Author: Jackie Mantey
It’s my three-year soberversary!
Three years! Holy no-more-shitfaced!
I think of the exact date of my sobriety as a feral-animal-turned-beloved-pet’s birthday. I don’t know it for sure. I had tried to quit so many times before April 15, 2016, and I was tired of “remembering dates” only to be alarmed and disappointed in myself when I found myself hungover yet again. In fact, I figured out about a year ago that my real soberversary date is perhaps a few days before today… BUT I’ve got it in my brain as April 15, so April 15 it shall be.
That means, I haven’t been drunk since a little over three years ago. < !!!! pew pew pew all the emojis !!!!>
I have had one glass of alcohol since then. A glass of champagne at my bachelorette party. As soon as I sipped it, I felt gold in my veins. That’s what it felt like—gold. Relief. Escape. Precious.
More-more-more came calling with just one drink.
By the time of my bachelorette party, I had at least a year and a half of sobriety under my belt, but it didn’t matter. That voice I hadn’t heard in so long shot its shitty little self into my ear and said, “OMG ORDER EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW. A WHOLE BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE, AND AT LEAST TWO BLOODY MARYS. AND SHOTS FOR EVERYONE! OMG WE’RE fUCk*$g DOING THIS!!!”
But, no, we were not doing this. It took a lot of effort—too much effort, I thought, considering I hadn’t drank in so long—to push that voice back in the cage where it belonged. But I did. I drank sparkling grape juice the rest of the weekend. And my amazing mother-in-law had some waiting for Justin and I in the hotel after our wedding.
I’m so happy for that glass of champagne, which the well-meaning waiter had brought me as a surprise when he heard what our group was celebrating. Getting and staying sober was really hard for me, and it was especially difficult my first year, but I had reaped enough rewards of sobriety to know that voice was no good. Being sober for a while had made me aware of that voice so I could shut it up early. Being sober for a while had helped me be in my body in a new way, a way that enabled me to recognize that fool’s-gold feeling for what it was as soon as it hit me.
I’m so grateful today. I’m grateful for the people who loved me unconditionally through some hard times. I’m grateful to the people who find the courage every day to face their addiction problems, who have the courage to try to be their better selves and who fight for it day after day after day. I’m so grateful to the people who recover out loud, too, like the writers and recovering alcoholics who helped me understand what I was going through and helped me feel less alone.
Most of all, today I’m so… like… earth-shatteringly grateful to that sad, disappointed, disgusted, rock-bottomed-out self who decided around three years ago that enough was enough—and that I was enough without booze. Thank you thank you thank you.
That glass of champagne and how instantaneously my old destructive-drinking self presented itself was the final sign I needed to accept that I had to be done drinking forever. There was no controlling it. No nice little bachelorette brunch with one martini for me. I couldn’t drink ever again if I wanted to be happy.
A look back at Year Three
And happy I am! Year Three was a good one.
Some highlights:
- I had my first solo art show, featuring work that I count as integral to my early sobriety. Listen to my interview about why on The Unruffled Podcast.
- I launched a sober book club podcast with my dear friend Shelley. Obviously, there’s so much power in sharing our individual journeys, but it’s important we never feel pressure to share until we are ready. My first year of sobriety was spent being very, very quiet about it. I didn’t want to talk about my new sobriety for fear of scaring it away. I also wasn’t sure about ~anything~, least of all if sobriety would stick… Take your time. When you’re ready, the sober community has open arms, ears, and hearts.
- I started going to therapy regularly. Regularly being the key word here. I was usually a three-visits-and-done kind of client, thinking “OK, problem solved!” Or (more often) “Why am I paying someone to just listen to me talk?” All things considered, I probably need regular therapy less than ever today. Ha! But that’s the point, I think. I’m healthy enough now to ask for help. Even minimal help. Going to therapy now is less about solving an urgent problem and more about reminding myself that it’s important to show up for my emotional self in some kind of physical capacity on a consistent basis. It helps me trust myself.
Year Three definitely brought some brought new challenges, too. This year, the shock of staying sober wore off. A layer of the onion had peeled away. The raw one. And now I was left looking at a whole new me. I had changed and had to get used to it.
When you get sober (from whatever you’re addicted to… doesn’t have to be booze) and want to enjoy being sober, you’re required to give up some additional things. You’re not ready for it. You think, “Well, I quit the number-one-problem thing. Problem solved!”
