Sharon, this is a full first draft of your book, built from the story you told through Eric and written in your voice, as if you were speaking. It is meant to be read, reacted to, and rewritten. You will almost certainly find places where you think, that is not quite how it was, or that is not how I would say it. Good. That reaction is worth more than a blank page, and it is exactly why this draft exists.
A few things to know as you read. Everywhere you see a shaded box marked Your turn, Sharon, that is a place where only you can add what is missing: a memory, a feeling, a specific scene, the inside of a moment I could only describe from the outside. Those boxes are the difference between a draft about you and a book by you.
I did not invent names for your children, your husbands, or the man who hurt you. Those are yours to decide, along with how much of certain hard things you want to tell and whether anyone should be named or kept private. Where I did not know a date or a detail, I kept it general rather than guess. And the one thing at the center of the whole book, what finally made staying sober work this time when it had not before, I left for you, because it is the truest thing in the story and it belongs in your words.
Nothing here is final. All of it is yours to change.
I have known Sharon a long time, and I want to tell you something about her before she tells you about herself, because I am not sure she would say this part, and somebody should.
There is a version of Johnny Cash I think about a lot. Near the end of his life, close to eighty years old, his body worn down by Parkinson’s, long past what anyone would have called his glory days, he made some of the most powerful music of his entire career. The voice was rougher. The hands shook. He was older, and beaten up, and out of practice by the standards of the young hitmakers with every advantage he no longer had. And he put out work that outshone artists half his age. He still had it. Maybe he had more of it than ever, because by then every word cost him something.
That is how I think about Sharon.
Yes, she is older than she was in her glory days. Yes, she is a little more beat up. Yes, she is a little out of practice, because life has not handed her a real win in a while, and it is hard to stay sharp when the world keeps knocking you down. But I have known a lot of talented people in my life, and I am telling you plainly: if we were choosing teams the way we did as kids on the playground, lining everybody up and picking one by one, I would take Sharon before almost anyone standing there. She has still got it. Whether or not she knows it.
And that last part is the reason I am writing this at all, because I am not sure she does know it anymore. The woman who built a company from nothing, who stood on stages and taught rooms full of people, who won the awards, used to have confidence to spare. Life has shaken it. When you have not had a win in a long time, you start to wonder whether you could still get one, and I watch her doubt herself now in a way the old Sharon never would have. It is the one thing about her that breaks my heart, because from where I stand the talent has not gone anywhere. It is all still there. She just cannot always see it through everything piled on top of it.
So if you are holding this book, you already have your proof. Look at what she made out of the hardest years of her life. Look at how honestly she is willing to tell you the truth, including the parts most people would carry to their grave before admitting. That takes a kind of strength her awards never knew how to measure.
I am not a neutral witness. Sharon is my friend, one of the truest I have. But that is exactly why you should trust me on this one thing. I know her all the way down, the good and the hard, and I would still pick her first. Read what she wrote. Then you will understand why.
With love, and without a shred of doubt, a friend of Sharon’s.
For a long time, if you had asked anyone in my industry to describe me, alcoholic is not a word they would have reached for. They would have said I was successful. They would have pointed to the company I built from nothing, the stages I spoke on, the rooms full of people who had come to hear me teach. They would have mentioned the awards, including a career achievement award I was genuinely, deeply proud of. And they would have been right about all of it. None of it was a lie.
It just wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth is that I was an alcoholic through every bit of it. I won the awards and I drank. I gave the talks and I drank. I was, in the language people use now, a high-functioning alcoholic, which is a polite way of saying I was very good at my job and very good at hiding how much I needed the wine, usually a white, usually a pinot grigio, usually with a smile and good company and a perfectly reasonable excuse. For years, no one worried about me, least of all me. My drinking didn’t look like a problem. It looked like success.
I’m writing this book three years into being sober, and I want to tell you something right at the start, because it’s the most honest thing I know and because it’s probably not what you’re expecting from a book like this. Getting sober did not make my life better, not in the way those stories usually go. In the three years since I put down the drink, I have lost jobs I didn’t deserve to lose. I have had two heart attacks, and during one of them I drove myself to the hospital, my own hands on the wheel while it was happening. I have had open-heart surgery. I have nearly lost my house, twice. I have stood in line at a food bank. When a friend helped me out and I could buy groceries, I remember thinking that fresh bread, bread that wasn’t stale, felt like a genuine treat.
By almost every measure the world uses, my life got harder after I got sober, not easier. I’ll be honest with you the way I try to be honest with myself: some days it feels like nothing has gone right since I stopped drinking. Everything seemed easier back when I drank every day. I know that isn’t true, and I know exactly what the drinking was doing to me, but I understand why it feels that way, and I’m not going to pretend to you that it doesn’t.
And I’m not writing to you from some calm place on the far side of all this, with everything already worked out and a lesson tied neatly on top. I’m in the middle of it right now. As I write these very words, my internet is shut off, because I can’t afford it this month, so I’m working off the hotspot on my phone and watching the data tick down. This isn’t a story I get to tell you from safety. It’s the one I’m living today: still broke, still frightened some mornings, still standing, still sober.
So why call a book Nothing Has Gone Right Since I Got Sober, and then spend the whole thing telling you that getting sober was the best decision I ever made? Why claim there’s a gift in any of this?
Because there is. It’s just not the gift I once thought it would be. I used to imagine that sobriety was the reward, that if I could only stop, life would fall back into place, the money and the friends and the standing would all come back, and everything would be good again. That’s not what happened, and I think a lot of books quietly lie about that, and the lie hurts people. Here is what actually happened. I found out that I could go through the worst years of my life completely clear-eyed, take blow after blow, and not pick the drink back up. I found out I could survive without the one thing I always reached for. I found out who I am when everything else is stripped away, and it turns out she’s still standing.
That’s the silver lining. Not that being an alcoholic made my life easier, but that surviving it made me someone I can respect. I would rather face two heart attacks sober and broke than go back to being the celebrated woman at the podium who was quietly drinking herself toward a hospital bed. That’s not a slogan. It’s a choice I make on the hard days, and I’ve had a lot of hard days to test it.
This book is about how I got here, and about what I’ve learned that might be useful to you, whether you’re someone who drinks too much, someone who loves a person who does, or someone who has never had a drink in their life but knows exactly what it is to be trapped, to lose everything you built, and to have to decide who you’re going to be about it.
I’m not going to sell you an easy story. I’m going to tell you a true one. Somewhere in it, I hope you find your own silver lining, not the promise that things will get easier, but the far more durable discovery that you can get through them as yourself.
I want to start not with a definition but with a fifteen-year-old girl, because you can’t understand my drinking without understanding her.
I left home at fifteen. I won’t spend these pages settling scores about my childhood. It’s enough to say it wasn’t a good or safe place to be, and that leaving felt less like a choice than like survival. I left with my boyfriend, who would later become my husband, and I became legally emancipated. At an age when most people are worrying about their sophomore year, I was on my own, responsible for myself, with no map and no net.
I tell you this because of something I only understood much later, once I’d had years to look back. I never got an adolescence. I never had the college years, the dorm friends, the safe and silly belonging that so many people take for granted. I skipped straight to being an adult who had to make it. And I did make it, and I want you to hear that too, because it matters. I built a real life. My husband and I started a company, a third-party administration firm that handled compliance work like FSA administration. It grew. It succeeded. I became known in my field as one of the best speakers and teachers around, someone people wanted to hear. I joined a national association and a couple of related organizations, threw myself into them, and won a number of awards for the work.
But the belonging I’d missed at fifteen didn’t just disappear because I was successful. It waited. And eventually it found me in the one place I never expected: at the bar after the conference, with my colleagues, a glass of wine in my hand.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then, and it’s the part of this chapter where I’ll put on my teacher’s hat, because understanding the machinery actually helps.
Alcoholism, what the doctors call Alcohol Use Disorder, is not a weakness of character. It is not a failure of willpower, and it is not a moral defect, no matter how much shame tries to tell you otherwise. It’s a chronic, relapsing condition in which your brain loses the ability to control how much you drink, even when the drinking is clearly costing you. It comes from a tangle of things, from genetics and environment and the experiences that shaped you, and it changes the actual chemistry of your brain over time. When you drink, your brain releases feel-good chemicals like dopamine. Do it often enough and your brain adapts. It comes to expect the alcohol, to need more of it to feel the same relief, and to feel wrong without it. That’s not a story about a person who won’t stop. It’s a story about a brain that has been rewired to believe it can’t.
