When a frightening truth becomes a beautiful promise
I remind myself it took me twelve years to get sober. Alcohol first laid its claim on my mind at age fourteen, as I was smiling drunkenly at myself in the bathroom mirror at a house party. Drugs arrived at seventeen, when alcohol became more enemy than friend, riddled with calories as it was, in direct opposition to my hunger for thinness. My body and mind swung and swerved with these two colliding tides of disorder and addiction for years before I decided enough was enough.
Then came the hard part—the liminal space. Conscious extrication of myself from my behaviors blended with reversion to my old ways. Only now I knew, without a doubt, that these choices wouldn’t save me. That gap between who I wanted to be—recovered and sober—and who I felt trapped in being—hungry and drunk—seemed endless when I was in the middle. And I moved in inches, not miles.
Because although my addiction was aggressive and linear, moving at breakneck speeds to sweep my legs out from under me, my sobriety was quiet, slow, and circular.
I remind myself it took me twelve years to get sober so I don’t forget that liminal space, the time of knowing yet feeling unable to stop. I also remind myself because I tend to revise history now that sobriety feels close to natural (sometimes easy, even), and the story becomes one of a small jump rather than a decade-long fight. This is a recurring theme for me. When I reach new summits, I look back on the rocky crevasses and think, “See, that wasn’t so bad—onto the next one,” neglecting to witness and be engulfed by the fantastic magic of what I’ve overcome.
Because in those two years, I’d built the muscles of remembering deep enough into my head to no longer associate alcohol with all the old feelings: joy, contentment, the lines of myself blurry enough to stop feeling so sharp. In their place: steadfast determination to preserve myself against this thing called addiction.
Which is why I became so terrified last Wednesday.
I wanted to drink, which is rare for me. Those sneaky cravings of what if and why not have rarely grown past brief whispers since I chose sobriety. Until I drove past an old dive that my now-husband and I frequented a few times during the pandemic. This was not an especially nostalgic place. Yet, as I drove home from leading a workshop, an unwelcome movie flashed in my mind’s eye.
I pull into the poorly lit parking lot, streetlights glowing dully in the summertime half-light. I find a stall and hop out, walking purposefully to the swinging front door nestled between windowless walls plastered in beer and hard seltzer ads, two-for-one specials, and “Life’s a Beach” Corona posters.
I walk into the raucous bar finding its stride as day stretches into night. I sit at the black Formica bar top, order my usual, and drink. Then I drink another, and another, and another. Then what?
The first movie jitters to black as another lights up. I’m sitting in my truck, boozy and woozy and weepy. Cut to me calling…except there’s no one I can call to buy drugs from or get a drink with. Everyone knows I’m sober. Cut to me being pulled over by the cops, blue lights flashing in my bloodshot eyes.
I snap out of that movie, the one of everything falling apart. There are three Savannahs now: a possible future me, who could turn into the parking lot; a past me who would have done exactly that; and a present me who heads home to wash her face, read her Kindle, and fall asleep.
An unfamiliar awareness of my sobriety’s fragility washes over me. I am afraid of how the first movie ends, knowing I was gripped by an urge that could pull me under, tear me up, and spit me out. Urges like this are new for me. My sobriety has rarely felt tenuous or endangered in the two-and-change years since I quit drinking and doing drugs.
My road to recovery was winding and relatively uneventful. I didn’t go the AA way; I chose to meet with a counselor for eight weeks instead. We worked together over those eight weeks—me and this man who’d chosen sobriety, too. And what struck me was his lack of sensationalism. Not uncaring, not minimizing, but also not urgent, life-or-death. I have utmost respect for my counselor because what I needed, at that time, was to take my drinking less seriously. Scratch that—I needed to take myself less seriously.
Not because my addiction was unserious, but because I am prone to shame and intensity. In my world of active addiction, each drink was a symbol of my sheer incapacity to be a productive human in the world. In our sessions, I cried. At home, I read Byron Katie’s Loving What Is and looked again at the traumas and sadness that had brought me to his office. I went deeper, but I also zoomed way, way out.
We took away the story of each binge and bender, each misstep becoming less imminent demise and more scientific assessment, simplifying what felt like a complex monster of an addiction into four words:
Drink or don’t drink.
I’ve only now realized that the shame began falling away in those four words: all it came down to was one choice: Drink or don’t drink. No earth-shattering revelations or proclamations required.
I had a choice to make, day in and day out, that held no deeper meaning about who I was or what I was worth. I didn’t make that choice until several months after our sessions ended, doing final “research” (his term for drinking once you realize you have a problem) at a New Year’s Eve party, one night of a snowboarding trip, and two nights of a music festival. My last night of research was at a Mexican restaurant in early March 2022 (which I wrote about here), when my soul spoke to me and said she was done with this ridiculous drinking game called addiction.
