My Friday Nights Need An Upgrade

Ever since I got sober, Friday nights suck.

After sitting around looking pensive for a while this evening,



I thought Screw this!



Me and beefcake guy might be sober and alone on a Friday night, but so what?



There's flirting with iPhone apps to be done.



We can dance in our kitchen.



We can even enjoy twirling.



We can insult invisible foes with a Shakespearean thumb bite.



We can take baths in the dark.



We can decide to knit new homemade washcloths and WE CAN DECIDE THAT FRIDAY NIGHTS HAVEN'T BECOME THE MOST PATHETIC THING TO HAPPEN 52 TIMES A YEAR.



What do your Friday nights look like?

This Is The First Anniversary Of My Sobriety

Listening: Patrick Watson's "Big Bird In a Small Cage":




That photo is of the last coin I flipped to decided if I should have another drink. The coin came up no. I said yes anyway and forgot the rest of the night. So it went, then. I forgot half my nights. I slid into an uneasy balance between tipsy and lost until I woke up some time later trying to work out how I got home.

It doesn't go that way anymore, because today is the one year anniversary of my sobriety.



When I start to wax nostalgic about the terrible good old days, I have a handful of photos that I look at to remind me of how isolating it was to sit drunk and hollowed out at a table most evenings with people to whom, for the most part, I felt no spiritual connection. It's amazing what we'll do for ten years to keep a hold of the safe sensation of the clack and thrum of moving along, moving along, moving along. I was my own cow, prodding myself along.



To be honest, it is only approximately the one year anniversary of my sobriety. When I quit drinking, I had to fool myself into it. I didn't tell anyone what I was doing. I barely told myself.

I remember the last thing I remember from the last night that I drank. I got up from the table on the patio I had been sitting at all summer and walked in the wrong direction. I didn't walk in the usual direction. I turned right instead of left. I have found that a good way to make a decision stick in your head is to make your body go over unfamiliar, unhabitual territory. It puts a mark in your brain that will make your needle skip when you hit it. It tells you to go this way and not that. It reminds you of what's important.

I walked away.

Making the turn I never made stuck in my brain, but the rest of the night disappeared down a hole like most before it, and I woke up unable to recall how it was I had made it home. I went through my usual post-drunk night motions for the last time: I checked my wallet to see that I hadn't been robbed, I looked at pictures on my phone to jog my memory, I checked my legs to see if I had more bruises that would tell the Palinode how drunk I'd been again, and then I cried with shame in the shower.

It was the last time. I didn't really believe that it was the last time, but it was the last time.



I didn't know at the time, though, that I would survive. I quit because I knew that I was going to kill myself, that the alcohol was fuelling the second nature suicidal desire I've had with me since first conscious light. I could see that unnecessarily herding myself over the precipice because I couldn't stop putting a particular liquid in a glass and then putting that liquid into my body, that allowing emotions to dictate the downfall of my entire existence like a child wound into a perpetual, unreasonable tantrum, was ridiculous.

I was going to lead myself to suicide over little more than a feigned helplessness about making the choice to turn right instead of left. It was ridiculous to choose that, so I got up from my table and walked the other way.

If you find yourself inside one of those moments where you wake up and feel like you're really breathing, and you are hit with a sudden clarity that pulls you out of the sad weight of subjective desire, grab on and follow it with everything you've got. That is life's invitation to hitch yourself to a new horse. You've been tapped on the shoulder by the universe. This is your time.



I'm sitting at my kitchen table this morning, and I don't know what to say about it all. I am floored that this is where I find myself. I have an entire year of sobriety under my belt now.

This work I'm doing is far from over. This sobriety baby is really only just now getting its legs, but rather than feel defeated by the fact that, a year in, it is still this hard sometimes, I am excited. All of the hours I put into drinking and wallowing and not believing and not doing never fed my heart and mind so much as doing the work to embrace my sobriety.

I've discovered an ability to realize my creativity that I didn't have faith in before. Confidence and self-esteem are like candy after years of self-defeat. Like flock to like, and I'm finding my soul brethren. Food tastes better. My full range of emotions is back, and I've discovered the delicious fierceness of real anger again. I am a kid with myself now that I no longer numb out every high and low with alcohol. I am actually alive and actually breathing after 21 years of carefully maintaining my drinking calendar.

