Sobriety & Thanksgiving for the Year I did not Expect

Today is January 3, the last day of a good week spent outside of Cleveland with family of my wife’s side. Last night we engaged an annual tradition at the dinner table: naming thanks for particulars of the year just ended, offering hopes and naming challenges for the year ahead. Simple enough, but with so much life to absorb where does one start? Probably with the breath and the pause that says, “Stop. Look back. Reflect. Give thanks.”

Unbeknownst to me, an article I recently read had prepared me for the process. Acknowledging at the outset that life contains multitudes, the article suggested giving yourself a simplifying template, a filter to try on, for either before or after the fact. Example: “2023 was The Year of ____” or “2024 will be The Year of ____.” Imagine yourself filling in the blank, in retrospect, twenty years from now. See what you hope for. What lands as most true?

Reductionistic, sure. But also useful for identifying the location of one’s heart. The way some art forms, like haiku, use the gift of limitation to produce, to lovingly lure out of hiding, creativity, beauty, and truth. 

So it was that I was able to look back on a year and first name these wonderful gifts (not exhaustive):

• the call to serve as rector to St. James Church & School, 
• our family’s purchase of our first home and subsequent relocation to East Dallas, streets and stories of my childhood,
• so much love and support and generosity from family, church, and friends, making both of the above possible, 
• the discovery of good schools for our children, 
• life-giving vocational opportunities for my wife and for me, and 
• acquisition and completion of an as-of-yet-vacant chicken coop.

Having named all of these, I then found myself giving voice to an answer I did not expect. Twenty years from now, how will I ultimately regard 2023? 

2023 is and will be the year of my becoming sober. 

I didn’t set out to give up alcohol this year. But I realized about three months into 2023 that maybe wondering at regular intervals if my relationship with alcohol was serving me was itself the answer I both needed and didn’t want to hear. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a problem to be a problem. Or maybe I get to decide what counts as a problem. (It was a moment not dissimilar from a realization that led me to ditch my smart phone for a time, back in the day.)

Years ago, it was a therapist in Wisconsin who, after patiently listening to my struggles with anxiety and exhaustion, asked if I drank. Yeah, but not that much. “Huh,” he shrugged. “Well, just know it works against your goals.”

For better or worse, my own story doesn’t include waking up needing to make apologies for things I couldn’t remember. I wouldn’t even swear to be being drunk often (or ever). For me, drinking was more of a creeping superstition. A security blanket. An end of day ritual. A six pack a week. A marker of the passage of time. Years later, become a second six pack a week. Become blushing embarrassment in filling out the forms that accompanied a doctor’s visit. Still not enough to prompt intervention. “Just something you’ll want to watch,” the doc would say kindly.

All these years later, and it wasn’t enough. What was I waiting for my relationship with alcohol to show me? That new life was really there, after all, at the bottom of the whatever numbered drink? That I could somehow drink my way to an end dissimilar to the grandfather I never knew, who died, before I was born, of liver disease fueled by drinking fueled by what we now know to call PTSD as a result of service in the Korean War and World War II? To drink and manage to not die like that - would that be my victory?

I share some of those personal details to name the personal shape of the discernment for me, which comes without judgment of those who drink. I admire those who enjoy a drink without thinking of the next one. I’m not one of them. In the end, I gave up. I decided to save the energy I was wrestling away.

Similarly, I’m not bothered to be around drinking, apart from my occasional and embarrassed resentments at society's general lack of interesting alternatives. (Sodas being really bad substitutes because sugar inhabits a relatedly addictive world of its own. I do like Olipops now.) But, truthfully, the hardest aspects of this first year, for me, were felt individually: the first few backyard grill outs without brews; the first Christmas Eve, coming home from services to a sleeping house, without a celebratory nightcap. 

I also share some of my personal story because the stories of others gave me courage to ask questions and take steps toward what I’ve experienced as a healing. Brené Brown’s What Being Sober Has Meant to Me was a gift and revelation. I still return to her description of life’s “sparkle,” which I’ve known on every day - even the hard days - of this journey. I wonder if there are others like me who, because they’ve never woken up wondering where they are, endure a purgatory that, because they know it isn’t hell, never ask themselves if they “qualify” for the sparkle, too. My friend, you absolutely do. 

From Brené, again:

“If you’re struggling, reach out and ask for help. Find a meeting. Get a therapist. Call a friend. We don’t have to do this alone. We were never meant to.”

We don’t have to do this alone. We were never meant to. If that’s not the Good News that belongs to this season of Incarnation, of Christmas, I truthfully do not know what is. 

2024 will probably be the year of something less dramatic for me. I hope so. The year of the chickens? (Finally!) I like it. The year of deep roots and soil quality, metaphorically in my neighborhood and faith community, and actually, in my backyard? I’m here for it. I’m still auditioning possibilities. But 2023, for all its blessings, has just one name for me: the year of my sobriety. I couldn’t be more thankful.