Personal Essay: Writing My Way to Sobriety by Natasha Skoryk

By Natasha Skoryk

In recovery, we are often told to think of a time we drank more than we intended to. That’s the classic sign of an alcoholic, after all. Someone who has lost the ‘ability to control their drinking’ and consumes way more than they had ever planned to. I often struggle with that task. Not because I was not a raging alcoholic - I absolutely was - but because I don’t know that I ever miscalculated just how much I intended to drink and that’s because, well, I intended to drink just about all the ethanol on Planet Earth. ​

I drank to attain oblivion. I drank to feel nothing. I drank until I passed out, and then I woke up and I poured myself another drink and repeated the cycle.

At the end of my prolific drinking career, I much preferred to drink alone. I didn’t look forward to drinking with other people, because other people did not drink the way I wanted to. I didn’t want to have shots or make merry. I wanted to chug spirits straight from the bottle and then go to sleep and wake up only to repeat the procedure. So I still am not sure I ever drank more than I intended to there, at the end. Because when your goal is the utter annihilation of the self, no amount can ever be more than what you intended. 

“You are so far from rock bottom,” my boyfriend spat at me after a relapse where I’d wound up at a police station for being a public nuisance. I didn’t like to drink outside my house at that point, but I also couldn’t drink at home because his watchful eye curtailed it. It was an alcoholic Catch-22 that had led me to two bottles of wine in a pizzeria (because a bar would have been too obvious). “You are still so far from rock bottom.” He was probably correct. I had my health, I had some work (not enough), I had family members that still talked to me (fewer than I’d had before), I had friends (I’d lost others). I had him. For now. I wasn’t living on skid row or prostituting myself. Yet. That’s the important word there, yet. I had not done any of that just yet, but I knew - sitting there in our lounge as he looked at me with a mixture of anger and hurt - that it was just a matter of time. I’d be doing those things one day - probably soon - if I didn’t get my shit together. 

Here’s the other thing, though. Even in that moment, I didn’t care. I knew it was true. I knew our relationship was hanging on by a thread, that my family was tired of the ongoing nightmare of me, that the sporadic work I had would dry up if I continued to miss appointments or forget about commitments. I didn’t care, because I knew something none of them did: I drank to get oblivion. I drank to feel nothing. And I knew that if I got that oblivion, if I felt nothing, then their disappointments and hurts and fears and concerns wouldn’t matter to me. I never, after all, drank more than I intended to.

So how do you get sober from that position? It wasn’t enough to do the 12 Steps because the first step - we admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable - was a given. That was the point. The primary point was to feel nothing, to think nothing, to disappear into the bittersweet ether of alcohol. The point of my alcoholism was to feel as powerless as possible. The point was chronic unmanageability. The quest, really, was complete destruction. So how the fuck was I meant to get sober? Well, no. I knew perfectly well how to get sober. I’d done it countless times. But how would I stay sober? And, more importantly, why?

I thought about that in rehab soon after. I had checked myself in. I looked to my counsellors and therapists to try and fix me, but I also knew full well that I needed a reason to stay sober, a purpose, a goal. My relationship, although extremely precious to me, had failed to provide me with enough impetus in the past. My boyfriend had said that in the same conversation: “You won’t get sober for me, how many times have you failed at that already?” And he was right, of course. I’d tried several times to sober up for his sake, and each time it had come crashing down around me; a flimsy little bar of cards scattered all over the floor. Love, it turned out, couldn’t ever win against my hatred of self. 

I tried to think of other reasons to stay sober. I came up with nothing. I considered checking myself out of rehab, just as I’d checked myself in, and walking down to the nearest bar. Seeing where it went from there. Pursuing further unmanageability. Drinking just as much as I’d always intended to. Drinking myself to the grave. Or perhaps, near the grave - perhaps he was right and I simply hadn’t reached my brink yet, perhaps I had a decade or so of drinking left to go. Perhaps on the precipice of my grave, I’d finally have Bill Wilson’s epiphany and sober up.

I abandoned the idea almost as soon as I’d had it, though, and that really was because of my relationship. I didn’t want to drink what remained of that away. I didn’t want to lose him. As long as I had him, I had a decent enough reason for sobriety. But would that be enough? Sitting in rehab, it felt like that was enough of a reason not to leave. Still, how long before I’d be back home, and I’d get in a mood, and I’d go back to the place of wanting to destroy myself and everything around me? Probably not that long. I had to find another reason. 

That’s when I remembered writing. I’d remembered that I’d stopped writing because it interfered with my drinking. I remembered that as a child, a teenager, a young adult - before I’d embraced the bottle as a way of life - I’d always been a writer. I wondered, suddenly, when I’d stopped identifying as a writer and started focusing on being a drunk. And then, I wondered - with a level of clarity that rivalled Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening - if writing could be my raison d’être. I may have not been enough. Love may have not been enough. But maybe my words could be. 

As a child and a teenager, I had often imagined myself writing some kind of bestselling novel or film script. As a pretentious college kid, I imagined academic manuscripts that rivalled Sartre’s. When I’d worked in newsrooms, I imagined myself publishing a memoir or a biography of someone fascinating, or perhaps telling my own stories of sex, drugs and rollicking good adventures. I’d never thought that I’d be writing for survival, though. I’d never thought that I’d be writing about the drinking, and seriously contemplating if the writing would keep me sober. And then I realised that if I didn’t try, I’d never know. 

I also knew full well that I wasn’t Hemingway - I could never write drunk, and when I drank, I was not sober frequently enough to edit it. So if I wanted to write, I’d have to write sober. I’d have to sit at my laptop for hours, clacking ferociously away, telling the stories I’d lived and the ones that came to me in my dreams.

I wrote with the abandon I had been giving my drinking. I wrote with the intention to write more than I’d ever intended, just as I had always drunk more than I had intended.

And as I wrote, I realised that there was still passion, and fire, and creativity inside me. All those thoughts I drank to drown out, all the many reasons I preferred to drink alone, were there and they were precious and then I realised something more. I realised that my words and I were never alone, and we didn’t need alcohol. I realised that while love had failed to keep me sober, words could. Because, after all, I’d loved words long before I’d ever met my boyfriend.

There, in rehab, I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote - a marathon of productivity, of abandoned ideas, of half baked thoughts, character sketches, memories of funny events - until I no longer wanted oblivion. I wanted consciousness. I wanted awareness. I wanted to feel everything. No wonder I’d abandoned writing for drinking, I thought - they were polar opposites for me. The drinking had nearly killed my soul. The writing would set it free.

I realised there was only one thing I wanted to do more than drink: write.

So I did.