There Are People Who Have Never Seen Me Drink

I've been sober since April 4, 2022. I'm approaching five years now, which is a strange thing to say because I can still remember when making it through a weekend without drinking felt like a pretty significant accomplishment.

Something occurred to me recently that I hadn't really considered before. There are people in my life who have never seen me drink, not because I hid it from them or because we never spent enough time together, but because they've only known me since I stopped. They have absolutely no idea what I was like before, and I find that fascinating.

They know the guy who has a wife and two kids, who gets excited about gardening, takes on too many things at once, and can spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about something he learned three days ago. They know somebody who drinks coffee, goes to bed sober, gets up the next morning, and generally remembers everything he did the night before. To them, that's just who I am.

I wonder sometimes what they would think if they met the version of me from five or ten years ago. Would they recognize me? Would they believe some of the stories? Would they understand how much work it took to get from there to here? I don't think about drinking very often anymore. It isn't something I wake up fighting against every morning, and I don't spend my weekends calculating how long it's been since my last drink. Sometimes I look at the number of days and realize another hundred have gone by without me paying much attention, which still surprises me.

There was a time when alcohol occupied an enormous amount of space in my life, even when I wasn't actively drinking. It influenced what I did, where I went, how I felt, and how I handled things I didn't want to deal with. I made decisions under its influence and then had to live with those decisions when I was sober enough to understand them. I don't particularly enjoy thinking about that version of myself, but I also don't want to pretend he didn't exist. My wife knew him. Other people knew him. I knew him, even if I wasn't always willing to acknowledge what was happening.

I think about that when I consider what recovery means to the people around me. For someone who met me two years ago, sobriety might just be an interesting fact about my life. For someone who knew me before April 2022, it might represent years of experiences, frustration, worry, disappointment, or memories that don't disappear simply because I stopped drinking. Nearly five years of sobriety doesn't erase any of that, and I don't expect it to.

I've also learned that being sober doesn't automatically make you a wonderful person to be around. I can still be impatient, overwhelmed, angry, stubborn, and difficult. I still say things I wish I hadn't said, and I still have to apologize. There are days when managing my own emotions feels considerably harder than it should. The difference is that I can't blame alcohol anymore, and I can't use it to escape whatever I'm feeling. Sometimes that's been harder than I expected.

Getting sober didn't hand me a new personality. It gave me the opportunity to figure out which parts of my behavior were connected to drinking and which parts were things I actually needed to work on. Nearly five years later, I'm still finding answers to that question, and I'm beginning to understand that some of those answers might take the rest of my life.

There are parts of my life now that would have been difficult for me to imagine back then. I spend weekends finding things to do with my children. I worry about whether I'm being patient enough with them. I think about the kind of husband I am, the kind of father they'll remember, and whether I'm giving the people around me the best version of myself that I reasonably can. I also have a ridiculous number of plants, which I'm fairly certain the old me would have found hilarious.

What's interesting is how ordinary all of this has become. Sobriety isn't the headline of every day anymore. It's simply how I live. I don't have to think about whether I'll be able to drive somewhere in the evening, whether I'll remember a conversation, or whether I'll wake up regretting something I did after drinking. I can make plans and reasonably expect to follow through with them. I can have an entire weekend with my family and remember all of it. These things probably sound completely unremarkable to somebody who has never struggled with alcohol, but they weren't always guaranteed parts of my life.

I sometimes wonder whether the people who've only known me sober would be surprised to learn how different things used to be. Maybe they would, or maybe they wouldn't care nearly as much as I imagine. They've never had a reason to compare the two versions, and I think there's something meaningful about having relationships that began without any history of my drinking. No old arguments connected to alcohol, no memories of me being drunk, and no expectations based on how I used to behave. They simply got to know me as I was when we met.

At the same time, I don't want to forget the people who were there before, especially the ones who experienced the consequences of choices I've spent years trying to move beyond. They deserve more than me pointing at a sobriety counter and expecting the number to explain everything. I know that being sober today doesn't change something I said or did years ago, and I can't expect everyone else's memories to change just because my life has.

I'm still learning how to be a better husband, father, friend, and human being. Some days I make progress, and some days I'm reminded that there's plenty left to work on. I don't think I'll ever reach some magical point where I've fixed everything about myself, and I'm not sure that's even a reasonable thing to expect anymore.

What amazes me most is that my children are growing up with a father who no longer drinks. They may know that I used to, and someday they'll probably understand more about what that meant, but the memories they're making of me now are being made in a completely different life. They get to know me as somebody who doesn't drink, and I hope that becomes such an ordinary fact about their childhood that they never give it much thought.

There was a time when I couldn't imagine making it five years without alcohol. Now I'm approaching that milestone with a family, a home, responsibilities, hobbies I never expected to have, and people in my life who have never known me any other way. I still remember the person I was before April 2022, and I probably always will, but I'm grateful that the people I've met since then don't have to carry those memories with me.