The first time I felt sad in my sobriety, I was sure something had gone wrong. I was sober now! I wasn’t supposed to feel like this!
To an outside observer, it was just a normal, benign evening after dinner—standing in my kitchen, dishwasher humming, a pile of shoes by the back door, kids doing their homework. But suddenly a wave of…something…rose in my chest. Was it grief? Loneliness? The fact that I couldn’t name it somehow made it worse. My mind and body jumped to the habitual response to emotions that are too big to handle. “Fix this.” I started towards the cabinet that used to hold the wine glasses and then remembered that it now only held mugs.
I stood in my kitchen, looking at the mugs, and cried.
After a few minutes, maybe twelve, give or take, the feeling passed. It rose, crested, and then moved through me as I stood there. And then I was just a woman in a kitchen again. The same as before, except with a wet face. Nothing had actually gone wrong. But what I later realized was that in that moment, something had finally gone right.
I had spent about thirty years making sure that uncertain moments like that one never happened. As a high-achieving, overfunctioning, extroverted people pleaser, it’s not in my nature to sit with discomfort. I fix. I plan. I bring a casserole. I clean out my closet at 10PM. And, in the past, if none of that worked, I would pour a glass of wine.
As we all know, wine is very good at its job. Alcohol is a superb anesthetic. Within a few minutes, the edges blur a little, the shame softens, and those difficult feelings feel a little easier to deal with.
But as Brené Brown says, you can’t selectively numb your feelings.
What I didn’t understand for three decades was that while I thought I was turning down the volume on the difficult stuff, I was actually turning down the volume on everything. The wine acted as a whole-house shutoff, not a dimmer switch on sadness.