And alcohol is only one of the shapes this takes. The same machinery drives addictions to drugs and nicotine, and it drives behavioral addictions too: gambling, shopping, food, work, all of them. The substance changes; the pattern doesn’t. You reach compulsively for the thing, it costs you, and you reach for it again anyway. I’ll come back to this later in the book, because one of the strange gifts of having been an alcoholic is that you learn to recognize this pattern everywhere, in yourself and in others, and that recognition can save you.
But I want to sit for a moment on my particular version of it, the high-functioning kind, because it’s the one people understand the least and the one that hides in plain sight.
I never hid that I liked to drink. That’s the thing people get wrong about someone like me. I wasn’t sneaking bottles into a closet. My whole industry ran on alcohol. The business meetings had it. The events had it. Every out-of-town conference ended the same way, every night, at a bar with old colleagues, laughing, catching up, a drink always in my hand. It wasn’t hidden because it didn’t need to be hidden. It was expected. It was what success looked like. And when a drink in your hand is just part of being good at your job, the line between “she works hard and plays hard” and “she cannot stop” becomes almost impossible to see, not just for the people around me, but for me.
That’s what “high-functioning” really means, and why it’s so dangerous. It doesn’t mean the addiction is milder. It means the consequences that would normally wake a person up keep getting postponed, because you’re still performing, still winning, still holding it all together on the outside. The disease gets to keep growing in the dark while everyone, including you, points at the awards on the shelf as proof that you’re fine.
I was not fine. I want to say that clearly for anyone reading this who is also “fine,” who is also successful and social and functional and quietly aware that they cannot picture getting through the week without drinking. The absence of a catastrophe is not the same as the absence of a problem. For years I had no rock bottom to point to, and I mistook that for safety. It wasn’t safety. It was just a bill that hadn’t come due yet.
Understanding all of this, really understanding that alcoholism is a condition and not a character flaw, did two things for me, and I offer them to you as the first tools in this book. First, it let me put down some of the shame, and shame is the thing that keeps you drinking more than almost anything else, because you drink to escape the feeling of being someone who drinks, and around it goes. Second, it let me look at myself and at other people with more compassion, which turned out to be the beginning of being able to help anyone at all, including me.
In the chapters ahead, I’ll take you through the rest of it: the triggers and the patterns, the years everything came apart, the true bottom, and the long, unglamorous climb to the sober, still-standing woman writing these words. But it starts here, with a fifteen-year-old girl who had to grow up too fast, and a grown woman who finally understood that the thing she’d been calling fun had a name, a mechanism, and a way out.
There was a group text we all called the bat signal. Someone would send it out, a word or two, nothing more, and within an hour a dozen of us would be at one of our spots with drinks in front of us. It didn’t seem to matter that we all had jobs, that most of us were in relationships that were supposed to come first, that it was a Tuesday. Somehow everyone was always available. The bat signal went up, and we came.
I loved it. I want to be honest about that before I say anything else, because the easy version of a recovery story pretends the drinking was always misery, always a thing you did alone in the dark to escape some pain. Mine wasn’t, not for a long time. My drinking lived in the best relationships I had. These people were my family. They were funny and smart and they knew my business and I knew theirs, and when I was with them I felt like I belonged somewhere, which was not a feeling I had grown up with.
I told you in the last chapter about leaving home at fifteen, about the adolescence I never got to have. I didn’t connect these two things for years, but I will connect them for you now, because I think it is the truest thing I understand about myself. The college years I missed, the dorm-room belonging, the safe and silly closeness of a group of people who are all figuring life out together, I finally got all of that in my forties, at industry conferences, over wine. My found family and my drinking were the same thing. You could not pull them apart. To be with my people was to have a glass in my hand, and to have a glass in my hand was to be with my people.
That is what makes this so much harder than the warnings ever tell you. When people talk about triggers, they usually mean the bad feelings, the stress, the loneliness, the grief that sends a person reaching for a drink. Those are real, and I will get to them. But my most powerful trigger was not pain. It was joy. It was connection. It was the happiest, warmest part of my life, and it came in a glass.
Now here is the part where I put the teacher’s hat back on, because I want you to understand what was actually happening to me, and maybe to you.
A trigger is anything that reliably prompts you to reach for the thing you’re addicted to. We tend to think of triggers as feelings, and many of them are. Stress is a trigger, because a drink promises quick relief. Boredom is a trigger, because a drink promises to fill an empty evening. Loneliness, grief, old unhealed pain, all of these can drive a person toward the bottle as a way to not feel for a while. If any of those are yours, you are not weak. You are human, and you found something that worked, until it stopped working.
But there is another kind of trigger that gets talked about far less, and it is the one that ran my life. It is the social trigger, the environment where drinking is simply what everyone does. In some worlds, and mine was one of them, alcohol is not the exception, it is the water everyone swims in. The deal closes over drinks. The friendship deepens over drinks. The night is a success because of the drinks. When you live inside a world like that, your addiction gets to hide, because it looks exactly like participation. Nobody stages an intervention for the woman who is simply doing what the whole room is doing.
People sometimes want to call that peer pressure, and I want to be careful here, because it wasn’t, and the truth is more unsettling than the easy word. Nobody in my circle was pressuring anybody. There was no one holding a drink to my lips or shaming me for wanting to go home. We were all just doing it, together, freely, because we wanted to. That is a harder thing to escape than pressure, because there is nothing to push back against. You cannot say no to a villain when there is no villain. There is only your family, your fun, your whole social world, and the quiet understanding that stepping away from the drinking means stepping away from all of it.
That is why, when I finally did get sober, one of the hardest and loneliest parts had nothing to do with wanting a drink. It was that I could no longer answer the bat signal. I will tell you about that later, because it deserves its own place in the story. For now I just want you to sit with the shape of the trap, especially if you recognize yourself in it. The trap is not always misery. Sometimes the trap is love. Sometimes the hardest addiction to face is the one braided into the best thing you have.
And I want to say one more thing about those years, because it would be dishonest to leave it out in the name of a tidy recovery message. I do not look back on that whole time with regret. I know what the drinking cost me, and I have spent this book being honest about the wreckage. But the times themselves were genuinely good. The people were genuinely good. The laughter was real, the belonging was real, and they are cherished memories that I will not let anyone, including my own recovery, convince me were nothing but a mistake. A life can hold two things at once: that something was bad for you, and that it was also, truly, one of the best parts of your life. Mine holds both, and I have made my peace with that. I will come back to those friends, the ones who are still with me, later in this book, because they turn out to be one of the blessings I almost forgot I had.
If you are trying to understand your own drinking, or someone else’s, start by asking not only what pain it numbs but what it gives. What does it connect you to. Who are you afraid of losing if you stop. Those questions are harder than the ones about stress and sadness, and they are much closer to the bone.
There is a comfortable lie people tell about addiction, which is that the addict is the last to know. It lets everyone off the hook. If she didn’t know, then she couldn’t have chosen otherwise, and the rest of us couldn’t have been expected to see it either. I want to take that lie apart, because in my experience it was the opposite. I knew. I knew for a long time. And I kept drinking anyway, and understanding how both of those things can be true at once is one of the most important things I can give you.
The original idea for this book, back when it was a short thing I wrote years ago, was that being an alcoholic gives you a kind of gift, a hard-won self-awareness that lets you see addiction clearly and steer around its other traps. I still believe there is truth in that. But I was writing it too early, and I made self-awareness sound cleaner and more powerful than it is. So let me correct my younger self here, with the benefit of everything that has happened since.
Self-awareness is not the same as change. You can see the thing with total clarity and still be unable to stop doing it. That gap, between knowing and doing, is not a character flaw. It is the actual nature of addiction. The disease does not require your ignorance. It is perfectly happy to let you understand exactly what is happening, to let you read the articles and recognize yourself in them, to let you lie awake at three in the morning knowing precisely what you are, as long as it still gets the drink at the end of the day.
