I held an open container of beer the other day for the first time in ten years.
I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want it. It wasn’t even a second thought. It was handed to me the same way somebody might hand me a pair of tongs or a spatula or a pool noodle. Here, hold this really quick. And I grabbed it, the same way I would have grabbed any other thing.
I was at a BBQ at our old neighbors’ house. They were the kind of unofficial aunt and uncle my siblings and I had growing up. They took us on hikes, on road trips, grocery shopping. They still tell the story of my kid brother dropping his pants in the middle of a store to show off his bare butt. They were mortified. They also thought it was hilarious. It had been years since we’d seen them.
We were on their back deck in front of a beautiful greenbelt tucked away in the busy suburb. It felt like a pocket of serenity. Quiet dead-end street, gorgeous deck, dusk, the smell of hamburgers on the grill, the sounds of catching up and laughter.
I was on the deck with Milo, playing with his Batman and Hulk figurines. Elaborate battles. Batman would fly. Hulk would fall. They would stand back up. They would transform from Bruce Wayne and Bruce Banner into their alter egos, and then back, and then again, because a four-year-old’s Marvel-DC crossover event never really ends.
My dad walked over with a can of beer he was bringing to the host. The host was having trouble opening it, so my dad was trying to open it for him. He couldn’t do it with his own beer in his other hand.
“Here,” he said. “Can you hold this really quick?”
I grabbed it.
I didn’t think anything of it. I noticed the cold can, but I had a chilled Diet Coke in a can sitting on the table two feet away. Cold can in my hand wasn’t a novel sensation. Nobody noticed. Nobody looked over. Nobody said anything, because there was nothing to say. It was a tiny insignificant moment between a father and daughter at a BBQ.
Except.
I sat with it, still on the deck, Batman and Hulk paused mid-battle, and it dawned on me what I was holding. I could feel the cold can. I could feel the weight of it. It wasn’t a trigger. It wasn’t a moment of weakness. It wasn’t a craving. It was just a reminder.
That anything can happen. That everything can happen. Even after ten years.
My dad took it back, or I handed it back to him, I honestly don’t remember. It was that unremarkable. I kept playing with Milo. I ate a burger. We came home. We fought about going to bed, which is our current running argument. He wanted to stay up. I wanted us in bed an hour ago. It ended with me giving him a piggy back ride up the stairs and him informing me, mid-ride, “okay, I’ll listen now.”
The next day, while Milo was in the bath, I was getting things ready for bedtime and it dawned on me.
I had held a beer yesterday.
I made a video on my phone so I wouldn’t forget. I was in pajamas. My hair was a mess. My face was freshly scrubbed. I was tired and ready for bed and you can hear it in my voice. I wasn’t making the video for anyone. I was making it so that when I sat down to write this, I would still remember what it felt like to realize.
I’ve been sober for ten years, as of July 28. Ten years is a strange milestone because it’s both nothing and everything. It’s a Tuesday and it’s a decade. It’s not the anniversary I would have imagined for myself ten years ago, when I was one week sober and couldn’t go to a meeting without spiraling.
I want to talk about that for a second. Because the version of me who held a beer at a BBQ and didn’t think anything of it didn’t appear out of nowhere.
Meetings never worked for me. I want to be careful about how I say this, because meetings work for a lot of people, and the community and the stories and the accountability are the whole reason many people stay sober. I have deep respect for that. It just wasn’t mine.
I put myself through treatment. I wanted to be there. I was desperately done with the life I had been living. Treatment required two meetings a week, which meant I did two meetings a week, and that is how meetings became part of my life at all. I did what I was supposed to do inside them, but I didn’t like being in them. There were too many people and it didn’t feel safe.
And then there was the moment that essentially confirmed for me that meetings weren’t going to be my place.
I was one week sober. I went to the bathroom during a meeting. There were three girls in there, standing in front of the sinks. They were cool. They were beautiful. They were intimidating in the exact way certain people can be intimidating when you’re one week sober and trying to figure out how to be in your own body without a drink.
They were also drinking.
In the bathroom. At the meeting.
They didn’t even notice me, but I noticed them. I stood there shaky, with no foundation and no idea what to do with my face. I washed my hands and went back to my seat. I was one week sober, in the bathroom of the place that was supposed to be helping me stay sober, and there were empty beer bottles in the garbage. I couldn’t tell you what the meeting was about that day, but I can tell you how I wanted to be part of the laughter and knew I couldn’t have it the way they were having it.
