13 Years Sober: A Memorial to My Drinking

If I kicked drinking, anyone can.

On Memorial Day, we celebrate, honor, and give thanks to the innumerable American soldiers who gave their lives for the noble causes not just of American freedom, but for the freedom of the oppressed around the world. To our many readers and authors who are veterans - and especially to our founding partner and artistic director

Mike Kilgore

- we salute you.

On this particular Memorial Day, though, I confess my thoughts were a little more self-centered. I spent the weekend celebrating, honoring, and giving thanks for a victory of my own: a battle that I fought, and which I'm pleased to report that I'm currently winning.

This weekend, I celebrated 13 years of continued sobriety and recovery from alcoholism.

I've now been sober since I was 26 years old, in 2011. Having been raised a proper Midwestern girl, the eldest child and daughter, it's taken me decades to unlearn the idea that I am never allowed to highlight my own accomplishments. So I'm practicing that here, and I hope you'll indulge me - because I'm pretty damn proud of quitting drinking and getting sober.

Alcoholism: God knows I came by it honest. There are too many depressing details to include here on the subject of this disease's love affair with my family tree. You wouldn't be able to follow it. I will point out, though, that I was incredibly fortunate to have had a very stable childhood, filled with love, encouragement, and innumerable advantages, despite all of this. One common misconception is that alcohol is a disease of poverty. I assure you, it is not.

What is it, then? It's a disease of heredity.

A big part of my eldest-daughter syndrome meant that I was terrified of being in trouble. So I made it through high school without touching a drop of alcohol - I remember giggling with my best friend, Kerry, on our graduation trip to Mexico over the delicious good-girl mischief of legally drinking strawberry daiquiris at the resort. It was my very first, very tempered taste, and it was followed by equally modest intake over the next two years as I lived and imbibed in Germany and Canada.

But by the time I moved back to the States, I was 21 and the novelty had worn off. Now I knew what I liked - I had a routine established. What I liked was wine. Dry red wine. By the bottle.

I think I hid it well - how often I was drinking and how much. At bars or with friends, I'd usually have one beer or cocktail, max - until I got home, that is. Then I'd make up for what I honestly saw as lost time.

So I usually did my drinking alone. Did my friends and family know? I honestly don't think so. Certainly my mother knew what to look for after her marriage to my father. But the only time she said anything about my drinking was one day, after my fiancé dumped me. I was 25 by this time, living with my parents temporarily, and I'd planned to take a long weekend trip to visit him in Detroit. Now I'd come back much earlier than expected - and minus a ring.

I turned to my tried-and-true method as I sulked and soothed my pain. Mom happened to walk past me through the kitchen door as I carried away my second wine glass, filled to the brim with Merlot.

'Whoa, there, Missy," she said in her Teacher Voice. "That's quite a full glass!"

I was in no mood. "Moooom," I whined, sinking down cross-legged on the buttery leather couch. "He called off the wedding!" She gave me a sympathetic grimace and backed off. I wasn't even allowed to sit on the couch that way, but nothing was said about that, either.

What she didn't know was that I'd been sneaking bottles of wine up to Detroit when I visited my ex. A questioning Muslim, he didn't always do Ramadan and he didn't need his hamburgers to be halal - but he certainly didn't drink. He had no idea I'd creep outside to my car once he was asleep and down half a bottle in ten minutes.

Then I moved out, and my brother would come visit me. We had a habit of hanging out on my enclosed front porch, shooting the shit and smoking cigarettes. I don't remember whether he was of legal drinking age, but he'd see me with a glass of wine. I really believe he had no idea that glass would usually be my sixth or so that evening. It was torture not to refill it until he'd left.

Then I started going to my job on a glass of wine - and I don't mean one serving; I mean a full glass. The job had changed and become much more stressful. I started developing panic attacks. Of course, I didn't know that was what they were. All I knew is that drinking was the only thing that prevented them.

I convinced myself I was just like the characters on "Mad Men." After all, my shift didn't start until afternoon, so what was wrong with a little liquid lunch?

Nothing, probably - it was an office, not an operating room. But when I'd shakily manage to make it through my shift and then go home and plow through another couple of bottles, even I could begin to see that something was wrong.

I never woke up in a gutter. I never went broke. I never totaled a car or lost a job or got a DUI - despite driving drunk to the damn liquor store several times. It was only half a mile away - why didn't I just walk (or, gee, just stop for the night)? I told myself it was because it was a rough neighborhood, failing fantastically to appreciate that it was a rough neighborhood precisely because of people like me.

