The pain and beauty of being a regular, sober, human person
One of the first things I remarked on when getting sober was how unbelievably simple everything was: getting up to go to work on time, keeping my home relatively clean and tidy, and making my paycheque last the full two weeks until my next one came in. It felt, at first, like I was suddenly living life on easy mode. I guess I was just realizing, in retrospect, how hopelessly, unnecessarily hard my drinking had been making everything. For that first few months — the honeymoon period — the contrast was a wonderful relief. Life felt ordered, clear and full of promise.
Honeymoons don’t last forever, of course: not in relationships, and not in sobriety. The thing about getting sober is that it does make everything so much simpler. At least at first. Then, as time goes on, you inevitably start to go a bit deeper into recovery, and you come to see all the things that drinking was helping you to avoid: in my case, all those parts of my past and myself that I hadn’t wanted to look at, and which were now forcing themselves, slowly, but brutally, into my field of vision. As many people have said before me, getting sober teaches you that the drinking isn’t the disease itself, but the symptom of something much more profound — not only in the sense of something deeper, darker, and weightier, but also…
