Opinion

Angela Garbes is the author of “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change” and “Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy.”

I recently saw my favorite Seattle bartender, Jeremy, for the first time in months. I was at the Clock-Out Lounge, our neighborhood bar, to meet old pals, laugh and cry, toast a friend who’d recently passed.

The Clock-Out did double duty as a kid-friendly pizza joint and, after bedtime, is a music and performance venue. It’s the kind of local gem that makes everyone say thank God it survived the pandemic. I’ve ordered so many rounds of “a shot and a beer” from Jeremy, he barely needs to ask what I’m having. But this time was different. Before he inquired, I said, “Well, I’m sober now, so no tequila and beer for me.”

As Jeremy fixed me a pint glass of bitters and soda on the house, he told me how he and his wife had stopped drinking for nine months as a sort of reset before her 40th birthday.

“So is this something you’re trying out for a while,” he asked, “just to see what it feels like?”

“Oh, no,” I blurted faster than I wanted. “It’s so I don’t die or kill my marriage.”

Six months ago, at age 45, I quit drinking alcohol and using drugs.

Choosing to get sober felt, as Claire Dederer wrote in her excellent book “Monsters,” like “the saddest decision in the world.” I also knew it was an absolute necessity. I didn’t understand what had happened to me. How I, a person who had been drinking and using for well over two decades with no major problems, had arrived at a point where substance use threatened to ruin my life.

I’ve had a lot of time to reflect, and I keep returning to the agonizing, early days of the pandemic. It’s shockingly easy to recall the claustrophobic mania of April 2020, when our children’s preschool closed and I stopped doing my professional work to care for them, ages 5 and 2, full time. We were housebound and cut off from friends and family; our neighborhood playground and swings were cordoned off by caution tape.

At the time, I was a successful freelance writer working on a second book under contract with a publisher. But my job did not provide our family with health insurance or consistent, predictable paychecks. My husband’s union job did. It was a no-brainer who would take the lead in caring for our kids.

I knew what I was doing at home was essential work. The most important work a person could do, more meaningful, and challenging, than writing a book. But I missed my old life. My professional self. Being a person in the world. I was also grieving the deaths of so many, and worrying about my elderly parents, all while trying to come up with fun crafts to make and three balanced meals every single day.

The tension between my domestic and public selves, which I was never not aware of, was unbearable — like witnessing all the pleasure, color and creativity in my life bleed away slowly.

I was not okay. I didn’t know how to sit in the discomfort, how long this “unprecedented time” would last. So I turned to what was at hand: group texts, gallows humor, wine, gin, pills.

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In those early days, I craved alcohol for a release, for the feeling of my shoulders collapsing, stress and anxiety washing away. Five p.m. couldn’t come soon enough. But hey, the world was collapsing, so might as well start at 4 p.m. 3:30. One drink helped me relax, two drinks made me laugh, gave me something to feel besides drained and empty, weary and scared. Three drinks made me feel entitled to whatever I wanted to ingest next.

I’ve never associated drugs and alcohol with morality. But in the pandemic, I began to in a through-the-looking-glass type of way. Drinking seemed like a completely rational and reasonable reaction to what was happening. Nurses didn’t have proper protective equipment to safely care for covid-19 patients. Thousands of people were dying each day, but the media made space for stories of people who didn’t think covid was real. Altering my senses was one of the few things that made sense.

At some point, and I wish I knew exactly when, drinking morphed from coping mechanism to habit. My husband is my favorite person to party with, but eventually, I was drinking by myself, spending money behind his back, trying to hide my habits from the person closest to me, “partying” not for pleasure but because I wasn’t able to stop.

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I would have been content to cruise along under the power of denial. But one night, talking with my husband in our kitchen, I realized I was losing his trust. Nothing I was doing would give him reason to take me at my word. I could taste the pain I was causing and the pain I was in — putrid, sickening. It was the worst feeling of my life.

I had two options: Give in to addiction’s chaotic cycle of elation, oblivion and shame, or give up substances and be fully present for my messy, complicated life. Choosing sobriety was actually quite simple. Breaking my habits, and forming new ones, is hard as hell.

The other night at the Clock-Out, my friends and I sat on the sidewalk patio in our shorts and tank tops. I didn’t want the night to end. But it turns out being back in public — encountering acquaintances, colleagues, preschool parents, my favorite servers and bartenders, in ways I could only fantasize about three years ago — is fraught.

My sober brain, without a secret to guard as if my life depended on it, is a little spacey. I forget words, names, my keys, what I’m talking about. Once, during a lunch meeting with a colleague, I picked up a bottle on the table and doused my plate of pupusas in Coca-Cola, not the hot sauce I thought I had reached for. Emerging from my cocoon, tender and sensitive, being among people who knew me in the before times, is hard. I feel larval, unpolished, under construction.

If I know one thing, though, it’s that I am not alone. In April, a Seattle woman named Rachel Marshall died suddenly — a shock to the community. Marshall was a small-business owner widely known for her bright and citrusy ginger beer, served at bars and cafes she owned throughout the city. I didn’t know her personally, but I was heartbroken to hear that she was just 42 and, like me, the mother of two young children.

Marshall’s family released a letter announcing a celebration of her life as well as the cause of her death. She died of cirrhosis caused by alcoholism.

“In the lockdown months of 2020,” her family wrote, drinking “went from a social, celebratory ritual to a coping mechanism, and one day alcohol gained the upper hand. Covid faded but the drinking didn’t, and this became its own source of depression, and this was the spiral she was caught in when she died.”

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Over the course of three traumatic, stifling, grief-saturated years, many people’s relationship to drugs and alcohol shifted, imperceptible in some, glaringly obviously in others. We have lost, will continue to lose, so many people to illnesses other than covid that are, nonetheless, direct results of it. These deaths won’t be included in the official pandemic death toll, but they are present in millions of lives.

I do not miss the terror and hypervigilance required to keep up the lie that I was in control of my drinking. But I have to admit: I am occasionally haunted by positive memories. I miss the quick fix, the lubricated ease of connection and laughter, singing and dancing.

At the heart of this vague “fomo” is something other than a lack of joy (thankfully, joy still abounds). It is loneliness. I am more dependent than ever on my partner, friends and community. But it’s just me in here.

In this early, embryonic period of sobriety, I am confronting so much that for decades I purposely avoided. Yes, the pandemic pushed me into active addiction, but I’ve long been numbing myself to feelings that, as an outspoken woman of color, I am “too much” and undeserving of happiness.

I have never been this vulnerable, this sensate — all the things I couldn’t allow myself to be for so long. I feel more human than ever. And I’m grateful.