Sobriety Date September 23, 1994
“I still believe that voice telling me it was my last chance to this day. I knew it was my last chance.” Sara reflected on her sobriety date. After listening to her story, I stared at my phone in shock.
“How? How have you stayed sober continuously for 26 years? That’s an entire lifetime. I could barely get through a couple of weeks at a time last year!” Sara paused for a moment; I could hear her breath drawing in as she braced herself, “Well, let me tell you how it started…it’s a long story cause I’m old as fuck.”
Born and raised in Louisville, KY, Sara’s upbringing led her to believe that the only acceptable and valid family structure was the one she was brought up in. I definitely related to some parts of her experience when she talked about her childhood. She was bright, looked good to others, all-around excellent behavior and grades, and was an award-winning student. She was the type of child that any parent would be proud of. The only facet of her childhood that I couldn’t relate to was that she was a dedicated athlete to what felt like a laundry list of sports. Ice skating, swimming, she did it all. She should’ve walked around feeling good about herself, right?
She didn’t.
Sara and her mother had a turbulent relationship. Wherein Sara desperately sought her mother’s affirmations, love, attention, anything really, she received the opposite. Sara’s mom was usually too busy for her, on the phone, always telling Sara to “go away.” Sara paused her story. She wanted to clarify that despite what she was about to say about her upbringing, her parents took care of her physical needs. I laughed because I know that feeling, too. I also carry scars from my childhood. At this point, though, the best way for me to be at peace about my past is to accept that my parents, and frankly most parents, tried their best given the circumstances they were in. She proceeded to explain that she grew up with a roof over her head, food on the table, but she felt perpetually ignored or in trouble.
That didn’t make sense, “So, wait, how were you in trouble if she wasn’t even paying attention to you?”
Another breath.
“I remember being threatened to be taken away to an orphanage when I was 5. That was the beginning when that (getting in trouble) started happening. I had had a tantrum, and while in the shower, my mother dragged me out to the car, wet and naked, shampoo still in my hair. She had a suitcase packed telling me that she was going to take me to an orphanage…I shrieked in terror and threw a fit. Ever since, I always felt and believed that I was bad, you know, just bad. I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t good enough. Nothing I ever did after that was good enough.”
She carried those same feelings with her into middle and high school, where the awkwardness of teen behavior did nothing to help her feel like she belonged. Gossip and kids constantly turning their backs on one another didn’t provide Sara with any secure relationships with her peers. Her teachers loved her. That was about it. Around this time, Sara discovered cigarettes, and she was 12. Within a week of her first cigarette, she discovered marijuana (which Sara calls pot, so I’ll call it pot moving forward) and alcohol. Well, correction, Sara backtracked; it was more of a reunion; her father would let her have some of his nightly beer in an orange juice glass from the age of three. “‘More, more, more! I want more!’ From the very beginning, I knew that phenomenon of craving was in me.”
Sara learned to sneak around with alcohol after that. Now sneaking, that I know all too well. She replaced liquor with water in her parents’ bar, filled nail polish bottles with it, and would snatch her dad’s beer when he wasn’t paying attention, anything she could do to get to her drink. I couldn’t help but laugh, “it’s so funny to me how we’re all so good at hiding things when we need to. We’re so creative!” It’s true; we addicts and alcoholics are a bright bunch. Too bad that smarts don’t save us from our own disease.
Older teens and adults started to take an interest in Sara once she crossed over to drinking and using. Suddenly she found herself “not giving a shit. I didn’t care if they (her classmates) liked me or didn’t like me. I just started partying really hard. In the 70s, people called them the ‘freaks.’ That’s what I was, a ‘freak.’” The feeling of rejection from her mother and then her peers quickly disappeared. Alcohol and drugs started to give Sara a feeling of power, a sense of belonging, a false sense of maturity. She described the “relief” she felt of no longer worrying about anyone else, of their judgments. She felt at that time like she was in control of herself, of her feelings.
Of course, that relief was only temporary.
Sara started to hang around gas stations with her girlfriends, waiting for creepy uncle types who would be willing to buy them alcohol. Any and every party that she was invited to, she attended, using and drinking whatever she was offered. “So, you’ve talked a lot about quaaludes, pot, and alcohol. Where was heroin in all this?” I was so curious about the late 70s, early 80s, considering that today overdoses with opiates are so prevalent. “Heroin got big after ‘big pharma’ got everyone hooked on pain pills. That was way after I got sober. Back then, people died from drunk driving or on occasion from suicide, not from overdoses, not like today.”
Sara was spot on. According to the CDC, in the US in 1980, the number of people who died from drug overdoses was 6,100. By 2019, it was 70,630. Out of that number, 49,860 died from opiates, including pain pills and heroin.
Drugs and alcohol had become so instrumental to Sara’s stability that she leaned on them through what would be anyone’s worst nightmare, rape.
While on a liquor run, she ran into some older friends who invited her to a boat party. There were over a hundred people who crowded this boat, older kids. Sara drank the whiskey fast, smoked some pot. All the while, someone at the party had targeted her.
