So I rented a car and I drove, with a furious cat, four hours away from New York City

 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. I had drained my own resources attempting to resolve a depression that had ultimately been deemed “treatment resistant,” and now here I was, on Medicaid and unable to work. I can’t work so I should die was a deeply American logic I had internalized, and in my frustration at his obtuse refusal to agree that I was simply being practical, I began to cry.

https://jezebel.com/i-got-sober-in-the-pandemic-it-saved-my-life-1848380935

I slogged through so many feelings, so many realizations, so many excavations of deep old festering shitty wounds. I started running to air them out. I took walks down my friends’ dead end dirt road in the tiny town I’d escaped to in Western New York and wept and sometimes yelled out loud at people who weren’t there. I was not graceful. But over and over, pushing forward through these feelings that I previously would’ve poured alcohol over got me to a place I couldn’t have understood.

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. I would think about these half-starts constantly, think about the editors I’d interacted with and sometimes flaked on, about the story subjects who I’d let down, whose time I wasted, and be so mind-bendingly embarrassed I would want to throw up. I would spiral into certainty about what a failure I was, what a humiliating joke it was that I kept trying to do this job that I was clearly so fucking bad at. Look at this fucking coward, I would think. This weak, worthless, talentless little nothing.

*****

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. Imagine spending every day with the person you like least on the entire planet. Of course I wanted someone else around!

And of course I was scared—what I wanted most in the world was other people’s approval, and that was absolutely not something in my control to obtain. And yet, without it, I had no way to feel okay. Other people, though, are some of the most unstable elements in nature. In fact, a common phrase in some sober circles is, What other people think of me is none of my business. Pre-sobriety, the way I coped was getting drunk or high before most social interactions, to dull how acutely anxious I’d feel and turn the volume down on my self-loathing enough to sustain conversation with someone else.

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I would like to be alive to the people around me. I would like to maintain the ability to get through a day feeling mostly solid, mostly of this earth, mostly whole. When I start to panic now—about being a failure, about craving success, about the passage of time, about a ravenous desire to be someone else, someone better and smarter and beautiful—I retreat by nestling not into isolation and a narcotic numbing, but gratitude and community. It’s corny! It’s also so achingly beautiful and nourishing, and it is saving my life minute by minute.