A Whole Hand Sober
Just an Ordinary Day
Today I celebrate five years as a sober woman. The celebration will be simple. Ordinary. I begin it here, writing. I will walk my dogs. Smile at my kids. Hold my husband’s hand. Look in the mirror, lock eyes with myself and know. I will know that I have my own back. Always.
I recall in the first year of sobriety, when I was inhaling all the quit-lit books and podcasts I could binge on, I heard someone explain the slow fade into an alcohol use disorder as:
First it was magic, then it was medicine then it was misery. I’ll add a fourth. Memory.
Because I don’t live their anymore.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on how I feel now versus how I felt in those earlier days of sobriety. Even year two, when I had stacked a lot of time. When I needed to prioritize and protect myself by hearing from other people who know what this feels like.
One day while kneeling on the floor, emotionally and aggressively scrubbing the fridge in our basement, with a podcast streaming in my ear I caught a glimpse of my husband walking past me. I paused the episode and lobbed a question at him that he didn’t expect. “Why can’t you be interested in learning about my recovery?”
The look on his face made it clear that he did not see this coming. In earnest, over the course of a few months, I had sent him podcast episodes of other people telling their stories with alcohol that I thought would be easier for him to digest because it wasn’t his wife. Easier to listen to because it was removed. I thought and hoped that in listening to it he might see what this is all like for me. Might begin to see the parallel lines.
Because sobriety was starting to build a wall between us.
It was a bid for connection. But it wasn’t a fair one. I see that now.
“Allison, I guess I don’t understand why you can’t just be someone who doesn’t drink?”
I was so offended and enraged by this question. I carried it and weaponized him with it internally for months and months. With time and distance, I now know why he asked this. He asked this because he could sense that I was slipping away from him. He could see me using sobriety as scaffolding for a new home I was building, a home he could not live in. He felt like a stranger every time he tried to visit me during its construction. And any bids for connection I tossed at him were covered with a glaze of resentment. You should want to learn all about this with me. You should...........You should….
The part of him that asked this question is the part of him that knew I would fade into a new identity. That I would double down on this new endeavor, like I did with everything I pick up, and slowly slip away from him.
He was right.
I was force feeding him “all this work” I was doing. And expecting him to digest it all in the exact way I wanted. Even though my husband’s drinking looked different than mine had, when we both did it, we were on the same team. Now, we aren’t even playing the same sport.
The thing is though. The older version of me that he clinked glasses with every weekend, she slipped so far away from herself years before he even met her. So, of course I was wondering how can he love me like this? Unarmored and fragile? This unfamiliar Allison?
My sweet husband could see I was recovering and he offered his support in the best way he knew how. But it was the HOW, the how I was recovering was the terrain he couldn’t climb with me. It was a language he couldn’t speak. All my feeble attempts at offering him cliff notes fell flat. I wasted a lot of time rolling around in resentment over that. It took me a long time to accept that this is my world to explore, not his. This is my language of fluency, regardless of his ability to hear it or speak it.
I was off discovering foreign land, and he was back on homeland. On the days we couldn’t find each other, I carried a lot of guilt because I was the one who insisted on moving. I was the tourist. Since I was the one who changed the temperature in the room, I felt responsible for the cool chill that whipped through some of our days.
Now, five years in, I know this is my mountain to climb. My summit to inhale. Sure, I’d love some company, but this has to be a solo trek.
Somewhere along the way, while working so hard at not succumbing to complacency in sobriety, I let complacency slip into my marriage.
Assuming he won’t “get this” I turned one degree away each day, facing a horizon I thought could only be for me. Not us.
I haven’t only done this with him. The subtle push away. I’ve done it with friends. And with myself. I have been going at it with a tool belt full of sobriety notches for five years now and somehow, somewhere recently, in a soft way I can’t quite name, I woke up to the understanding that I don’t need to work so hard.
When did I convince myself that I have to master all of myself?
I was making sobriety my identity. I was making sobriety a project I needed to master. A new self-syllabus that pulled me out of my marriage because it was time for me to honor the vows I made to myself.
It had to happen this way for me. I don’t regret any of it. I am grateful I can see it all now with compassion and understanding. This has always been my thing. My thing to hold. I can’t pass it off to anyone, even those that love me the most, and expect them to know how to care for it.
There is no instruction manual. There is just time. Time to let it unravel how it needs to. Until one day, it just becomes an ordinary thing about you. Not THE thing about you.
Now, I actually do feel like I’m just someone who doesn’t drink. Because sobriety can never be all of me. It doesn’t define anything about me. I am proud beyond measure of all I have dug up in myself these last five years. I can unfurl my fist, open my palm up wide and say, “I’m a whole hand whole.” Because that’s what this is all about. It’s all about becoming whole. And these pieces of me that make me uniquely me will continue to shift and slide around. None of this can be predicted. It’s just that now I finally can see that being whole means we move all these parts of ourselves around constantly.
When you loosen your grip, with an unfurled fist, you do risk being exposed to the stark glaring parts of your past. The things historically you may have hid from and kept in the dark. But I’ve learned that I need others to see my underbelly.