“This guy came and grabbed me. He pulled me off of the boat, and it was dark. It was night. I had a swim meet earlier that day, and this girl on my team French-braided my hair; I left the French braids in….anyway, I remember I escaped from this guy, I got back on the boat and hid from him. He came in there and he found me and he dragged me out. I was screaming, screaming to all these people, ‘Help me!’ And nobody would help me. They just let him take me away. He took me out there and he raped me. Then this other guy raped me. I think I knew who one of the guys was, and possibly the other guy. They were in on it together.”
My heart broke for her. I was scared to ask if this was her first time. It was.
“They beat me up. They ripped my hair out. I was covered in dirt, in pee, their pee, grass stains, mud. They tried to shove gravel down my throat to keep me from screaming. I was left there for dead and someone from my neighborhood found me and dumped me on my lawn. My brother found me out there, carried me inside, put me in my room and closed the door. I came to the next day, my parents never noticed. They didn’t even know. I woke up torn up. I think that was my first hangover. I was 14. That was the first time I felt true fear, horror, how awful everything was. So I put my clothes on, snuck out, and went back to the gas station to get more liquor. I went to another party, did acid and quaaludes. I knew then I shouldn’t go around these people anymore, my soul told me not to, but I would do it anyway. After that, I left my body mentally every time I had sex. I just felt like men were always going to take it, anyway.”
I hated it, and though I don’t share the horrifying experience that Sara just described, I recognized the feeling of the pain, the dread, and the need to drown it out. The need to cope through oblivion. The feeling of knowing better yet being driven to do the exact opposite.
Needless to say, Sara’s behavior continued to spiral. Once again, she was betrayed by friends and nearly drowned when she drunkenly fell off a boat and into a river while hanging out. “You’re going to drown by the time we get to you!” they shouted. Panicked that even her swimming experience couldn’t save her, she felt herself swallowing water and was prepared to give up when she heard a voice reminding her to do the dead man’s float. She survived, but her risky behavior led others to think she wouldn’t live to her next birthday, and they contacted her parents. Sara’s mother and father acted like they were shocked. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, but Sara ended up in treatment and got sober for the first time.
I remember that I was terrified my first time in treatment, and that was being a grown woman. By the 8th time, I was just tired of it, but what was it like for a teenage girl? To Sara, it was okay. She got used to it, and being a sober high schooler wasn’t bad. She had a tiny circle of sober friends, and they did fun normal teenage things. She remembers going to meetings with people who now have over forty years of sobriety. Things got steady for Sara. She finished high school, kept her good grades, and started college. It was not long before things fell apart, again.
Sara managed to stay sober the first semester of her freshman year, but the day she moved on campus, literally semester two day one, she got drunk. This time around, Sara didn’t go back to drug use. She stuck only to alcohol.
“You knew being sober worked. Why did you go back out?” I asked, knowing damn well why she did, because she’s an alcoholic, enough said. Nothing we do ever seems to make sense.
“I wanted to fit in. When I was younger, I didn’t want to fit in with my peers, this time, I did.” The classmates she hadn’t cared for had now grown into classic binge drinking, partying college students, Sara’s kind of people. At this time, Sara knew she had a problem, she just ignored it. She started having run-ins with the police. Despite her increasing number of arrests, she had about six of them for public intoxication, what felt like never-ending community services that the judges kept giving her, and nearly getting expelled from school, she didn’t stop drinking. She was horribly sick every morning, barely taking “nights off” of drinking. At this point in her story, I figured she must have dropped out of school.
I could envision the smirk on her face. “I’m smart, I still got good grades. I was on the Dean’s list, and also on the dean’s list, for my conduct.” she laughed. I chuckled, too. Come to think of it, if I wasn’t naturally bright myself, I don’t know that I would have ever finished any schooling, either. Sara got by with taking night classes to accommodate her drinking schedule and eventually graduated, arrests and all.
“I didn’t know what living like a normal person was,” Sara told me as she described the sound of the dot matrix printer as it printed her arrest record, page after page after page. I later Googled what a dot matrix printer was and what it sounded like. The funny thing about addiction is that despite us being from entirely different generations, the undercurrent remains the same. A disease is a disease, diabetes doesn’t change from one person to another. It was the same disease thirty years ago as it is today. Our experiences are our own, but the disease of addiction remains the same.
After college, Sara met her husband, who she stated became her “new drug.” She still drank, just not as much. She was now getting validation from him and not just the bottle. He joined the military, and they lived what appeared to be a beautiful life in Florida by the beach. It was like a return to her childhood, everything on the outside looked “perfect,” but on the inside, she felt far from it. She still lived in fear, and she still had an emotional and spiritual emptiness. Even skimming her high school yearbook, she realized that though her classmates described her as joyful and cheerful, she knew even then that she had a void that she always needed to fill.
