sobriety Archives

Getting Sober in Paris

May 11, 2022

Paris is quite possibly the toughest place to get sober in the world. When I look out of my apartment window on the Rue Montorgeuil I see not one, not, two, not ten but two dozen drink outlets. They are bars; they are brasseries; they are mini-markets, they are specialty liquor stores; they are rum boutiques; they are wine bistros.

Everybody—and I mean everybody—seems to be downing a drink. The yuppies and the street people, the teenagers and the septuagenarians.

But not long ago, I realized I had to stop. A single mother of a child with Down Syndrome who was abandoned by her father at birth, I was running into bad trouble. My child was taken from me and placed—for a week—in a state home. I had been chasing her on the street barefoot after she dashed off. Kids with Down syndrome have a “runner syndrome” and love to escape and hide. My daughter is no exception and when she raced down the stairs of my 5^th floor apartment while I was running the washing machine, I did not take the time to put on my shoes. I bolted after her and was found shoeless in the rain on a busy intersection. I had Eurydice in my arms but I reeked of alcohol. I was sent to a hospital and Eurydice was dispatched to a home for neglected children.

The irony of this is beyond words. After Eurydice’s abandonment by her Greek father she had contracted leukemia and I—entirely besotted with her—had spent eight months in the hospital as she submitted to chemotherapy. 24/7. I slept on an armchair next to her hospital crib. Knowing that she had only a 50% chance of survival, I entertained her with all the breath I retained.

Eurydice survived and we joined at the hip. A twosome, we travelled to Tunisia and Morocco, Italy, Greece and Slovenia. I was, among other things, a travel-writer, after all, and we took on all of my assignments together—and others to boot.

My problem, however, was my drink. Since I’d been a teenager, I ‘d been painstakingly shy and I’d quickly realized how to self-medicate with alcohol. Brave in private, I was paralyzed in social situations. The solution? A diet coke bottle full of red wine; a seven-up bottle full of vodka.

For years, alcohol was my ally; it untied my tongue; it allowed me to be who I wanted to be, to express what I wanted to express. I gave speeches to crowded auditoriums; I was interviewed on French public television; I aced my oral Ph.D. examinations.

And then it all turned to ashes. It turned to ashes and I had to figure out what to do about it. I went to rehab after rehab on the French state’s tab. There was little worse than those rehabs. Trembling and retching from alcohol deprivation, I was evacuated from my single hospital room so somebody could die there. When the corpse was wheeled away a few hours later, I was returned to the same room. My view? A machine in the corridor designed to remove limp bodies from their beds and to transfer them into mortuary vans.

This story has a happy ending—if happy ending one can call it. After several in-patient rehabs in ghostly public hospitals I embarked on an outpatient detox. Miraculously, I was able to stare at the many drink-dives in my area and resist their draw. Despite the fact that I had to trek to a distant hospital every day, get tested, breathalyzed and medicated, I was with my daughter and the violent delirium tremens I suffered—delirium tremens that could only have been diminished through the ingestion of alcohol—subsided after several days.

I began to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and to learn to speak in public. The first time I spoke I said I needed a drink to speak to non-drinkers. The second, the third, the thirteenth and the 300^thtime I spoke I had acquired some tools.

When you give up alcohol you dispose of a jailer. Granted, you remain, for a while, a naked prisoner—a tongue-tied teenager—but this too shall pass. And even before it passes it’s not all bad. To feel in your second decade of life when you’re in your fifth or sixth is not just a liability, it is an opportunity. It is an occasion to reinvent yourself, to rediscover yourself, to make yourself better than ever you were in the past.

Eurydice and I are growing up together today. She is 13; I feel 17. She is vivid and I am shy. She is getting slowly bigger and I am getting slowly bolder. Whatever the future holds we will stick together. We will stick together serenely and tenderly.

