Written by, JoyceAnne
I didn’t arrive here with a dramatic crash. No one dragged me into a meeting. No one waved empty a pipe in my face. No one ever said, “You ruined my life with your using.”
I just used enough to muffle the edges. Enough to stuff things down. Enough to crawl into bed when it got too loud. I anesthetized, but I didn’t burn the carpet. I blurred, but I didn’t knock over the furniture. Even when I divorced an abusive man, nobody mentioned my using.
That silence became part of my confusion: If it never got that bad, do I really deserve to be here? Do I really have a right to get help? But inside, I knew: I was using chemicals and habits to hold back a tidal wave of feeling— rage, grief, terror, and a lifetime of being the one who holds everyone else up.
I am a businesswoman. I built my own life. I learned to read people, money, danger, long before I ever picked up a drink. And somewhere along the way, I noticed that I was more useful to the world around me when I stayed a little dulled. Fogged just enough to keep going. Numb just enough not to scream. Soft enough not to insist on boundaries that might cost other people their comfort. There are people who preferred me that way. They may never say it out loud, but I could feel it. The fogged version of me worked longer, argued less, asked fewer questions.
Three years sober, the fog is gone. Now I see the builder who doesn’t quite look me in the eye when there’s money on the table. I see the employee who bristles when I say, “We need a deposit first,” or “If a refund goes out, the commission goes back too.” I see how money changes people, how fear of not having enough can twist good hearts into strange shapes. I see how often people are more comfortable when I am exhausted and agreeable, rather than clear and awake. How many times I dumb myself down to make other people feel more comfortable, especially men.
And I see my own fear—the one that has been with me since I was 12 years old when I watched a woman on a movie screen lying in her bed, too weak to move, while people climbed through the windows and took everything she had. Before she even had a chance to leave this world.
I have lived my whole life trying not to become that woman. I overworked. I over-planned. I over-produced. I tried to build enough money, enough structure, enough “reserve” so that I would never be helpless.
Sobriety has not made that fear vanish. It has simply taken away the padding between me and the truth. I love 12-Step programs — BUT — It’s hard to “hit bottom” when you never smashed the car or the marriage because of drinking or using. It’s hard to surrender when you believe God helps those who help themselves when you’ve never trusted anyone else to hold your life up.
I’ve struggled with the language. I hear “give your power over” and something in me flinches. I have never been able to hand my power completely to any one man, any one group, any one religion.
I look at religion and think man has used that powerful spirit. To his advantage to control others around him, especially women and name it whatever sounds good to him. So I sit in the rooms, half-in, half-outsider, listening. I hear the messes, the wreckage, the DUIs, the blackouts. And mine is quieter: a life run on fear and over-functioning, a body held together with stress and small doses of numb.
Three years sober, this is what it feels like: My brain is sharper, and sometimes that hurts. I see when people use me, when they lean on me instead of standing up themselves. I feel lonely because I can’t fully join any one club, any one religion, any one side. But I am also, finally, telling myself the truth: I was never “crazy,” never “selfish,” never “too much.” I was a woman trying to run a whole world on a nervous system that had never been allowed to rest.
Sobriety, for me, is not just about not using or drinking. It is about letting myself see what I have been doing to stay alive. It is about cleaning up my world—the property, the business, the relationships—so that if and when I set it down, it won’t crush the next person. It is about letting my life get smaller, on purpose, so it matches the size of my actual body, my actual lungs, my actual heart. It is about learning, slowly, to trust the spirit I don’t have to name, and learning, slowly, that I don’t have to anesthetize myself to be loved or to be useful.
I am three years sober, and I am still afraid sometimes, still lonely sometimes, still unsure where I fully belong. But I am here, awake, not dulled, not hiding from myself anymore. And today, that is enough.
