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What It’s Like Being a Sober Person in a Drinking World
How do you stay sober when drinking inspires friendships, connections, and even promotions?
“Cheers!” I said, clinking glasses of wine with members of the Communist Party in Vietnam’s National Assembly, the equivalent of the U.S.’s White House. I brought the glass to my mouth and tipped it, as if to drink, stopping just shy of the wine reaching my lips. If anyone noticed the lack of gulping (my acting skills are trash) or the never-empty glass, they made no mention of it. There were more important things to discuss anyway.
I have been clean and sober for seven years. In November, I’ll be 30 years old, followed by my eighth sober birthday in January. I got clean and sober when I was quite young and it was an unexpected turn of events for me at the time. Looking back on my life, however, is like rewatching a TV show or movie again — you see all the clues so clearly, so much so that you think about how blind you must’ve been the first time through. As the old adage goes, hindsight is truly 20/20.
At 21 years old, I went to rehab for bulimia and came out, three months later, still bulimic but freshly sober. It took me eight months to conquer my eating disorder but, other than the lone beer I had post-rehab, my alcoholism has come with fewer setbacks and much more social discomfort. No one asks me why I’m not binging and purging because, thankfully, it’s not a socially acceptable thing to do. However, the sad truth is that we live in a diet-obsessed world where so many women (and men) struggle with disordered eating to some extent. All of that is to say that my own bad eating habits, if they still existed, could largely go unnoticed. Now, thankfully, I eat when my body — rather than my mind — tells me to, something that was only possible after a slow and steady years-long journey toward establishing a healthy relationship between myself and food.
Drinking, on the other hand, is not so easy to escape. It’s ubiquitous, always presenting me with new challenges in a world that’s still learning how to understand and talk about it. In my early days of sobriety, I refused to feel “left out.” I established this need during my first dinner with my friends post-rehab in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee…
