Lived Through This
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Reflections on 10 years sober
Ten years ago, I woke up in San Francisco and I was not drunk or high for the first time in a long time. I cried for hours that morning, because I thought it was the end of something — the end of fun and freedom, the end of being interesting and edgy, the end of nights spent racing toward oblivion, numb and glorious and shimmering with the electricity that came whenever I put drugs into my body, that mystical alchemy that turned me from the anxious, self-critical wreck I’d always been into someone invincible and starry and golden. That’s how it felt in my head, at least. To other people I was the young man staggering through the city streets at dawn, rifling through the medicine cabinet at your parents’ place, waking up on park benches and in strangers’ apartments and in hospital beds, trying to reconstruct the shape of the previous’ days excesses, scanning my body for clues in the form of bruises or track marks. But to myself I was doing the best I could, the best I knew how to do.
This is true: My intentions were always good. The desires of an addict are not so complicated. All I ever wanted was to feel okay, which was the only way I had never felt, except in those brief and gorgeous moments when the drugs were in my body and my noisy, nagging internal narrator’s voice turned loving and liquid, and there…
