two years sober today :D

Tomorrow I will be two years sober and it’s funny because I got too excited and sat down too fast to read on my vintage blue velvet couch, and I hit my head against the arm of it. And now my OCD brain is convincing me that I’m cognitively impaired by an impending concussion. It hurts, too, in a way that Tylenol (the only medicine that I can effectively take due to my SSRI, which I affectionately refer to as Ty-Ty) has not penetrated. It’s funny because when I was drinking, I would wake up worried because everything hurt and I didn’t know what happened now. Now, things still hurt and I know exactly what happened. Knowledge is power, am I right ladies.

It’s sort of an emotional time when my sober anniversary rolls around because I’m reminded of that first apocalyptic week of July 2024. Please, please please by Sabrina Carpenter playing. Unbearable heat, and a strange vacancy in my New Jersey hometown. I feel a pang of guilt. Survivors’ guilt? Or just general unease when I think about how it could’ve ended on that very last night.

I never thought I’d say this, but I don’t think about drinking the way that I used to. alcohol is no longer the main character. Similarly to Lana Del Rey, I always say that alcohol was my first great love. It changed me, no doubt, but now it feels more like an ex that I’ve gotten over. I continue to suffer from totality and I continue to crave oblivion when I am inconvenienced by the volume of my emotional world. It’s not that I don’t miss the temporary departure from self that drinking lent me. It’s just that the person I am today exists outside of a sphere where intoxication is an option.

While being present can be undeniably agonizing and exhausting, it is out of respect for myself and for this life that I don’t miss a moment of the narrative. I have evolved into someone so fucking bad ass, chic, intellectually, curious, audacious, and as Ariana Grande says in “thank you next” - the way she handles pain is so amazing. There was a stretch of time during which I romanticized and poeticized my alcoholism like making shapes out of a purpling bruise. I don’t regret doing that because the art that I made in that space, while sometimes incoherent, was a way to survive. However, my life has never been more rich with imagery than it is in sobriety. It is so exciting and so silly and so raw and so fun and so possible. The story is everywhere. I spill out of myself. My life is filled with yellow roses and carl Jung, and a career in academia that I built brick by brick. I actually didn’t teach at all before I got sober. I mean, I dabbled when I would chug Corona light and then catapult myself (hungover) over the Ben Franklin bridge and hand out seventh grade worksheets as a 21-year-old. But teaching… like really and truly teaching and falling in love with education? That happened for me in sobriety, and I think it’s only because of my sobriety that I was able to devote myself to the craft in a way that was honest and thoughtful. I was able to hone a pedagogy that I cared about and a present, humanistic ass approach to my relationship with my students, because I wasn’t thinking about getting gone. I knew that to write was to BE and I hope that I’ve been able to teach them the same. I hope that I can continue to teach them that escape isn’t the answer, even when everything feels hopeless.

Like I said, for a long stretch of my life, I became quite accustomed to poeticizing my experience of alcoholism as this glamorous, romantic fever dream frenetic blur. I revered a drunk night as this enigmatic portal of possibility, an alchemizing endeavor, a biblical freedom. But really it was just me taking pictures of random piles of trash on the New York City streets and throwing some sticks on top of it and saying some crazy slurred shit like “this is concept art where the natural meets the material.” and that’s on the lighter side. It makes me sad to think that I thought I needed alcohol as a lubricant for connection. That I thought that simply being seen was an act that required so much chemical loosening for all parties involved. Perhaps if we must pathologize it (unfortunately we usually must) (what up siggy F, you haunt me daily) …. Perhaps it is true that I learned somewhere in my childhood that my emotions made me crazy. Fuck it.. not perhaps. That is true. And maybe, like we all do, I just wanted to be loved (both romantically and platonically) and I didn’t think that I could be worthy of love with the heaviness of my anxiety attached to my soul. With the way that it showed up in my body. My nervous system was dysregulated, and instead of meeting myself with compassion,I was humiliated by my own suffering. I thought that the only way that I could be palatable is if I were anesthetized. I just want to give that girl a fucking HUG.

Connecting is a completely different thing, now. It is so vulnerable and so wholesome and I feel so brave every time I do it. I think about one of my very best friends in Pennsylvania, the kind of BFF that I’ve been manifesting forever and how our shared sobriety has been courage in everything we experienced together. Real girlhood shit like going to Taco Bell and crying and having existential crises and thrifting and rewatching the sopranos. We started a weekly writing club with our other friend, also sober, and we pour our souls out to each other w these fun journal prompts. Uninhibited, yet autonomous. I think about the way that I connect with A. The way that I am able to show myself to her. Allow myself to be witnessed. How I will always remember everything about our intimacy because I am present for it.

I have always been a ballsy bitch, (nj Italian) - but the way that self-worth changes once you put the gun down is incredible. I was so fucking impatient with myself, dude. so desperate to prove that I was worth it: worth my Ivy League masters program, worth a romantic partner, worth being in the cutthroat literary scene in New York, cool and sexy enough to party in Philly. I worshiped approval and achievements. My relationships were abusive or transactional and strange. And despite this, as a writer, I always prided myself on knowing myself, on being a self indulgent fuck who knew what made me tick. I loved that quote, not sure who it’s by and too lazy to look it up, sorry - “You can only meet others as deeply as you’ve met yourself.” but I didn’t know the half of it. Sobriety lifted a huge veil for me in terms of self discovery. The self trust that I’ve built in these past two years of sobriety has given me a safe place to feel and to play. To dream ridiculously and manifest delusionally. But also to understand that my purpose in this world is not for anyone else to like me. if they do, great. But my purpose is to be a dope ass bitch and have so much fun and contribute the research that I can to intellectual spaces that I care about, to lift up the voices of those who don’t have the chance to amplify their own. To play mermaids in the ocean and eat gnocchi flights and make out with my girl. To destigmatize panic and addiction - to contribute anything I can. To do my part!!!!!

Now, I think distraction and escape are different. As much as I enjoy holistic healing and hot yoga and self improvement- I still spend money that I don’t have on ambient lighting on Amazon and lip combos. I still put Marlboros in my mouth and parliaments and dark chocolate Reeses. I still love hard as fuck. There is no world in which I know how to be a muted version of myself. I don’t know how to exist in lukewarmth, but when I surrender to the fact that brutal totality is not sustainable, I allow myself to be imperfect. Progress not perfection, hoes.