On the kinda wild creativity of a super sober life
The more sober I am, the more awake I am as my life energy flows.
Last week I shared with you why I gave up drinking, but now I want to write about how sobriety feels to me, and show you how it has helped me feel a very complete sense of creative transformation, in my writing, but also in the way I process and live my life. Because taking alcohol away doesn’t, as many people fear, reduce life, or make it any way less colourful, less interesting, less pleasurable, but expands it - and expands it in huge, unexpected, and wildly vivid ways.
Sometimes I think this is the easiest way to describe what it feels like to be long-term sober: imagine finding a door you’d never noticed on the back wall of your house you thought you knew inside out. You feel weird and quite scared to open that door, since inside is a dark, unfamiliar corridor. Leaving the familiar rooms of your life and stepping into the corridor is hard and might take several attempts, but after a short while – not long at all, really, in the scheme of a whole life - that corridor opens up, revealing big new spaces, full of the kind of light and views and expanses you always wanted. It feels like a miracle! The rooms were there, you just didn’t know they existed. Your house is so much bigger, so much more beautiful and so much more surprising than you thought it was. Life without alcohol gives you all these new rooms in your life, magnifying it in the most incredible ways. Being sober is not quiet, or small, or “sober” at all. It’s extreme. It dials your senses and your experience of the world right up. It can feel psychedelic. In many ways, it’s kinda wild. But not always easy…