Since then, I’ve taken this choice I make every day for granted, falling for the false security that my sobriety is a given—un-precarious, stable, and immutable.
Not a big deal because it’s just who I am now, as though I haven’t reinvented myself time and again in my twenty-eight years of being a human. Not a big deal because the alternative seemed so distant until last Wednesday.
Driving past that dive bar, my mind already halfway to the counter, reminded me that every day is a big deal. There was a time for simplicity, but now there is a time for something else. Not fear, but fragility. Not shame, but vigilance. Not anxiety, but awe.
I’ve become a little too blasé in the past few months, pretending my sobriety would never be in jeopardy, believing from my pseudo-pink cloud that I am uniquely immune to the urges, believing my brief sobriety would always stand up against a decade of escapism. In my unseriousness, a crack opened, a fragile moment of what if. I flew too close to the sun, my fingertips grazed with burning to remind me that this has always been and will always be a daily choice.
Sobriety has become so reflexive—no thanks to offers of beer at parties, being the designated driver, going to grocery stores without ever stopping in the alcohol aisle—that I forgot how delicate it is. At any moment, I could fall off the proverbial wagon, pull over and walk into a bar, or buy a six-pack at a gas station.
A beckoning whim of “Well, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad,” flares my shame, catalyzing the razor’s edge of that night, adding acid to the burn. Shame says, “How could you be so careless? Don’t you know what this would mean?”
Yet on its face, it wouldn’t mean much of anything. Drink or don’t drink. I remember shame can never heal this fear, a fear I’d foolishly determined I’d never have to face again—my fear of drinking. Which is not a fear of a distilled beverage that contains intoxicants but what that drink would mean. Who I would become were I to drink.
I think, unexpectedly, of the ocean.
There’s simplicity in my surfing, too. Paddle or don’t paddle. Surf or don’t surf. All the rest are complications of the mind, projections of meaning onto a single choice.
Yes or No.
Be alive to life or turn away from it.
One of my clients once said, “Every day we make it out of the ocean alive is a day to celebrate.” The ocean breathes, moves, and injures. She gives and takes without discretion or judgment—not caring about any of us in her midst. In the ocean and my addiction, to believe I’ll ever be in control could kill me. I didn’t understand what she meant until I asked myself what this essay is about. Now I do.
Wonder lives in the precariousness.
My sobriety is as powerful and enduring as the waves and as frail as my breakable limbs and surfboard, my finite lungs and flesh. I was terrified that its fragility meant I was in danger, yet there is no surfing without the knowledge you could be swallowed whole. There is no sobriety without my awareness of its opposite.
And to surf is to conquer, fear, dance with, tune into, be broken and humbled by the ocean all at once. Every day I make it out alive from the sea and addiction is a day of wonder, one made more precious and sacred for how unpromised all of it is. Each wave I ride is a request, my secular prayer to come closer to truth, making myself just a little more raw and willing to weather the inexorable ride into bliss and pain.
Fear begets awe. A storm rages, and life goes on. I must take myself less seriously.
What I love in surfing is what I despise in life—the sensation of my smallness, the total lack of control. I move my body as best I can to survive in these worlds: one where I find solidity in my unimportance, the other where I seek to escape the same.
The answer as to why one hurts and one heals eludes me.
Yet wonder arises. Wonder I’d lost sight of and will lose sight of again in my self-indulgent “I.” Me. My addiction. My struggle. My life. Which are exquisite and worthless unto themselves.
I am infatuated with surfing and enamored with drugs for their unique abilities to remove me from the equation, for their wildness and promise.
Neither does what I crave from them in any consistent way. But one keeps me from doing the other, so sacrifices are made, and here I am—healing from another sunburn with a freshly damaged-then-repaired surfboard in the bed of my truck and hoping to sneak in a session tomorrow, my days orbiting around possibilities of swell. Craving and craving for more, more, more.
I began this essay to ruminate on fear and anxiety, and what it would mean to relapse. I thought driving by the bar that night meant I’d fallen from grace. What it meant is I fell further into it. Deeper into surrender. My secular prayer for truth. My flimsy sobriety jarred me as though I’d hit reef or been held under by one too many set waves, my utter breakability flashing through my amygdala. How easily I put my faith into chaos.
Now, I arrive far from fear to celebrate my tender, vulnerable self.
To be awed by my tender, vulnerable self.
To be awed by your tender, vulnerable self.
To be stunned by our tender, vulnerable selves, which does not mean we are weak or failing, but precisely the opposite—our precariousness a testament to our strength and the redemption of this thing called sobriety made all the more wondrous for its unpromised tomorrow.
And to walk toward that humble tomorrow one fragile, spectacular day at a time.
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