Split the Difference

Ten years of (apprehensively) showing up

Earlier this week, I texted my sponsor in an early morning panic. For a solid week, I’d been feeling pretty low—a fog hung over my head that I just couldn’t shake. “Still feeling like garbage,” I wrote her. “But trying.”

I sent her the litany of things I’d done to try and shift my mood: Running. Prayer. Meditation. Therapy. Writing. Wringing of hands at sky. None of it had worked. Why wasn’t it working?

A bubble appeared on the screen. She was typing. I hoped for something profound.

”That’s it,” she said. “U keep showing up.”

The Buddha, this woman.

I wanted something bigger, grander. I want her to show me the photos of her wounds, what they looked like before she healed them, before she was healed, before she became the impossibly cool woman she is now, zen and chill and sober for as long as I’ve been alive. Really, I wanted her to tell me that everything would be okay.

And then I wanted to believe it.

My life is in transition, and it’s hard. I want it to move faster. I want to know how everything turns out—get to the part of the movie where the sun crests the horizon and birds chirp or whatever and I most definitely want this movie to skip right over the treacherous, minor-key parts that one must traverse in order to get there. I don’t want to deal with the daily showing up for this shit, especially when I’m sad. As if any of us are owed a life full of days without sadness.

There’s this old maxim that drives nuts in how true it is: We often overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what can be done in ten years. 

For me, this feels especially poignant: On May 21st, I’ll celebrate ten years sober. That same day, I’ll submit the seedlings of my first book-length project. My first book. 

[I just waited for the ceiling to fall on my head for putting that in writing. Reader, it has not fallen.]

And so my mornings have been consumed by the goings-on of life anxiety and finals—too much coffee, deleting and rewriting sentences in four different ways, fixing little snacks and inhaling them over the kitchen sink, battling the voices in my head telling me that the writing is garbage I’ll probably lose my job and a lot of other unkind, colorful variations of “you suck this sucks have you considered making another snack.” 

The progress is slow. I write so many words that I end up deleting. I have a post-it note above my desk that simply says “Do the Reps” — meaning, just keep showing up (the sponsor was right. she’s so annoying in how she is always right). Things will add up. I don’t always believe it, but it’s true.

Because I’m learning. What a profound privilege.

You know what’s a surefire way to spoil that gift? To focus on how far you have left to go, instead of measuring how far you’ve come.

This week, to celebrate those ten years and give myself a wee break, I’m sharing a story I wrote eight years ago, on my second (sober) anniversary. It was originally published by the now-defunct XOJane Magazine, my first-ever article, and was shared over a thousand times. It feels so young, reading it now. I wrote it young. Just barely 28, years before I knew I’d go back to school and study writing in earnest. 

It is, irritatingly enough, about the magic of just doing the damn thing. There’s a little post-script at the end. I hope you enjoy it.

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I instantly regretted showing up.

I stood at the entrance of the church basement, looking out into a sea of empty folding chairs and children’s books. It was just me and two old men well into their 70s. I’d clearly misread the meeting description online when I thought it said “young, hip meetup for folks just going through a phase.” 

I was two days sober.

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I got drunk for the first time at 14. Someone passed me a Zima at a friend’s backyard kegger and before I knew it, everything was hilarious and I had to pee. I was often shy and awkward around guys, but that night, I got two phone numbers. When I got home, I made it past my mom undetected and collapsed onto my bed, feeling like I’d just struck gold.

I loved drinking. I was good at it. Nobody knew when I was drunk, and that made me feel mature. In control. It was a point of pride that I could drink like “a grown up.” Which to me, meant I could do it. A lot.

I started with wine coolers and quickly upgraded to sneaking tall shots of the Tanqueray behind my parent’s bar, refilling the liquor bottles with water so they wouldn’t notice. I was a tragic angry 15-year-old reading Valley of The Dolls alone in my room, and the whole thing felt really romantic.

By the time I hit my early twenties, a shitstorm of depression, anxiety, and family tragedies led to me self-medicating. I discovered that when you mix pills with alcohol, they work faster. The faster they worked, the less I felt.

I became a full-time musician, and while doing what I loved was amazing, it also made daily drinking incredibly convenient. I spent six days a week in bars and venues—free booze were always a part of my pay. Most of the time, the drinking seemed innocuous: Fat Tires running songs with my bandmates. Merlot at networking events. Whiskey on stage. We were all doing it. The problem was, I was doing it everywhere, all the time.  

My drinking went undetected, mostly because I wanted it that way. With booze, I became an actress. Charming, funny, shoot from the hip whiskey-drinking-songwriter-gal. Nobody asked questions.

I knew I had a problem, but brushed off dealing with it because I didn’t look like an alcoholic. An alcoholic was a crusty, middle-aged dude in a tank top passed out on the couch. Me? I was moving and shaking. I was young and attractive and no one around me would ever accuse me of being an alcoholic. Mostly, because I surrounded myself with other people who drank just like I did.

We drank to celebrate and commiserate—to magnify our feelings or totally obliterate them. I drank to numb the parts of myself that still felt like an anxious, awkward 14-year-old.

