Why I'm grateful to be sober – even if the Pentagon is in a group chat

I am constantly reminded of reasons why I'm grateful to be sober – and they always seem to see the least expected places. Sometimes it is with my children in a quiet moment. Sometimes it is in a chaotic group chat. And sometimes it is a woman with a deep southern accent on “The White Lotus” sighing: “I don't even have my Lorazepam. I will have to drink myself to sleep.” Was there, girl.

The recent memory was friendly with the friendly approval of a catastrophe at Pentagon level: When the news broke that the officials of the Trump administration classified war plans in a group chat-I immediately transported a journalist. Not because I ever endangered national security, but because I remembered that there was a time in my life when no cell phone, a secret or fragile structure of my own well -being could trust me.

I am now a sober mother and a debut novelist -not someone able to escape global diplomacy -but I know what it feels like to be the source of a violation. My own violation. Emotional home protection security if you like.

I know the incomprehensible demoralization that goes hand in hand with the knowledge that they have overshadowed something personal, raw or ruthless – and now it's out there. Screenshot-possible. Interpretable. Permanently public. A digital slip turned into a living, breathing source of shame.

My drinking was never casual. From the beginning in my life, alcohol was a way to escape the parts of myself that I didn't know how to live – grief, fear, shame, ambition. It started in the high school, escalated in college, and in my late 20s I stopped convincing that I had control. I drank too deaf. Bring silence. Disappear.

With the kind permission of Jessica Guerrieri “Data-SRC =>

On the outside I kept it together – married and desperately tried to start a family and work as a special school teacher – but behind the scenes it was chaotic. Towards the end of my drinking career, I had to throw out the poison from my own body just to work. The carrying out of vomiting became part of the routine. I found it easier to hand over at home before work than between the pass times. I had to throw up either way – better to do it comfortably from my own bathroom. And I knew I had to do everything the next morning. So far I was gone.

Before I got sober, I lived in an almost constant state of digital fear. I would panic with full body and reached for my phone before I signed up where I was. What did I post? Who did I write an SMS? Did I tell my boss at midnight some awe and deeply serious one because I felt “brave”? Did I send my ex a long, denominational message because a Taylor Swift song made me realize some things?

Sometimes I went on. I hide my phone in front of myself – throw it into a closet, push it under a bunch of laundry, bury it on the bottom of a drawer like a ticking bomb. I even changed the pass code during the power failures, convinced that I would save myself from myself. And then I had inevitably around the next morning in cold sweat and tried to find the post-it notes that I had left behind with the scribbled numbers-my own version of nuclear start codes.

I treated my phone as if it were a living wire. Wipe. Scan. Delete. REU. Repeat. The evidence was sometimes ridiculous-a memo that I couldn't get to open-sometimes devastating: broken friendships, passive-aggressive stories, vague explanations to “change everything tomorrow” or flirt that read more like shouting. I spent my days doing emotional triage and cleaned up after a version of me that I hardly recognized – but who had used my name, my voice, my heart.

There was a period of time before I became sober when I wanted to desperately get pregnant – but we were not. Every month felt like a calm kind of grief and I didn't know how to hold it. So I drank. And during the power failures, this grief slipped on the side.

The next morning I would wake up with blurry flashes because I told it to the people. Friends. Acquaintance. A woman I hardly knew at a birthday party. “We tried it,” I said with a glass in my hand, as if I was sitting on my own disappointment.

I had showered through ovulation skits how I had convinced myself that this was the month, as broken when I felt when it wasn't. And the next day I scroll through texts, check social media and try to put together what I said – and who. Did people avoid me from pity or just pretended to forget politely?

When my best friend had her baby, I visited her in the hospital. We got to know each other on the first day of the kindergarten and she is one of the few people who know all my strange little quirks – as I refuse to eat food with the same color at the same time (no orange panes and cheddar cheese on the same plate). So of course I appeared, tried to act normally and tried to be present. But I wasn't.

Just a few weeks earlier, I had drunk alone during the spring holidays and decided to reject my living room. Somewhere in the haze I slipped from the ladder and tore my knee in three different locations. That should have been a wake -up call. Instead, it only deepened the spiral. I found that the mixing of my SSRI medication because of anxiety -which was already tightened by my drinking -whereby the newly prescribed pain relievers jumped into a new form of completely forgetting.

I wanted to be more than anything else in the world, but to see in the parking lot of this hospital when my best friend steps into motherhood – something that I desperately longed for – I swallowed pain relievers just to survive our visit. To numb the pain in my chest that she had a baby … and I had a problem.

I don't remember that I kept her daughter, even though there is a photo that says I did it. I sit on the edge of the hospital bed, raced a newborn and smile, as if it means something. And later, still in this fog, I posted some incoherent, bubble -supporting mess on the experience on social media – without asking the permission of my best friend. I converted her deeply personal moment into another victim of my addiction. I wish I could remember the weight of this day, but the truth is, I was too far away.

It wasn't just the non -networking pregnancy that broke me. It was the loss of privacy. The way alcohol converted my sacred and painful longing into cocktail party. I couldn't decide who I shared it – my shame did it.

The sobriety has changed me in a thousand species, but maybe the deepest is: I'm no longer afraid of my own digital trail. I go to bed and remember what I said, what I posted, what kind of damage control I habit Must do in the morning. I wake up without fear. I don't work on the impact. I don't scanne for rubble. I don't have to send follow-ups that with “Sorry for last night …”.

What finally stopped me to drink was not a big public low – it was the calm pain to live as a warning sign every day. On the last night I drank, I had humiliated myself in a back yard BBQ by celebrating my sister -in -law and the new home of her husband. I said it was a great opportunity to let go of not holding back – because I don't deserve it? The next morning I crept into the guest bath – the same where I handed over to school so that I felt reasonably sober enough to teach. I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize what I saw. Haggard. Bloated. Reduced. And then I heard a voice – calmly, firmly, not my own – say: “Don't you have enough?” And I had. I went back to our bedroom and told my husband that I had a problem with alcohol. That night I went to my first 12-step meeting. It was May 2, 2013. I've been sober since then.

The miracle is not just that I stopped drinking – it is that I stopped going. Emotion, shame, secrets, despair – I suggested everything and hoped that someone would notice and repair me. Now I can unsubscribe in peace. My life is not boring – I had three daughters in a soberness, I am about to go on a national bay tour, and I no longer throw living nuclear weapons into my own life, just to feel something – but it is stable. Kept. Mine.

I worked like hell so as not to be my own liability. I have made peace with the past. Learned how to stay. How to hold the flap. How I trust myself again.

The most magical things on my cell phone are now Facebook memories of 13 years ago, stamped proof of a girl who called spiral and personality. I am sober and responsible for my actions because I finally take care of my own name to protect it.

Soberness gave me back my credibility – with others, yes, but mainly with me. And when I think of the woman I used to be – the one desperate texts that are frightened from her own trace – I do not judge her. I want to hug her. She did her best. She just tried to survive.

It is now safe. She is here.

It no longer licks.

Jessica Guerrieri from Bay Area lives with her husband and three young daughters in Davis, California, Davis, California. Jessica has a background that teaches special education, but left the field to pursue a career while writing. The Maurice Prize for fiction from her Alma Mater, UC Davis, won her debut novel “Between the Teufel and the deep blue sea”. With over a decade of sobriety, Jessica is a violent lawyer to relax the addiction. Connect to her online in Jessicaguerrieri.net; On Instagram @jessicaguerrieri author; On X @Witandspitup; and Tiktok @jessstyssober.

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