At 13 years sober, I’ve come to the understanding that getting sober doesn’t fix everything … and that is perfectly okay.
In some programs, there seems to be a belief that when you get sober, all your dreams come true. That has not been my experience. My imperfect life made me resentful of the program and made me feel like I was doing something wrong.
‘Are the other people lying? Trying to look good?’ I wondered. Sure, if substance use disorder is your only issue and you take that away, maybe things should be pretty dandy. But even then, no one is immune to life: accidents, financial problems, breakups, illnesses, deaths. The idea that you get sprinkled with some fairy dust and rewarded because you stopped killing yourself and destroying the people around you is ludicrous.
Do you know what you get when get sober? If you’re lucky, you get sober. And that is plenty. Many people die trying to get this thing. So the idea that life should become perfect and you should get all the gifts and prizes seems kind of arrogant to me.
Looking at addiction makes me grateful to be alive in this messy, imperfect life
Nobody is exempt from life’s trials and tribulations, but some are luckier than others. When I went searching for hard numbers about how many people get and stay sober, the data varied. The number that kept coming up was between 50-65%. However, having tried to get sober for 30 years, living through the appearance of fentanyl, and burying many of my friends, that estimate seems high to me. When you look at those numbers and consider that you’re alive … everything stops seeming so unfair. You become grateful you’re still here, despite things not being perfect.
Mental health issues don’t go away when you quit drugs
Now we come to dual diagnosis. There are people whose only mental health concern is substance use disorder. Lucky them. But those people are not in the majority. It’s really common for people with addiction to also have one or more mental illnesses. Depending on how you look at it, the overlap of substance use disorder and mental illness is about 30-50%. (The 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that about one-third of US adults with mental illness (21.2 million people) also had substance use disorder. Those 21.2 million adults with both mental illness and substance use disorder make up almost half of the 46.3 million adults who had a substance use disorder in the past year.)
For those of us in this camp, even if we get sober, we still have our mental illness to grapple with. We all know mental illness is treatable, but rarely curable. Once I got sober, I realized my mental illness was my road dog for life. It has severely impacted my life, far into sobriety. I think I realized, like many of us, that I had been using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate my mental illness. And once you get sober, you really feel your depression. Prozac is okay, but it’s not methamphetamine.
Life isn’t perfect for anyone. Why would sober people be the exception?
Even for people who were never a drug user or had mental illness, times are hard. Rent is expensive. Relationships are difficult. Jobs are scarce. I think we’ve all realized in retrospect that drugs provide at best a temporary relief, but no real solution for the hardships of life. And boy, oh boy, is the price of that temporary relief high. If I had known I’d be on four anticonvulsants, have a battery in my chest, never be able to get an MRI, and have a criminal record, I’m not sure I would have gone down that road. But like every arrogant addict, I thought I’d get out unscathed.
Nothing fixes everything. No job, no amount of money, no fairytale relationship, and certainly not drugs (which we all found out the hard way).
I hate to sound hippie dippie, but the solution is inside. It’s your attitude. It’s putting in the hard work, eating clean, exercising. Ugh. And I admit that I’m far from mastering that.
I thought there was a shortcut to success and happiness, and that the shortcut was getting loaded. But I was mistaken and it took me years to find my way out. So if you’re sober but your life is not perfect, you’re not alone and you are not doing anything wrong.