Don't Drink, Go to Meetings

“Don’t drink, go to meetings.”

That is one of the golden rules of the recovery program I found sobriety in.

Don’t drink, no matter what, is another.

For eight blissful months I followed those guidelines religiously. Accruing the longest period of continuous sobriety I’d achieved since I first admitted to my alcoholism.

Then, COVID-19 hit and the world shifted on its axis.

In March 2020, as COVID began to change daily life in the United States, parts of the routine that kept me sober started to shift.

My bi-weekly therapy appointments became telehealth. My office building emptied out. My gym closed. My company began offering the choice of reduced hours or furlough and I found myself spending my days at home with nothing but empty time in front of me.

And then, the doors to my 12-steps meetings closed. Some were replaced with Zoom meetings and some were just shuttered until some undetermined date.

A piece by AJ Daulerio aptly described the feelings I was having at the time. I came across it on St. Patrick’s Day, in-between memories of the years I’d spent the holiday boasting about being half-Irish and drinking to an oblivion I was sure would make my ancestors proud. Devouring Daulerio’s words in minutes, I breathed a sigh of relief, assured that what I was feeling was normal.

Describing the unique challenges alcoholics were facing in this trying time, Daulerio wrote that he was “navigating through a truly unique kind of emptiness and anxiety now that all of my weekly meetings are canceled.”

“Make no mistake,” Daulerio predicted, “after this is over, many people will have relapsed and lives will be ruined.”

One week later, I sat with a drink in my hand, questioning how I’d become one of them.

It’s commonly said that alcoholics “hit bottom.” In most support programs, you’re told that the bottom is just when you stop digging. You’re also warned that your addiction picks right back up where you left it. Mine resumed with my usual tolerance, and before I knew what was happening, I was storing a 1.75 ML bottle of vodka in a throw pillow to hide it from my mother.

I cannot tell you how hard it is to come back from a relapse. Relapsing is a form of demoralization unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. You hate yourself for failing while simultaneously wanting more of the substance you hate yourself for imbibing. And then you hate yourself for wanting more. Every voice in your head screams at you for being weak, while every bone in your body wants another drink.

In most recovery programs, this feeling is described the “phenomenon of craving.” As Dynamic Transformations, a rehabilitation center in California aptly describes it, a craving is a “nagging feeling of want.”

“It takes over your thoughts and becomes the focus of your world.”

That is not an understatement.

Part of the stigma associated with addiction comes from the idea that it is some sort of moral failure or mental weakness. It assumes that the alcoholic or addict should just be able to get over their desire for their substance of choice, ignoring the very real neurological factors that contribute to the disease of addiction.

As the Hazelden Betty Ford Institute explains, this flawed assumption “unfairly minimizes the challenge of overcoming chemical dependence.”

“Advances in neuroscience and imaging technology have rapidly evolved our understanding of addiction and demonstrated a great deal of support for what is often referred to as the brain disease model of addiction.”

The disease model. The first time I heard of it was in an outpatient treatment program. I still remember the relief I felt as I saw the clinician write it out on the white board. Finally, someone put words to what I was feeling, the downward spiral that I had been trapped in for so many years.

You set off the craving for your addiction and it becomes this vicious cycle that you can’t escape until you stop drinking, all while your body is screaming for a drink. Every time you cave to the voices yelling in your head, you start at the beginning of the cycle all over again. It’s unbelievably hard to break out.

For me, a relapsing is like falling into a black hole. You just keep falling deeper and deeper.

Near the end of self-inflicted torture that was my relapse, I’d find myself in the care of an aunt searching for a detox and I denying needing one. She’d locked away her alcohol but had a penchant for baking. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, I downed her entire reserve of almond extract.

I had hit a new bottom. My life was in ruins.

Still, even after the almond extract incident, it took me months to admit that I was falling and unable to catch myself. I spent over six months in my relapse doom spiral before I finally agreed to go back to rehab.

On September 25th, I checked into my fifth inpatient treatment for alcoholism in three years. There, I met dozens of other patients who’d met the same fate as I.

Since the start of the pandemic, Recovery Centers for America, a nationwide network of substance abuse treatment facilities has reported “spikes in admissions including relapses due to drug and alcohol use for those once in recovery.”

“I honestly think COVID caused my relapse,” another patient told me one night as we watched coverage of the pandemic on the news.

It was a sentiment I’d hear over and over again in our support groups. Work moved online, meetings closed down and days got very, very long. Suddenly, a drink didn’t seem like such a bad idea and 5:00 p.m. kept creeping up earlier and earlier.

In the first month of stay-at-home orders back in March of 2020, Nielsen reported a 54% increase in national sales of alcohol.

Over 40 states have reported an increase in opioid-related deaths as well as heightened concern for those with a mental illness or substance abuse disorder, according to an October report by the American Medical Association.

Even more devastating is these numbers fail to account for all those continuing to suffer. Those who are still out on benders, thinking their drinking is under control, or who haven’t had some calamitous circumstance occur to force them to seek help. There are those too who have reached desperation, but are unable to find help, as treatment centers have been forced to halve the capacity of their facilities to ensure the safe care of patients, even while the number of people needing help further eclipses the available opportunities for care.

With the CDC's recent announcement that vaccinated individuals may go without a mask, it feels we may finally putting this pandemic behind us. But for those who relapsed and haven’t made it back yet, the nightmares of the pandemic are far from over. For some, they will never end.

I am one of the lucky ones, who chanced into a coveted bed at a phenomenal treatment center which was working tirelessly to provide the highest level of care, despite operating at 50% capacity.

There I rebuilt my foundation stronger, tackling unresolved mental health challenges that were threatening my sobriety way before COVID. I learned that my relapse went far beyond the Zoom meetings and isolation of the pandemic, but that yes, those factors certainly didn’t help. I learned that don’t drink, no matter what, really means no matter what. Even a global pandemic.

After a 38-day stay I was discharged from treatment far better to handle the tumultuous world that waited for me outside the rehab walls. Today, I celebrate eight months of continuous sobriety, returning to the milestone which matches the longest amount of sober time I’ve had since I began this journey.

These days, I’m still doing Zoom meetings, finally having embraced them for the opportunities they provide, opposed to obsessing over the ways they differ from the in-person ones I first got sober in.

With the world returning to normal, I have also enjoyed the re-opening of a select few in-person support groups. I’ve developed a new found appreciation for these gatherings, refusing to take for granted the human contact I yearned for so dearly when the world shut down. I walk into those rooms with a deeper gratitude than I held before the pandemic, remembering not only how precarious their place in the world is, but that also, for every alcoholic like me walking in, there’s someone else who will never make it back.