How Sober Feels...

If you have never been addicted, you likely cannot relate.  The pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization you wake with every day, that dogs your every footstep all day, every day, and the oblivion you come to find that is the only thing that blots out your miserable existence.

And as awful as the cycle is, attempting to break out of the cycle is worse.  Getting sober is fucking awful.  Wanting to die is absolutely part of that process.  A lot of us don’t ever make it.  We get stuck on the merry-go-round that is addiction (and Is not merry), forever going around and around and around, destroying ourselves and all our sweet relationships at the very same time.

But once you get sober, like really sober, off of all the things, sober feels great.  You can see color, taste things you didn’t know tasted that way, you can feel the pulse of life.  I can remember being in my first year of sobriety, every morning I would get up and walk to this woods edge to with my dog.  My amends to her for being such a shitty dog mom when I was drinking.  And she would run in the woods and I would watch her, and I would take in the smells of the woods and watch my breath in the cold air.  I would stand on the path and just marvel at life and how I was living it in that moment and how present I felt.  It was unbelievable.  That is how my life felt.  Absolutely, completely unbelievable to me.  And I wasn’t doing anything all that amazing, I was just walking my dog in the woods before work.  That is all.  But it is one of the best times I can ever remember in my life because I was there. Really fucking there.

Sober doesn’t feel good at first.   I am not going to lie.  The process of getting to sober, is not a great deal of fun.  It sucks ass in truth.  But once you get past the DTs and the stomach issues and the disrupted sleep and reactive hypoglycemia, things begin to level out.  And you feel better. (You really do, I swear).

And eventually, you feel everything, better.  And that is likely where we lose a lot of people along the way.  Most of us started drinking or using to avoid the intensely unmanageable feelings we had about pretty much everything in this life.  Most especially ourselves.  Addicts have a mind that constantly and unremittingly chewing on them all day, every day.  The internal self talk is critical, delusional, and full of pain.  And escape feels like the only option.

But if you make it to physical sobriety, you do feel better.  Your labs sort themselves.  I came in at 25 and I had poor liver function.  But because I stopped when I was relatively young, it all leveled out eventually.  The horrible stomach issues also improved and I could stop drinking a bottle of pesto bismal everyday.  My reactive hypoglycemia took a bit longer to get under control and I ate my way through early recovery.  I gained 20 pounds.  But honestly, if you look at photos of me still drinking and then 6 months later, I look heavier in the drinking photos because I was so bloated.  Even 20 pounds looked better on me than active addiction.

Sober is hard to achieve, but once you get there, I highly advise remaining.  Staying sober is a lot easier than getting sober.  The toll of achieving sobriety is difficult and unfun.  I cannot say enough about doing the whole “getting sober” thing just the one time and then staying.  I promise, there will not be anything in sobriety that is worse than trying to get sober over and over again.  Everything passes.  Not without pain and suffering, but it does eventually pass and it is so nice when it does to still have your day count and not have just endured a whole ration of shit, only to have to start the whole motherfucking process all over again.

There is nothing quite like taking the edge off with whatever substance you prefer.  Nothing like that at all.  But I will also tell you that there is also nothing quite like waking up sober day after day, no hang over, no demoralizing behavior to atone for, no wreckage.  Highly recommend the sober over taking the edge off.

It has been a long time for me.  30+ years since I took a drink or a drug or hell even had a smoke.  That is a long time, and I am hear to tell ya that it still feels like a release.  I still feel the relief of that impulsive and not well thought out decision to get sober all those years ago.  It is an investment that pays handsome dividends, while allowing you to live a life that is beyond any bar room delusion.  If it wasn’t, I would NOT still be here living this whole sober deal.  Life had to get better AND feel better in order for me to still be here sober.  Absolutely and without a doubt.

How sober feels is good.  Sometimes it feels ecstatic, sometimes it feels unbearably hard and unfair.  But most of the time, it just feels fucking good.  Not the best feeling ever, but always, always that is juxtapositioned against how awful drinking and using felt when you were on your way down.  And the high of being sober is pretty fucking great, even when compared to how great it felt to knock back a couple of whiskeys in a bar room full of strangers I mistook for friends.

I was out watching a band play on Saturday night with some of my “normal” friends.  One of my friends’ husbands turned to me and asked me if I ever missed the drinking.  Did I ever wish I could partake in what all of them were doing?  And I didn’t even falter.  I told him, “I cannot think of the fun without the carnage.  The two are forever married up in my mind.  I know there would be fun but the price tag on that fun would be far beyond my budget. So, no, I do not miss it.  I know the high and I know the low, and I do not want either anymore and I have no delusion that I can ever have the high without the low.”

And that is how sober feels, grounded.  Happily grounded.  Like I am actually living life instead of running from it.  I am in the race even on the days I don’t really want to be.  I get to be.  And the whole psychic change that happened to me, that took me from being a hopeless drunk to a sober, functioning adult was that before I got sober life happened to me and now life happens for me while it is happening to me.  I do not always like what life throws my way.  But I do look for what I am supposed to learn from all the shit flinging life does sometimes, and I can always, so far, find a lesson and a blessing in whatever it is, no matter how much I detest it and no matter how badly it hurts.

Sober feels good all day, every day.  I really don’t ever want to ever experience the high because I cannot think about the high without remembering in excruciating detail the low.  So, for me at this point in my life and sober journey, sober feels better than my other options.  And as an addict of the highest magnitude, I will tell you that if sober did not feel better than drunk, I would not still be here.  An addict always chases a high.  And so that is what recovery does for me, allows me to chase the high of being here, right now, in this life, sober, alive and relatively sane.  I said relatively...

Again, still...