What Happens After You Get Sober?

SOBRIETY TV IS ADDICTIVE –

May 25, 2023 – Like Mulaney’s, my early sober life was a hall of fun-house mirrors, each one waiting to reveal a new, terrible reflection. During a tearful conversation with my wife on our couch in 2015, I quit drinking—and in that instant split into two warring factions of myself. There was the sober me who chose to seek help, and the drunken me who had clanged around in my life months, weeks, hours before. It didn’t make sense. Quitting was subtraction, I thought. But days felt longer without hangovers for me to sleep through, and many nights I’d dream I was drunk—the vibrant slowness of it flowing through me again, along with a familiar, potent shame.

And in the waking world, my recovery work only showed me a clearer picture of who I’d been. Getting sober of course meant repairing decades of damage, in my life and in others’. But I didn’t expect my favorite people and places to morph into living archives of my old, worst mistakes. Seeing them sent me back through time and into a corridor of regret, where I lived again through a series of drunken, horrifying moments I was desperate to distance myself from. I existed in a state of apology, or at least the constant desire to apologize, to erase the bad depiction of myself that was still, defiantly, everywhere.