I was a smart, capable woman. I taught other people complicated things for a living. I could look at my own drinking with a clear eye and describe it accurately, and I sometimes did, to myself, in the quiet. And then the evening would come, and the bat signal would go up, or the conference would end, or the house would just be too quiet, and I would drink. The knowing didn’t stop me. For a long time the knowing just gave me something new to feel bad about, which, if you have been paying attention, is its own reason to pour another glass.
Here is why I still think there is a gift buried in this, even though it is not the tidy one I once described.
The gift is not that self-awareness saves you. Mine didn’t, not for years. The gift is that once you have lived inside the machinery of an addiction, once you have felt from the inside how a craving hijacks a decision, how the mind builds a reasonable-sounding case for the exact thing that is destroying you, you can never again believe that willpower is the whole story. You understand, in your body and not just your head, how these traps actually work. And that understanding, if you survive long enough to use it, becomes a strange kind of expertise. You can spot the pattern in yourself faster. You can spot it in the people you love. You can smell the difference between a habit and a hook.
That expertise does not come free. It is bought with years you cannot get back. But it is real, and later in this book, when I talk about watching my own children fight this same disease, and about the people I have been able to sit with because I know exactly where they are, you will see the gift put to use. I am not glad I am an alcoholic. But I would be lying if I said the knowing has been worthless. It is the most expensive education I have ever received, and I paid for all of it.
If you are reading this and you already know, the way I knew, I want to say one thing to you plainly, because I wish someone had said it to me without wrapping it in shame. Knowing is not the finish line, and it is not the failure either. It is just information. What you do with it is a separate question, and the fact that you have known for a while and not managed to stop does not mean you are hopeless or that you lack the strength. It means you have a condition that does not respond to knowledge alone. You will need more than knowing. I did. The rest of this book is about what more turned out to be.
When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, my husband and I looked at the compliance business we had built and thought we saw the future. We decided the work we did was about to dry up, that the ground was shifting under our industry and that the smart move was to get out while the company was worth something. So we sold it.
We were wrong. I can say that plainly now, with the distance of years. The opportunity we thought was ending did not end. The work we did is still being done today, by companies not so different from the one we let go of. We read the writing on the wall, and the wall said something that never came true. I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, some of them far more dramatic than a business decision, but this is the one whose consequences I am still living inside, and I want to tell you why it mattered so much more than the money.
Two bad things came out of that sale, and they were tangled together the way the important things always are.
The first was money, and the way I gave it away. Not long before we sold, my husband and I divorced. I won’t pretend the marriage ended because of one person’s failures, because it didn’t, and I have had to be honest with myself over the years about my own part in how things fell apart. But when the company sold and there was money to divide, I gave him much of it. I didn’t fight for the even split I had earned. I told myself I was being fair, that after everything, this was the decent thing to do. Looking back, I think it was guilt wearing the costume of generosity. I felt responsible for the wreckage, so I paid for it, out of the account that held the value of my own life’s work. You will see this pattern again in my story, this instinct to settle my guilt by giving away the very things that could have protected me. It has cost me more than any drink ever did.
The second thing was harder to see at the time, and worse in the end. When the company was gone, so was the person I had been. That business was not just my income. It was my identity, my standing, my reason to walk into a room with my head up. I had built it from nothing, starting from a girl who left home at fifteen with no map, and it had made me somebody. Without it, I was still in the industry, still known, but I was no longer the owner, no longer the one at the front of the room by right. I bounced between jobs. I was good at all of them, but none of them were mine.
I want to slow down here and name something, because it is one of the most important patterns in the whole disease and it is easy to miss when you are living it.
Addiction feeds on lost identity. As long as I had the company, the drinking had a container. I was a successful businesswoman who liked her wine, and the success held the drinking in a shape that looked acceptable, to the world and to me. But take away the thing that defines you, and the drinking floods into the empty space where your identity used to be. It stops being the reward at the end of a good day’s work, because there is no more good day’s work. It starts becoming the thing you do instead.
This is why loss is so dangerous for anyone prone to addiction. Retirement, divorce, an empty nest, the end of a career, the death of the role that made you who you were. These are the moments the disease waits for. Not because the pain of loss drives you to drink, though it can, but because the structure that kept the drinking in bounds is suddenly gone. If you are watching someone you love go through a loss like that, or if you are living one yourself, understand that the danger is not only sadness. The danger is a hole where a self used to be, and how eager the addiction is to fill it.
I did not understand any of that then. I just knew that the awards on my shelf had started to feel like they belonged to a different woman, and that the quiet after the sale was a quiet I did not know how to sit in without a glass. So I didn’t sit in it. I poured. And the slow years of coming apart, which I will tell you about next, had begun.
After the divorce and the sale, I met someone new. I dated him for a while, brought him to a couple of conferences, introduced him to my world. My friends, the bat-signal crowd, the people who knew me best, told me it was a bad idea. I married him anyway, and I moved to Louisiana to be with him, away from my industry, away from my city, away from the family I had made over all those years at the bar.
I have thought a great deal about why I did that, against the advice of people who loved me and who turned out to be right. I think, if I am honest, that I was trying to fill the hole I described in the last chapter. The company was gone, the marriage was gone, the identity was gone, and here was a chance to be somebody’s wife again, somebody’s something, in a new place where nobody had watched me come apart. I mistook a fresh start for a solution. They are not the same thing. You cannot outrun a problem that packs itself in your own suitcase.
That marriage ended too. I moved back to Texas, back toward the life I had left, expecting, I suppose, that I could simply pick it up where I had set it down. I couldn’t. That is one of the quiet cruelties nobody warns you about. You can go back to the place, but you cannot go back to the time. I had been gone long enough that the group had drifted. We were still friends, in the way people stay friends, but the nightly gathering, the easy always-available closeness, had loosened and scattered. People had moved, changed jobs, changed priorities. The bat signal didn’t light up the way it used to. And when it did, I wasn’t always the first one called.
And so my drinking changed, quietly, in a way that took me a long time to admit and that I need you to understand, because it is one of the most important turns in this entire book.
For all those years, I had been a social drinker in the most literal sense. I drank with people. I drank to celebrate, to connect, to belong. The wine was the medium my relationships flowed through. It was not good for me, but it was aimed outward, at other people, at the world. Now the people were scattered and the celebrations had thinned out and the successes I used to toast were behind me, and the wine was still there. So I drank it alone.
I need to tell you that the shift from drinking with others to drinking by yourself is not a small thing. It is not just the same behavior in a quieter room. It is a different animal. Social drinking, however heavy, still has a floor under it, some structure, some reason, some witness. Drinking alone has none of that. There is no occasion. There is no one to pace yourself against, no one to go home from. There is just you and the bottle and the evening, and the only thing the drink is connecting you to anymore is the memory of when you were the woman at the podium, back when your glass meant you belonged somewhere instead of meaning you had nowhere to be.
If you take one clinical fact from this chapter, take this one. When a person who has always been a social drinker starts drinking alone, regularly, on purpose, something has shifted that deserves attention. It is one of the clearest signs that drinking has stopped being about the party and started being about the escape. I did not have language for it at the time. I just knew that the wine had gotten quieter, and lonelier, and that I was reaching for it not to enhance something good but to blur something empty.
This is the stretch of my life I find hardest to look at, harder in some ways than the disasters that came later, because the disasters at least had drama, a shape, a before and after. This had no shape. It was just a slow going-down in a quiet house, one evening bleeding into the next, the celebrated woman I used to be getting further away, and me reaching for the only thing that had never once failed to show up when I called it. My rock bottom, when it finally came, did not come as a single moment. It came as a direction, and I had been traveling it for a long time before I understood where it led.
People love the phrase rock bottom. It shows up in every recovery story, the single terrible night that finally turns everything around, the arrest, the crash, the moment the person looks up from the floor and decides to change. I understand why we love it. It is clean. It has a before and an after. It promises that suffering has a purpose, that the worst moment is also the turning point.
I am here to tell you it did not work that way for me, and I suspect it does not work that way for most people, and the tidy version does real harm by making everyone whose bottom was messier feel like they are doing recovery wrong. My bottom was not a moment. It was a long, grinding descent with more than one false ending, and I want to tell it to you honestly, because the honest version is the one that might actually help someone.