Alas, recovery is a lifelong journey. There are 12 stupid freaking steps for a reason. You don’t just admit you have a problem and, bam, all is well. It takes work. And constant self-vigilance and discipline — two seemingly scary words that are, I’ve found, the root of all peace.
This year I was able to recognize ways in which the behavioral patterns tied to my alcohol abuse were still showing up in my life. The patterns were just channeled through other outlets, less destructive outlets certainly, but unhealthy ones nonetheless.
They were hard to pinpoint initially. I’m being vague for a reason… it’s still sorta hard for me to explain. The best example I can give is work. Workaholism is real and I got it, y’all. I can sometimes use work and overcommitting myself for the same reasons I used alcohol. As a means of escape, to outrun perfectionism and fear and guilt and shame and imposter syndrome and and and…
Plans for Year Four
I don’t think my intense work ethic is bad. Not at all. It’s one of the best things about me. I am loyal AF to something I say I will do and earn everything I have. That means a lot to me and always will.
I just want to work on working better. Saying no to good opportunities and only taking great ones, for example. Making space for more personal goals and being clear on what those are. Really working on being a better partner and friend and a person who lives every day aligned to her values. Etc.
In my vision, my highest self (lookin’ sexay in a white toga because I guess that’s how my mind works?) presented me with… a jug. A freakin’ jug! I was like, ugh, my highest self is one cheap bitch. What is this supposed to mean? I thought maybe water. Like I was thirsty at the moment (highest selves being quite practical), but in hindsight, I think it represents a couple important things: 1) taking a time-out to re-energize and 2) connecting with others over a new drink (ie. I don’t need to hide anymore… I can hang out with people sober and just drink water).
After this meditation, I also kept seeing jugs in artworks everywhere! Particularly in still life paintings, where the message is obvious — be still for bit, Mantey. But also in paintings where the jug was meant to represent community (a jug being something you have on the table when you have people over). I like that one and I think it’s important. I think Year Four will mean coming outside of myself more, now that I’m ready, and connecting with other people in better, more honest ways than ever before.
I have three ideas for how to achieve this all in Year Four. Recovering workaholics still need a plan:
- Hustle with intention. I want to focus on the writing I’ve been planning for a while now but have been pushing to the back burner out of fear. Fear of it not being good enough, and also fear of not taking any paying job that’s offered me (even if I have five others lined up… oy). I want to focus on saying no to things, and I don’t just mean work that is unrelated to my creative writing. I mean saying no to, for example, taking a class that’s wrong for me or taking the time to read a book about craft just because I’m afraid to actually do the work.
- Take the emotion out of most decision making. Blah. How many decisions do we make or how many worries do we focus on simply because we are afraid or trying to distract ourselves from some deeper truth? I want to be strategic and responsive, instead of reactive and unreasonable about my time and energy and interests. I want to look at choices as only that: Choices with pros and cons (not right or wrong, black or white, life-changing or life-threatening). Choices that I consider and make a logical decision about based on truth, not feeling. Contingency relationships with an if/ then approach.
- Rest. Unapologetically. If I need time, I’m going to not only ask myself for it, but give it. I’m the one who puts myself in these overwhelming situations, for reasons that run the same deep paths that my excessive drinking did. I’ve learned a lot about boundaries the last three years, and I think this year will be about learning to put boundaries on my restlessness, which presents itself as ambition but is actually insecurity and a short-term escapism disguised as a “good idea.” Acting lovingly toward myself and my people is the better idea. Always.
#SundaySentence: Misdirected instinct
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
(Except I totally give context and commentary.)
“Nearly every serious emotional problem can be seen as a case of misdirected instinct.”
Some food for thought from AA’s “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,” Step four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
I used to think step four was the scariest! Now I welcome it. You can’t improve anything if you only look at what’s working. This quote reminds me that I’m not alone in any problem (there are 7.6 billion other humans out there with the same instincts), and it reminds me that any internal challenge is surmountable.
Same goes for you, my friend. If you were fearless — if you weren’t worried about how looking at your weaknesses would make you feel — what could you change for the better?
