On Sobriety

This is a picture from just before I got sober.

I had struggled with substance abuse for years, had lost friends to it, and been told by doctors that my own death was imminent. I was suffering from congestive heart failure and most of my friends, after multiple interventions had told me they didn’t want to watch me die.

I wanted sobriety.

But my ideas about obtaining it were mostly that if I just got through detox, I would be sober. If I could just suffer through rehab, I would be cured. A short period of discomfort or pain was all it took to fix this problem. So I did that over and over again.

In the short term, I was incapable of experiencing happiness, let alone joy or elation, without drugs. Life took on this grey pallor, and when that didn’t magically disappear once I was no longer physiologically addicted to drugs, I’d give up. Occasionally, I’d white knuckle my way to a glimpse of normalcy and that sensation of being cured would send me back to drugs, because as a “cured” “normal” person, surly I had a handle on it this time.

What I never wanted to see was that those people who had achieved long term sobriety AND were happy, had never been cured but rather continued to work at it day in day out. I wanted a get rich quick scheme.

What I found was that it required constant attention and intention and work, but that eventually life did get better. The pallor lifted and I was able to experience real joy again.

There are so many parallels here to food.

Having stepped onto the path of sobriety that required a real internal look and real external work, I’m shocked that it took me over a decade to apply this to diet.

For years I wanted to punish myself with diets. If it did not really hurt, it would not work. I needed to feel that pain to make up for the years of self inflicted shame.

Lighter long term daily work was uninteresting, tedious. I wanted to harm myself to health. “If I could just lose weight, I’d be cured…”

There was rarely a look at what had lead me, over the course of decades, to reach 550lbs. It only seemed to be something to address as quickly as possible.

And then, you cannot be abstinent from food.

I didn’t achieve years of sustained weight loss until I stopped trying to get all the work I had to do done in as short a time as possible.

It is a daily practice for me.

If you are struggling with substance abuse or an eating disorder, there is no shame in asking someone for help. A quick google search will turn up a plethora of options if you don’t have someone close by to reach out to. Don’t feel you have to have anything figured out beyond, “I need help.”

I often think of it this way: if I am failing alone, another + me is a power greater than me, and we can win.