I've thanked God more times than I can count for the totally undeserved blessing of never having hurt anyone.

One night, I was sitting on my porch alone, drinking after work. Oddly, I recall that it was Malbec this time. At 1 in the morning, my phone rang. It was Kerry - the friend I'd savored those strawberry daiquiris with in Mexico. She lived in St. Louis now, and her shift at the hospital must have just ended.

We'd had a precarious friendship for awhile now. There was literally and figuratively distance between us - we no longer seemed to understand each other as we once did. But I was always thrilled to hear from her. I picked up.

"Sally. Um. I have to apologize to you for some things. I'm sorry for ..." And she rattled off a list of everything that had seemed to come between us.

I was baffled. "Well ... I forgive you, of course! Thank you. But ... what's this about?"

There was a pause. "I'm in AA," Kerry said stiffly. "I'm on Step 9. It's 'making amends.'''

I listened in shock as Kerry proceeded to explain that she was an alcoholic, and that she'd been drinking during many of our interactions for quite awhile now. I knew she drank - didn't we all drink? - but I had no idea it was something she'd need to turn to AA for.

As I listened to her enumerate the ways in which her behavior around alcohol had gotten out of control - and it clearly had; she described misadventures far worse than my own - I started sweating. I started feeling the way I did at work, when I was thirty seconds away from a panic attack. My empathy curdled into fear.

Suddenly I heard another voice. It said, "Sally, Kerry is where you'll be in six months."

I don't remember the rest of the call. Instead, my mind pinged frantically from thought to thought.

My father had just died from complications of kidney failure. Three months before, he had sobbed to me over the phone that he'd had an awful dream. He was in heaven, standing before God. God asked him what happened to his kidneys, and he'd said, "I drank them away."

Drinking was getting in the way of my life. Sooner or later, I was bound to have an accident in the car, or someone at work would notice I was drunk.

Or both.

But I needed it! I honestly needed alcohol. Didn't I?

I had just had a preview of what my future could be. And honestly, I'd be lucky to experience what Kerry had. After all, she was still here to tell the tale.

There in the dark of my front porch, sitting on an appalling orange vinyl couch that had been there when I moved in, I downed the last of the Malbec in my glass. And then I poured the rest of the bottle out the window. I never opened another.

No rehab, no outpatient program, no AA. I just quit. And I never looked back.

In the time since I got sober, alcohol has taken more people I've loved. They've died, or their drinking made them a destructive presence in my life. I regret to say that alcoholism ended my first marriage - but I'm proud as hell to say that I have never relapsed. Not once.

Oh, it's not that I haven't thought about it. Staying sober does get easier, but that old longing can still pop back up and surprise me! Just a few weeks ago, our family was in San Diego for the weekend. We stopped at a light in front of a lovely restaurant patio, and as I watched the patrons enjoy their glasses of beer as they looked out at the ocean, I felt a physical pang! Just one beer, some deep-down part of me wanted to argue. Just one!

But I can't. I can't have just one, so I can't have any. That's all there is to it. As a matter of fact, I'm so committed to my continued sobriety that I'll stake everything I stand for on my record still being intact in another 13 years. Another 23 years. Another 33, or as many as I'm lucky enough to get to enjoy, waking up clear-headed and in control.

Getting sober doesn't magically fix everything that can be hard or unfair about life. I certainly still have personal issues. My life definitely still has its share of challenges. But the issues are ones I'm well-equipped to face, and the challenges spark growth. I'm in a relationship with a partner I don't have to sneak around. I'm in a career that doesn't give me panic attacks! And above all, I no longer have anything to hide.

It's impossible to overstate how important that is. It's - well, it's freedom. And as we've seen, fighting for freedom is the best fight there is.

So here's a memorial to my active-alcoholic self: Girl, thank God you got your shit together. Your whole life was waiting.

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I want to close with a special note: Alcoholism is a disease, not a character flaw. What is a character flaw is choosing not to get help. Even if you don't think you're hurting anyone but yourself, you deserve a better life.

If you or someone you know needs help getting sober, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) hotline at 1-800-662-4357.

If it's a crisis, call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

And if that's too scary, shoot me a message. It’s a blessing to me to help folks embarking upon their sobriety journeys, and I'll point you in the right direction.