Getting Sober in a Closet

A pandemic is a good time for another first year of sobriety. It is also the worst.

A pandemic is as good a time as any to learn new things.  I’ve got many friends who disappeared into their homes in March and by September they were speaking a new language and pickling vegetables.  People can always change in ways that are not always predictable.  I have a drinking problem, and so I decided that the pandemic was an excellent time to not drink, another day of lockdown at a time.

Being sober has meant that I’ve had to sit through an entire pandemic without anything to soften the edges.  Every Doug Ford presser?  On full alert.  The American election?  Wide-eyed and awake, for as long as it lasted.  It turns out  I am foolish enough to take the world head-on with a gusto only seen amongst the desperate or the freshly sober; a distinction without much of a difference.  I didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter.

The decision to stop drinking was made for me, at least at first.  This wasn’t a pandemic-induced decision; I didn’t stop drinking once news broke of a situation in Wuhan.  Trust me.  I decided to stop drinking on a typical December evening, when I should have been elsewhere.  I distinctly remember a police officer telling me to walk home, and I tend to take the first offer I get, especially if it is the best offer I expect to receive.  And on that night, one year ago today, I had my last drink.  And when I woke up the next day, not drinking became an ongoing decision I started to make for myself.

Getting sober during a pandemic is remarkably easy or difficult, depending on how you are socially calibrated.  I call it getting sober in a closet, and it isn’t for everybody.  Some people need the support of others to push through the greatest challenges of life.  Not me.  I go solo, without a net.  It’s how I’ve gotten sober all three times.  The method clearly works.

Alcohol and drugs have always figured prominently in my life.  First to self-medicate away the pain and hurt, and then just to function within my own skin.  Neuroplasticity is interesting.  I was always coasting along on something, and I was doing a really good job for a long, long time, until the wheels just suddenly came off.  A high-pressure job that involved heavy social drinking got me to four pints a night, and the rest was just me taking things a little bit further.  Because that is what I do.  

I had been in control of my drinking for a long time before I suddenly wasn’t again.  The last time I got sober was after my first year of undergrad.  I did it in a closet (specifically, the university library) and absorbing new ideas became my drug of choice.  I made sure my mind was always busy, it wasn’t allowed to stop.  For a long time, my brain just stayed in motion, pushing me to higher levels of education and into progressively larger offices.  For a while I was convinced I had arrived, I just wasn’t sure where.

One day, or maybe it was a year, I just got bored.  I wish I could point to something more climatic or eventful, but when my brain slows down it secretly keeps itself busy by becoming its own worst enemy.  I was good enough at work that I didn’t need to think anymore, everything was paint-by-numbers and I had macros to fill in any blanks.  And so my brain continued finding uncomfortable things to think about in order to keep itself busy, while the several drinks at night would serve to slow it down very effectively for at least a little sleep.

Drinking has always been the only way I’ve felt comfortable in my own skin.  You either get this or you don’t, and if you do I am sorry.  I made a choice to be uncomfortable again, because everyone gets to choose how they want to feel, and under what conditions.  Addiction is a horrible disease and I am not a stranger to the worst of it.  I was well along the path to becoming a person that nobody ever wants to become, and so I walked home one night, one year ago, and decided it was probably time to call it a career.

I got sober in a closet by returning to the world of ideas.  I write again, if we’re going to call it that.  As I share my thoughts, I am slowly remembering who I used to be.  You learn a lot when you get sober in a closet, about the world and about yourself.  You learn that there is as much to be learned in a library as there is along the length of a bar, and although the two are very different, they both teach you that the world is seemingly open with possibilities, yet forever closed off and restricted.

I am very aware that pandemic sobriety is always precarious, although to be sure there isn’t a lot of recent data to draw on.  My great grandfather certainly enjoyed the Roaring 20’s, so anything is possible if we pretend I’m not adopted.  What I know beyond any doubt, and what I never learned by reading any book or studying the bottom of a glass, is that my daughters are very proud of their dad today, and that’s all I ever wanted.