Not The Way I Celebrate
Chronicles of a sober life.
All through my twenties and thirties, I celebrated life in the typical traditional societal way, with alcohol. It didn’t matter what was being celebrated, whether it be a one-year-old birthday party or a funeral, wedding, divorce, new job, loss of job, or anything in between, I turned to king alcohol to spice up the celebration. To heighten the experience. Doesn’t everyone? I believed so. My entire life was centered around king alcohol. It’s what I saw as a child, it’s what I experienced as an adult. I never saw anyone celebrating the ups and downs of life any other way.
My family moved from New Hampshire to Southern Utah when I was thirty-seven. It was the first time I experienced or witnessed a society of people celebrating life without alcohol, and my first thought was that these people are wicked weird, crazy, cultish people. Instead of taking this as an opportunity to pivot how I celebrate in my life, I went to work seeking out people who continued to celebrate life with the “king” as I knew him; vodka and cranberry. But I was met with resistance. You see, in Southern Utah in 2011, they only had one “bar” in the entire town, called “The One and Only,” and they only served beer. I thought, what the hell kind of town is this? Not only that, but every “restaurant” that looked and operated like a bar, or had a bar in it, had stringent rules on alcohol.
For example, they couldn’t put more than one shot of hard liquor in any drink, even if it had more than eight ounces of juice mix. You had to order food with every five drinks ordered on one ticket, and you had to order food even to be served an alcoholic beverage in the first place. Not to mention, they tampered with the alcohol content in beer as well; they only allowed 3.2 percent alcohol in the state unless you went to the state liquor stores, which were hard to find. There were only two in the entire county at the time. You had to buy the imported beer to get the standard 5 percent, and they charged you for each individually; there was no price for a six-pack. It’s weird. Being the bar drinking high functioning alcoholic that I am, this was crippling the only way I knew how to celebrate life.
So, what does a person like me do in this situation? Well, where there’s a will, there is a way, and I found it. I switched my drink of choice from vodka to wine, because it was the only alcohol the State of Utah couldn’t mess with. I joined this group called “The Dixie Newcomers,” which I saw advertising a wine education class by a woman named “The Wine Queen.” I began attending these classes and pretending I was interested in learning about wine, when in truth I wanted to meet people who continued to use and abuse alcohol in the name of celebration, the way I did, so my life could feel normal again.
Fast forward nine years later, I find myself walking into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous as a forty-six-year-old wino, who had just quit running five different wine clubs around town, including a well-known country club, during the black hole of COVID. I also ran a pub trivia group at a new local sports bar that opened briefly a few years before the pandemic. I did all those things, under the banner of celebrating life’s ups and downs, and so I could drink alcoholically with others like me.
Now, here I am, a 46-year-old recovering High-Functioning Alcoholic, not knowing how to celebrate life sober. But I also knew that I didn’t want to spend one more day on another bar stool or wine mixer, nor did I want to nurse one more regretful, remorseful hangover. When I began my path of recovery, I sincerely thought I would never celebrate anything again. I thought my life would become boring, isolating, and friendless.
Well, in my first 30 days of recovery, I found myself in a group of young people of Alcoholic Anonymous, in a bar, singing karaoke at mid-night laughing my ass off. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. I couldn’t believe it. This experience gave me hope that my sober life would not be boring or lonely.
Since that hopeful night, I have made many friends in the program. Friends like I’ve never had in my whole life. I realized as I got sober, the friends I thought I had from my drinking days were never friends; they were drinking buddies. As soon as I stopped drinking, those people dropped me like a bad habit. They didn’t even look back; they didn’t even check in on me. Friends I thought were my “best-friends” when I told them I stopped drinking and I joined the program, all they said was “Emily, we’re not those people!” as they were shouting it in my face, demanding that I stop this non-sense, again insisting “We’re not those people.” When I insisted that I was “those people,” I never heard from them again.
The women of Alcoholics Anonymous get me. These women are still wild and crazy badass women. They have tons of sober fun. We hang out at house parties, retreats, social events, conventions, etc., and celebrate each other honestly and authentically. A way where I feel heard and seen. I now have deep, raw, genuine conversations with these friends. I get to celebrate all the things in life fully. I get to be present and there for others. I get to remember every experience. I don’t wake up with shame, guilt, or remorse trying to remember the supposed good time the night before.
I am now living through my fifth year of sobriety, 1,554 days to be exact as of this writing, and I have a new way of living and celebrating life. I love the way I celebrate today. If you’re struggling out there and can relate to my story and thinking that there will not be a life without “king alcohol,” I can assure you, if you join Alcoholics Anonymous, you will never be alone. A new way of living and celebrating life is waiting for you.
I hope to see you on your journey. Thanks for being part of mine.
Emily Blossom