With a hand wide open, I’m less inclined to throw a punch at my day when things don’t go my way. With a hand wide open, I’m more inclined to hold another’s and offer help. With a hand wide open, I can place it fully on my heart and lead from there.
My daughter with her hand wide open on her fifth birthday. I drank my way through her birthday party. By the time I put her to bed that night, things were fuzzy. While she was starry eyed, I was glassy eyed. Things are so different now. My heart is so grateful to be on this side of it all. A lot can change in five years.
My habitual overthinking and daily drip of anxiety followed me into sobriety. Somehow, somewhere this past year something shifted. And it came wrapped in multiple colors and flavors.
These past twelve months or so felt harder in many ways. I’m now realizing THAT - the wading in the hard and not running for the shoreline. The soaking in sorrow for as long as it needs to visit and trusting it will not drown me. The knowing and trusting -all of this is the float of sobriety. It took me five years to surface and while I know I’ll have days again when I’ll flail, there’s something new in my bones.
I used to think sobriety meant letting the feeling surface and naming it. Name it to tame it. I told myself THAT was the work. So, I doubled down on learning about the HOW of naming. What inadvertently happened is I numbed out on the naming.
All the seeking soaked me in a new kind of dissonance. I was going around all the feelings, flagging them but not feeling their fullness. Hurdling them instead of holding them.
Sobriety became a weighted blanket. All the tools and modalities I learned brought such comfort and contained me in a cocoon like bubble. But with time, and without me even noticing, that weighted blanket morphed into something that was simply weighing me down. The me underneath it all. I was still suffocating.
I needed sober tools in the same way I needed alcohol. I needed to stack and track my “knowledge”. Not necessarily to put it on display but more to feel sturdy. I am slowly beginning to understand that wobbling a little and not posturing is the sweet spot.
Turns out there is a lot of suffering that sticks around in sobriety. But it’s the kind you want to feel. You want to turn the attention dial up on this kind. Because it wakes you up.
Feeling is not failing. If I’m feeling tender, angry, confused. Overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean I need to double down on distracting myself from it. It doesn’t mean I ought to work harder at my job, deep clean my house, power walk with podcasts. Those things get me out of the feeling but none of that moves it along.
Those things are all just pause buttons.
Just like alcohol was for me.
The escape hatches I use now may actually be more pernicious because they are followed by accolades. Not hangovers.
So, the cycle continues.
And the feelings never get their full cycle.
As I walk into 2026, my sixth year as a sober woman, I feel a strong impulse to place things down. To not grip the tools that got me this far. Because for some of us, filling our tool belt weighs us down. In my pocket, yes there are tools, but sometimes they are also glazed with a little bit of insecurity. A little bit of I need this to get by. It feels very familiar to the way I held onto alcohol. A tight grip.
None of this means I won’t be protecting my sobriety. None of this means I take it for granted. None of this means this is me being complacent. All this means is, I will lead the way this year. Not my sobriety syllabus that I’ve clung to for this last half decade.
There is something in me that knows it’s time for me to be a person who just doesn’t drink.
I knew unsticking myself from the identity of being someone who drinks would be complicated. What I didn’t expect, and I didn’t even realize was happening in real time, was I became attached to an identity of being a sober person.
I think there is a sweet spot in the middle. One where I can hold hands with that version of me who was only doing her best to cope and take my other hand and hold hands with the one who dragged her out of that life. It’s a blessed union of sorts.
I will never not be in a sober community. I hold such a high regard for The Luckiest Club I will never want to meander my way through sobriety without fellow travelers.
A few weeks ago, while on a call with Laura McKowen and the Second Sunday Gatherings that she offers; there was a rich discussion on emotional sobriety. Lots of time was spent on the concept of the wise Self. The one we each have. The wise voice within that is sometimes hard to tune into.
I think my wise Self is ready to be the tool on my belt now.
My life just wants me in it. Honoring my emotions instead of managing them. My sobriety will always be a big deal. And I’m really fucking proud of myself.
If I had to pick an anthem for this fifth sober anniversary it would be this song;
Anniversary
This latest album from Brandi Carlile is incredible. She will forever give me goosebumps. This song, particularly the end, sums up how I am feeling right now.
Thank God for reprieve, for the primitive peace
Discovering beautiful, easier ways
And closing the door on that joyless old bore
Anniversary mercifully fading away
It was just an old promise, a dogma at best
A square on the calendar, a bulletproof vest
Be your own magic feather and put it to rest
Give it back to the keeper of days
It’s just an ordinary day
It’s just an ordinary day now
It’s an ordinary day
Sobriety can feel like a marriage. It may be the deepest commitment I’ve ever made. I’m finally able to drop all the self-imposed presumptions I had about what this marriage should look like. Where I should be five years into this journey. Am I upholding my vows? The honeymoon phase has been over for quite a while, yet I know deep in my bones that all this work was worth it.
The slow accumulation, all of a sudden, became ordinary. In the most extraordinary way.
