Good for you, not for me.
2 years sober.
I’m two years alcohol free.
The last time I drank was at a friend’s wedding. In every single picture from that night, professional and amateur, I have a drink in my hand. It was an open bar, that’s the point, right? It was a wedding, that’s the point, right? I was celebrating, that’s the point, right? I didn’t know it would be the culmination of 15 booze-soaked years. It wasn’t my intention. It wasn’t on my radar. It wasn’t even until 3 months later— I had blinked and had strung together that much sobriety, the longest streak since I was a teenager — that alcohol had begun to loosen it’s grip and I was at a choice point.
I was in the desert, in a house on top of a mountain, devastated by a cascade of endings, and I wanted to do what I always did: numb the hell out. The drive into town was just long enough to feel inconvenient, so I didn’t go that particular night. Then, a few days later, somehow, things got worse: truths of my childhood revealed in a brutal spotlight, and I knew that if I did drive down the hill to go into town and buy some whisky, I would never be able to stop drinking. So I pleaded with myself, prayed to anyone and anything that would listen, cried, and danced all night while my eyes were locked on the keys to the car. As if they were the problem. As if they were seducing me. “I’m not drinking anymore.” I melodically repeated out loud, until I sung myself to sleep that night.
For the next few weeks, as the negotiations with myself flexed from minute to minute, to hour to hour, and back to second by second, I was deep in the process of ancestral lineage healing. As I created and enforced new energetic boundaries with the dead, and witnessed the healing rippling through space and time, it got easier and easier. There were many requests for alcohol on my ancestral altar, and I was happy to oblige. My body was no longer the vessel though which they could drink.
For more than three decades, I had been successfully leveraging all of the socially acceptable ways of numbing, control, and running away from myself as fast as I possibly could. Perfectly calibrated to not overtly seem like anything was wrong. It never looked that bad: I was generally a happy drunk, could really hold my liquor, never blacked out, always found my way back home (or to someone’s home) I didn’t get into fights or lose my phone or my wallet. I always closed my tab. And yet, I knew I thought about it too much. Calculated how much there was, when I should start, considered when I should stop. Calculating the ever-changing ritual at the end of the night to try to keep the hangover at bay—usually a joint, an orange Gatorade, and Dunkin Donuts hashbrowns. I was fucking miserable. Each time I would have the first sip of a drink, I would be repulsed. I didn’t even want to? I simply felt overpowered by the compulsion.
I found New York City to be much like the Big Ten party school where I decided to go to college— it’s nearly impossible to tell if you have a drinking problem because everyone around does. The mirrors are distorted. What’s common is deemed normal. In a place where no one drives, as long as one can function and maintain a job and a social life, nothing is deemed a problem. (Even if it is, it’s a very accepted, even respected problem.) The city is infused with alcohol. At work, after work. Weeknights, weekends. Morning, noon, night, and late night. It felt unavoidable.
For most of my 20s I sought male attention by attempting to, and always succeeding at, drinking as much as them. This is nothing unique, I was stumbling in the footsteps of so many before me. The first job I had at 22, fresh out of college, was a buyer for a clothing store. I would get taken out to dinner fairly often by vendors, and they were always so impressed at how much I could drink. At how well I could hold my booze. It was my deepest source of pride for so long.
There was one afternoon that had haunted me for nearly a decade. I was working in an office and got triggered to hell after seeing the name of my ex-boyfriend. At lunch, I decided to have a couple of beers. I got buzzed. Hit that sweet spot of feeling really good just without having too much. Sloshing around in a warm, hoppy haze, I came back to the office and sat down at my computer and felt a surge of power and adrenaline. No one else knew I was drunk. It was so easy. It freaked me the fuck out: how easy it was, how good it felt. Oh. I thought. This feels like a red flag.
Occasionally, the record would scratch. More red flags. Often, on first dates when sitting across from a rare man who seemingly didn’t have a drinking problem, the shame clouds would roll in across the table, as he asked me “What are your hobbies?” Getting drunk at concerts, going to bars with my friends, and trying new wines were the only hobbies had I from ages 18-30. One man shared he broke his own rule when swiping: he usually didn’t swipe yes to a woman if she had more than one photo with booze I had 4 on my profile at the time. I was 30 years old.
My first date rituals included me looking at myself in the mirror and promising to only have two drinks, and to drink them slowly. I never stuck to this rule. Ever. Constantly upset with myself for disappointing myself with my lack of control. The third, fourth, seventh drinks would trigger an all too familiar series of events: trauma bonding with someone because I’d share too much, or fall, or throw up, then jumping too fast into sexual situations, and waking up for work in the morning worse than hungover— I would often still be drunk.
March though May 2020 was the height of something for me. I was alone for lockdown in my Manhattan apartment. Furloughed. The world was ending. I had nothing to do and no where to be, and so I drank. A lot. 2 bottles of wine a day was my prescription. The negotiations I would often only have with myself in the context of dates or work events began to creep into every hour of the day. I promised to only drink after 12p, and only if I was on Zoom with friends. Or maybe only after sunset? But then sunset got too late. Only after 5pm? And I was sick of Zoom, so if the TV was on, that counted as company. I eventually tried to transition to cans of wine. My drunk math was that one bottle really wasn’t enough, and two bottles was actually too much, but I would feel compelled to finish the entire second bottle simply because it was open and I had convinced myself I deeply cared about the oxidation of my $17 bottle of Cab Sauv. This didn’t exactly work, I was then just downing 6-8 cans of wine a night.
I started dating someone who didn’t have a drinking problem. He was so far removed from struggling with alcohol that my relationship to it perplexed him. He didn’t mean to be shaming about it— or maybe he did— but mostly because he was highlighting the shame I felt about it. For the next two years, I was able to summon the ability to rarely drink with him, or in front of him. Convincing he and myself that everything was fine, and things were shifting. The calculations and negotiations were exhausting. The hangovers were brutal. What I had been numbing and running away from was quickly gaining on me.
I don’t care if you drink. I can’t even promise myself, or anyone else, that I’ll never drink again. It’s moment by moment sometimes, still. Late in the fall, an all consuming wave of grieve came over me. It felt like too much. I stared at my front door for what felt like 36 hours straight. Again, as if it were daring me to cross the threshold. I didn’t. It was an important moment for me to feel that there was still charge. Still a pull for a quick fix when the feelings feel too big to feel.
It’s a fairly unremarkable story. May it resonate with whomever it needs to resonate with. Something doesn’t have to be apocalyptic to be unaligned, worth examining, and offered up for change. Something doesn’t have to be so far out of control that it is actively hurting others, is something in the way of your own personal process? Might you be able to get out of your own way? Might it not even be personal to you? A back log of hungry ghosts using you a vessel to get a little energy and because while the term boundary gets tossed around a lot, a remarkably small amount of folks are devoted to their energetic hygiene?
If you’re feeling the pull to explore where your energy is leaking, or to address the ghosts around you…
Ancestral Lineage Healing sessions and packages. Ancestral Lineage Healing is a type of spiritual repair work that addresses deep attachment and cultural wounds through contact and meditative time with your ancestral lineages.
Mediumship readings. A form of connection and communication with the human dead. By allowing a connection with these Beings images, feelings, and messages can be transmitted to the living via the medium (me.)
Good Grief: Guided Sessions. Together, we look at how your grief needs to be seen, and co-create ritual and meaning to support you in your process. I provide energetic assistance, clarity, direction, and connection to the unfolding. You tend and nurture your grief. There is nothing that needs to be fixed. You are grieving, you are not broken.