Today I’m proud to celebrate eight years of sobriety.
Because I’ve quit a few things, I like to honor other milestones on this day as well: I quit cigarettes nine years ago and am celebrating 13 years of being vegan, around 21 years of not eating meat including my vegetarian years.
There are so many lessons and gifts that not-drinking has given me. My sobriety led me back to myself. It also led me down a path to years of therapy and a whole new life. I am happier these last few years than I have ever been, doing things I only dreamed of doing even a couple years ago. I am a different person than I once was.
When I moved to Seattle in 2007, drinking was already my go-to method to soothe anxiety and cope with some rough shit I went through a few years before. I didn’t see it that way back then. As far as I could tell, I drank like pretty much everyone I knew and worked with.
Seattle was different in 2007. There were more house venues, more punks, cheaper rent. All the punks, queer and trans folks I knew worked service industry jobs and drank every night, and I was one of them. I wasn’t any different from the people I knew, which is not to assume they had the same issues I did. Sure I had a blast, but my deeply entrenched work-to-bar/show/venue/drinking in my room script felt hollow after a while. That same tired script continued for years.
My 20s became about simply working service jobs and surviving. Punk is always in my heart, but at least at that time, it didn’t show me any other ways to live.
The exception was a handful of straightedge punks I knew or knew of. They lived another way; they chose to live sober, and oftentimes vegan, for the revolution. In the wild-ass dumpster fire that is 2020, I still can’t think of a better way to live. I see my sobriety and veganism as choices that uphold and point to the larger theme of collective liberation.
Sobriety didn’t change the fact that I’m a flawed human being who still makes a lot of mistakes. I have so many lessons to internalize about my own complicity in racist, oppressive systems. I have plenty of blind spots and I just plain fuck up. I’ve found sobriety grants me greater capacity to acknowledge and move through accountability and growth.
It’s almost impossible to write a short blog about living sober. Every time I sat down to write this, a dozen angles would pop up and I’d struggle to synthesize them all. In an attempt to summarize things, I usually say that my life before sobriety was like careening from chaos to chaos, and that sobriety gave me back to myself.
Quitting drinking started my journey out of the service industry and enabled me to achieve one of my biggest dreams: making writing my full-time gig.
If you ever want to talk about sobriety, or harm-reduction, feel free to reach out.