Sobriety Isn’t the End of the Party
“Sobriety isn’t the end of the party. It’s the VIP section for the ones who made it out alive.”
I saw this uncredited quote on a meme this morning, and I immediately shared it. Throughout my nine-year battle with opioid addiction, this concept was a huge part of why I didn’t want to quit– I thought it meant the end of the party.
When I look at my experiences in active addiction, particularly the last three years after I advanced to the point of needles and homelessness, very few of those memories include anything that resembled a party. Most of the time there was nothing fun about it at all. But there’s a certain camaraderie we form among those we use with, like a misery-loves-company sort of thing and being the first one to step away and leave the circle comes with a feeling that you’re going to be missing out on something.
And at first I really did feel left out. I grew up in Boston, MA and only moved to Florida in 2019 at the age of 32, at which point the pill habit that I was trying to run from intensified into an IV fentanyl habit. This meant the only friends I ever made here were other addicts, and from the warm safety of my room in rehab I’d often find myself thinking forlornly about them all getting high out there without me, carrying on doing the things that I couldn’t.
The hardest part was that there actually was no “couldn’t.” Nobody was forcing me to stay there. I could have left anytime. I could have called my dealer in the morning and been high before dinnertime. But what had led me to treatment was that one day I’d woken up to find that suddenly the part of me that was sick of my own life was, for the first time, speaking louder than the part of me that wanted to use. Not much louder, in fact the margin was pretty small at first. But sometimes it only takes a bit to tip the scale, and when I woke up that day I just knew it was time.
My first month after the detox week was hard, and it was mostly those in my “party” that kept my butt in that seat when I wanted to walk away from recovery. It was a full residential rehab, so we were stuck in the same building all the time, and although our rooms had tv’s there was also a common room to encourage us to be social. At night a few of us would sometimes watch YouTube videos from the drug-ravaged streets of Kensington, PA where people stand around smoking crack, or bent overshooting up and nodding out on the street. It was not exactly uplifting subject matter, and I’m sure it wasn’t healthy that we all sat and watched this with the unspoken commonality that we all kind of wished we were doing the same things. But at some point, one of us would snap out of it, grab the clicker and redirect our addict hive mind to something lighter. Usually we landed on funny video compilations like people running into things or getting hit in the nuts, cats slap fighting each other or a variety of people doing “the Dougie”, and in those moments the mood would shift to a place where we could have almost passed for just a regular group of people. Those times when we were all in that TV room laughing together were some of the most therapeutic moments we had there. They gave us hope that sober happiness was possible, and that was huge. In fact, those nights were so good that I would often stay up way past the point where I could have fallen asleep, just to prolong the healing spell of that group dynamic.
When the time came to go home at the end of my month, I made yet another difficult but necessary decision to continue treatment by stepping down to PHP. It was almost physically painful to make the choice to stay; all along I’d been promising myself if I just got through the 28 days, I could allow myself to use again. But once again by the end of that period I’d come to the undeniable realization that if I were to go home and regress, it would feel like a colossal failure in a way that getting high would never be able to fix.
I struggled a lot during this phase. I had to find a way to accept that I’d moved beyond that singular coping mechanism I’d been using for so long, but I didn’t yet have anything solid to take its place. I felt completely lost spiritually; neither staying put nor going back out seemed particularly attractive, so what did that leave me with? I still wasn’t totally sure I even wanted to commit to staying clean forever, mostly because I was still having trouble believing I was capable of doing that. There was also a certain surrealness to my newfound understanding that whether I used or not was and always had been totally in my control, while at the same time still feeling like it wasn’t up to me. It was a level of internal conflict I’d never experienced before, and all I knew for sure was that I was angry and sad that I’d put myself in the spot I was in to begin with.
I spent about a week barely keeping my head together as I grappled with this, until one day one of the staff helped me think about it a different way: I’d already gone from doing the drugs being the obvious choice at all times, to feeling like I was stuck in the middle– and although a rough spot to be in, that was progress. So, wasn’t it reasonable now to assume that if I kept going, staying on the right path might eventually become the choice that was obviously, right?
This return to logical decision-making completely changed my mindset, and what that beautiful soul promised would happen did in fact eventually happen. I can’t pinpoint when exactly, but at some point I stopped being jealous of those who still got to use and began redirecting my thoughts to all the times when I was stuck in the cycle and felt jealous of those who had already escaped it. I realized I’d now become the person I’d once envied, and that was a valuable turning point.
I’ve been clean without a single hiccup since January 23rd, 2024, and the loneliness I feared I’d be plagued with in sobriety doesn’t even exist. In other words, the party is most certainly not over– I’ve just changed my definition of what party means.