I loved the idea of being the tortured songwriter who drank whiskey in order to make art. In reality, I was spending all day in my pajamas, taking frequent “writing sabbaticals” and not writing a damn word.

I was trying so hard to make it seem like I had it together. Until one night, on tour, I hit my breaking point.

I was in North Carolina playing my first sold-out show. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t drink that night, but by soundcheck, I was on my second glass of cabernet. Afterward, I went to a friend’s place and holed up. I closed the blinds, cracked open a sixpack of Dogfish Head and sunk onto the couch in a depressed stupor. I drank, watched TV all night, and inhaled the last of the ramen and oatmeal he’d left in the cabinets, and then threw it all up. I woke up the next morning feeling like I wanted to die.

Before hitting the road the next morning, I got on my laptop and searched for a recovery meeting in town. There was a meeting in Raleigh that night, a few blocks away from my gig.

And so there I sat, staring blankly at an old man in a church basement, wondering if I belonged there at all. But as soon as he started talking about struggling to control his drinking, I heard my story. He shared about staying clean for years, and it gave me hope.

Finally, he looked at me and said, “Honey, taking that first drink is like walking to the center of town in the dead of winter without a coat on and pissing yourself. It feels reeeeal good at first….”

I finally got it. My very first drink was a relief, like I’d finally found myself. But everything that came after that only pulled me further and further from the woman I wanted to become.

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It’s been two years since I stepped foot in that church basement, and I still haven’t picked up a drink. I'm sharing this now, on my anniversary, because other people's stories are a big part of the reason I got here at all. They gave me hope. 

It hasn’t all been a party. My brain still whines when I order club soda with lime instead of a rum and Coke. It tells me that recovery meetings are culty and weird and what I really need is to meditate more. It looks at people I admire and says “She drinks wine! She makes $100k a year. See! Wine is good for you!” It points out studies claiming that people who drink 2-3 glasses of wine a day live longer and says “SEE!!!”  

When that happens, I go to a meeting or reach out to friend who gently reminds me to stop comparing my insides to somebody else’s outsides. If I can’t do that, I bring it back down to the simplest equation: Don't drink today. Worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

Quitting drinking didn’t make all my problems go away, but I’m better equipped to handle my problems when I’m not drinking. Even when I've screwed up and made a hundred mistakes, I know I’ve kept one tiny but profound promise to myself: I didn’t drink.

I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been. I’m writing again. Every day, I’m showing up for myself.

And for that, I have zero regrets.

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Post Script:

I still so clearly remember that night. I walked out of the church and looked across the empty parking lot at my 4Runner, covered in dust and soot from the road, and the cool, black Raleigh sky. I wondered: “What now?”  

The answer then was simple: Don’t drink. 

There was an immediacy and clarity to the task ahead that I still sometimes long for—the simplicity of knowing if I just went to a meeting, I’d probably be okay. Between meetings, I texted other sober people like a maniac. I walked around with a purse full of Lifesavers, plying myself with hard, sour candy to soften the comedown off of 12 years on liquid carbs.

Eventually, it worked. I stopped wishing I was dead. I still harbored so much self-loathing—taking care of that would require a lot more time and discomfort. Therapy. Medicine. Other humans. Patient, daily action. 

Some things have changed: I no longer order club sodas and wish they were rum and Cokes. I never fantasize I might someday be one of those people who can drink normally. It’s a non-starter. The risks are too great—I just won’t.  

Other things remain the same: I still get down on myself, though I try not to. I still don’t say “never again” because I know better than to jinx that shit.

I say: Don’t drink today. Also: Thank you.

I’ve learned that growth rarely feels like an upward trajectory, especially in the moment.

See, when I wrote that essay 8 years ago, I conveniently left out that Raleigh was not my first recovery meeting. Two years earlier, there had been a meeting in Chicago. And then San Antonio a few years before that. Even after Raleigh, there was a slip-up on a girls’ trip to San Francisco when I was too ashamed to tell anyone I’d quit drinking. There were tequila shots on May 19 followed by a humble return flight to New York City on May 20 and me, sheepishly walking into a recovery meeting and restarting my day count on May 21.

Progress is slow. You show up.

I am thinking about this now because I want to remind myself why I started this newsletter: To examine the stories that we choose to tell ourselves. The stories about who we are, and what we’re capable of. And then question them over, and over.

I couldn’t have imagined I’d have three sweet pets now, or the deep privilege of doing this lovely but stressy day job that supports me and my writing. That I’d lose count of the late nights and early mornings spent gingerly stepping toward my voice as a writer. Panic-texting my impossibly cool sponsor. The relationships I’ve begun and ended, in all their joy and disappointment and frustration. 

How we underestimate what can be done in ten years. 

I think back to that girl standing in the parking lot in Raleigh; I want to sit her down on the curb and tell her it will all be okay. That she has such tremendous beauty ahead of her—and plenty of grief, too.

But when you split the difference, I want to tell her, what you will be left with is awe.  

Problem is, nothing would’ve convinced her. She’d just had to go out and live it for herself.

I am going to be alright. So are you. 

Just promise me you’ll keep showing up, okay? 

Aly