I was twenty-six when I got sober.
I am thirty-six now.
The decade between those two numbers contains the full arc of what I am: the person I became in the rubble of the person I had almost completely destroyed, rebuilt over years of difficult, unglamorous, uncinematic work. Recovery is not what movies make it look like. There is no single revelatory moment, no bottom so dramatic that the only direction available is up. There is, instead, a long accumulation of small choices, most of them painful, many of them made in bathrooms or parking lots or the back of group meetings at ten o’clock at night in fluorescent-lit church basements.
I was working two jobs when it started.
My father had left when I was twenty-two — not dramatically, not in a scene that anyone could use as a narrative, just gradually, inexplicably gone, first from the house and then from the phone calls and then from the birthday cards, until the absence was simply a fact we all lived with. My mother was managing debt that had accumulated the way debt accumulates when one income disappears and the fixed costs of a life don’t adjust to match it. I was the oldest. I was the one who could work. I was the one who could help.