I understand now that this wasn’t a fair representation of what meetings can be. But I was one week sober. I didn’t have context. I just had that moment.
I went to my required meetings. I got sponsors. I did the steps. I finished my treatment. It helped me. I chose to be there. The meetings were the part I didn’t choose.
I stuck with meetings for two years, even though I didn’t want to. And then I stopped going.
People will tell you in twelve-step programs that stopping is the first step toward a relapse. Maybe it is for some people, but it wasn’t for me.
I threw myself into gardening. Actual gardening. My backyard that year became a secret garden. It was beautiful and completely unsustainable to keep up, which I would learn later, but at the time it was the thing that got me from morning to night. I threw myself into spirituality. I threw myself into Pokemon Go, which had just come out, and I’m not being funny when I say Pokemon Go kept me sober. It gave me a reason to leave the house. It gave me a reason to walk. There was a certain thrill about chasing a Snorlax through a parking lot with a crowd of strangers doing the same thing.
I got sober in a dark, windowless room, sweating and shivering and withdrawing. I found recovery in a garden and on a walk to a Poke Stop. The rooms were where I figured out how to put one foot in front of the other one day at a time.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.
I have to say something about early sobriety because I don’t think I’ve said it out loud in a while. I was agoraphobic. I couldn’t leave the house without a panic attack. I couldn’t go to the grocery store alone. My mental health had already been in the worst place of my life leading up to getting sober. After I stopped drinking, it was still rough, and in some ways it was almost more unbearable because I couldn’t numb it anymore. There was no off switch. Everything I had been avoiding by drinking was still there, waiting for me, sober.
It wasn’t because of meetings. It was because I was newly sober, and I had anxiety, and I had depression, and I had undiagnosed ADHD that I would not get diagnosed for another eight years. Being newly sober was the main thing. The ADHD was underneath it, running its own show that I did not have language for yet. Alcohol had been my off switch. Without it, everything was loud.
I had to build a whole different set of tools. Some of them were things I would have never chosen if I hadn’t been forced to. Some of them are still with me. The plants died. The Pokemon Go account is still technically active. K8poked8 lives on, mostly through the occasional sent gift.
There’s another moment I want to put next to the beer at the BBQ, because they belong together.
I had a C-section when Milo was born, and after the C-section I was on pain medication. Real pain medication. The kind that would be a problem for me if it weren’t being handed to me by a hospital and then by my mom, one dose at a time.
Before I even left for the hospital, I sat my mom down and told her I needed her to be in charge of the bottle. I didn’t trust myself to hold it. I needed her to hand me each dose when it was time and keep the bottle somewhere I couldn’t casually access.
I want to be clear about why. I wasn’t craving or planning to abuse anything. The pain was real and the medication was necessary. But I could see the wheels turning. Old thinking, the kind that starts with what if I just took mine a little early and ends somewhere much worse. It wasn’t a craving, it was a pattern of thought I recognized because I had lived inside it for a long time before I got sober.
I watched myself. I watched myself watch myself. What I mean by that is I was noticing myself in real time. Not after. Not in hindsight. In the moment. I could see my brain starting to build a case, and I could see myself hearing it, and I could pull back before the case got any traction. It’s the difference between having a thought and following a thought. I told my mom, and she took the bottle, and it was fine.
Those two moments belong together. One is an insignificant moment where I held an open can and felt nothing. The other is a medically necessary prescription that I didn’t trust myself to hold. The addiction voice doesn’t go away because you got sober. It just gets quieter and shows up in more surprising places. Sometimes it isn’t there at all. Sometimes it’s there when it has no business being there.
The whole game is knowing which is which. The whole game is being able to tell.
I have a four-year-old who is my whole world. I have a career I wouldn’t be able to do drinking. I have a real relationship with my family that took years to rebuild. I have been painting again. I can go to the grocery store by myself. I still have a hard time stepping out of my routine, going to places I wouldn’t normally go, being in situations where I don’t have a map. That’s where it still gets me.
The thought of trading any of this for a single drink is absurd, and I know I don’t have the control to have a single drink. I’ve had to be honest with myself about that. I wouldn’t stop at one. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I could see the problematic thinking during my C-section, and I know the wheels are still there. They just aren’t turning right now.
Ten years sober. I held a beer last weekend for four seconds, and it was insignificant, and I noticed. I’m proud of myself. I love myself. I worked hard to get here. I’m not going to lose it.
Today.
Homebody & Heart 
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