A Woman of Grace and Dignity

Okay, this is it, I’ve figured out what I want my first book to be.

Full disclosure: at the time of starting this book I am one year, five months, four days and exactly 19 hours sober.

I know what you’re thinking: this chick has a little over a year of sobriety and she thinks she can write a book about it?

Me too. Welcome to the voice of my imposter syndrome, or as I like to call it my "shame gremlins."

But here’s what I also know: I only have today.

My sober time, while the proudest achievement of my life, is not the only thing that defines me. Because behind that one year, five months and four days I’ve had sober, was over three years of desperately trying to achieve sobriety with varying levels of success. And behind that is an entire lifetime, which I now genuinely choose to believe was building up to me getting sober, so that I could should share this story. So that people everywhere can know, that as they say in AA “no matter how far the scale you have gone,” you can rebuild your life back even better than it was before.”

And for the record, this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to write a book about getting sober. For what it’s worth I’ve started and abandoned numerous future best-sellers along my journey. Honestly for every single good run I took at sobriety before I finally “got it,” this most recent time there’s at least five chapters worth of “the book” I started in rehab and abandoned somewhere around five months sober.

But can you guess what happened to those books?

I still have them actually. They’re scattered inside word documents and an entire shelf of journals I’ve written over the course of this journey. And what I’m finding is that as I’m healing, the pages of these future bestsellers are growing with me. I’m still learning about my life, so I’m still learning to write about it. But while I work out the great work that is my memoirs, an activity my mentor set me about earlier this week helped show me exactly what this book, my first, should be.

It has to be what was missing for all the amazing authors I’d read when I got sober.

Back when I was still drinking, at the height of my career in Washington, I started picking up books by authors like Annie Grace, Sarah Hepola, Lisa Smith and Anna David. Sober-curious, is the best way to describe me at the time.

I’d listen to Annie’s audio book and try and fail the alcohol experiment over and over and over and over again for literal years before I actually successfully got sober. Through their stories, these incredible women showed me that time and again that no matter how far down the scale they had gone, it was possible to become a woman of grace and dignity. They gave me hope and helped me feel less alone. Even long before I was willing to get sober myself.

My only problem with the quit lit favorites greats like Party Girl, Blackout and Girl Walks Out of a Bar, was that they ended.

I became obsessed with Party Girl, and through it its amazing author Anna David, because in that story she actually shares what to do *after* rehab.

Lisa Smith is a similar case, who doesn’t just take us through her drinking lifestyle, the torture that was getting sober and building a life after. Hers I devoured as a sort of how-to-manual for the professional young woman, who happens to be an alcoholic.

But as much as writers like Smith and David have built the quit-lit industry and as a result countless sober lives who needed it, they were writing their first books at a very unique moment in our country’s relationship with alcohol. It was a big enough deal that they, alcoholics, could get a book published. No publisher in the world was going to give them the time and space they needed to continue the story long after they got sober. We saw David and Smith go back to work in their memoirs, or make it through their first nights in their apartments but then the books ended, leaving this future alcoholic asking “what’s next?”

One of the more embarrassing batches of fan letters I’ve ever written (and you’re talking to a girl who in college wrote to Clay Aiken to tell him how much he’d meant to my childhood and that I hoped his Congressional bid would go well) was a batch of desperate emails I wrote this last time I got out of rehab.

FYI: You’ll hear me say “this last time,” a lot when I talk about rehab. And I want to pause here to note that’s very intentional wording I plan to use throughout my book. I pause to explain it to let you know, that I absolutely plan on my last time in rehab being my last time. But I also told everyone that every previous time before. So I’m very careful to acknowledge that here. Let’s remember the one-day-of-a-time aspect of this whole sobriety deal.

Anyway, I got out of rehab and with less than a month of sobriety under my belt, I wrote to all my favorite authors and told them how much their sobriety stories had meant to me. I told them about getting out of rehab, about wanting to write a book so badly and about my fears of how myself up to this whole sobriety thing might mean I’d never get, as I desperately wrote them “get a real job again.”

Basically, I wrote them and said. “I read and loved your book, now what do I do with my sober ass self?”

Here’s the thing about these amazing, sober pioneers like Annie Grace and Ann Dowsett Johnson.

They actually took the time to write me back.

Those emails I will treasure for an eternity, and continue to guide the life of grace and dignity that I live today. The advice held in them made this one year, five months and four days possible. It helped me build the kind of sober life I’ve always wanted. To become the Woman of Grace and Dignity who I am today.

And now it’s time to pay it forward.

To put together my experience navigating the life beyond my wildest dreams that’s come since I got sober out there into the world. My hope is that one day some girl fresh out of rehab won’t be humiliating herself in fan-girl emails to authors asking for advice on how to build a long-term sober life, because the book on it will have finally been written. My working title: A Woman of Grace and Dignity.

What do you think?