As my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous say, it’s one day at a time. I take nothing for granted. I do not know if my boyfriend, just retired, will spend more time with Eurydice and me in France; even without marriage vows we have, over the last decade, outperformed many a married couple, sticking together in sickness and in health, in grief and in joy. I do not know what the future has in store for Eurydice. There are far more questions than answers in my life right now. But one thing I think I know for sure: I will address them soberly.

Even in Paris.

Cristina Nehring’s first book, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the 21st Century, (2010) obtained a glowing review on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. She has written for the Atlantic, Harper’s, Oprah Magazine and the New York Times, among other publications. She holds a Ph.D in literature and teaches in Paris.

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Abuse, Guest Posts, Relationships

Love Thy Neighbor

March 3, 2021

By Kelly Wallace

Biking around my Portland neighborhood, I saw a moving truck with a good looking guy front of a house. He was photographing a Bianchi bicycle in front of the fence.

“Nice bike,” I told him as I cycled by. He was tall, thin, and looked Italian with dark curly hair.

“Thanks. I’m trying to sell it on Craiglist,” he said. “I used to ride it to my job. But since I retired a year ago, I don’t need it anymore.”

“Where did you move here from?” I asked. Up close, I noticed silver mixed in with his black bangs and sexy eyes.

“I was living in Florida,” he told me.

“Well, welcome to the neighborhood,” I said. “It’s a beauty. Good luck selling it.” Cycling to my exercise class, I made a mental note to try and strike up another conversation. It was exciting to have a hot new guy so geographically desirable.

He was often out in his front yard. I stopped to chat whenever biking by. We’d chat about cycling and his luscious garden. He’d managed to retire at 40 by never going on vacations, buying everything second hand and cooking at home, he said. He spent hours planting vegetables. As a 38-year-old, brunette business consultant, with fifteen years of recovery from alcoholism under my belt, I’d purchased my own two-bedroom bungalow but felt lonely living alone. An agnostic, I didn’t want marriage or kids. The only relationship I’d been in post college was five years with someone who couldn’t commit. As a survivor of sexual abuse, emotional intimacy wasn’t easy for me.

One night I asked him if I could try some cherry tomatoes from his garden. After the tomato tasting, he offered to make me dinner. We stayed up late talking. Within weeks we were an item. On Halloween we rode in the pouring rain to haunted houses, posting pictures of each other sitting on bales of hay. We sautéed Thai green curry with shrimp in his kitchen, then played cribbage on my sofa with my brown tabby Billie. He drank a beer here and there while he cooked but it didn’t bother me. My craving for alcohol had long since disappeared.

When I was sick, he made shakshouka, a middle eastern poached egg dish. He was a great cook and offered me tips, like the importance of having a good cooking knife. He taught me how healthy food was nurturing – something I needed after struggling with drinking and starving my way through college, another byproduct of my childhood trauma.

It was so awesome with him just a few houses down, not even a car, cab or Uber away. I loved popping into his place for dinner, snuggling up to watch old episodes of “The Jersey Shore,” then going home to sleep in my own bed. It felt like the perfect distance, the trick to finding love at last.

In June, during a city wide bicycle festival we road our bikes in the Bowie vs. Prince annual ride. We dressed up in David Bowie outfits, rode through town with hundreds of others and danced in competitions featuring the two iconic musical performers. On a rare Portland snow day, when the entire city shut down, we walked around our precinct, holding hands. We went to the mountain and tried cross country skiing, gliding along groomed trails, posting goofy pictures of ourselves with a frozen lake in the background on Facebook.

I invited him to my family Thanksgiving. Roasting cauliflower and delicata squash in the morning at his house, he prepared dishes to take to my dad and stepmom’s house an hour way. We feasted on turkey, mashed potatoes, and my stepmom’s famous lime green Jello salad. My dad and stepmom rarely drank. After years of not talking to them, we’d reconciled in therapy. On one visit, my stepmom and Dad sang “Walkin’ After Midnight,” by Patsy Cline in my beau’s living room while he accompanied on guitar. I loved watching him play, a remnant of his former life as a high school band teacher, before I knew him.

