The Agony of Sobriety and the Richness It Has To Offer

Every therapist or coach I've ever had has told me I'm a rare breed.

That I'm "that client" who only comes along every so often.

The client who digs deep. Goes there. "Does the work."

When you are told something by enough people over a long enough period of time, you figure it must be true.

Yes, I am relentless. I refuse to throw in the towel. I always have another layer of myself to pursue. That was put to the test a week after I published my last First and Sober article in mid August.

My world was rocked.

Only my inner circle knows the specifics, but I was gutted. Devastated.

It's something I never again want to experience. It's also something that brought me to a place of critical reflection, inner work, and growth. It was one of those moments I had to go through to continue growing.

That is one of the most difficult things about choosing sobriety: pain is essential to growth. We can't move forward without moving through difficult things. We can't read a book and step-by-step our way to becoming a better person.

We have to face the music and allow ourselves to feel things we've been trying not to feel or admit things we've been refusing to admit.

Growth is uncomfortable as hell.

When I chose to champion First and Sober, I thought hard about how to define the brand. I am sober from alcohol and, therefore, wanted it to be about that. Specifically, I wanted to reach the functional alcoholic. I didn't even know what a functional alcoholic was until I got sober, but I learned it's what I was: a person going about their life, able to hold it all together by the world's standards. They're pretending everything is fantastic, going through the motions, engaging in the song and dance.

They're "happy."

They're "fulfilled."

They're "fine."

But when they go home at the end of the night, they reach for that glass of wine. On the weekends, they live for that night out. They attend every professional mixer, always drinking just a little too much. Then they check in with friends to gauge whether what they said was "that bad." They thank God they didn't hurt anybody when they drove home buzzed. They live every day with anxiety and fatigue.

They may be miserable and not even recognize it.

When that was me, approaching me about my drinking was to be met with defensiveness.

I have a friend who -- after seeing one of my sobriety posts on social media -- reached out in a private message to apologize because "she thought my drinking was a little out of control" and was "sorry she didn't say anything." I reassured her (laughing to myself) that it was all good, because there was no way I would have welcomed a comment about my drinking. I would have quickly shut down and vowed never to speak to her again.

That's what we do. We put up a wall. An armor. We don't want to admit how sad we are. How insecure we are. How hurt we are.

We don't want to admit that we don't want to feel what our body is trying to get us to feel, so we push it down and have another drink.

At least that's what I always did.

But a week after I wrote that last First and Sober article in mid-August, I found myself having to feel what I was feeling.

And it hurt like hell.

It hurt like hell.

If I was still an active drinker, I would have drank to avoid those feelings.

That would have planted sadness and stress in my body like a seed, and the longer I avoided it, the more it would grow. Little things would set me off in a big way because that energy would be there, lying dormant, ready to strike at any moment.

Embracing sobriety is to actually feel it. To process it. To allow it to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

It is to allow ourselves to learn from it, grow from it, become richer because of it.

That doesn't mean every experience should be looked at through rose-colored glasses or that we must subscribe to an "everything happens for a reason" mantra. Far from it. People experience horrific things in this world.

A friend of mine lost her son when he was five years old. To lose a child is arguably the worst thing anyone can experience in this life.

Once when I was speaking with her, I mentioned EMDR, a therapeutic method that can help with healing.

I'll never forget her response. She said, "No thank you, I trust the grieving process."

She wanted to process it. To go through it. To let it evolve.

That is sobriety.

I use the movie City of Angels as an analogy. The movie shows angels living among us. They are immortal, but the trade-off is that they can't feel, taste, or smell. This means they don't experience pain, but they also don't experience pleasure.

When the main character chooses to become human, he begins experiencing pleasures life has to offer: eating new foods, smelling the outdoors, engaging in sex.

Then at the end of the movie, he experiences profound loss.

He is asked by his friend (another angel who choose to be human) whether it was worth it. He says that it was.

Pain and all, he would do it again to experience life in its full spectrum.

That is sobriety.

To choose it is the more difficult path. It's work. Discomfort. Pain.

It's also living a richer, fuller life, tapping into the version of yourself that you were created to be.

Embrace it and see where it takes you.

About First and Sober

First and Sober is about living life with presence. For some, that means first getting free from the hold alcohol has on their lives. For all, it means getting real about living each day wide awake and on purpose. If you believe you have a problem with alcohol you can't overcome on your own,?please reach out for help.