While married, she became a periodic drinker instead of a daily one. Though she could stay away from alcohol for periods at a time, when she had the first drink, she couldn’t stop. Sara required an intervention each time she drank in order to stop. She wanted to seek help but her husband at the time discouraged her, telling her that she didn’t have a problem despite getting angry with her every time she got drunk at his suggestion and then couldn’t be his designated driver. Sara knew better, but she ignored what she knew because she valued her husband’s word as the end all be all, even when he became verbally abusive. Once again, she lived with low self-worth. She suffered in silence daily until he abruptly divorced her before getting stationed in Japan. She returned to Kentucky, and her drinking picked back up.
Sara started drunk driving, losing cars on weekends, waking up with the sick feeling in her stomach, dreading the unknown. Had she hit something? She vaguely remembers several near-death experiences, and then in July of 1994 (a few months before her sobriety date), she got her first DUI. She should have gone to jail, but on her fifth court date in September, the arresting officer did not show, and the DUI dropped down to a misdemeanor. Did Sara stop and think, “Maybe I should stop?” Not at all. That night, Sara got drunk and drove to celebrate getting out of her DUI situation.
That was the night of her last drink.
She remembers waking up in the morning at home. She didn’t know where her car was. She really didn’t remember much of the night before. However, she was incredibly sick, and she dragged herself into the bath, barely able to hold herself up. She sat down in the tub as the water washed over her, that same voice that saved her from drowning spoke to her again. This time it said, “This is your last chance. You better take it.” Sara said, “I believe that voice to this day. I knew it was my last chance.” It was the voice of God. It was September 23, 1994. The Tuesday after, she went to her first recovery meeting since her teenage sober years. Her reception was not a warm one.
She decided then that she would be sober despite others’ attitudes or behaviors toward her. Even if they didn’t reach their hand out to help her, she was going to stay sober and stay alive. Sara had gotten through the worst of times in the past when people betrayed her, and she was going to stay sober, even if it was just her and God carrying her through. It was a moment of clarity. She thought to herself, “this is the end. There is nowhere else to go. I couldn’t drink; I had no other choice. Am I going to do this or not do this?”
It’s been twenty-six years of sober living since.
We were running short on time, but considering that she has at this point lived more years as a sober woman than as an actively drunk/high woman, I had to have her share about living sober.
Jokingly she said that her first motivator to stay sober was the desire to stay out of jail, “that’s the easy reason,” she chuckled.
Seriously though, she described her first two years as the hardest. At 105 days sober, she looked at herself in the mirror, and it was the first time she could see herself. “I actually was present. My soul, body, and mind converged into one for the first time.” St. Patrick’s Day and other days that people celebrate by drinking weren’t easy to get through. “I was salivating, craving. I remember getting off work at five. I was going to get off the expressway to go to a bar, and I said, ‘well, guess this is it.’ But while driving, I remembered someone saying to pray for cravings to be removed, and while I prayed to God, I ended up missing the exit.”
For Sara, staying sober isn’t all about the fellowship, the socializing. Being around other sober people is definitely important, but she needed to break her codependent tendencies. She spent her life using the external to being her internal joy, and it was always fleeting. Working with a sponsor, building her spiritual base, and her connection with her higher power, which for her is God, has filled that void she had felt all those years ago.
Sobriety isn’t easy. Sara wanted to make sure that anyone who reads her story understands that. We did not get to cover twenty-six years of her life, but she’s dealt with life on life’s terms. Death, heartbreak, loss, ailments, Sara’s lived through all of it, and she’s stayed sober. For Sara, staying sober means having power. It means knowing that she’s enough. She has freedom. She has peace. Anytime she’s been triggered, she asks herself, “If I drink, what will my life look like in six months?” Suddenly, whatever trivial thing was triggering her becomes insignificant in the grand scheme of things. “Whatever is going on, you won’t remember what pissed you off in six months. It’s not worth it. It’s temporary. I ask myself every day what is worth more than my peace and serenity. Nothing is. I’m willing to give up everything to have peace and serenity.”
When I heard Sara say that, I felt inspired. It was a hope shot for me. I literally just gave up everything in December to have my own peace and serenity, and hearing a woman with twenty-six years of sobriety essentially say the same thing lets me know that I need to keep doing what I’m doing. Maybe one day I’ll be like her, telling my story to a newly sober person.
So, after all she’s lived through, how does Sara feel moving forward?
“If you’re a victim, you’re never free. You’re never happy. Everything you feel is always dependent on what someone else does, says, doesn’t do, or doesn’t say. I don’t want to be dependent on other people for my happiness anymore. I learned to write a new story. I mean, I always used to tell my story with a negative connotation. That was who I was. I always framed it as something that kept me from succeeding. I was held back by self-pity because I kept blaming everything that happened. Telling that same old negative story kept me stuck in it. I tell a new story now. My story is now about me living how I want things to be. I firmly believe that anything is possible with God. There is power in our words. If you say you can, if you say you can’t, you’re right. Even if things aren’t how I want them to be right now, I’m still going to speak them into existence in the way I want them to be.”
“Sara” participated in Bottomless to Sober anonymously, but her story, like all of our stories, carries a message of hope.
We don’t need to know who it was to know that we do recover.
Thank you for sharing your experience, strength, and hope.