For years, I tried to fix myself. I want you to know that, because the story people imagine is of someone who drank obliviously until one dramatic night woke her up. That was not me. I went to rehab. I went more than once. Sometimes I went for short stretches, a few days, a week, squeezed into the margins of a life that still needed me to work, because the bills did not stop and the jobs did not wait. Sometimes I stayed longer. Sometimes it even worked, for a while. I would come out clear and hopeful and certain that this time was different, and for a stretch of days or weeks it would be, until it wasn’t.
And sometimes, I have to tell you, it was almost absurd. There was a rehab where people drank while they were inside, myself among them. There was one across the street from a Denny’s that, for reasons I still cannot explain, served free drinks, so patients would walk over and get them. I am not telling you that to be funny, though I understand it sounds like a joke, and honestly some days you have to laugh or you will not survive the memory. I am telling you because it is true, and because it says something real about how hard this is. Even inside the buildings designed to save us, the disease found a way. If you have ever tried to get sober and failed, more than once, in ways that looked ridiculous even to you, I want you to hear that you are not uniquely broken. This thing is that strong.
And then there was the relationship. I am going to tell this part carefully, because it involves another person and because it is the hardest thing that happened to me, but I am not going to skip it, because it is the closest thing to a true bottom that my life contains.
After everything else had come apart, I ended up with a man in a relationship that turned abusive. It escalated the way these things do, slowly and then all at once, until one night it ended with him in jail and me in the hospital. That is the plainest way I know to say it. By then I had already lost so much, the company, the marriages, the money, the circle, the standing, that I came to that hospital bed with almost nothing left to cushion the fall. I think that is what a real bottom is. It is not the single worst night. It is the worst night arriving after everything that could have caught you is already gone.
Let me put the teacher’s hat on one more time, because there are two things I need you to take from this chapter.
The first is that relapse is not failure. It is, for most people, part of how recovery actually happens. The brain changes I described back in the first chapter do not reverse in a weekend, and the pull of an addiction does not vanish because you have decided you are done with it. Most people who get sober and stay sober did not do it on the first try. They did it on the try that finally held, after a string of tries that didn’t. If you have relapsed, you have not proven that you cannot recover. You have proven that you are in the middle of exactly the process almost everyone goes through. The only try that matters is the next one.
The second is about the bottom itself. You do not have to wait for some cinematic catastrophe to decide you have had enough. If you are hoping to hit a rock bottom dramatic enough to justify changing, please hear me, because I nearly waited too long. A bottom is just the moment you stop digging. You are allowed to choose it. You do not have to earn it with a disaster. Mine came wrapped in about the worst circumstances a life can hold, and I would give anything to have chosen it sooner, on an ordinary quiet evening, before the hospital, before all of it. You can choose yours today. That is not a slogan. It is the one piece of advice in this book I would carve into stone.
The climb back did not start with a decision. It started with a person. After the worst of it, when I was about as low as a life can get, someone in my industry stepped in and helped me. Not with a speech about my potential, not with tough love, but with the two things I actually needed: a job and a place to stay. I have thought a lot about that since, about how the turning point in so many recovery stories is not a moment of inner strength at all, but an ordinary act of decency from another human being at the exact moment you cannot help yourself.
I want to say that clearly, because the myth of recovery is that you pull yourself up, alone, by sheer will. That is not how it went for me and I doubt it is how it goes for most people. I got back on my feet because someone put a floor under them. If you are trying to help somebody who is drowning right now, you may be tempted to think that only some grand intervention will matter. It won’t. A job. A room. A ride. A meal. The plain, practical, unglamorous help that lets a person stop falling long enough to find their own footing. That is what saves lives. Someone did it for me, and I am here to write this because they did.
That help did not last forever, and I don’t want to pretend it did. The friend who had stepped in, someone who, along with her husband, had once worked for my old company, eventually stopped being a help in my life, and we parted ways. I have made my peace with it. People come into your story to carry you across one particular river, and it does not diminish what they did if they are not still walking beside you a mile later. I am grateful for the crossing, and I try to leave it at that.
But something happened in the middle of all that scrambling that I am prouder of than almost anything I did in my successful years, and it is the reason this chapter has the name it has. In the middle of having so little, I bought a house. On my own. My name, my mortgage, my front door.
You have to understand what that meant, coming from where I had been. I was the woman who built a company and then signed away its value out of guilt. I was the woman who gave the money to her ex, who lost the business that was her name, who came home to a life that had scattered. So much of what I had earned, I had let slip through my fingers or watched get taken. And here, at the bottom, with my hands shaking, I put down roots that no one could sell out from under me, that no divorce could split, that belonged to me and me alone. I started fixing it up, a little at a time, and every small repair was a sentence in a new story I was telling myself: I am still here. This is mine. I can build again.
Here is the tool I want to hand you from this chapter, and it is a quieter one than usual. When your life is chaos, when you cannot fix the big things, when the addiction and the losses and the fear are all too large to get your arms around, find one concrete thing that is yours and tend it. It does not have to be a house. It can be a room you keep clean, a plant you keep alive, a routine you keep no matter what. The point is to have one solid place to stand while everything else moves. Recovery is not built in a single triumphant leap. It is built the way I fixed that house, one small, stubborn, unglamorous repair at a time, each one a proof that you are still the kind of person who repairs things.
That house is still mine as I write this, though even that is not simple anymore, and I will tell you about the trouble it is in now before this book is done. But I am getting ahead of myself. First I have to tell you about the thing that finally made the sobriety stick, which is a harder and more honest chapter than this one, because I am not entirely sure I can explain it. But I am going to try.
This is the chapter I have been both building toward and quietly dreading, because it is the one where I am supposed to explain the thing I am least able to explain: why this time worked. Why, after all the rehabs that failed, all the fresh starts that collapsed, all the years of knowing and not stopping, the sobriety I found three years ago has held, through worse circumstances than any that ever sent me back to the bottle before. If I could bottle the answer I would give it away for free on every street corner. I can’t. But I can tell you what was true this time, and let you and your own life sort out which parts might matter for you.
One thing that was true is that I had less left to lose than ever before. Every earlier attempt happened while I still had something the drinking was woven into, a job, a marriage, a circle, an identity, a reason the wine still made sense. This time, most of that was already gone. There was no successful life for the drinking to hide inside anymore. Maybe you have to lose the disguise before you can fight the thing wearing it. I don’t recommend it as a strategy. But I won’t pretend it wasn’t part of what happened.
Another thing that was true is that I finally did the work, all the way, instead of partway. I went to AA, and this time I did not just attend, I participated. I worked the steps instead of skimming them. I kept going when it was boring, when it was inconvenient, when I felt too smart for the room and when I felt too broken for it, which were sometimes the same evening. There is nothing glamorous about it. It is showing up in church basements and community rooms and saying the same honest things over and over until they start to hold. But something about doing it fully, rather than the abbreviated version I had always managed before, made a difference I can feel but cannot fully account for.
And I turned back toward my faith. I had always had some, but it had gone quiet during the drinking years. As I got sober it came back, stronger than it had ever been, and I started going to church and taking part in it, not as an obligation but as something I actually needed. I want to be careful and honest here, because my faith has not been a simple, comforting thing through all of this. It has been real and it has been full of hard questions, and I am going to give a whole chapter to those questions later, because I think the doubt is as important as the belief. But I cannot tell the story of how I got sober without telling you that faith was part of it. It gave me something to stand on that was not another person and was not my own willpower, both of which had failed me before.
There is one more piece of this chapter, and it is a hard, clear-eyed one that I insist on including, because leaving it out would be its own kind of lie.
The job I got sober into was one I took because I was desperate. After a stretch away, a previous employer agreed to bring me back, but at a small fraction of what I had earned before, so low that I suspect it wasn’t even legal. I took it anyway, because I had no better option and I needed to work. So picture the shape of this honestly. At the exact moment I was doing the hardest, bravest thing of my life, getting and staying sober, I was also being paid less than I had made in decades, working for a company that offered some of the very same services I used to provide when I owned my own. I had come all the way around the circle and ended up on the other side of the desk, sober and grateful and quietly furious at how little that sobriety was worth on the open market.
