500 Days
Another milestone in sobriety
Six days ago, I hit another big milestone, if you can call it that. Five hundred days sober—in a row! It feels important, although I didn’t even know it was coming up until a friend congratulated me that morning. I stopped counting days when they turned into months, and months when I hit my one-year anniversary.
That in itself feels like an accomplishment. When the strangeness of this new life becomes overtaken by it just being the norm. Is that acceptance or complacency?
My brain or the universe or God or the ice cream I ate before dinner believed the latter because I had another one of those dreams that night, the one where I forgot I can’t drink, and I downed two glasses of wine at lunch. I only remembered my sobriety on my (drunk) drive home.
The details are what stayed with me nearly a week later. The aftertaste of pinot grigio on my breath (it wasn’t even my favorite wine! What was I even doing?) That buzzed feeling, the combined numbness and boldness. But mostly, that crushing despair of knowing how easy it was to throw away 500 days. I’ll tell you about my crazy psychic dreams another time, but for now I’ll just tell you that I don’t dismiss what my brain tells me at night.