And, for this, I need to thank you. I came here to this place on the internet 365 days ago and laid it out. To love myself, I had to come clean everywhere, and I came here not knowing how you would be with me. I had to be willing to lose you, to lose this place, but you were gentle with me. You were kind. You took me at my word and held me up. You wrote me comments and e-mails to let me know that I was not alone. You told me that putting it out there made you less alone. You bouyed me up when I had to walk away from almost everyone that populated my daily life. When I wasn't sure who I was or why I was doing this, I came here, and because you were here, I stuck to the work of making it work.

People who say that friends on the internet aren't real don't know you.

This is the first anniversary of my sobriety, and, for the first time, I feel like I'm walking into my life. My life. I own this one.

Thank you.

Meet My Sobriety Belly. Her Name Is Esther.

When I began my first year of sobriety ever in my adult life eleven months ago, I told myself that I would not spend this first year dropping everything that I use to soothe my furrowed brow. Dropping alcohol and pot are one thing, but my ice cream, my cookies, my tortilla chips with salsa, my chocolate-dipped donuts filled with Boston cream? Those were staying, and in greater numbers. I was going to get sober, not self-flagellate for bad behaviour. The rest of my better health could come later when I had shored up greater internal resources.

Well, the first year is nearly up, and the results are in. In short, I'm still sober, and I'm decidedly fatter.



I haven't gone so far as to fully outgrow my pants, but I have gone far enough that my double-chin shows up every time I move my head.

I'm not feeling the double chin part so much what with all these actresses and models with nothing but shadows beneath their jawlines, as though their necks are stuck into their heads like candied apples on sticks.

Mmmmm, caaandiieed aaapples.

Uncharacteristically for me, though, I am barely fazed by my newfound puffiness. In fact, I kind of like it for now.



Eleven months into my sobriety, I am still possessed of the powerful urge to suckle at three bottles of wine in a row, and I am a regular old lush in my dream life. In my dreams, I get sloppy, falling-off-my-chair drunk and have sloppy drunk sex and eat sloppy drunk food. My dreams insist on sticking to realistic scripts, though, and so I also get to experience sloppy drunk hangovers before I wake up. Jerks.

I won't lie that I often hate saying no. After I got over the hump of an early buzz when everyone still irritated the hell out of me and fell into the warm river of inebriation, I felt brilliant. I wasn't brilliant, but I felt brilliant. It felt good to feel brilliant, that particular flavour of brilliant that came with my favourite hoppy beverage and a crew of fellow pub dogs you could set your watch by.

The rest of the time I felt like absolute, unadulterated shit, though. I felt like physical, spiritual, and psychological feculence. I didn't love myself, and I certainly didn't trust myself. What I dragged around with me when I wasn't drinking was leftovers.



I sat down on the edge of my bed in my underwear the other day, and I noticed that my belly was sitting on my thighs. Not a whole lot of it, but just enough that I would really notice, was flopped there, and I started going down that familiar path on which I chastise myself for being weak and probably ugly, and then I laughed at myself, because this was what I had to worry about? A little belly fat?

As far as I'm concerned, that handful of belly (or two generous handfuls, because who am I kidding here) is a sign of what saved me through this last winter while I learned how to live it sober for the first time in my adult life. Seriously. My comfort foods brought me through some very low moments since last August, and on more than a few occasions they were what kept me from running out to a local dive and sucking back some liquor where no one I knew could see me do it.

If chocolate ice cream saved me from being the middle-aged lady perched on a sticky stool staring down a neon Molson's sign, then I'm thankful.



When I quit getting drunk and stoned, I gave myself a free pass for a year to self-medicate with food, to take this thing in stages so that I would be less likely to have a knee-jerk response involving a sad plunge into several pint glasses of cloyingly yeasty, cheap draft. My year is almost up, and I'm ready for the next phase of my life, one in which I eat more greens and maybe even do some of that *gasp* yoga that you've all been going on about for years.

Still, though, despite the fact that I am going to work to lose her, she feels like a badge of honour. Esther is bearing the first year of my sobriety.

That's right. Her name is Esther. She feels like that little, old, grandmotherly type who insists that you need cookies. Were she not merely an anthropomorphized pocket of stored fat, she would say things like How are you ever going to find a man without a little meat on your bones? while dishing extra potatoes onto my plate.


Please note the treasure trail and surgery-scarred belly button: this belly's been around, and she likes it.

Right now, Esther is saying YOU'VE COME THIS FAR.

I'm going to miss my little Esther when she's gone. Plus, who's going to talk me into eating greens? My pinky finger? My elbow? Greens got nothing on Esther's sweet pudding.