★★★★☆ | Sobriety | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph
One of the best sobriety memoirs I’ve read. McKowen has a wonderful writing voice and uses blunt honesty to share her journey from alcoholic to a well-balanced sober person. The sheer number of highlights I marked (see below) are a good indicator of how much this one resonated with me.
Highlights
I’d been using alcohol to hold things up on the back end for so long — and even though it had only made everything far worse, it offered the temporary illusion of escape and control. For a few hours every night, I didn’t have to see or feel so sharply the mess.
Drinking, plans for drinking, casual references to drinking, jokes about drinking, memes about drinking, advertisements for drinking were everywhere — are everywhere.
Here’s the dirty little truth no one likes to admit — everyone feels better in the long run when they don’t drink. Not just alcoholics — everyone. Because putting alcohol into your body isn’t life giving; it’s life sucking. Nobody’s life actually improves because of alcohol, even though most people I know would scoff at that — That’s what you think [wink, wink clink, clink ] — and society tells us otherwise ten ways to Sunday.
Isn’t it completely fucking bizarre that we don’t question (and, in fact, highly encourage) regular consumption of a drug that’s more harmful and causes more deaths than cocaine, heroin, and meth combined?
Alcohol is the only drug you have to explain not using.
Liminal space. Limen is a Latin word that means “threshold.” It is the time between the “what was” and the “next,” a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing.
I was still hoping for a third door: another option besides door number one (drinking) and door number two (sobriety). I simply could not fathom that there wasn’t a fucking third door.
One of the definitions of sobriety is to be clearheaded. In that way, sobriety is about freeing yourself from any behavior, relationship, or way of thinking that enslaves you and keeps you from being present to life.
This is how it is done — how anything is done. One moment, then the next, then the next. This is how this book is being written: I type this word, then this one, then this one. The words build sentences. The sentences build a paragraph. A book is impossible, but a word and then another word is not. A lifetime of sobriety was impossible, but a moment of sobriety was not. I was doing it, and I was doing it, and I was doing it again.
Now I feel about sobriety much the same as I feel about becoming a mother: it has brought me right up to the nose of life itself and forced me to look it straight in the face. At first, the nearness was too much; there was nothing to protect me from the immediacy of things — not from the bright lights or the sharp pain. But then, eventually, I came to realize that this is what it really means to be alive — to not look away from any of it — and that all I was really doing before was pretending: floating through my days half-numb, half-involved, half-awake, thinking I was really living when in fact I was missing it all.
In those moments, I found that right alongside the sharp intensity and unease, there was some small part of me willing to stay, another voice softly saying, I am willing to be here. Behind all those nos and never-agains is a much bigger yes. It might not seem clear now, but it will be clear soon. Listen to the voice. Listen to your body. This is in you already.
There is a life that is calling you forward, begging you to meet its eye, to glimpse its vision for you. You can get only so far by running away from what you do not want. Eventually you will have to turn toward what you do. You will have to run toward a bigger yes.
One stranger who understands your experience exactly will do for you what hundreds of close friends and family who don’t understand cannot. It is the necessary palliative for the pain of stretching into change. It is the cool glass of water in hell.
Nothing in the future exists yet. But anything is possible right now. Including the thing you think you cannot do.
What do you want, sweet girl? What do you really, really want? And I found it was this. It has always been this. To have a direct experience of life. To know its depths completely. To be enraptured in the mystery. To be the hero of my own great adventure.
Khalil Gibran: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”