Counting Down to 10,000 Days Sober — Day 9910
On April 2, 1996, sometime around 8:00 in the morning, I was in my car, very hungover and late for work. Pretty typical for a Tuesday.
After months of hustling from one temp/day gig to the next, I was several weeks into my first steady Los Angeles job as an assistant editor (really a glorified Production Assistant) at a very small production company. I was starting at the bottom, again, after leaving behind a post-film school career/detour in Sports Television on the East Coast, where I had spent seven years climbing from PA, to Master Control, to Live production, to Editing and Producing.
I had only been in Los Angeles for 5 months, but I had already learned for myself a bit of Hollywood wisdom Bette Davis shared with Johnny Carson way before my time: If you want to get anywhere in Hollywood “Take Fountain.” So, that morning I was blasting down Fountain Avenue, trying to get from the room I was renting from a crazy German dude in the shadow of the Hollywood sign all the way down to South Robertson in my recently purchased very, very used car.
I was shaking and sweaty behind the wheel, and very likely still a bit drunk. As I pulled up to the stop sign at the intersection of Fountain and Seward, a thought popped into my head. Actually, it didn’t just pop into my head, it blasted into my head - loud and insistent. I think it even echoed a little: “Nothing has changed.”
How could that be? Everything had changed, and I had changed it all by myself. After a year of planning and saving up a whopping $1600, I had left my lifetime home in cold and haunted (for me) Massachusetts and taken the train 3000+ miles to a new life in the city of sunshine and new possibilities. How could this voice be telling me nothing has changed? I refused to believe it, but the voice didn’t shut up for the rest of my frantic and sweaty morning commute.
I was distracted all that day at work. I knew I had been sent a message and I knew I was denying its core truth: In spite of the palm trees, sunshine, and possibilities, really, nothing had changed. I was still me and I was getting worse at it even quicker than I had expected.
Long before hearing that message at the corner of Seward and Fountain, I knew I was an alcoholic, probably always had known it (trust me, we’ll get into all that in the coming days and weeks.) I thought I had accepted that as my fate. It is important to note here that I did not move to Los Angeles with the expectation that it would help me quit drinking. In recovery circles, those kinds of moves are called “Doing a Geographic” and they never work, because no matter where you go, you’re still you. As I was packing up my life in Boston, my thinking was actually the opposite of that. Yeah sure, in the back of my mind, I had long-harbored dreams of being a TV/Comedy writer, not a Sports TV producer. That was part of it, but mostly I knew my drinking was out of control and getting worse. I knew it was going to kill me, and in my disordered brain, I was fine with that. I just didn’t want my family and friends to see the final stages. I also didn’t want to die without experiencing a little bit more of the world than New England. So my plan, what little I had of one, was to just move to Los Angeles, see what happens and drink myself to death in the sunshine, far away from people who knew me. If this all sounds a bit over-the-top and melodramatic, I can promise it seemed inevitable and logical at the time, and I wasn’t a kid. I was 31.
But somehow that evening, on that April 2, 1996 drive home from work, I didn’t pick up a 12-pack and a pint of rum. Instead, I stopped at a health food store and purchased a two-week supply of “liver cleansing” herbs. It was a desperation move, I knew. It sounded both naive and ridiculous because I had rarely gone 2–3 days without a drink for a decade and a half. There was no way I was going to go two weeks without one, even if I was trying to “cleanse” my liver…
And now here we are.
27 years, 1 month, and 19 days later I still haven’t taken another drink. How did I do it? Honestly, even I’m not 100% sure. Is it a miracle, or the result of decades of hard work and support? It’s both. Does it make me an expert on sobriety? NO. It only makes me an expert on how to keep myself sober, that’s all. But I also know how important it was to me, especially in my early days of sobriety, to hear/read other peoples’ stories, so I feel like it is time for me to try to untangle mine. I also think it will help me sort a few things out because I’m still wrestling with myself even after all these years. Long-term sobriety comes with its own set of challenges.
My approaching 10,000-day anniversary seems like a good time to make this attempt. When we first try to get sober, reaching just 10 days (double digits) seems impossible. A few months later, crossing into triple-digit territory at 100 days is a major accomplishment. Then it takes nearly 3 hard years to hit quadruple digits. I’m now on the threshold of reaching quintuple digits. It feels like a big deal since no one lives long enough to hit sextuple.
I decided to start this blog now, 90 days from the milestone (obviously, it isn’t a “finish line”) for a couple of reasons: It will help me focus the nervous energy that comes with approaching milestones in a productive way. It will help me prioritize sobriety in my daily thinking again, and it will give me a chance to see if I’m really ready to share this story or not.
I know some people will say it is risky to look 90 days ahead and assume I’ll still be sober then, instead of taking things “One Day At A Time.” I get it, but after 9910 days sober, I think the odds are pretty good that I’ll stay on track for the next 90. Speaking of things like “One Day At A Time” I’ll say right now that AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) was only a part of my personal recovery. This blog isn’t going to just be a recitation of the Big Blue Book and the 12 Steps. My journey has been wider-ranging than that. I do know AA works, but for me, it was just part of the solution to my sobriety puzzle.
One of the AA tenants I can get behind is their suggestion that, if you’re going the AA route, you gotta try to attend a meeting every day, for the first 90 days. So as I hit [publish] on this Medium post, I’m thinking of everyone who is ONE day sober today. I know, heart-breakingly well, that only a small percentage of them will still be sober 90 days from today, but that’s OK too. Everyone can start over, as many times as it takes. If this blog is for anyone, it is for them. It is for you.
I’m not saying I’m going to write a post every day for the next ninety days, but I am going to try to be honest and expansive here in my cloak of anonymity as I sort out how I managed to ride life’s rollercoaster for the past 27 years and build a life for myself, sober.
[If you’ve read this far, please consider hitting the FOLLOW button. I’ll try to make it worth your while.]
