“Where’s that restaurant you always used to go to…where you took us that one time?” my sister Kate asked me last week as our group of five sat in the back lounge of the local ice cream shop, slurping the last of our melty sundaes and coming down from an exhilarating (at least for me!) three-hour tubing expedition down the Delaware River on a 100-degree day.
Incidentally, it was my first time tubing, even though I’ve lived in Bucks County, PA, for a quarter-century. Considering I fancy myself such a devoted nature girl, I’m ashamed it took me so long to get my ass out there; the instant I plopped into the plastic donut and started floating off on the current under a pristine sky dotted by hawks and eagles on the wing, it was truly a “where have you been all my life?” moment, not unlike an alcoholic’s first drink. You don’t have to ask me how I know.
As I sit down to write this, I’m seven years sober, and Kate’s question about the restaurant is relevant here, because it forced me to pause in the midst of my reinvented life, look back, and remember how things used to be.
I don’t do that very much anymore. Seven years is long enough to start forgetting, which any addict understands is a beautiful reward that comes with a side of risk. They who forget history are doomed, and all that…
I purposely did not comb through my Instagram archives, tempting as it was, and delete the embarrassing photo evidence of my alcoholic exploits. I couldn’t have known I’d need visual aids for my seven-years-sober blog post, but I did understand the value of preserving history, and being honest with myself. As I tell my therapy clients all the time, acknowledging how far we fell reminds us where we never want, or have, to go again.
According to my IG, I haven’t gone to Isaac Newton’s in Newtown Borough since June 2019, a few weeks before I quit drinking. Kate and her two daughters came to town a full three years prior to that.
Back then, going out anywhere, anytime, meant I was getting drunk — even if the party included young kids — because I had no “off” switch in my off hours. Given how uptight and anxious I felt in a newspaper job that didn’t suit my sensitive, introverted nature, and how exhausting it was to white-knuckle my way through the work day/week, my all-or-nothing brain equated “letting go” with zero restraint. A trip to the bar usually turned into a full-blown binge, first on alcohol, then on candy from the 7-11 just down the street, or maybe ice cream or baked goods stockpiled in a blacked-out supermarket sweep, and ended with me waking up at 2:30AM feeling like the worst kind of shit. The alcoholic in me placed no limits on everything the sober “good girl,” “health nut” version of me deemed off-limits.
It was truly a double life, and neither was good OR healthy.
The spot where I sat in the ice cream shop last week was the starting line for so many races to rock bottom. I needed only turn my head a notch to glimpse the unmistakable Isaac’s storefront and signage, just over my shoulder, out the window and across the parking lot. A pit, or rather blob, of ugly sludge immediately popped up in my gut when my eye hit on that scene, like I’d seen a ghost. Or like I was the ghost, possessed monetarily by the misguided “party girl” of summers past who was prone to snapping photos of her beverage through a fog of booze, and stayed willfully blind to the doomed trajectory of her ruinous routine.
Recovery can be a kind of supernatural experience, because even after many years of healing, growth and transformation through clean living, “emotional sobriety” and self-compassion/forgiveness, any exposure to “people, places and things” from the old days can make the quaint, peaceful, tourist-friendly world you’ve built feel like a cursed island that’s “waking up.” Yes, this continues to be a “Widow’s Bay” reference with which I’m getting carried away.
Humor me, though, because there’s a scene near the end of the first season that stopped me in my tracks. It’s about acceptance, and it perfectly encapsulates my understanding of life after seven years of sobriety and two years working full-time as a psychotherapist.
Town mayor Tom (played by Matthew Rhys) has spent the previous 9 episodes desperately trying to bury/drown the island’s demons and scrub its creepy image to attract mainland visitors, and as a Nor’easter rages outside, he attempts to get his eccentric assistant Ruth to (ahem) sacrifice for his cause.
She explains to him that even though she’s been through a lot of hardship in her long life, “one of the benefits of growing up in Widow’s Bay is that we learn to weather the storms.” She tells Tom his vision of the island as an idyllic, squeaky-clean paradise that promises folks freedom from their suffering is a foolish fantasy, because enjoying the good stuff goes hand in hand with enduring the bad stuff. She takes a famous Tennessee Williams quote down from her wall to help make her point (see below).
“C’mon, Ruth,” Tom says, “this place is a house of horrors.” And she laughs. “Life is a house of horrors! You should know that better than anyone, Tom. I always worried about you, because you avoid the truth. You want this place to be Martha’s Vineyard, and it’s never gonna be. There’s no bliss waiting at the finish line, and even if there was, it would just be taken away from you, because that’s just life, in all its ugly, beautiful, terrible glory. You just…you just have to accept it.”
I used to think that life had to lack pain to be worthy of love, but that mentality sent me chasing temporary highs all over town and the interwebs, which drove me deeper and deeper into the prison of addiction. I have learned, slowly over time, that being “saved” or “freed” means accepting the full spectrum of human experience, the sweetness and the sorrow, and realizing that I can love life even when I don’t like what is happening, or how I feel, or the task(s) I have to perform in any given moment.
I can love myself — and my fellow humans — even if I don’t like everything about us, or how we behave when we allow our demons to run amok.
I mean, this love stuff is all definitely still a work in progress. I feel plenty of fear, anxiety, rage and sadness/grief in my daily sober life, and the vicarious trauma I experience as a therapist is no joke. But I can honestly say I’ve felt more and more balanced and peaceful inside as my time in recovery has gone on.
It’s amazing how our bodies naturally seek homeostasis when we stop trying to control everything and let nature take its course, in its own time! And what more could I want… other than, perhaps, the world around me NOT to follow the exact opposite trajectory? 🔥
There’s a reason this theme, of how we find meaning in a doomed existence, runs through so much of our favorite art. From Tennessee Williams to “Widow’s Bay,” to this humble little blog, where I’ve been chronicling the ebbs and flows of sober living over 7 full years (less frequently lately; but hey, I’m still here!), the truth is evident to all who are honest and brave enough to face it.
A good life is not some blissful heavenly safe haven where there are no storms to weather or fires to put out. It’s maintaining our balance in the middle of rough seas, and holding onto our humanity — the good and bad — while everything around us seems like it’s burning down.
I continue to be saved by love, for and from my husband and family, my therapy colleagues and clients, the art I create and that I admire — on my TV screen, in the great outdoors, and everywhere in between.
My former AA sponsor had a saying for anniversaries and milestones: “Your higher power must really love you a lot!” Given what my life looks like today, I would have to agree. 😍
Jen Wielgus Journalism 