The First Slip

Newly in love, returning to school, and plotting my relapse.

For the past month, I’ve been chipping away at my manuscript, a memoir-in-essays. I get up each (mid)morning and pull on seven layers of warmth, run Casino to St. Nicholas Park, and then come home, peel it all off, and sit down at my slender secretary’s desk overlooking 8th Avenue. Then, I write. Sometimes it’s an illuminating day, sometimes it’s mush. But every day, I update my little spreadsheet with my word count and feel as if something good has been done.

This book is a patient labor I promised myself I would commit to early in the New Year. That same week, I signed up to train for another half-marathon, a reminder that the projects most meaningful to me often favor persistence—and perhaps lowkey masochism—over speed.

This week, I passed the 50,000 word mark. As is often the case when doing something for the first time, I found myself confronted with that delicate intersection between exceeding what I once thought was possible, and the fear that I won’t pull it off. I skipped a day to prep for classes and filled a big “0” in my daily writing log. This is it. a voice said warned. This is where it all falls off a cliff.

Maybe, I thought back. But tomorrow, it won’t. The next day, I got up and went back to work. 

Sobriety is how, I think, I learned to weather this kind of anxiety. I can’t pin down when exactly I passed the threshold of settling in my identity as a person who doesn’t drink, who wouldn’t, but I know that it was earned through many near-slips. There’s a bunch of research on this. In The Upward Spiral, clinical psychologist Dr. Alex Korb frames our setbacks as key moments in accomplishing any goal—when you slip up, skip a workout, or heck, two, and a little voice whispers that maybe you can’t, maybe you won’t. Disregard that voice, keep going, and the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain in charge of decision-making and planning—reasserts itself. “Every time you stick to that goal,” Korb writes, “the voice gets softer.”

Today, I’m sharing a piece from my archives for paid subscribers only, a story about a time I was confronted by that voice, and nearly gave in. It takes place during a weeklong vacation in Cuba, when I was four years sober and on the precipice of continental life shifts—newly in love, returning to school, and plotting my relapse.
 

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It was 2017. My then-boyfriend, B, and I were only a few hours into our first day in Cuba. We’d spent the morning wandering the cobblestone streets of Old Havana, and by noon, the July heat was thick enough to swim through. We spotted an empty bar off a small corridor, and ducked in, ordering two cocktails: a regular mojito for him, and a virgin for me.   

After taking our order, the waitress returned and placed a glass tumbler filled with mint and lime between us.

“Un mojito natural,” she said. 

My tongue swelled. “Is this yours or mine?” I asked B, gesturing to the glass.

“Natural means it doesn’t have alcohol in it,” he replied.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what nat—” I stopped mid-sentence. Unlike B, I’d grown up speaking Spanish. I had a bad habit of correcting his pronunciation and had promised to resist the maternal urge to nitpick all week. 

I picked up the glass and took a long sip, my mouth filled with the sweet tang of fresh lime and club soda. Then a subtle burn—was that…rum? I took a second sip, and the old, familiar bite of butterscotch evaporated off my tongue. I wondered, briefly, if the glass had booze in it, and took another sip to be sure, saying nothing. 

The waitress returned with a second glass on her tray, shaking me out of my trance.

“Un mojito, sin alcohol,” she said and placed the mocktail in front of me. 

Shit.

“Guess this one isn’t mine,” I said with a nervous laugh, and slid the half-empty drink toward B.  

He furrowed his brow and studied my face for a reaction.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said, and put my hand on his knee. “This kind of thing happens all the time.”

Except, it hadn’t. As the Twelve Step app on my phone was eager to remind me, I hadn’t had a sip of alcohol in 1,517 days.