Patches of snow in the foothills on a bleak morning in March. It is your first week sober. You’ve been a daily drinker for 20 years now and this is the longest you’ve gone since you can remember. It is that tumultuous time between seasons when it’s unclear who’s in charge. The addiction is lashing out, a multi-headed hydra of hissing snakes. This is called bargaining. Part of you wants to stop while another part is begging please don’t. So you switch to cannabis and seal yourself off and bask in your secrets alone.

A year passes, still sober. Not “clean,” but sober. The high you effect is ritualistic and laughable: sneaking out to the garage or garden shed like a kid. In fact that’s the allure of the high, the root of it: this going back to a time of no responsibility. That’s what you crave.

But one day in the shed you look down at yourself and say alright, enough. Let’s try clean. And once you do, there’s no going back.

Despite all your internal suffering, what can feel like a form of madness, it’s not enough for your family: they want you to join a support group, to go to therapy, to read books. It’s like adding insult to injury but you do it anyway and somehow, amazingly, on the other side of it all there is Christ. You don’t care so much for Christ. But it represents something bigger you never imagined. Something made up that becomes real. The bizarre part is the made up bit doesn’t matter. That’s the secret, it’s faith.

Here it is, a week into the season of Lent and there is some odd grace, something special in denial. The pastor uses that word, denial. He talks about the apple in the garden of Eden. You despise that story. But there is something in it for you you never saw. You can deny yourself in favor of something more. It’s a bad word, denial, but better than addiction.

The drunks you know who go to Christ, you never thought that would be you. You hate to call yourself a drunk, you don’t even see yourself as Christian. You’re a survivor though, and better for it.

Five years ago, your first week sober. How would you ever make it through spring, through summer, sober? The first snowfall, Christmas?

And in the dark while the clock ticks and you are half twisted trying to keep warm you pray for others who are suffering in hopes they will make it out too. You can make it up, and it will be true.

Categories: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: inspiration, recovery, sobriety, spirituality