Art you should know: Genieve Figgis’ haunting paintings
The past few months I’ve been grooving to a morning routine that’s 100% helped me get 85% focused for each day. It involves some variation of tea (I’m that person now… tea drinkers are to blogging about being a tea drinker as marathon runners are to 26.2 bumper stickers), journaling, reading, and watching a meditation or an affirmation video. I know, affirmations seem so corny, but I swear to 20-something granola Jesus, they have helped me out of many a morning funk.
While I try to watch the meditation or affirmation videos ~mindfully~, I sometimes—almost all the time—end up getting distracted and, instead, mindlessly scroll through Pinterest (I figure my subconscious is picking up on whatever’s audibly streaming at me in the moment, so all is not lost). Pinterest is one of the few (two) social media platforms that don’t make my blood pressure rise (the other being Instagram). I end up pinning artwork the most. It’s such a visual platform and has helped me discover many artists whose work I really enjoy or feel inspired by. Or, the best, feel rapturously in awe of.
Genieve Figgis was one such morning scroll find.
The Ireland-born and -based painter creates murky, dramatic scenes that are at once recognizable but elusive. They continuously capture my attention and then do something with said attention that’s increasingly impossible in an oversaturated visual culture—hold it.
“Not doing what was told would be my future, avoiding that, was just so fantastic”
Painter Genieve Figgis
Her work makes me feel like I’ve been in it before. Not just seen it; known it intimately. Like when you see, for a split second, a face on the street and you do a double-take because it kind of looks like a kid you used to know in high school. And that kid definitely died three years ago.
The familiarity I feel toward her acrylic paintings is partly easy to explain: We’ve all seen some crisper version of it, as she often uses 18th century paintings of aristocratic life as her starting point. But her work also feels familiar because of its ability to evoke the kind of primal dread that is exciting and addictive. The kind of dread you can’t turn away from. The kind of dread where you don’t understand you’ve sauntered into something deadly until the teeth around you have already closed… you were just stunned by the beauty and sipping your Earl grey and then BOOM, you’re falling down the throat of the beast.
The dramatic danger, the warning, her paintings seem to emanate is made fully clear after you spend more than a scroll-click-Pin with it. In fact, the more I look at her paintings, the more they seem to melt before my very eyes. I find that darkly exciting too.
“If you’re really enjoying something you don’t need to see the end of the road, the finishing line. That’s not always going to be the ultimate triumph, you know? If you’re not enjoying the journey, the end result will be no good.”
Painter Genieve Figgis
Suggested reading:
- A Twitter Artist Makes Fun of Rich People The Cut
- Genieve Figgis: Why I Paint Phaidon
- Artist page Almine Rech gallery
- From Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains, Genieve Figgis Paints Dark Narratives of Previous Worlds Artsy
- Good Morning, Midnight New York Times
Zero Proof: Lit
In the latest episode of Zero Proof Book Club, Shelley and I discuss Mary Karr’s third memoir, “Lit,” detailing her heavy drinking days and eventual recovery and conversion to Catholicism. We talk about the art of writing memoir, the unique shame of drinking as a mother, spirituality, and lots more.
Listen to the new episode here, at ZeroProofBookClub.com, and follow us on Instagram at @zeroproofbookclub.
This book represents a positive turning point for my eventual sobriety, feeling a familiarity with Karr’s alcoholic anger and a longing for her hard-won sober peace. But Shelley, who read it a couple years after she quit drinking, had a different experience with the book.
Karr is a professional writer and a dedicated AA-er (in “Lit” she calls it “the therapy group for people trying to quit”), so you know she’s all about her coffee. Our newest podcast episode, in which we discuss Karr’s gorgeous, painful memoir about her alcoholism and recovery, pairs well with this iced coffee drink. For this upgrade on black coffee in a styrofoam cup, we poured cold brew coffee over ice and stirred in a little maple syrup and oat milk (pick your favorite creamer or non-dairy milk).
About “Lit: A Memoir”
What to expect: A groundbreaking entry in the quit lit canon, served with a side of southern sass and literary acuity
From the book jacket: “‘The Liars’ Club’ brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood. “Cherry,” her account of her adolescence, ‘continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal’ (Entertainment Weekly).
Now, ‘Li’t follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness—and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can’t outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.
‘Lit’ is about getting drunk and getting sober, becoming a mother by letting go of a mother, learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up—as only Mary Karr can tell it.”
