Yawning and stretching, I could stay sober for the rest of my life, as long I remember to remind myself I can never drink again. That’s part of the reason I write this blog.
It sure as shit isn’t for the fifty or so people that regularly read it.
Sobriety’s super easy on the surface. When I collected my one-year chip at That Thing I Go To On Saturday Afternoons, someone congratulated me, and I made a flippant comment, making light of the achievement. I shrugged and said, “It’s no big deal. All I did was not drink a drink for one year.”
And that’s true. But, as pointed out by one of my closest fellows, who luckily was in earshot, it is a big deal.
I agreed with him, and then proceeded to accept my congratulations in the way I should’ve received it in the first place: with humility and dignity, and without false modesty.
Making it to a year sober is a big deal, when you consider the previous six years I’d been drinking every day, apart from the odd period of sobriety. The only other things I did daily on those days were sleep, eat, drink, go to the bathroom, and floss and brush my teeth. Imagine stopping doing one of those out of the blue and keeping it up for a calendar year, still holding your pee as you try to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
So it is a big deal, but I’ll write something next that might piss a few people off, and unlike when I attempted to eschew the congratulations, there’s no false modesty of flippancy in sight: staying sober for that year was a cakewalk for ninety-nine percent of the time.
I could’ve done it standing on my head, while simultaneously riding and hopping up and down on a unicycle that doubled up as a pogo stick. Hell, throw a bear and crocodile into the mix, and I’d have wrestled those, too, all while staying sober.
It was easy.
But here’s the catch: If you really want it—don’t just need it, this time—and if you have no reservations about wanting to quit drinking, and if you’re convinced you’re an alcoholic and that drinking alcohol is something you can never do again, it’s only easy for ninety-nine percent of the time, bar the first three for four days.
Seems like I might have made a typo in the last clause of that sentence by including the word “only.” I haven’t.
That one percent, which might arise when a relative dies, you don’t get that promotion for which you were a shoo-in, you get into an Armageddon-style argument with your spouse, or god forbid, something happens to your children, that’s when you earn your sobriety.
That one percent doesn’t have to be something significant on the outside, either. It could just be a sudden change in attitude, a strong desire to drink that comes out of the blue, and a wholehearted disregard for everything and everyone for which you’ve been staying sober accompanying it. It might last for ten minutes, or five minutes, but every sober person has an Edward Hyde inside him wanting to come out and fuck-up his sobriety.
It doesn’t have to be sudden or acute, either. It can be over a longer period and it can creep up on you. Your diseased alcoholic mind, your Edward Hyde, could convince you, over days or weeks, that you don’t like the job you have, that you dislike an important person in your life, that you’re a bad person with little to contribute to the world, and ultimately, that there’s only one solution: to get drunk.
In the history of mankind, getting drunk has only ever achieved one thing: getting the person in question drunk.
But in your moment of madness, it will seem like a viable solution to whatever bullshit problem Mr. Hyde convinced you of.
So yeah, staying sober is easy. I completed a great deal of that first year in my pajamas, watching B-movies and laughing my ass off. But to get home without alcohol on my breath or bottles of it in my shopping bags, I had to ride a bucking bronco some of the time.
Yawning and stretching, I can stay sober for the rest of my life, at least for only ninety-nine percent of the time.
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