tell. The ‘befores’ and the ‘afters’ and those are the ones that sell. I am someone who used to drink so much that drinking lobbed off the limbs of my feelings and left me that way, inept, incapable, incapacitated. But the thing is, I hardly remember that now. I lived it. I told about it. I only find myself thinking about it when someone (or me, usually it’s me) makes me feel like I need to justify why my drinking was ‘really bad’ — you know, like bad enough to warrant the sobriety.
Was I bad enough?
I can hardly remember anymore. I can hardly remember why I used to tell the very bad parts. I know I didn’t tell them all. If you take secrets—bad ones— to your grave, does that make you bad? Or just human? Or just interesting? Would you rather die full of secrets or full of freedom? Are they different?
It was 5:04pm on a Saturday evening in June. My lipstick stained the paper coffee cup. The music was chill and the kids were up and down the streets drinking at bars that served frozen drinks, the kind with lots of sugar and rum that I used to absolutely hate. And the time didn’t trigger anything at all for me. And the spring evening air fell soft and impartial through my wavy hair as I sat doing nothing and telling no one about it.
And this is my life now. It’s so good and it’s so smooth I could tell about it but no one would believe me anyway. I feel like a kiddo who found a frog in the creek and brought it home to show everyone not the frog but the excitement. And you try so hard to make sure that frog doesn’t jump out before you can prove you have him, that he exists. That you found him and here he is—look! And you open your pocket and out he jumps and jumps away down the sidewalk. And even if anybody saw, they smile like they know, like they already know everything there is to know and you haven’t really shown them much, but you’re cute in your little excitement anyway.
So tell your story if you want to, that is your decision. I was able to tell mine all this time, mostly to help me heal, and also to help others feel not so alone in the terrible.
On Sunday I pulled a tarot card that contained the phrase “the transformation is complete.” And it finally felt like something out there in the Universe saw the frog I brought home. And saw the excitement inside me about it, too. And I sipped my coffee. And didn’t write a single word about any of it because maybe I don’t need to anymore.
Just the other day I told a friend, off hand: “…just because you don’t tell your story doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
It scared me, to say that. It scared me that there could be stories we keep inside forever. But maybe they don’t stay inside. Maybe some stories you carry around a while but then you open your pocket one day to grab money for ice cream, and they just jump, jump, jump right out and down the sidewalk and you never see them again.
And it’s fine. Because there’s still ice cream and evening sun. And you know. You know better than anyone in the whole wide world, what you had when you had it. And you are the only one who knows for sure when it’s gone.
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This is so beautiful Allison!! The peaceful warm sunshine you’re just radiating. So happy you’re doing so well. ❤️