I was traveling a lot, mostly by myself. I went to the Women’s March in Washington, then to Atlanta to visit my cousin, renting Airbnb’s. I admitted that the owner of an apartment in Kyoto had invited me to go out for a beer, but I’d turned him down. Though I’d declined his invite, my boyfriend thought I was hanging out with him. I reassured him I wasn’t for hours over Skype.

“He seems too possessive,” my pal Julie said one night. “He’s sounds narcissistic.” She had a masters in vocational rehabilitation and knew about personality disorders. After a fight, I told him what Julie had said.

“So Julie thinks I’m a narcissist? What did you say when she said that?” He asked while making parsnip puree at the hot stove.

“I told her I didn’t think it was true,” I said, but I had doubts, tucking away her observation.

A psychic once told me, “You are a loner in this lifetime.” At seven, I told my mom that I was being molested by my paternal grandpa. She believed me. My dad did not. At eight, I testified against my father’s father in a courtroom and his side of the family turned against me. They insisted I wasn’t telling the truth. He was found not guilty. I thought it was all my fault. I didn’t know sexual assault cases were incredibly difficult to prove in a court of law – the chances of conviction were less than 3%.

As an adult, I escaped to college 3000 miles away. Now, with my partner’s charismatic personality, he was a bridge to my paternal relatives, making me feel more protected and at ease around them. Besides, they had a four-month old border collie that he loved to play with and soon he got his own dog.

My boyfriend adopted a twelve-week old golden lab mix, Augie, and he watched YouTube videos to learn to teach him new tricks. At a special store that sold only organic pet toys, he bought the puppy a special synthetic tennis ball.

The puppy went everywhere with him. He bought a trailer for his bike to put him in and watched videos on how to get the canine to be comfortable in the carrier. We went out to dinner one night, biking with the Augie in the trailer as a test run and sat at a picnic table with us after we ate. “Take a picture of us,” he asked as he fed the dog the leftover pizza crusts. I uploaded it to Instagram. It seemed insanely cute.

Weeks later, I went to upstate New York for my college reunion. As soon as I landed, we argued over the phone. I didn’t tell my girlfriends what was happening. I thought I could follow what the relationship book I’d consulted said: keep the lines of communication open and try to make it work. My beau posted videos of himself training the pup. I was glad he had company while I was away.

On the last day, there was an event at a winery. Not knowing what to do with myself at the winery and surrounded by drinking, I followed my schoolmates, Melissa, Katie, and Tuesday, listening to their interchanges about their kids, and work life. All three were happily married. I broke down crying.

“What’s going on?” Katie put her arm around my shoulder.

“It’s not working out with my boyfriend,” I admitted. “We’ve been fighting all weekend.”

“Let’s go out the parking lot,” Melissa said. Tuesday followed behind.

“Your marriages are perfect and I feel like a failure in comparison,” I confessed. “But I feel stuck since he lives down the street from me and wants to be together.”

We stood in a circle like a college football huddle.

“We aren’t perfect,” Tuesday said.

“But if you’re not in love and happy, you don’t have to stay,” Melissa said.

“He has his puppy,” Melissa reassured. “He’ll meet someone else.”

I finally realized I could put a stop to it, just like as a child when I told my mom what happened. I broke up with him calmly over the phone.

Now, entering my twentieth year of sobriety, we still live on the the same block. I see him walking his dog every day but keep my distance. We had some good times together and I don’t regret loving him but I’m relieved it’s over. I’m more comfortable being single. The only downside of dating a neighbor three houses down is I have to keep seeing him long after I stopped seeing him. But when I try out a new vegetable recipe I think of him fondly and all that he taught me about cooking and nourishing myself.

Kelly Wallace recently completed work on The Book of Kelly, a memoir, about her experience as an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She previously had words in On Loan From the Cosmos and The Manifest-Station.

