Fear and Loathing in Rural Vermont

Contemplating sobriety and hope

Who decides when you are sober? Well, everyone. There is no 100% applicable baseline for addiction. It looks different on everyone. But by the time I was seventeen, I had a White Girl Pill Problem down pat. I am just over three years sober; I still have the occasional drink or joint, so I’m not passing any piss tests, but I haven’t picked up a pill off the floor of the Eras Tour, or any event like it, in three years. These days, sobriety has its own buzz. A low electrical buzz that never shuts off, a motel ice machine grinding through the night down a locked hall in my skull. No one hands you a medal for not taking a pill in three years. I get out of bed in the morning and scrub my brain raw to a sobriety that is administrative and full of paperwork. The administration gives me the control that pills used to; I can dictate my days by task and not dosage. I needed the experience of life; I wanted to arrive at my destination in perfect shape after sleeping through the journey. 

The beauty of the pills — God help me — was the cleanliness. No smoke to fog up my dorm room, no smell to linger through Pre-Calculus or Spanish, no sneaking out required. Just a quick and quiet adjustment, a slight lens tilt, and everything was literally so much better. Everything was not particularly good or meaningful, but it was manageable. It was better, and that’s a powerful promise when your baseline is a pain in your back that makes your legs go numb. 

I used to play a game with velocity. I wanted to find a faster, smoother, and more efficient way to completely outrun my mind. You can take a pill that makes you faster. One that makes you feel like a worm, digging through April dirt, carving a reality for yourself below the noise. One that makes you wake up in dark forests. There are pills to make your dreams leak out like sap without you noticing. You can rattle an alternate reality around in your pocket like lose change. I was already on antidepressants and birth control, so some of the pills in my pocket were sanctioned. You can trick yourself into thinking anything is good for you as long as you don’t remember what it feels like the next day. 

Getting high became a grim procedure in which I took inventory and made calculations; once you begin remembering but not recollecting what you did when you were high, that’s when you’ve hit the jackpot. Your life will narrow down to a series of small, precise decisions that all point in the same direction, like iron filings around a magnet. There’s no operatic downfall or grand collapse, just a gradual shrinking. Friends become logistics, conversations become obstacles, and time becomes something measured in milligrams rather than minutes. The worst part comes when you get good. I could talk, eat, run, and read while high. I was holding myself hostage! Gun to my head, feet on the blackbox stage, sweating through the 1989 World Tour jumper, a real hostage situation where the sirens had to flash, and the secret agents had to come, but still I had no epiphany. The truth is ugly and unsatisfying, something you loathe to read about when you’re in search of a quick resolution. Sometimes you get to the beach, and the tide is so far in that you can’t put down your towel.

I got sober because I ran out of room. I counted wrong, couldn’t memorise my lines, and turned in essays that were never assigned. Frankly, the margins collapsed. My sleep got strange. My body began sending warning signs I could not ignore. 

Withdrawal is not enlightening; anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or selling something. It’s itchy, petty, and humiliating. I kept an extra shirt in my backpack because I had to go to class, and knew that I would sweat through my shirt. Your body throws a tantrum, your mind and soul join in — revolting against the breaking of a contract that I signed as a minor. It’s sweat, shaking, and in an acid-deep misery that feels personal. You’re always awake, you’re always asleep. The moderation of addiction has fallen away, and you’re left in a RedBull ad without the wings. There’s no lesson, no hidden wisdom. If you want to get sober, you just have to put on your walking shoes. 

Most people talk about ‘getting clean’ as if it is a moral upgrade, rather than a recalibration of your values, and relearning how to literally put one foot in front of the other. Sobriety is returning to a baseline you avoided for a reason. That baseline is unbearably boring. The pain in remembrance or the chaos of consequence did not curtail my efforts at sobriety the way that boredom did. 

Early sobriety is a room with fluorescent lighting and no exits, perpetually set to be whatever temperature would make you most uncomfortable. Everything is clear, defined, and disorganised. My thoughts no longer echoed across prairies; rather, they sat cold in front of my face: Tony Soprano’s talking fish. 

To get around this horror, to get out of the trenches, I built routines. The same Moka Pot coffee, same walk, same friends, same circuits around the day; anything to build a wall to stand between me and the logic that had kept me afloat for so many years. That logic is persuasive. It’s chemical, emotional, dangerous, and euphoric. I know one possible answer to my problems is Pandora’s Pill Bottle — and oh boy, I want to swallow them all just to get to hope, who lingers, small and dusty, at the bottom of my LePliage. I love getting high, but the pills were not about that; they offered me relief — efficient, optimised relief. The need for relief does not disappear when the chemical cravings do. Three years in, it’s still around. That’s something you must make peace with. 

By the second year of sobriety, I stopped thinking of myself as being ‘in recovery.’ I stopped taking pills without telling my friends, therapist, or parents that I had even started them. It was me, my boyfriend, and our pills against the world, and now it must just be me. When I thought of myself as ‘in recovery,’ I felt I was anxiously waiting for something to arrive, some final state where the cravings vanish and the narrative resolves itself into a neat little arc. 

Of course, this never came — I got used to waking up without calculation, without the constant subtext of acquisition and maintenance. I started making plans that extended beyond the next 24 hours. Sobriety came with a clarity that was cold and anxious; one must realise that you are not, and never were, special. I was not uniquely burdened; I was fifteen and chemically susceptible. A zoo animal, like any other, who dug their way out. 

Three years is an unspectacular amount of time. I have no glowing aura of redemption except second-puberty acne, and I certainly have not unlocked a hidden path to enlightenment. I exist in stability, the kind that would have bored me senseless before. I wake up, I drink coffee, I write my to-do lists. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s dull. Occasionally, it’s awful. I feel all of it, every seam in my brain, all the time. That’s my miracle. 

I was not able to recognise the miracle for a long time: the ability to endure without editing, to let something play out in real time, with awkward pauses, boring jokes, bad blowouts, and uneven pacing. 

Some people like to check for cracks in the surface: Do I miss it? Of course I do. Not the reality that I barely remember, but the promise of salvation.

Altogether, three years sober does not mean I have solved anything. The underlying concerns are still there, pacing around, waiting for my attention. What do I do with my mind? Pills answered this by erasing it. Sobriety is handing back my mind, upsettingly intact, with a crisp Good Luck. Some days this feels like a fair trade, other days a back-alley deal. But it’s the only deal on the table now, and I can’t afford to void it. 

I’m building a life that does not revolve around escape. It’s a functional, if not impressive, life. My life will have the felicity to hold me together and let me breathe. My life will — I regain my free will. And under it all, no matter what, there’s still a low hum. The motel ice machine. I walk past it every day. So far, I've kept walking. The walk is nice; a bit repetitive, quite long, but surprisingly not lonely. I walk companioned on the liminal track; I have known the divine and chosen the mundane. You get one awesome shot to experience. To know fortune, troubles, delight, music, desire, fear, beauty, revenge, love, and (of course) truth is the only experience worth having, and we only get one. I find myself compelled to write it down — in active addiction, I wrote pages of words I did not remember and found no truth nor nature — I must memorialise my friends and their laughter, the lapping sea, a running dog, eyes I love, all twelve months of the year, the worst parts of it all, colours, mists that hang over bay and eye! I realised that the ‘goal’ of my life must be to experience it; when the goal is to experience, you cannot miss your shot. 

Illustration by Ramona Kirkham