sobriety, outside issues, and hell
I was blackout drunk on election night in 2016. I hosted a party at my house with friends, and I remember the map turning red. I remember friends panicking and leaving. I remember the house being mostly empty, then nothing.
The next day I went in to teach elementary school. I used to teach in a college town private school, and most of my kids had professor parents. They were a mess. I was a mess. A third grader was bawling over his art project, and I tried to help. Nothing will be the same, he said. I said something about checks and balances, and he looked at me and said this is different. I am tired of grown-ups lying to me. Stop lying. I went home after that class.
I got sober right after the 2020 election. My nervous system was shot from the stress, the panic, the refreshing of the 538 website. I was working in a hospital then, and the sheer amount of death and wailing of family members did something to everyone who worked in the building that year. The summer of fires and police murders and pearl clutching and rage. That whole year was a blur, but after the election I just couldn't numb anymore. I had to look at reality as it was, on its own terms, and it was finally just a little bit less painful to look at.
I have four years now. It's worse than my most anxious nightmares from a year ago, and that's the worst thing for an anxious person: somehow you didn't worry enough to fill out this part of your flow chart.
I don't do AA, but I do have an incredible small support group on Reddit I love even as the platforms enshittifies like all the others. Politics is an "outside issue" in basically all sobriety spaces and I try not to push it too much there, even when it feels insane. As one friend in the group said - and I am paraphrasing - you can talk about losing your job, but not your rights. You can talk about your fear of your students getting abused at home, but not ripped from the classroom by ICE.
I get it, actually. People are fragile and "politics" - I would not call what we are dealing with politics without the scare quotes, this is something else - can and will kill a group that could be a lifeline for someone. I also surround myself with like-minded people in so many parts of my life that I do think it's important to be around people who I suspect don't agree with me on human rights issues, because that's still half of our country. Maybe, by staying in scope in this group, they can see that someone they have checked in with every morning is watching the jobs they applied to get pulled for funding cuts. That their spouse may lose access to HRT. I think, for many people, seeing suffering to people they know is the only way things change.
I think sobriety-only spaces do still serve a purpose, but I find myself needing the support of people who understand how shitty it is to have an addicted brain that cannot just let life be on its own terms in a time of peace, much less the hell we are in now. Nothing will be the same. Now what?
I know what it's not: consuming and consuming the news until we've seen every horror, then refreshing to read the takes of others consuming the horrors. I learned from long covid - another long story - that my nervous system is the heart of my sobriety (and for the normies, maybe something like "wellbeing" or "sanity" for you). When it's shot, I'm shot. And for most of four years, I was stable and steady. The takes and the refreshing and the new daily horrors are keeping me in my room on my computer alone instead of laughing with friends. They are keeping me so mad and frozen I can't even call my reps.
I have an inkling about what it is: it's keeping abreast but not consumed. It's actually calling my reps or showing up to meetings. It's not just not doomscrolling in the way early sobriety was not drinking - it's doing something else that fills the place of what is being taken from me daily. It is making things with my hands and listening to music. It is sweating and doing hard things my body was meant to do. It is talking about something other than the hell - maybe checking in on the 32-bit Cafe forum to solve my neverending website problems and get inspired. It is often WALKS.
It is listening to podcasts where people play with ideas about what's wrong and how to fix it on a macro level and not having to agree with everything people say. It is being around new ideas about ways the world could work on the other side of this, while still preserving as much as we can. It is laughing with a friend. It is not drinking. It is keeping my goddamn oxygen mask on and not feeling guilty about closing my computer to the very real hell we are in for a day or two so that I am not paralyzed - because these people want me paralyzed and I won't hand it to them.
And if you know of a sober space for talking about the shared reality we are living in and using out skills to handle it, for the love of god find me at smallcypress@indieweb.social. Or I'll end up starting something eventually.