Getting sober, staying sober
Welcome to my Substack, and hello to my new Berlin-based subscribers! My name is Bettina, and I’m a US-born writer in Berlin. I don’t always post regularly due to day/job duties, but I do when I can and when I have something to say. Today, I have many words for you as I attempt to parse this one very personal aspect of my life. I hope it’s also somewhat universal and that you can relate. Check out my other writings on my travels, life in Berlin, and my experience with grief. Enjoy!
After the recent elections in the USA, there was an image making the social media rounds of a seated Statue of Liberty, holding her head in her hands, with cigarette butts and empty beer bottles strewn about her feet.
No kidding. On November 4th and 5th, I thought about my emergency pack of cigarettes. They wait patiently in a drawer for occasions of emotional upset. Every six months or so, life gets to a point where I need a drag.
If I hadn’t still been fighting an endless flu-cold in November, I would have stood on my balcony and lit up a dried-out, year-old Camel Light—ignoring the graphic photos of cancer victims on the box meant to deter people like me. I would have enjoyed that cigarette and the kick of nicotine crawling up the back of my neck into my brain and soothing me after reading all the news trickling in on all platforms. News that I had already over-consumed in the 48 hours surrounding the 2024 elections with their unsurprising results. Then I’d have flicked the ashes into the glass ashtray I found on the street that sits on standby for moments like this.1 Looking out southeast from my apartment, I would’ve thought to myself that the lights of the TV tower over Alexanderplatz looked particularly brilliant that night.
What I thought about that night but didn’t do was to buy a bottle of beer on my way home, passing the corner Späti (the Berlin equivalent of a 7/11). But it crossed my mind.
In Berlin, or anywhere else in the West for that matter, alcohol is a socially acceptable and legal drug. Heck, it’s encouraged. The advertising for products containing alcohol is clever, funny, and very convincing (with its $7 billion budget, no wonder). Despite growing up in a dry household—or maybe because of it—I was eager to partake when I got the chance. With time, I learned that there’s something for everyone and every occasion. From liquor-filled chocolates to dessert nightcaps and morning pick-me-ups. There’s an aperitif before a meal and a digestif to round it off. Aperol Spritz is the summer beverage of Europe, and it is good any time of the day. The same goes for Glühwein from late October to January. There are entire months dedicated to drinking beer in big tents with music and socializing; this tradition is no longer limited to Germany. On my recent trip to Japan, there was an Oktoberfest Festival outside the entry to the Tokyo Skytree Tower.
When I was a sixteen-year-old studying abroad in Berlin in the nineties, I was fascinated by the colorful little liquor bottles at the check-out at Penny Markt, as well as by the ubiquitous tobacco machines. For five Deutsche Marks, anyone could buy the forbidden fruit of my youth. I remained cautious around alcohol until a year or two later when I went to a friend’s party and I drank everything at once, from Goldschlager to red wine, with predictable results. After that crash course in mixology, I eventually cultivated my knowledge of spirits. I cycled through the categories, building up my tolerance during my time as an enlisted soldier. But by my early thirties, even one drink would give me a headache; the high wasn’t worth the trouble. But it took me years to actually stop. I persisted drinking until I was 34 when I found a good reason not to.
That reason was wanting to pray and meditate. I had determined, in a scientific study of myself, that this goal was incompatible with the consumption of alcohol.2
It’s hard to be sober sometimes when the options are so appealing—I mean, have you ever had an Aperol Spritz? All your troubles melt away—for a few hours at least. I would forget myself when I drank as if with each glass, my center shifted outwards until I would completely exit my body. Passing out but never blacking out, the memories steeping in my soaked brain.
Sometimes, I forget why I quit. I had so much fun! Oh, the parties, dates, dinners with friends, and titillating conversations. I have not forgotten the glow—glanz in German—the brilliance of the spirit-infused encounter. But I have also not forgotten the many downsides. They have been chronicled in many places more eloquently than I could, no need to recall every degradation. Leslie Jamison’s memoir of alcoholism comes to mind, and I highly recommend it.
Certain aromas still remind me of drinking. The smell of butter emanating from a fine restaurant as I pass by catapults me back to many a happy hour in the days when I earned good money (at a high-stress job). I poured it down the drain of my stomach in the form of garlic mussels in wine sauce with a glass of white wine, and then another. And another.
Certain songs remind me of drinking. “Major Tom”, …coming home…. I am swirling and twirling on the dance floor, pining for my latest crush or even making out with one. Observing myself from a point in the ceiling. Put on Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” and I’m the sexiest chick grinding in the club. The beer goggles were primarily for me, to blur the judging eye and still the inner critic. That dulling of my sense of self was what I craved.
Leslie Jamison says drinking made her selfish, recounting her sharing in an OA meeting. That is certainly true, and of me, too, but I think I was both selfish without knowing myself and an immature twenty-something (is that redundant?)—and the drinking revealed it. I was searching for myself yet studiously avoiding myself.
This poem called “A Drinking Song” by the poet William Butler Yeats sums up my younger years.