I tell you this because I promised you at the start that I would not sell you the lie that getting sober makes your life better in the ways the world measures. It did not make mine better that way. It made me poorer. It handed me clarity and took away comfort in more or less the same season. If you are getting sober right now and finding that your circumstances are getting harder rather than easier, I am not going to tell you that you are doing it wrong or that the reward is just around the corner. I am going to tell you that this is sometimes simply how it goes, and that the reward is not a better external life. The reward is that you are the one living your life now, clear-eyed, instead of the drink living it for you. That turned out to be worth more to me than the money, though I want to be honest that some mornings I have to remind myself of that on purpose.
I have three children, and I have to write about them, and it is the part of this book I would most like to avoid. Not because I am ashamed of them, but because their stories are theirs as much as mine, and because loving them through what has happened is the deepest and least resolved pain in my life. Everything else in this book I can hold at some distance now. This I cannot. So I am going to tell you the truth about it, carefully, and imperfectly, and with the understanding that Sharon herself will decide how much of this the world gets to read.
Two of my children have struggled with substance abuse. I want you to sit with the weight of that sentence coming from a woman writing a book about her own alcoholism. This disease does not stay politely in one life. It runs down through families. It reaches into the people you would trade your own life to protect, and it takes them by the same throat it took you, and there is a particular kind of horror in recognizing your own enemy in your child’s eyes.
My daughter followed me, in more ways than one. She worked for a time in the same industry I did, and she did well at it for a while. And then she spiraled, into addiction of her own, and she has been unwilling to get the help that might turn it around. She lived with me off and on. I bailed her out more times than I can count, and I would do it again, because that is what it is to be a mother, even when you know that the rescuing is not working. But I also have to tell you the hardest part, because this book runs on honesty. She stole from me. She stole my identity. She is a real part of the reason I am in the financial trouble I am in as I write this. I love her, and she has hurt me in ways that will take me the rest of my life to sort out, and both of those things are true at the same time, and I no longer try to make them cancel each other out. They just both live in me.
One of my sons and I are not close. We do not talk much, and I carry that quietly, the way you carry the distance from a child you would give anything to be near. But I want to tell you one thing about him, because it matters more than the distance. When my heart gave out, when I was in the hospital, he showed up. Whatever lies between us on the ordinary days, when it was serious, he came. I have held onto that harder than he probably knows. It told me that the thread is still there, even frayed, even long. If you are estranged or half-estranged from someone you love, I offer you that small hard-won hope: the distance is not always the whole truth. Sometimes the thread holds anyway, and you only find out when everything else is falling.
And then there is my other son, who has also fought addiction, and whose story is the freshest wound in this book. A couple of months ago, as I write this, he overdosed. He nearly died. I got him into a facility, and right now, today, he is doing well, and I am grateful in a way that has no bottom. But I also know what is coming, because I have lived it. He will get out. And the real world, the one waiting on the other side of those doors, is always harder than the safe place inside them. I know that from my own rehabs, from my own clean stretches that shattered on contact with ordinary life. So I sit here sober, holding my gratitude that he is alive in one hand and my terror about what happens next in the other, and I do not get to know how his story ends any more than I get to know how mine does. We are both still in the middle of it.
I promised in every chapter to give you something useful, so here is what I have learned, paid for at the highest price there is.
The first thing is about boundaries and rescue, and I say it knowing I have failed at it more often than I have managed it. You cannot get sober for another person, not even your child. You can love them, you can help them, you can put a floor under them the way someone once did for me. But there is a line past which your rescuing stops being help and starts being the thing that lets the disease keep going, and learning where that line is, for a mother, is the hardest boundary in the world. I am still learning it. I do not hold myself up as someone who has it figured out. I only tell you that the line exists, and that loving someone does not require you to be destroyed alongside them, even when every instinct you have says otherwise.
The second thing is gentler. If you are watching someone you love go through this, you did not necessarily cause it, and you very likely cannot cure it, and you certainly cannot control it. Those are not my words originally; they come from the rooms where families of addicts gather, and I resisted them for a long time because they felt like giving up. They are not giving up. They are the difference between staying alive to keep loving someone and going down with them. I am my children’s mother. I would still walk into fire for them. But I have finally understood that I cannot drink their pain for them, and I cannot get sober for them, and the most useful thing I can be is a person who stayed standing, who stayed sober, who is still here when they are ready. That is the only rescue I have left to offer, and it is the one that required me to save myself first.
I got sober, and then my body started sending its invoices. That is the plainest way I can describe the years that followed. Nobody warns you that some of the hardest physical suffering of your life may arrive after you put down the drink, not before, and that you will have to face all of it without the one thing you used to reach for when things hurt. But that is what happened to me, and I am not going to leave it out, because it is a central part of what it has meant to stay sober anyway.
There were back surgeries. There was a fall that shattered my knee, which is exactly as bad as it sounds and took a long time to come back from, and never all the way. There was pain, ordinary and constant and grinding, the kind that follows you into every room and sits down next to you. And through all of it I stayed sober, which meant I met that pain head-on, with nothing between me and it. If you have never had to do that, it is hard to explain how large a thing it is. For most of my adult life, discomfort of any kind had an answer, and the answer was a glass. Now the discomfort came and the answer was gone, and I had to simply feel it, and keep feeling it, and not drink.
And then my heart. I had a heart attack, and I drove myself to the hospital while it was happening, my own hands on the wheel, because that is the kind of alone I was by then. They did open-heart surgery, a bypass. I survived it, which the doctors made clear was not a foregone conclusion. And then, later, I had another one. Two heart attacks. Open-heart surgery. All of it sober. All of it faced with a clear mind that got to register every bit of the fear.
I have thought about why I am telling you all this, whether it belongs in a book about drinking at all, and I have decided that it belongs at the very heart of it, for two reasons.
The first is a matter of simple truth about what alcohol does. Years of heavy drinking are not free. They are paid, eventually, by the body, in the currency of the heart and the liver and everything else the drink quietly wore down while I was busy feeling fine. I cannot tell you exactly which of my ailments the drinking caused and which would have come anyway, and neither can the doctors with certainty. But I can tell you that the bill for the drinking years does not stop arriving just because you have stopped drinking. If you are still in it, still telling yourself that you are basically healthy, that the drinking has not really cost you anything physical yet, I would gently ask you to consider that the word in that sentence is yet. The body keeps the account. It collects on its own schedule.
The second reason is the one that matters more, and it is the whole argument of this book compressed into a single hospital room. When my heart was failing, when I was in the worst physical crisis a person can be in, I did not drink. Think about what that means. The old me drank to celebrate good news. She drank at parties, at successes, at the top of the world. And here was the sober me, at the absolute bottom of the physical world, in pain, in fear, facing surgery that might kill her, and she did not reach for the glass. If sobriety could survive that, it could survive anything. My own body, trying its hardest to break me, could not send me back to the bottle. I did not know I had that in me. I am not sure I would have believed it if you had told me in my drinking years. But it turned out to be true, and it is one of the few things about myself I now trust completely.
That is what I mean when I say the silver lining is not that life gets easier. My life got a great deal harder, right down to my own failing heart. The silver lining is that I found out I could meet the hardest things sober, and remain myself, and not go under. There is a strength in that which the woman at the podium, for all her awards, never knew she had, because she never had to find out. I would not wish the finding-out on anyone. But I have it now, and no one can take it back.
I want to spend a chapter on money, and not in the abstract, because the shape of the trap I am living in right now says something about our whole country that goes far beyond me, and because if I left it out I would be softening the truth. I got sober, and I got poor, and then I discovered that the systems meant to help a poor sick person are built so that any attempt to climb out can knock the ladder away.
Here is where things stand as I write this. I have a job I actually like, twenty hours a week, twenty dollars an hour. Do that math and you will see that it does not cover a life, not with a mortgage and medical bills and the ordinary costs of being alive. I have applied for disability, because between my back and my heart there is real question about how much I can work. I have gotten connected with free care through a community hospital, and I will say, to my surprise, the care has been genuinely good. So I am surviving, barely, on a patchwork of a small paycheck, free medical care, and the hope that disability comes through.
And now here is the trap, the actual Catch-22, and I need you to follow it because it is maddening and it is real. If I manage to get a better job, one that pays enough to actually live on, I may disqualify myself from the disability I have been counting on and lose the free medical care that is keeping me alive. If I sell my house, the one I am so proud of, and finally have some money in hand, that money may do the same thing, push me just above the line where help exists, without being nearly enough to replace what the help was providing. In other words, the system is built so that improving my situation can make my situation worse. Every path up is also a trapdoor. The reward for climbing is to lose the net.
