If I Drink, They Win

Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions

I often try to take what I’ve learned in addiction recovery and stretch it out to you earthlings. I want so badly to offer the ideas and practices that have pulled me through the worst times. But today, I need to make it about me.

The thought of taking a drink has been close by lately. She’s a visitor who’s never really left me in the thirteen years and 350 days I’ve been sober. Today, she’s so close. Just standing there. Just reminding me of the sweet astringent feel of a gin martini and the briny bite of an olive after. Luxurious smoky caramel swallows of bourbon. A sudsy, cool, throat-rinsing sip of beer.

Writing that makes my mouth water. She’s good at this.

The visitor is drawn by the anniversaries of this season: my divorce, my last suicide attempt, my last drink, my mother’s death.

The difference this year is fascism.

Like so many of us on the left—alarmed and exhausted by the clumsy fools knocking down whole pillars of democracy—I’ve joked about leaving the country. The jokes feel less funny when I consider the logistics. I can’t do it. And I think that’s true for too many of us. Those hit hardest by the destructive urges of those teenage dunces and empowered ghouls are also the least able to escape.

And a drink—well, a drink is a cheap vacation from all of that. One that so many can take and return from with ease. But not me.

I’ve learned a lot of ways to sit through the urge to take that trip. Meetings. Connection. Service. And also: playing the tape through. What would really happen? How much would it cost me? Who would it hurt?

But when everything seems grim, when what I have seems worthless, when everyone gets hurt no matter what—how do I say “no” then?

I have a disease that will invent reasons to drink. I’ve heard stories of people with decades of sobriety who relapse because “it just sounded good.”

So maybe it’s not fascism pushing me closer. Maybe it’s just my genetics, singing their old, seductive song.

It occurred to me today I may have it all wrong. The threat of fascism—as much as it seems to justify a relapse—is what is keeping me sober.

If I drink, they win.

There’s not much more to it than that. Drinking takes me off the table. Drinking takes me out of the fight. Drinking makes it easy to ignore suffering—and easier to wallow in my own.

And again, I want to turn this into a lesson for you earthlings, you normies, you lucky majority without this siren song in your head. But today, I have to ask you:

How do you do it?

How do you keep going?

All I have to do is stay sober, and I’m signed up for the resistance. All I have to do is wake up without a hangover, and I know I’ll be able to fight another day.

People congratulate me for my years of recovery. I try to be gracious. Some of it is hard work. Some of it is joy. But it’s also my only option. If I’m going to be here—for anyone, including myself, including you—this is the path.

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This Sunday, March 23 at 6:30pm CT (7:30pm ET), I’ll be celebrating this miracle. You can pre-register at this link. I hope you’re celebrating something, somewhere.