January 2016, a decade ago this week, was the last time I drank. Not that I knew it was the last drink at the time. “Never again” was as much part of my vocabulary as “shall we get another?” (a rhetorical question). I didn’t really mean to stop drinking and taking drugs, mostly because I didn’t think I could. Getting wasted, blacking out, tears, tumbles, unexplained bruises, strangers’ kitchen tables at dawn: it wasn’t just what I did—it was who I was.
Until it wasn’t. That January I finally hit my “rock-bottom,” which didn’t look that much different from the hundreds of other rock-bottoms that had come before. Something about this time, however, shocked, scared, and plainly bored me into action. With the help of some good, generous, patient people I started over, and began my sobriety journey.
That is where the story normally stops getting told. I was Bad and now I am Good. Chaos replaced with order, darkness with light, cigarettes with green juice. It’s an uplifting tale with a tidy resolution, a satisfying narrative arc with an inspirational message to take home. Look, everything worked out! Roll credits. The End.
Except it wasn’t. It was just the beginning; at least of a more nuanced, but I think ultimately more nourishing and rewarding, story. We say (I say!) “I got sober” as if it is something to be ticked off and acquired. But recovery is an ongoing process. Rather than calcifying over time, it reveals itself to be fluid. Sometimes I have to clench my sobriety tightly, as if I might lose it; mostly I can wear it as lightly as a tissue-fine silk scarf.
Reasons to drink, I have found, are always there. Sometimes those reasons are big and important (grief, for instance; who could blame me?) and sometimes they are quotidian and silly (like, orange wine is a thing now… Should I?). To date, I haven’t acted on those thoughts, but I’d be lying if I said they don’t flutter in and sometimes stay a beat longer than is comfortable. I hope that drink a decade ago was my final one. I believe it will be. But I am smart enough to accept that I don’t know it to be.
Part of the process of recovery, for many, are relapses. (In the last 10 years that has not been me, but there were many false starts before.) But they don’t play into that Happily Ever Sober… narrative so we ignore them, dismiss that person as weak or not ready. Shame, fear, disappointment, embarrassment—there are many reasons we don’t talk about relapsing.
An emboldening transparency around the struggles of sobriety is emerging, however. Last week the actor Natasha Lyonne wrote on X: “Took my relapse public more to come,” later adding, “Recovery is a lifelong process. Anyone out there struggling, remember you’re not alone […] Stay honest, folks. Sick as our secrets. If no one told ya today, I love you.” (The post has since been deleted.)
Later in the week, Chrissy Teigen posted that she was 52 days sober after a relapsing. “After being sober for a little over a year, I went back to drinking. I promised myself it would be in a ‘mindful’ way,” she wrote on Instagram, explaining how steadily her consumption escalated. “We aren’t talking the kind of drinking where you slur your words and miss a step on the stairs. It was just quiet and consistent. And god, I felt like shit.”
Like any of us, Lyonne and Teigen owe nobody explanations about their experiences. Nevertheless, it takes guts to make such public admissions and their generosity in sharing will no doubt help many others. These women who outwardly “have it all” can struggle too, and there is something comforting about that.