My journey to sobriety has made me more aware of my actions and how I treat others. I want my family to feel proud of who I am.
I look at the worn-out shoes next to me, and the time really sinks in. Life is about choices, and five years ago I made the choice to stop drinking. By then I had given up meat, successfully kicked cigarettes for the second and more difficult time. Once I found myself with a bit more money in my pocket, I treated myself to a new pair of shoes. It is kind of symbolic in ways, to put a new pair of shoes on your feet for the new path forward. They were pretty expensive, and more than I would usually spend, but I felt at that moment, it was important.
Five years later, those shoes have served me well. The soles are worn, and there is a whole on the corner right’s little toe. I still wear them from time to time. When I put each on, it isn’t lost on me that I’ve been walking a much different path than I had. For decades I wondered around, mostly on my own, going from dive bar to dive bar. Headphones stuffed into my ear, I would find an isolated perch and endlessly scribble in my small notebook. The places I’d go had to meet certain criteria of course. They had to be relatively cheap because I refused to drink inexpensive alcohol. There was something about if I was going to do it, I wouldn’t do well drinks or dollar beers. The bartenders would need to be friendly, but not friendly enough to take notice of how I was there each day at opening and some nights back around close. Rarely did I talk with anyone, and if I had, I have zero recollection of that now. I wrote poetry while living out a grand fantasy in my head that the things I wrote were brilliant. They may have been if I took the time to decipher the whiskey-ridden chicken-scratch. Or maybe if I cared at all about the things I wrote about. They were just fantasies too.
Years and years of this went on and on from one side of the country to the other side of the world. October 31st, 2019, I found myself in one of those friendly bars, and I remember that in the midst of the wild crowd, I had been very sociable. Some Englishmen and I were discussing football (read: soccer). The subjects ranged from certain players, how teams were doing, what leagues they were in and what leagues they deserved to be in. It was a ruckus of sports talk. Somehow, I managed to bullshit my way through an hour or so of this conversation. Drinks were bought for me, and I returned the favor. As I had been there since early afternoon, by late evening I decided it was best to stumble home.
On that walk I was really excited that I had gotten out of my shell and made it a point to bond with some guys. Usually, I would crank my headphones up higher when a group of men started getting the “bug” and wanted to smack shoulders and laugh that belly-filled raucous laugh. But that night I had joined in; I laughed and slapped backs too. The closer I got to home, the more the jubilation turned to a mild confusion. By the time I was home, I was fully disgusted with myself. This isn’t the person I want to be. I wanted to be genuine.
Ahead of me was the end of my 30s and I was not anywhere closer to my goal of becoming a writer than I was when I was 11 and started to write poetry. I was still just writing little poems that would be forgotten by me and anyone else. At 36, I felt much older than I should have and the prospect of being a daily drinker at 40 was horrifying.
Somewhere, years ago I read about Dick Van Dyke’s struggle with alcohol addiction. He had described it in a way I hadn’t thought of before. Growing up in the Midwest, your idea of a drunk or an alcoholic is grounded in the fantasy that this person wakes up and starts drinking. There are, of course, people like this, but Van Dyke talked about being sober all day and then after working hard, he’d retire to his study, lock the door and pour himself drinks until he couldn’t stand up. And even though I didn’t have a study of my own, I thought of my drinking in a similar isolation. Being surrounded in a loud bar, sometimes with a band playing, or a world of people moving around you, you exist unto yourself. Before noise-canceling headphones, I could still block out all of it if I was in the zone while writing. My music gave me a soundtrack and the rest of the patrons were mere fodder for my poems.
Being surrounded in a loud bar, sometimes with a band playing, or a world of people moving around you, you exist unto yourself.
As isolating as alcoholism can be, sobriety for me has had the opposite effect. I’ve found myself in social situations where when you mention recovery, you rarely get a pity-filled look. No, I’ve found that in the places I put myself these days, I’m met with encouragement and the stories of others who faced their own dark days. That’s the key though. You’ve got to make sure to put yourself in those places. For me, the strange thing is that I still like to go to a bar and grill, post up at the bar and have a meal with a full glass of iced tea (no lemon, please.) The boozing and the smell of bleach don’t bother me one bit. I’m quite sure this is not the case for other people who have their own struggle, but for me I’m not tempted by any of it.
For myself, the difficult part is going back to where I was born and raised: Cincinnati. See, the thing about Ohio – or maybe just the area I’m from – is that when you make a choice to better your life in any way almost everyone will take that as you are judging them for their choices. Personally, I don’t care what other people will or want to do. I’ll happily be the designated driver and chauffeur people around bars or whatever. But even when I show zero judgement, me just being this new person is a threat to some of my closest and dearest friends. Sure, they’ll say they’re happy for me and make comments like “good for you!”. But more often than not, they’ll say something like “oh I didn’t know you had a problem” or “you never seemed that bad to me.” It always reminds me of the first time going to steakhouse with relatives after quitting meat. “Well, you still bacon, though, right?”
My own struggle has made more conscience of how I live my life, what I eat, and most importantly how I treat other people. Being sober doesn’t make me a better person, it makes me aware of my actions in a way that I was lacking for a very, very long time. I want people to be proud of my actions, and I want my son when he hears people regal about my wild past to think “no way, not my dad…”
