White Knuckling: What I Learned in My First Year of Sobriety
By Kimberly C.
Before I took Step One, something in me constantly whispered what I already knew: “I can’t keep living like this.” I was becoming a living and breathing carbon copy of my favorite poet Charles Bukowski – emptying myself at both ends of my body every night, compulsively, projectile-fashion, and infantilized. I needed diapers for all the stuff my body was taking in and rejecting simultaneously in the wee hours of midnight. That whisper continued and became a prayer to a higher power I didn’t even know I had – HELP! That quiet, powerful, whispered truth beyond the noise ended up saving my life. I didn’t get a divine lightning bolt out of the blue, or an instant quantum healing that made me wake up the next day and conveniently not drink—I got my daughter on a visit home, the only person I didn’t have the ability to charmingly BS because she was born of my womb, who took one look at me and said, “You are bloated, you are worn, you are red, you are carrying on the lineage of our family disease and I don’t want you to die.” I surrendered at that point, I realized she was my “God-shot” and I entered AA.
Surrendering was terrifying but also felt like peeling off a sheath of armor that had clung to me lifelong but had never done its best at being bullet-proof—was more like the fragile faux-confidence I assume would be the bane of a soft-shell crab.
In the beginning, sobriety felt like standing on the edge of a foreign land without a map. I wondered how I would ever belong in this new place, how to fill the hours that alcohol once consumed, or who I’d be without it. I felt like I’d lost my best friend, the one I would sneak out of the house with as a teenager and follow on fabulous adventures with cute guys and radical theorists and rebel activists and all the other non-conforming, wounded beings that I felt at home with. It was also my worst enemy—who would conveniently disappear the moment I got caught on any of these high adrenaline pursuits. In a brain fog for a few weeks once committing to sobriety, I didn’t realize this confusion of a love/hate relationship was right on time. And that awkwardness, discomfort, and humility were not only okay, but a vital part of human existence that I had only subsisted within halfway for many years because of my overblown pride and ego.
When I first heard people say, “Do this one day at a time,” I thought, sure, but what about next week? Next year? What I didn’t realize was that “one day at a time” isn’t about time at all — it’s about attention. It’s permission to live inside a single sunrise without carrying the weight of yesterday or tomorrow. When you can just focus on this day, your mind quiets, your heart steadies, and your nervous system finally exhales.
I found a sponsor immediately. I realized you can’t think your way into recovery. You need another human being who’s walked through the fire and come out with wisdom to share. A sponsor is like a translator between the language of chaos and the language of grace. You don’t have to agree with everything they say — just stay open. The point isn’t perfection; it’s connection.
In “The Keys to the Kingdom” story of the Big Book, one of my favorite parts is when the doctor tells the woman, who he is starting to explain his experience with alcoholics to, that alcoholics tend to be very intelligent, high-functioning people, which is both their fortune and their non-fortune. When I found my sponsor, I started working the steps and got comfy as a pig in dirt on my little fluffy pink cloud. I decided I was going to become immediately enlightened, lose twenty pounds of vodka weight, repair my credit in a flash with overdrive workaholism, become popular in the new fellowship of people who were just like me, and find my life’s purpose. Albeit my sponsor’s constant advice of taking it slow, not worrying about major life decisions until I actually started figuring life out on life’s terms, and being kind to myself, I was like one of those annoying girls in history class with her hand up, going “pick me, pick me!”
What I discovered was that the only job I had was to stay sober and let myself feel. So, I did. I vacillated between calling myself a “prickly cactus” and a “walking waterfall” the first twelve months of sobriety because I was either crying my eyes out from feeling my feelings for the first time in my life without self-medication or bristling at all the words, actions, and realizations I had about all of YOU that I encountered on a daily basis. I needed a LIFE 101 book and there was none to be had, so I had to sit and let presence overcome me while I processed all my new emotions and learned to show up just as I was regardless of how peculiar I felt in this world. I ate a lot of donuts instead of running a marathon and that was okay, because the people I met in AA had been there and weren’t judging me on the size of my hips, my professional accolades, or my esteem in the world – just my ability to be rigorously honest about being human, needing help, and sincerely looking for a light at the end of the tunnel.
When AA spouts, “Don’t make any major life changes in your first year,” —that’s not control; it’s mercy. It’s giving your soul time to stabilize before you rebuild.
I came to understand through the Step work with my sponsor, that I numbed myself for a reason. When the anesthesia of a pint and a half a day of vodka wore off, things still stung — shame, anger, grief, loneliness, joy but I understood it was all a part of thawing out. With the help of the fellowship, in daily meetings, where I heard people say resonant things, I could laugh and relate and realize that feelings weren’t fatal. They were like weather. They moved through me when I stopped running from them. I cried, I journaled, I walked, I prayed. But whatever I did — I didn’t pick up the first drink. Because I wasn’t embarrassed to call someone and say I wanted to.
I went to meetings, especially when I didn’t want to. They say, whatever you are resisting is actually what you need to do. That’s where the magic happens. I’d hear my story come out of someone else’s mouth, and suddenly the loneliness that followed me for years started to loosen its grip. I heard myself laugh again — honest, belly laughter — and that’s when I’d realize recovery isn’t punishment. It’s freedom.
Because of all these actions, I realized I wasn’t broken, I was healing. I’d been trying to survive the best way I knew how. I learned that sobriety wasn’t about becoming a saint, it was about becoming whole. I’d stumble. I’d doubt. But when I kept showing up, something holy started to happen. I began to meet the real me, the one who had been born long ago, been a little sweet girl full of potential once, and who had been waiting underneath the wreckage all along.
AA literature and lore talk about having faith before you know what faith is — what I consider faking it before you make it, or what the transcendentalists call “acting as if” which precludes manifestation of reality. We hear, “Don’t leave before the miracle happens,” and you will surely reach the fourth dimension of happy, joyous, and free. In my first year, I clung to this concept when listening to all the old-timers spout about why they are still here, still show up, still go to meetings, still shepherd newcomers. They are on the other side and in my first year, that’s what kept me going, that extraordinary promise from the other side about how I will start to feel beauty in ordinary things, a cup of coffee, the water in my shower, dusting my kitchen cabinets, finding little dots in the everyday sacred.
After a year of sobriety, I learned that all my human foibles, insecurities, flaws, mishaps, stumbles, tears, humbleness, vulnerability, and showing up made me actually start to become someone I could trust. I needed to do that first with the help of the members of AA. And now I can plan that first marathon.