Musings on 12 Years in Recovery

2008 Facebook post

12 years ago today, I woke up still kinda drunk from the night before for the last time.

Well, for the last time in 12 years, at least. I haven’t yet learned how to divine the future, so I can’t say for sure that it was the last time ever.

I do, however, hope with all my heart that I’ve already woken up for the last time after drinking against my will. Because that’s what was happening at the end of my addiction: I was drinking against my will.

I didn’t want to drink the way I drank. I didn’t want to black out every day. I didn’t want to wake up swearing I’d drink less, only to find myself blacking out again later that day.

I didn’t want to drink to stop the shakes. I didn’t want to be suffering from memory problems or to have warning signs of liver damage.

I didn’t want to lose jobs due to my drinking or to get arrested or to put other people at risk when I made the really poor decision to drive when I shouldn’t have.

I didn’t want any of that.

And yet, I couldn’t stop. 12 years ago, I was mentally, emotionally and physically dependent on alcohol because I had an addiction that had taken over my life.

Today, I’m free of all addictions (or at least free of any addictions that concern me—I consume a lot of coffee creamer…which I pour into decaf coffee after having a single cup of caffeinated coffee in the morning…how wild of me).

My recovery story is somewhat unusual because treatment worked for me. I had a problem with alcohol, I went to rehab, and then I stayed sober.

Literally no one expected that, me least of all. I thought that I was going to treatment to take a break, then that I’d get back to it in a few years. When I got coffee with my rehab therapist seven years into sobriety, she said, “I’m shocked, Keely. No one expected you to be one of the people who got it. We all hoped that we were planting a seed with you and that one day down the road you’d find recovery.”

The reason she was shocked is because I was open about my plan: I intended to stay sober until I was 25 (when my brain would be fully wired), then begin drinking again. Once I began drinking again, I’d document my descent back into alcoholism (which I assumed was inevitable), then write a book about it. The proceeds from the book would then fund my drinking until I died young (which I also assumed was inevitable).

And yes – my treatment team knew it. That’s an interesting thing about me: I don’t lie about much. Even back then I didn’t. I didn’t sit there and say what they wanted to hear, I shrugged and told the truth. 

Then, for years, I sat in recovery rooms and shrugged while I told the truth.

It’s probably why sobriety stuck for me. Not because I worked harder at it (I didn’t) or because I had everything going for me (I didn’t).

I did, however, accept the truth a lot. So, when living in a halfway house became too expensive and moving to my mom’s house in Pennsylvania resulted in me becoming suicidal-ish, I acknowledged that reality and moved back to Florida, where I stopped being suicidal-ish.

When I was so miserable working in DC that I fantasized about drinking again just to escape my life, I acknowledged that truth then went and spent six weeks in India, where I stopped fantasizing about relapse.

It didn’t make anyone else’s life easier. Those weren’t popular decisions. But they were decisions that worked. Decisions that kept me sober. There were hundreds of them along the way.

Today, I’m in a weird place with recovery. I found sobriety through programs that say that addiction is a lifelong disease. Once you have it, you’ll never not have it.

Then I was introduced to other worldviews. Today, I know almost as many people who think that addiction can be healed as I know people who think it can’t.

In these alternative worldviews, someone like me can feasibly drink again. I haven’t done it yet, but I contemplate it. I’m not sure where I’ll land. 

I do, however, know that I land firmly in the pro-psychedelics camp. I am someone who, years into recovery, began to alter her mood and mind with substances like ayahuasca and San Pedro. So far, I’ve exclusively seen benefits from my psychedelic work, so it’s hard for me to sit in circles and pretend that all mind- and mood-altering substances are bad. It’s not black and white for me. It’s very gray.

So, here I am, musing about it on my 12-year recovery anniversary. I no longer celebrate my sobriety date in the traditional sense, because I don’t apply the label “sober” to myself anymore. I’m not sober. But I am in recovery. I once had an addiction that was actively ruining my life and now I don’t. So, on this day, Sam, my family and I celebrate that shift. We celebrate the day when things changed, when I went from having a life that was controlled by alcohol to having one that isn’t. Even if I begin drinking again, we’ll still celebrate this day because it’s an important one.

I don’t have a tidy bow to put on this musing. There’s no neat way to wrap it all up because this is still a story that’s unfolding. But it felt right to contemplate it today as a way to honor the occasion. Also to contribute to a dialogue that’s important to me: the same way I thought I was doomed when conventional treatments didn’t work for my depression, I know people who think they’re doomed when abstinence-based programs don’t work for their addiction. There are other options and I think that’s a message worth sharing.

Here’s me hoping that anyone whose life is currently controlled by substances finds a way out,

Keely

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