I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life.

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2021 was, in the rearview, better than any of the years in which I’d been able to hide.

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2021 was, objectively, not a great year for most people living on this planet. It also happened to be the first full calendar year of my life that I spent sober, having realized in 2020 that I had a problem. It was not a year I would’ve expected to get through rawdogging reality, as it were, or even really to get through at all.

My life before sobriety wasn’t all bad. But most days, for at least five years, I fought with a panicked, angry voice in my head that said I needed to die. The end of 2019 saw me in a Medicaid clinic with a medical resident younger than me patiently going over a list of questions he was required to ask of depressed patients. I explained that yes, I wanted to kill myself, but it was just logical. I was a burden—on people, on systems.

One example: My Google Docs is full of half-started stories and interviews that I never managed to turn into something publishable, never managed to turn in. Text Edit docs litter my computer: “so-and-so friendship interview,” “essay for x,” “article for y”—a horrifyingly populous graveyard of failures that has haunted me for years.

Scared and lonely. Those were the biggest things, I discovered. I had a really frightening loneliness that felt fundamental to who I was, like it had maybe been in my body for as long as I’d been alive. And loneliness is tricky, because it’s not bad or unhealthy to want to be with other people. Human animals, in general, are interdependent as a species. But I felt like I needed and wanted so much from other people, and part of it was because I hated myself so much.

It was just a little newsletter, but I wrote it so happily. And then I wrote another, and another. At some point I joked,Foreign concepts. The conceit was that it was a bad newsletter—a way to free myself from the fearful perfectionism that had hobbled me.Sylvia’s mother came over and immediately upon meeting me and said, “Well, you have to stay for the summer!” I snuck a look at my friends, and they were smiling. They cheered on my sobriety, and my writing.

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