Originally I had titled this post, ‘What no one tells you about getting sober”, but really it’s what no one tells you about life.

In early 2011 I knew I needed to get sober. It’s a longer story, one you can read about here, but a couple months into my recovery, I realized I was going to have to face something that I had never done before:

Face my feelings sober.

And it’s no shock that many people that get sober from drugs and/or alcohol, turn to another “drug”: shopping, relationships, exercise, food, over-achieving, busyness, Internet, you-name-it. Whatever they can get their hands on to numb out with. Why? My guess is that they get sober and feelings come up. They don’t drink anymore, so they have to turn to something else to cope and numb.

We live in a culture that doesn’t teach us how to feel our feelings. There’s no class in school for it, and many families don’t talk openly about it. And even if we kind of know what to do with our feelings, rarely are we encouraged to do so. The generations before us were mostly emotionally illiterate– meaning vulnerability (which is what encouraging the expression of feelings is) is simply not fostered. Personally, I grew up in a house with a metric shit-ton of love, but when it came to vulnerability– Nope.

So in 2011 when I found myself sober, the irony was almost funny: When drinking I had my days feeling like I would crawl out of my skin if I didn’t have a drink (or 5), and then when I got sober, I felt like I had crawled out of my skin– like I was this raw person walking around bumping into everything. Emily McCombs says so eloquently about this stage:

“Snorting coke is not hardcore. Walking around feeling whatever fucked-up shit you feel, without escape, 24/7, is fucking hardcore.”

And yes, it’s fucking hardcore.

Read the rest HERE

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