— Lit: A Memoir
#SundaySentence: Maud
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
(Except I totally give context and commentary.)
“My heart would hear her and beat/ Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat/ Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet/ And blossom in purple and red.”
From ever-the-romantic Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” as read in Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace.”
My list of books to read this month
Before She Knew Him by Peter Swanson
I’m spending some time OOO later this month and I needed a good vacay read. This recently published book, my March Book of the Month Club pick, should do the trick. It’s the story of an artist who is increasingly convinced her next door neighbor is the culprit of an unsolved murder. That, or she’s having another psychotic episode. Can she stop him—or herself—before someone else gets hurt? I’ll find out in Orlando. 😉
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
A buddy of mine wanted to read this 1996 Atwood classic, so I hopped on board and am heading back to 1843 to meet Grace Marks, a young woman jailed for murdering her housekeeper but whose guilt is being questioned by someone who could save her from a life in prison. I’m not too far in, but it’s already got that Atwood-spook. The scenes of Grace’s childhood in Ireland, during which she helps parent the nine-kids-deep family, has me saying a Handsmaid-y Praise Be for birth control.
Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann
I really enjoyed reading Fleischmann’s earlier work “Syzygy, Beauty,” and was excited to receive an advanced copy of their forthcoming narrative essay, “Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through,” to write about for a literary publication. Here’s the description: “How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s artworks—piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles—as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.”
Published: Photography in Honey & Lime Lit
I’m excited to announce that two of my photographs were selected for publication in issue two of Honey & Lime Lit magazine, entitled “dancing into oblivion.” I love this publication’s dreamy visual aesthetic and am honored to be included (they had over 300 submissions for this issue!).
Check out both of my photographs here, and then read through the issue here. I’ll let you decide which of my images caught my eye because standing in it made feel like Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks. A girl can, ahem, dream.
#SundaySentence: Finding beauty in being alive
For David Abrams’ Sunday Sentence project, readers share the best sentence they’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
(Except I totally give context and commentary.)
“And really, she reminds me, isn’t some information about being alive beautiful enough? That we dry forks and touch hair and throw away a sock?“
From T Fleischmann’s forthcoming autobiographical narrative “Time Is The Thing The Body Moves Through,” due out in June from Coffee House Press. Preorder it here.
Seven things I’m loving this month
“Killing Eve”
Thanks to a beloved cousin’s wedding and some previously planned plane-hopping home to Ohio, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling this month. I needed a new TV show to binge while I was airport bound, and “Killing Eve” did not disappoint.
The BBC America series is about Eve, an M15 security guard turned international spy (played by the incomparable Sandra Oh), who is on one twisted (and surprisingly funny) hunt for a psychopathic murderer named Villanelle (played by the also awesome Jodie Comer).
Seeing some ladies lead the psycho game trope is really fun. And def bloody. If you didn’t love Sandra Oh already (who even are you?), you will after watching this show.
“The Philosophy of…” on YouTube
re: Psychopaths, the Wisecrack channel on YouTube does some excellently down-the-rabbit-hole worthy videos on The Philosophy Of our favorite cultural characters, movies, and TV shows.
One pot vegetarian meals
In my effort to be a better, environmentally friendly human (ie. not a psychopath), I’ve been trying to eat more plants. I’ve found vegetarian recipe how-to videos on YouTube to be more helpful to me than the static veggie food porn I find on Pinterest (though I like those too).
The Good Ancestor podcast
Particularly, this brand new episode with writer Glennon Doyle. You can and should listen to all of author and speaker Layla Saad’s episodes here. My Zero Proof Book Club co-host, Shelley, recommended this episode to me (Glennon’s big in the sober movement) and tuned me into Layla’s important work about how white feminists can be better advocates for racial justice.
Seltzer Squad podcast
re: Sober movement, the Seltzer Squad podcast has been getting a lot of buzz about not getting buzzed. Each episode covers a topic that inevitably comes up in sobriety.
This body meditation
Since we’re not peeing the bed anymore, and all that.
My kitty cat
My main squeeze is now roomies with my ‘rents, thanks to my husband’s atrocious allergy to anything cat. Hanging out with Little Dude when I’m visiting home always makes my heart grow 10 sizes. ‘Till next travel, cuddle buddy.
