Three Years of Practicing an Alcohol-Free Life
Fall in love with swinging the bat, not hitting the home run
Phew. This past week has been a doozy. Last weekend, we brought a new dog into our home (!!!). Her name is Daisy, and she is the sweetest six-month-old little peanut. We rescued this cuddly eight-pound love muffin from a neglectful and abusive situation in downtown Detroit. In just one week, she has already blossomed, bringing an abundance of love and light into our home.
As thrilling as this is, it has also thrown my whole routine out of whack. If there’s one thing a sober autistic girl craves, it is rigidity and daily structure. I might need several days of rest to recover from this massive change.
The week of Valentine’s Day holds painful memories for me. Twelve years ago this week, I woke up in jail after blacking out behind the wheel. Three years ago this week, I filled a water bottle with vodka and drank the entire thing during a morning shift. I have no memory of leaving work or walking home that day.
For nine torturous years, between my first DUI and blacking out at work, purgatory was my home. I knew I had a problem, but I couldn’t stop. Occasionally, I would string together a week or a month without alcohol, only to crawl back to a bottle of cheap, warm Barefoot Pinot Grigio. You would think that a second DUI, three years of probation, and an alcohol-detecting ankle tether would be enough to make me quit for good. But they weren’t.
Finally, when I woke up in a hungover haze three years ago, unable to recount my drunken work steps from the day before, I decided I was done. I decided, after all those years, to get serious about abstinence.
I like to say I have been practicing an alcohol-free life for the past three years. During the first seventeen months of these three years, I was ninety-seven percent alcohol-free, only imbibing five times. For the past nineteen months, I have been one hundred percent alcohol-free. It has been an imperfect three years but a practice of progress nonetheless.
“Fall in love with swinging the bat, not hitting the home run.”
Waking up in jail twelve years ago was the catalyst that propelled me to pick up the bat for the first time. Even though my relationship with alcohol continued for nine more years, I still spent time in between binges reading quit-lit, listening to podcasts, seeing a therapist, and intellectualizing addiction neuroscience. Even though alcohol was a part of my life, I was still trying to quit. I was still swinging the bat.
I don’t share that it took nine years of trying to be disheartening or discouraging. I share because this is the truth for most people. One study shows that, on average, it takes eight years of stopping and starting before sobriety sticks. I’ve never met anyone who got sober on their first, second, third, or twenty-seventh try. Similarly, I’ve never met anyone who hits a home run after one, two, three, or twenty-seven swings of a bat.
For many of us, alcohol use starts as a fun and carefree place of connection. For many of us, our substance of choice serves the purpose of numbing generational trauma. Until it doesn’t. There is no shame in this. The substance is working exactly how it’s supposed to. We are not defective, low-life losers. We are suffering, systematically oppressed human beings who are trying to navigate a society that encourages stigma and lacks accessible, holistic care.
These past three years of practicing an alcohol-free life have been far from a home run. Getting sober while swinging a bat that is weighed down by a criminal record, no driver’s license, and no roadmap to success has kept me stuck at first base. But, whenever I show up for hard things, learn from a mistake, or practice self-compassion instead of reaching for the bottle, I fall deeper in love with swinging the bat.
Like all good hitters, I need rest, repetition, and bandaids for the blisters on my hands. I need to slow down and get extra rest when life brings a puppy into my life. I need repetition until new routines become the norm. And I need bandaids that resemble a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates and fresh flowers to soothe the blisters of change.
While sipping coffee this morning, I cried tears of gratitude for my calloused hands. As much as my autistic self rages against it, change is the only constant thing in life. Like getting sober and learning to swing a bat, bringing home a dog requires endless patience. There is no way I could have handled uprooting my daily routines for a new puppy if I was still drinking. There is no way I could’ve welcomed sweet Daisy Dukes into my world without twelve years of swinging the bat.
This Valentine’s Day, instead of dwelling on the ghosts of memories past, I welcome a celebration of progress. Three years of practicing an alcohol-free life is a big deal. Home runs are nice, but for now, I’m happy with consistent line-drive base hits between short and third.
Progress.