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Addiction, Guest Posts, healing

Gramma in the Slamma (or Granny is the New Junky.)

November 18, 2014

By Jenny Gardiner.

We were expecting my mother for a visit, her first in many years. She was on the overnight train from Atlanta. My daughter had a starring role in her high school play, and mom was coming to see it. I’d arrived around dawn at the farmers market that morning to stock up on food for a busy weekend of houseguests before heading to the train station, when my pocket buzzed — a text from my brother that read: It’ll be the difference between Ambien and Ambien PM whether mom gets off at your stop. Good luck.

I wasn’t hip to the world of sleep meds, but I was well aware that my mother had succumbed by then to a severe addiction to all sorts of other legal drugs. The ask-your-doctor-if-this-is-right-for-you drugs. Years back, while a chipper Nancy Reagan was blithely advising us to “just say no”, her husband’s deregulation-of-everything was ushering in an era of direct-to-consumer campaigns by Big Pharma urging us all to say “yes” to the “good” drugs. The legal ones. Eventually my mom heeded their bad advice.

My mother was a smart woman, with more academic degrees under her belt than your average tenured professor. An educator, a lawyer, a reformed alcoholic, she should have known better. She hadn’t had a drink in over twenty-five years; she wore her sobriety like a badge of honor, with good reason. She’d reinvented herself after years of drinking and a marriage gone bad, picked herself up, earned a law degree (top of her class), and remade her life. She’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams in her private law practice, focusing too much of it, in hindsight, on what seemed like a sure-bet: real estate. She lived in a beach community during the glory days of the industry, and her hard work as a highly sought-after settlement attorney had paid off, with a beautifully-appointed home on the sound and a spectacular view of the ocean. Continue Reading…

And So It Is, Grief, Guest Posts, healing, loss, love

Nothing Is Just One Thing. By Elizabeth Crane.

February 6, 2014

Nothing is just one thing. By Elizabeth Crane.

The last few days have involved a combination of gratitude and morbid reflection. The inevitable losses that result from addiction somehow still never fail to shock me, though I have not had a drink in nearly twenty-two years and I’ve seen more than a few people die at this point. It wasn’t until the news about Philip Seymour Hoffman that I thought about how many there have been – which turns out to be too many to count – I keep thinking of others. Sometimes you see it coming, sometimes you don’t, and for me, most of the times, I just don’t want to. I’ll make up reasons why this one or that one is an exception so that my friends will all live forever, or at least until after I go first. The people I’ve met in recovery are some of the most phenomenal people I know; some have come back from homelessness and prostitution to build lives they could once barely imagine. My own drinking story is less dramatic; think of your most self-pitying girlfriend and add in a bunch of booze (whatever was available/free) and poor decision-making and that’s about as interesting as it gets. When I quit, I had reached a point where I imagined going on like that for the rest of my life, maybe never even missing a day of work at the job I hated and for sure never having any more money than I did then (which was in fact, substantially negative), or a relationship that lasted longer than four months, and I saw a way to change that worked for me.

When I was newly sober, Phil was part of a crew of my closest friends. He wasn’t my closest friend, I want to be clear about that. We had many delightful conversations, but we weren’t I’ll call you when I get home kind of friends. We were close with a lot of the same people (who I did call when I got home), and I often saw him on a daily basis. That was two decades ago. But it was a critical time in my life. I cannot overstate how much each person in that group meant to me, then and now; we were part of a greater thing, and we all helped each other whether it was deliberate or not.

Over the years, many in that group moved away from NY, including myself. In Chicago, I found a new group of people to break my daily bread with, and as we built our new lives, we all had less time to gather every day. I have kept in touch with those who aren’t close by, and we’ve always found ways to keep tabs on each other, pre-social media and pre-email. We used the phone. We wrote letters! Crazy.

I’m not getting to it here.

