How My Life has Changed in Nine Years of Sobriety

I got sober nine years ago. I made the decision a few weeks beforehand, so I could really go out with a bang and savour a few more sweet rounds of beautiful chaos before my retirement from the wild life. And I really did savour them — sipping, shooting, and straight-up chugging more than ever as I approached the fateful day when I would finally call it quits. As a result, when the time came, I felt like I could give up drinking without regret, and even with a feeling of dark satisfaction. I had drunk deeply from the tankard of life until my belly was full, my beard was dripping, and my shirt was soaked. I had consumed enough alcohol for one lifetime.

And because those last few weeks of drinking were so explosively excessive, my first few days of sobriety were a transformative time in my life. It was like waking up, like coming back to life. I could feel my body resting and healing and recovering for the first time in years — years during which I’d never given myself more than a day or two off drinking, and during which my weekend beer binges spanned Thursday afternoon pints to painfully late and crazy Sunday nights. Drinking — and my utter inability to stop once I started — had exhausted me.

Now, finally, my soul and my system were being allowed to rebuild themselves, and, with my newly clear eyes and mind, I realized my salvation hadn’t come a moment too soon. Looking back, I saw that if I hadn’t stopped drinking of my own volition when I did, something else would certainly have stopped me: probably jail, hospitalization, or death. If my last few weeks of drinking had been madness, so too, by most sane people’s standards, had my last few years. For so long, I’d been trying to sustain something fundamentally unsustainable, and it was about to catch up with me. In every sense, sobriety saved my life. And that realization was one of the things that made those first few days, weeks and months of sober living feel so beautiful and blessed.

I don’t know how else to do justice to the feeling of early sobriety except by saying that everything in my life got easier and more manageable, and I rediscovered the sweetness and joy of simply being alive. Yes, trying to learn to live life sober was a big shift for me, and there were difficult, awkward, and downright painful moments. But these were all…

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