can I show you what I’m proudest of?
Eliza would tell you the orphanage. But this Hamilton… well, she’s just not that fancy. However, I imagine the thing that I’m most proud of took equal amounts of hard work and persistence.
After leaving a marriage that felt like it took everything from me, including my friends, I started the arduous process of building back all I’d lost, including my community. As I opened myself up, I met some of the most incredible people that I still continue to hold dear to my heart to this day. I went from having no plans to having plans every weekend. Those plans often included visiting our favorite brewery and becoming regulars at some of our local watering holes.
What started out just as a social thing I would do while meeting new people or hanging out with friends, slowly snowballed and got to a point where I realized that the alcohol was starting to take over. For a little more than the past decade, I started using alcohol as a way to not deal with the past trauma, the hard things of my present, and to numb having to feel it all. So as I woke up early one morning in Texas extremely hungover (and possibly still a little drunk) from the night before and Ubered to the airport for a flight back to Detroit, I decided that it was time for alcohol and me to take a little break.
The timing of my sobriety could not have come at a more difficult or better time. Three months sober, the world came to a standstill as we entered into this global pandemic. When we were all asked to stay in our homes until science could determine the best path forward for our collective health and safety, we all thought this was going to be just a couple of weeks until we could resume life as usual. And we were all so wrong! In complete solitude with nothing but my dog and the thoughts running rampant in my head, I had nothing else to do but to go wander into the darkest wilderness ever. Without the safety net I was so used to relying upon, I started fighting one of the hardest battles of my life.
My sobriety won. I won. When I take an inventory of the things I have in my life at this point, I have none of it without my sobriety. What I thought would be a brief sabbatical from alcohol has turned into a nearly three-year separation and will likely end in a divorce. The poetic symmetry of it all: a decade of my life bookended by two different types of divorce. Both of which have afforded me new levels of growth and gratitude. Both of which I’m so thankful I’ve had. Some would see these detachments as something to avoid, they’ve been some of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.