It’s been twenty-two years. Countless individuals have helped me change my life, countless more help me keep it changed. But there’s a special place in my heart for the people I met at the beginning. And losing one of them feels different – shocking, frightening, heartbreaking, cause for a broad, unbidden life review. The short version is that it’s good now, life. I’m happy and well, I have meaningful work and healthy relationships with people. I’m also married to a sober person, and yet it’s not until just now that I’ve stopped to really consider the flip side of that. We continue to do what we need to to maintain our sobriety, but it is part of our makeup to want to drink or use. Relapse happens. There’s a lot of talk in the media right now that makes me want to scream, the idea that we can just suddenly decide to not drink or take drugs, and that it’s a moral failing somehow when we can’t. We drink and take drugs because it’s what we’re wired to do. I’ve said many, many times that I think it’s just incredibly hard to be awake and conscious in the world. Shitty things happen kind of non-stop. People die. That’s just the deal. Spectacular things happen too, which is the part of the deal that makes the other part of the deal worth shaking on. But the feelings associated with the relentless input of life can often present themselves as unbearable, and plenty of people can have one beer or one hit off a joint and resist taking another. Alcoholics and addicts don’t have that luxury, not in my view, but we’re really, really good at making up stories about it. Maybe I should just speak for myself. I’m really good at making up stories about it. “Oh, I never crashed a car. Oh, I never drank as much as so and so did. Oh, it wasn’t really that bad. Oh it’s been a long-ass time now, I’m older and wiser and sure it will be different. Oh, I’ll just take one extra painkiller, just this once – it’s prescribed!” And so you have one, but for an addict or an alcoholic, as they say, one is too many and a thousand isn’t enough.

I’m still not getting to it. Maybe I don’t even know what it is.

So Phil died, and our friends are crushed, and I’m in shock and yet I feel lucky and amazed that I’m here. I don’t know how I got to be this age. (My thirty-fifth high school reunion is this year. Wha-huh?) That’s shocking too, because not many people get to be this age without a lot of losses. Both my parents are gone now. I’ve been back in NY for a couple of years, where I grew up, where I drank and where I quit, fueling my bittersweet nostalgia for that time of early sobriety in particular, crossing Columbus Circle with eight or ten friends through rain and slush and sunshine to our favorite coffee shop; we had a big round table in the window that was almost always held for us. I think of all those guys – and it was a guy-heavy group, though I had many sober women friends too – and how I had crushed on almost all of them for one five minutes or another even though I was in no position to be seriously involved with anyone at that time – and according to some greater plan, wouldn’t be for another ten years. (It worked out right.)

Maybe there’s nothing to get to. Oh yeah, gratitude and morbid reflection. I think we exist in a culture where we still think in black and white so much of the time. So and so should have not taken drugs, obvi. This is right, that’s wrong. You’re happy or you’re sad and if you’re sad you should get happy. But that’s not my human experience. I exist in a place where I feel at once profoundly conscious of what I’ve been given in this life, and also how quickly that goes. I feel grateful, giddy, on occasion, at the bounty that’s been given to me, but it’s not mutually exclusive of feeling impossibly sad. They coexist, more or less constantly. I’d much prefer an easier, softer way. I haven’t found one yet, but I have found one that works for me.

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Elizabeth Crane is the author of the story collections When the Messenger Is Hot, All This Heavenly Glory, and You Must Be This Happy to Enter. Her work has been featured in McSweeney’s The Future Dictionary of America, The Best Underground Fiction, and elsewhere.

Jennifer Pastiloff is a writer based in Los Angeles. She is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Jen will be leading a Retreat in Costa Rica at the end of March and her annual retreat to Tuscany is in July 2014. All retreats are a combo of yoga/writing and for ALL levels. Read this post to understand what a Manifestation retreat is. Check out her site jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Jen and bestselling author Emily Rapp will be leading another writing retreat to Vermont in October.