So I am stuck, on purpose, by design, in a poverty I am not allowed to climb out of without risking everything. And the house I was so proud of buying, the one solid thing I built at the bottom, is now in danger again. I nearly lost it once already and managed to work something out with the mortgage company. Now I am trying to sell it, hoping the equity will carry me a while, if it sells quickly enough, if the timing works, if the trap does not spring on me on the way out. I am doing the math on my own life like it is someone else’s spreadsheet, trying to find the one narrow path that does not end in disaster, and some days there does not seem to be one.
Let me tell you about the internet, because it is the detail that surprised me most, and I think it will surprise you too.
My internet is shut off right now. I could not afford it this month, so it is gone, and I am getting by on the hotspot from my phone, rationing the data. I would not have guessed, in my old life, how devastating that one loss would be. But everything runs through the internet now. Job applications. Medical portals. Disability paperwork. The forms that decide whether you eat. Being cut off from it is not an inconvenience, it is a kind of exile from the machinery of survival, and it falls hardest on exactly the people who can least afford to be cut off, the ones who need the forms and the portals and the applications the most. I have learned that surviving without internet is far harder than a comfortable person would ever imagine, and I say that as someone who used to be a comfortable person and never once imagined it.
And I have stood in line at food banks. I, who used to travel and speak and win awards, have taken free groceries because the alternative was not eating. There is no shame in it, I want to say that for anyone else who has had to do it, but there is a strangeness to it, a vertigo, when you remember the woman you used to be. There was a day a friend helped me out with a little money, and I bought fresh bread, bread that had not gone stale on a shelf somewhere, and I want you to understand that this felt like a genuine luxury. Fresh bread. That is where the road led. And I am telling you about it not for your pity but because it is true, and because the small dignities, the fresh loaf, the paid internet bill, the twenty-dollar hour, are the real texture of a life at the edge, and somebody should write them down honestly.
This chapter is not really advice, because I do not have a solution to hand you. I cannot tell you how to beat a trap that is built into the system itself. What I can tell you is that if you are caught in something like it, you are not lazy and you are not failing. You are doing math that has no right answer, inside rules that were written as if no one like you would ever have to live by them. And I can tell you that a person can be sober, and trying as hard as a human can try, and still be poor, still be trapped, still be one shut-off notice away from real trouble. That is not a personal failing. That is a broken machine. Naming it plainly is the least I can do, and maybe, if enough of us name it, someone with the power to fix it will finally have to look.
I have spent a lot of these pages telling you what I have lost, and every word of it is true. But if I stopped there, I would be lying to you by leaving things out, because the ledger has two sides and I have only shown you one. So let me set the record straight, for you and, honestly, for myself, because I need the reminder as much as anyone reading this does.
One of the cruelest things people assume about alcoholics is that we burn every bridge, drive off everyone who ever loved us, and end up alone in the wreckage. It happens. It nearly happened to me, and I have grieved the friendships that quietly drifted away during the years I was coming apart. But it is not the whole story of my life, and it is not the whole story of a lot of people fighting this thing. I did not alienate everyone. I still have friends. Real ones.
And I do not mean the fair-weather kind. I have a few people who are what my old crowd used to call ride or die. The kind who would show up at any hour with no questions asked. The kind you could call and say you needed help burying a body, and they would grab a shovel and ask only where. I say that as a joke, but the loyalty underneath the joke is not funny at all. It is the realest wealth I have. They would be helping me right now, today, through all of this, if they were not busy fighting their own hard battles, because that is the season of life we are all in at the moment. But I know they are there. I know it the way you know the floor is under you in the dark. Knowing it is a kind of riches that never shows up in a bank account, and mine is nearly empty, and I am still, by this measure, not a poor woman.
There is something else I want to put on the good side of the ledger, and it surprises people, because it does not fit the shape of a repentant recovery story. When I look back on my drinking years, I do not only see a mistake. I told you earlier how much I loved those nights, and I meant it, and time has not changed it into regret. Those were genuinely good times. The people, the laughter, the belonging I had never had before. They are cherished memories, and I refuse to let anyone, including my own recovery, talk me into pretending they were nothing but wreckage. On the rare occasions I get to sit with old friends now, we still laugh until we cannot breathe, still cannot stop telling the stories. A life can hold two truths at once: that something was bad for you, and that it was also, truly, one of the best parts of your life. Mine holds both, and I have stopped apologizing for it.
People sometimes ask me, gently, whether I have hit rock bottom. Whether all of this, everything I have laid out in these pages, is the bottom. And my honest answer tends to surprise them. Not completely. Because when I make myself actually stop and count, I find that I am not standing here empty-handed, even now.
I still have a house, for now, even as I fight to keep it. I have a job I actually like, even if it does not give me enough hours or enough money. I have AA, which has genuinely saved my life, and I have real friends inside those rooms who understand me in a way almost no one on the outside can. My son is in recovery as I write this, alive, doing the work, and there was a stretch not long ago when I did not know if I would be able to say that. I still have my mind, clear enough to write the book you are holding, which is not a small thing after everything my body and my life have put me through. And I have my faith, complicated as it is. Laid end to end, those are not scraps. They are a lot of things. They are, when I am honest, blessings, and there are people with far less than I have.
So no, I am not at rock bottom, not completely, and I hold onto that on the days the fear gets loud. But I am not going to insult you by tying it up in a neat bow either, because there is another honest truth that sits right beside the gratitude, and I feel it most at night. It could be worse. Yes. But it could also be a lot better. I have done the hard, right thing. I am sober. I am trying as hard as a person can try. And I still cannot always see why my life is this hard, why the blessings and the struggles are mixed in exactly the proportions they are. I count my blessings, and I mean every one of them, and in the very next breath I wonder why there are not more, why all the good I have managed has not yet added up to anything easier.
I have made a kind of peace with the fact that I do not have the answer. What I have decided is that gratitude and bewilderment can live in the same heart, at the same time, without canceling each other out. In mine, most days, they do. And if that is where you are too, grateful and confused in the same breath, holding a fistful of real blessings and still wondering why it is all so hard, I want you to know that you are not doing gratitude wrong. Counting your blessings does not require you to lie about your struggles. The truest thing I can tell you is that both lists are real, mine and yours, and you are allowed to hold them both. I do. I count what I have, and I wonder why it is not more, and then I get up the next morning, still sober, and do it all again.
I need to talk about God, and I need to do it honestly, which means I am not going to hand you the tidy testimony you might be bracing for. My faith is real, and it is stronger now, sober, than it ever was in all my drinking years. And it is also full of questions I have not answered and may never answer. Both of those things are true, and I have stopped believing I have to choose between them.
Let me start with the part that is not complicated. Faith came back to me as I got sober, and it came back stronger than before. When I was drinking, God was distant, more a habit than a presence. As I climbed out, and especially as I did the real work I described earlier, something reopened. I started going to church and actually taking part, not out of duty but because I needed it, because I needed something to stand on that was not my own willpower and was not another person, both of which had already collapsed under me. Faith gave me that. I do not think I could have stayed sober through everything that came without it. That is the simple part, and it is genuinely true.
Now here is the part nobody tells you is allowed. Getting closer to God has not made things make sense. If anything, it has sharpened the question. Because here I am, finally doing the right thing, finally sober, finally honest, finally trying to live the way I always knew I should, and my life has gotten harder, not easier. The heart attacks came after I got sober. The poverty came after. The trap I am caught in, the house in danger, the children in crisis, all of it has piled up in the years since I started doing what faith asks. And I would be lying if I said I have not looked up and asked, plainly, what exactly are you thinking. It does not make sense. I am not questioning whether God is there. I am questioning what on earth the plan is, because from where I am sitting it is hard to find one.
I have decided to leave that question in, unanswered, in this book, and I want to tell you why, because it is a choice and not an oversight.
Most books about faith and recovery smooth this over. They tell you that if you just believe, just surrender, just trust the plan, everything falls into place and the peace descends and the blessings follow. And when that does not happen, when a person does everything right and their life still falls apart, that tidy story does real damage, because it whispers that the problem must be you, that your faith must not have been strong enough, that God is rewarding everyone but you for reasons you had better not examine too closely. I refuse to do that to you. I have done everything I know how to do, my faith is as real as it has ever been, and my circumstances are hard anyway. If that is where you are too, I want you to know that it does not mean you are failing at faith. It means faith was never a vending machine, and anyone who sold it to you that way sold you something false.
