Six Months Sober

As of today I’ve now been sober for six months — halfway to the one year mark. Six months free of alcohol, painkillers, or sleeping pills. I feel good. It feels like a significant milestone and the urges to drink or drug dissipate little by little over time. I still have bad days. But here’s what I like about being sober:

My brain and thought processes are consistently much sharper and more focused. I can hold on to a thought or an idea and follow the thread to the end, instead of sporadically jumping frantically from half-formed thought to abandoned idea.

I wake up in the morning a lot more grounded and less shaky — literally my hands no longer shake in the morning. But I wake up at a reasonable hour (like 7:30 or 8:00) sure of who and where I am. I snap into consciousness more quickly and solidly, and stay there throughout the day.

I don’t have to write down things people tell me any time after 10 p.m. because I know for sure I won’t remember it the next day.

My days feel like less of a blur, or just a mad dash to whenever I can start drinking again. My experiences have more weight and clearly defined shapes to them. Conversations with people, books and articles I’m reading, I notice more details with more regularity when I’m walking around outside.

My feelings and emotions are more manageable and easier to process, thanks in no small part to daily meditation and regular Buddhist and dharma teachings.

The biggest thing: I’m just one person — for better or worse. I’m less splintered into a hundred different versions of me depending on whatever I think people need or think of me in my furious and futile and debilitating need to be liked by everyone at all times. There’s one Chris from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep, and this is the person I have to live with, free of however much alcohol and pills I used to need to stifle fears or bad memories of things done to me or things I’ve done to others. I know longer have the blunt object I had to knock my brain into a me that I think people will genuinely like and validate. I have to live with who I am and reconcile that with who I was and choices I made and people I hurt, and that takes most of my energy, I think, on a daily basis. The fiction and fantasy — the idealized me that I thought I was or tried to convince people I was (or both) fades into the background a bit more each day.

So, it’s been a long six months but also, it’s only been six months. I’m still figuring this out and every day’s another chance to put it together. There’s a lot of hope and peace in that, I’m learning.