The Blog

The collective process right now, when compared to the expanse of human history, has probably happened before. I’m no history scholar, but the literature and teachers tell me we have been here. The specifics are different, but symbolically the story is not new: we are in a burning, spiritually speaking.

This time has me sitting as close to center the of my sobriety as I did in the earliest days. I think about it when I wake up, when I make coffee, when I sit on my couch and look at the sun coming up, or the sun-having-already-come-up since my wake up seems to be getting later and later.

Early sobriety is hard enough, but going through the holidays and managing family can be ninja-level hard. In this post, I address a woman who is nervous about how to manage her mother-in-law’s niggling questions about her not drinking at Thanksgiving.

How do you ever get over the shame? Even with two years in therapy, I feel like I sit in a shame cave that I can’t get out of. You mention that you made poor choices that hurt yourself and others when you were drinking and you also say you have gratitude for all of your days because they led you to where you are now.

It’s great more people are talking about this because, frankly, alcohol is stupid. It was time for a change in the dominant paradigm of how we talk about sobriety. But not drinking and a cool IG feed isn’t a light switch to a better life—it takes a hell of a lot more than that.

I thought it was about social media. But it was about all of it. It was about being on, all the time. Being connected, and open to connections, and available, and expected to respond and expecting to get a response, and creating thousands upon thousands of tiny slivers of interactions to “connect” and “be productive” simply because I could...

The phenomenon has revealed itself over time. In the beginning, traveling was nail-bitingly stressful and not fun at all. For a while—like a couple years—I equated new places with the uprush of intoxication. It felt sad, boring, and incomplete to even imagine a vacation unpunctuated with cocktails, let alone actually do it.