What faith has actually given me is not a fixed life. It is a floor under the unfixed one. It is the sense, on the days I can feel it, that I am not screaming into an empty room, that the questions I am hurling upward are at least landing somewhere, even when no answer comes back. Some days I feel that floor solidly. Some days I do not feel it at all and I keep walking as if it is there, which I am told is a fair definition of faith. What I have stopped expecting is for the belief to make the arithmetic of my life come out even. It does not. And I have found, strangely, that holding onto God and holding onto my honest anger and confusion at the same time has made the faith sturdier, not weaker. A faith that cannot survive a hard question was never going to survive a life like mine.
So if you are a believer whose life is not making sense, or someone who wants to believe but cannot square it with what you have suffered, I am not going to resolve it for you, because I have not resolved it for myself. I am just going to sit here next to you in the not-knowing, sober, still showing up on Sunday, still asking God what the plan is, still not getting a clear answer, and still, somehow, not letting go. That is the most honest thing I have to offer on the subject, and I think honesty is worth more here than comfort.
For most of this book I have been telling you what my story cost me. I want to spend this chapter on the one thing it has given back, which is the ability to be useful to other people in a way I never could have been if my life had gone smoothly. It is the closest thing I have found to a reason for all of it, and it is the part of the silver lining I trust most, because I have watched it be real.
When you have been where someone else is, you can reach them in a way that no amount of training or good intention can match. I can sit across from a person who is still drinking, still lying to everyone including themselves, still certain they are fine because they are still functioning, and I can tell them I know, because I was the woman with the awards and the wine, and I can watch something in their face change when they realize I am not talking down to them from some clean height. I am talking across to them from the same hole they are in, or the same hole I climbed out of. That is a kind of authority you cannot fake and cannot buy. It is minted only in suffering, and I paid the full price for mine.
There is a thing that happens when you share the worst of your story with someone who needs to hear it. It stops being only your wound and becomes a bridge. The affair I am not proud of, the rehabs that failed, the drinking inside the treatment center, the abusive relationship, the identity my own daughter stole, the two heart attacks I drove myself to, the food bank line, the fresh bread. Every one of those is a private pain when I hold it alone. But handed to the right person at the right moment, each one becomes a way of saying, you are not alone, and you are not uniquely broken, and here is someone who has been exactly where you are and is still standing. I cannot give another person my sobriety. But I can give them the evidence that it is possible, which on the darkest nights is the thing a person most needs and least believes.
I have come to believe that helping others is not a nice side effect of recovery. It is part of the machinery of staying well. Every time I use my story to reach someone, I also remind myself where I came from and why I do not want to go back. The person I am helping is helping me, whether they know it or not. This is the quiet genius of the support groups, the sponsors, the whole culture of one sober person walking beside another. It is not charity flowing in one direction. It is two people keeping each other alive. When I show up for someone else, I am also showing up for the woman I used to be, the one who needed exactly this and did not always have it.
There are many ways to do this, and you do not have to be finished healing to begin, because none of us are ever finished. You can share your story in the rooms where people gather to recover. You can become the person who answers the phone at two in the morning, the way someone once answered for you. You can sponsor, mentor, sit with, drive, listen. You can be honest in public about a thing most people hide, which gives quiet permission to everyone within earshot who is hiding the same thing. And if you have a story like mine, a story with a shape and a voice, you can tell it out loud, from a stage or a page, to the people who need to know that the woman who had everything and lost it and got sober anyway is a real person and not a fairy tale.
I will be honest that I am still learning to let my own hardest chapters be useful rather than only painful. It is not always comfortable to hand a stranger the worst thing that ever happened to you. But I have decided that if my suffering has to exist, and it does, then the least I can do is put it to work. A pain that helps someone else is not erased, but it is no longer purely waste, and after everything, being not-waste is a kind of redemption I can actually reach. That is why this book exists. It is the largest way I know to take the wreckage of my life and hand it to whoever might be able to use it. If that is you, then it was worth writing, and some of what I went through was worth surviving, because it ended up here, in your hands, saying you are not alone.
There is something I want more than almost anything, and it feels almost foolish to admit it at my age and in my circumstances, but I promised you honesty from the first page, so here it is. I want my business back. Not a business. My business. The thing that made me, the thing I built from nothing and then signed away, the thing whose loss I told you about early in this book. I want to stand at the front of the room again, except this time sober, this time all the way myself, with nothing hiding in my hand.
And I have not only wished for it. I have quietly chased it. I called the old software vendors, the ones who have the tools that could make a new company real, the ones who could turn the idea into something that actually runs. And do you know what they told me? They were willing. Some of them were excited. They remember what I could do, and they said they would work with me. I want you to sit with what that means, because on my low days I forget it and I have to make myself remember. The people who know this industry cold, who have no reason on earth to be kind to me, looked at what I was proposing and said yes.
There are two things standing between me and that dream. The first is an investor. To start it and start it right, I would need someone to believe in it with their money, and so far I have not found that person. That is a real, practical obstacle, and I am not going to wave it away. Building something takes more than talent and willingness. It takes capital, and capital is the one thing my life has been stripped of.
But the second obstacle is harder to admit, and it does not live out in the world where investors and vendors are. It lives inside me. I am hesitant to chase this too hard, because I am not completely sure of myself anymore. That is a strange sentence to write about a woman who once had confidence to spare, who walked into any room like she owned it, who won the awards and earned them. But it is true. I have not had a real win in a long time. And when the wins stop coming, and the losses stack up, and your own children and your own heart and your own bank account all seem to be conspiring against you, something in your certainty quietly erodes. I look at the dream and part of me lights up, and part of me whispers, what if you cannot do it anymore, what if the woman who could do that is gone. And so I do not push as hard as I could. A part of me is protecting myself from finding out.
I think that might be the cruelest thing this disease and these years have taken from me. Not the company. Not the money. Not even the health. The confidence. The losses did not just cost me things I could count. They cost me my belief that I can still go out and get things, and that belief was the engine underneath everything I ever built. You can have all the ability in the world, but if you no longer trust that it is there, you leave it sitting in the garage. That is where mine has been. Idling. Waiting for me to believe it will start.
Here is what I hold onto, on the days I can reach it. The vendors said yes. That was not my imagination and it was not charity. The talent did not go anywhere. It is still in here, under the fear, and every so often I feel it flicker, when a friend reminds me who I am, or when I catch myself solving a problem the old way without even trying, the way you never forget how to do the thing you were truly built for. Someone who loves me told me recently that if we were choosing teams the way we did as kids, he would still pick me first, before almost anyone. I did not believe him when he said it. But I wrote it down. And on the hard days, I read it back.
If you have lost your confidence the way I have lost mine, I want to tell you the one thing I am slowly learning about how it comes back, because it is not what I expected. I kept waiting to feel confident again before I would take the risk. That is backward. Confidence does not return first and then you act. You act, in small ways, while still afraid, and the confidence trickles back in behind the action, built out of small wins that you have to go out and earn before you feel ready to earn them. I have not fully done this yet. I am telling you what I know, not what I have mastered. But I have started to believe that the way back to myself is through doing, not through waiting to feel like the old me first.
I do not know if I will get the business back. I do not know if the investor will appear, or if I will find the nerve to keep looking for one. This is one more story in this book without an ending, because I am telling it to you from the middle, the way I have told you all of it. But I have decided that the wanting itself is a good sign. A woman who has given up does not call software vendors. A woman who has given up does not lie awake dreaming about the front of the room. The dream is still alive in me, and as long as it is, so is she, the one who built something once and might, if the confidence returns and the pieces fall into place, build something again. I am not counting her out. I am just waiting, sober, for her to believe in herself again. Some days I can almost feel her getting ready to stand up.
I want to put two women side by side, and ask you which one was actually succeeding.
The first woman is standing at a podium. There is an award in her hand, a career achievement award, and a room full of people applauding. She built her own company. She is one of the best in her industry. She travels, she speaks, she is admired, she has money in the bank and a marriage and a wide circle of friends who adore her. By every measure our world knows how to count, she has made it. She is also, though almost no one in that applauding room knows it, quietly drinking herself toward a hospital bed. The applause is real and the achievement is real and the disease growing in the dark underneath it is also real, and it is going to collect on everything she has built.