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
Yeats often wrote about being torn between the spiritual and physical worlds; I found this to be my paradox. I’m longing for all the things of this world: the food, the chocolate, the sex, the cigarettes. The associations are strong. Beer and cigarettes; wine and cheese; champagne and caviar. But the supersensible, the unseen spirit—not the one in the bottle—was what I also wanted to find. Prayer and meditation are activities that bring us closer to feeling and sensing that self. I needed so many years to stop self-sabotaging, that I sometimes feel behind in the skill set of meditation. Finding quiet is not a natural state of mind, but these baby steps are worth it. The faint hints, a tiny glitter of true spirit-self I glimpse, are worth every sip I do not take.
On my recent trip to Japan, my first time visiting that country, I had the opportunity to visit a small bar frequented by high-earning elites. While I was drinking my nonalcoholic beverage, one of the patrons delivered gifts to a young hostess (this is a whole thing in Japan). It was the hostess’ birthday, so there was much celebrating in general, and this man’s gift was an $800 bottle of Napa Valley red wine, among other things (a Tom Ford makeup set and high-end dried figs).
The bottle was ceremoniously opened and shared in tall large wine glasses (it has to breathe, this class of wine needs Lebensraum) with the other patrons. I put my glass aside for someone else, but given the social pressure and my desire, I decided to try a micro-sip of my friend’s glass just to participate in the specialness of the occasion. I wet my lips on the tiniest of tastes imaginable. It was indeed delicious. Playing with fire, or a more vulgar image: C’mon, just the tip!
What was stopping me from gulping down the rest? Really, what’s preventing me from suddenly breaking down and chugging all the drinks in the hotel mini bar, like the Denzel Washington character in the movie Flight?
There is a voice in my head that makes the following argument, and which chimes in usually when I’m on vacation in the Mediterranean, surrounded by vineyards. I think, “I could partake here, just a glass of local wine with dinner.” It’s not only me, but people around me suggest it. Waiters and dates offer it. Just the other night I met a friend for Thai food, and when I arrived late, small glasses of what looked like soda were already on the table, so I took a sip assuming it had been ordered by my friend who knows I don’t drink but realized, too late, that it was some kind of fizzy wine. The aggressive (non-Thai) waiter had brought it and kept trying to push it on us despite my saying clearly that I don’t drink. Trust me, if I drank alcohol, you would not need to encourage me not to be shy. I was not demure in my drinking days.
I have one friend, who, despite knowing me for many years, still offers me alcoholic beverages on various occasions. It’s the polite thing to do in normal circumstances, after all. I used to be the one making sure everyone’s glass was full. My friend has the European mindset around alcohol, which is, notably, not an alcoholic one. They can have one drink on special occasions and certainly don’t think to themselves, as I do, is this drink—and the occasion it is celebrating—worth breaking my 12-year sobriety record?
There are so many things I say I will do or won’t do and then do anyway, or leave undone. What makes me stay sober when I fail to follow through on other resolutions?3 More self-research is due on applying the alcohol policy to other itch-scratching. This decision not to drink because I can’t trust myself is unique among the various itches I need to scratch. If I could put my finger on exactly what keeps me from drinking, it’s this: a combination of truly knowing, down to every cell in my body, that I would prefer something else (sobriety in all its positive potential) more than the consequences and the habit of saying no. And yet, it is a paradox: as every day, I cannot guarantee that I won’t start drinking again tomorrow. Even after publishing this essay.
It’s a maxim that the difficulty in quitting drinking is when you remove the crutch, you need to face what was driving you to drink; you must strengthen the muscles to hold yourself up without it. The hard feelings are still there. Life can suck.
It may feel like the inmates have taken over the asylum in the US—or any number of other places—right now, but I tell myself that taking the long view on a macro-historical level and micro-personal plane is advisable. This too shall pass. The itch of anxiety will pass, don’t scratch it with the same old habits. I might have a backup pack of Camel Lights, but I don’t have a secret stash of liquor like Helen Hunt in that movie “Pay It Forward” with the kid from the I-see-dead-people movie, where she hides a bottle in the ceiling lamp above the kitchen table. I just keep walking past the Späti, and politely decline the latest offer.
When bad things, or even inconvenient ones, happen to me or in the world, my answer is no longer self-destruction with alcohol. I won’t hand power to the ones already causing so much damage, to affect my inner life, down to the level of my body. Not today, at least. I can’t guarantee that the next time won’t get me, but not today, Satan.
I may smoke a cigarette, or binge Netflix until three am and eat a whole bag of popcorn—but so far, I’ve managed not to do that other thing.
There but for the grace of God go I—these words I know to be true. Humility is wrung from the bitter taste of gall from the morning after. The line between me and the man I saw the other day, vomiting into the train trash can (the bathrooms are always occupied or broken in the German trains, ah, city living) is a thin one, drawn anew every day.
It’s a Berliner custom, people put a box out on the street with their hand-me-downs, labeled “To give away”
Some people seem perfectly capable of imbibing and fulfilling their full potential, but I wasn’t one of them.
Romans 7:15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
Beautifully written with lots of insight on the topic. Thanks for sharing 🫂