The second woman is sitting in a house she is trying not to lose, doing math that will not come out right, her internet shut off, a job that pays a fraction of what she is worth, a body that has been through two heart attacks, children she cannot save, and questions for God she cannot answer. By every measure our world knows how to count, she is failing. She has less than she has ever had. And she is sober, and she is honest, and she is entirely, painfully present in her own life, meeting all of it with a clear mind and not going under.
Those two women are me, and I have become certain of something that would have made no sense to the first one. The second woman is more successful than the first. Not more comfortable. Not more admired. Not richer, God knows. But more successful, if success means anything real, because she is actually living her life instead of drinking it, and because she has discovered that she can survive nearly anything without going back to the thing that was killing her. The first woman had everything and did not know who she was underneath it. The second woman has almost nothing and knows exactly who she is. I would not trade back. On my worst days I have to remind myself of that, but I would not trade back.
The original version of this book had a chapter about redefining sobriety, and this is where I finally understand what I was reaching for when I wrote it, years too early. Sobriety is not just the absence of alcohol. If it were only that, it would be a thin and joyless thing, and it would not be worth the price I have paid for it. Real sobriety is a whole way of being present. It means meeting your life as it actually is, the pain and the fear and the bills and the grief, without an anesthetic between you and the truth. It means your mental and emotional and physical health all being part of the same effort, because you cannot heal one while numbing the others. It means, most of all, being the author of your own days rather than handing the pen to a substance and hoping it writes something bearable.
And that is why I can call it a silver lining without lying to you, even though nothing has gone right since I got sober. The lining was never that the sky would clear. It was that I would be here, awake, myself, to stand under whatever sky there is. The awards the first woman won are in a box somewhere. The thing the second woman found, that she can lose everything and not lose herself, cannot be put in a box or taken by a divorce or stolen by anyone, not even by her own child, not even by her own failing heart. It is the only possession I have that no one can reach. I built a company once and signed it away. I will never sign this away. It is mine in a way nothing ever was before, and I paid for it with everything else, and some strange mornings I think it might have been worth the price.
I called this book Nothing Has Gone Right Since I Got Sober, and I have spent every chapter earning the second half of the title, the part that is not on the cover of your mind when you first read it. And why I’d do it all again. So let me end by saying plainly what the whole book has been circling.
It is true that nothing has gone right, by the world’s accounting. I am sober and I am broke. I am sober and my body is failing. I am sober and my children are fighting the same disease that nearly took me, and I cannot save them. I am sober and my house is in danger, my internet is off, my income is a fraction of what I once earned, and my questions for God go unanswered. If you had shown me this life in my drinking years and told me it was what sobriety looked like, I might have laughed and poured another glass. I understand the temptation to believe that everything was better back when I drank. Some days it still whispers to me.
And still. I would do it all again. Not because I expect it to get easier, because I have stopped expecting that. I would do it again because I would rather live this hard life awake than live an easier lie asleep. I would rather face two heart attacks with a clear mind than be the celebrated woman who did not know she was dying. I would rather stand in a food bank line as myself than stand at a podium as someone slowly disappearing behind a glass. The drinking made everything look better and was quietly taking everything real. The sobriety has made everything look worse and has given me back the one thing that was actually mine, which is me, present and accounted for, in my own life, for whatever it is worth and however long it lasts.
I am not writing to you from the far side of this. I want to say that one more time, because it is the truest thing about this book and the thing that makes it different from most. I have not made it out. There is no tidy ending here, no chapter where the money comes back and the health returns and the family heals and the questions get answered, because that chapter has not happened, and it may not. I am writing to you from inside it, tonight, on a phone hotspot, still frightened, still uncertain how any of it resolves. And I am sober. That is not the end of the story. It is the middle of it. But it is enough to build the rest on, and it is more than I ever had before.
So here is what I want to leave you with, whoever you are. If you are drinking and you know it is a problem, you do not have to wait for a rock bottom dramatic enough to justify stopping. You can choose your bottom today, on an ordinary evening, before the disasters. If you are newly sober and finding that your life is getting harder instead of easier, you are not doing it wrong, and the reward is not a fixed life, it is a returned self. If you love someone caught in this, you did not cause it and you cannot cure it and you cannot control it, and the most powerful thing you can be is someone who stayed standing until they were ready. And if you are simply someone whose life has not gone the way it was supposed to, who did the right things and got the wrong results, I hope you have found something in my story you can hold, because that is the story too, and there are more of us in it than anyone admits.
Nothing has gone right since I got sober. And I would do it all again. Both of those are true, and learning to hold them together, without letting go of either one, is the whole thing I know. It is the silver lining, and it is not made of comfort. It is made of the fact that I am still here, clear-eyed, in the middle of a hard life, as myself, having turned the worst of what happened to me into these words, and handed them to you. If they help you stand up under your own sky, then it was worth writing. It might even have been worth surviving. Some mornings I believe that all the way. And every morning, right or wrong, I stay sober, and I begin again.
If any part of my story sounded like your own, or like someone you love, please do not stop at recognizing it. Reach for help. Below are organizations and resources that offer information, community, and support, for people struggling with alcohol and for the families who love them. You do not have to have hit a bottom to use any of them. You can start today, wherever you are.
If you or someone you love is in immediate danger or crisis, contact your local emergency services, or in the United States call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which handles substance and mental health crises as well.
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), at aa.org, is a worldwide fellowship of people who share their experience, strength, and hope to help one another recover. Meetings are free, widely available in person and online, and are where much of my own recovery has happened.
Al-Anon Family Groups, at al-anon.org, exist for the friends and families of alcoholics. If you love someone who is drinking, this is a place built specifically for you, and it is where the hard, freeing idea that you did not cause it, cannot cure it, and cannot control it is put into daily practice.
SMART Recovery, at smartrecovery.org, offers a self-empowerment and evidence-based approach to recovery from all kinds of addictive behavior, for people who want a science-based alternative or complement to the twelve steps.
Celebrate Recovery, at celebraterecovery.com, is a Christ-centered, twelve-step program for people dealing with many kinds of hurts, habits, and addictions, for those who want their faith at the center of their recovery.
The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence and its affiliated network advocate for prevention, intervention, and treatment, and can help point you toward local services.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), at samhsa.gov, runs a free, confidential national helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357), available around the clock, that provides referrals to local treatment, support groups, and community organizations.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), at niaaa.nih.gov, offers clear, trustworthy information about alcohol use disorder, how it works, and what treatments actually help, including its Rethinking Drinking and Alcohol Treatment Navigator resources.
This Naked Mind, by Annie Grace, for a fresh way of thinking about alcohol and freedom from it. Living Sober, published by Alcoholics Anonymous, for practical day-to-day tools. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the foundational text of AA. And Codependent No More, by Melody Beattie, especially for family members learning where love ends and enabling begins.
One last word. Whatever brought you to this book, you are not beyond help and you are not alone, no matter how far down you feel or how many times you have tried before. I have been about as low as a person can go, and I am still here, sober, writing this to you. If I can, you can. Reach out. Someone is waiting to answer.
(Draft marketing copy for the back of the book, in Sharon’s voice.)
Hi, I’m Sharon, and I’m an alcoholic.
I’m also three years sober, and I’m going to tell you the truth most recovery books won’t. Getting sober did not make my life better. Since I put down the drink, I’ve had two heart attacks, driven myself to the hospital in the middle of one of them, nearly lost my house twice, stood in a food bank line, and watched my own children fight the same disease that almost killed me. Some days it honestly feels like nothing has gone right since I got sober.
And I would do it all again.
I used to be the woman at the podium, the one who built her own company and won the awards while quietly drinking herself toward a hospital bed. Today I’m broke, clear-eyed, still standing, and more myself than I have ever been. This is the honest story of how I got here, told from the middle of it, because I have not made it to the far side and I am not going to pretend that I have.
If your life hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to, if you did the right things and still got the wrong results, this book is for you. The silver lining was never that the sky would clear. It’s that I am still here to stand under it.
Nothing has gone right since I got sober. Let me tell you why I’d do it all again.