Awareness Hell...IYKYK

I’m writing this at the end of December, the time of year when the culture around me is awash in talk of resolutions for the new year, predicting what could come, how this year will be different from the last. I am 14 months sober, experiencing my second holiday season without alcohol, noticing with humility that this go of it has been surprisingly easy. I am freer than I have ever been.  

Last year at this time I was up to more than drafting a list of resolutions. I was determined to change my life.  Like real real change.  Life had felt like a free fall for years, and I couldn’t catch my breath.  An intense therapy bootcamp earlier that year showed me what my issues were, but I was stuck — caught in the same cycles of thought, action, and outcome.  A prisoner of my own conditioning, stuck in awareness hell.

Awareness hell is a special form of suffering.  It’s being caught in the messy middle of knowing you have to change, and not yet fully surrendering to what it is going to take to realistically make that change.  But thank God for awareness hell!  Without the pain of this awareness I would still be drinking.  And I would still be stuck. But because there was no way to unknow what I knew about myself and the changes I needed to make, awareness hell forced me to start telling myself the truth.  And the truth was that alcohol was keeping me stuck.  And as long as I was drinking, those changes were simply never going to happen.

So on October 29th, 2023, I made a commitment to myself to put down the substance that I didn’t think I could live without and began the process of learning to live another way. Yep, right before all the major holidays, but also my birthday, and a scheduled trip to Vegas with friends 28 days later. Terrifying.  Drinking was everything to me and I used it in every way imaginable, for decades.  As much as it was taking from me, and it was taking a lot, the fear of the life unknown without my drug of choice is what was keeping me stuck.  I get why addicts keep on choosing the thing that takes them down while loved ones look on with disbelief. Putting aside the very real physical dependency of drugs and alcohol, genuine behavior change, changing how we have come to do anything in life, is an incredible uphill climb.  And the process of change is not quick, exciting or instantly rewarding.  It’s mostly a mundane, repetition of faith, done privately without a highlight reel to show for it.  

That is the pesky little thing about change that we don’t tend to acknowledge; change isn’t meant to feel natural — not at first. It feels awkward, unfamiliar, even terrifying at times. But that is the surefire way you can be certain that you are actually changing.  You can, and will, be scared as hell, but the objective is to just keep living differently, in the unknown.  As Martha Beck aptly puts it, if you keep making small, one degree turns, before you know it, you arrive somewhere else.  And that somewhere else might just be more beautiful. You might even stumble into your dream life that way.

Change forced me to really get to know myself from the inside out. I had to learn to be still with myself, question who I was authentically, and identify what false parts I hold up as my representative to keep myself safe and belonging. I had to confront subconscious beliefs I’d carried for years, beliefs that kept me small and stuck. These toxic thoughts would trap me within the same small reality if I continued to believe them.

Over time, my reality became the reflection of my inner transformation. My external world was mirroring the internal change I had worked so hard to create. The changes I made weren’t performative, and I didn’t do it for anyone’s approval. This may be why this holiday season has felt different. I’m not gripping at sobriety using willpower, or living a pretend version of other people’s values. I visualized the best version of myself, and just kept pushing through fear, doubt, uncertainty, and pain until there was less doubt and some sprinkles of hope, and less pain and more moments of pure joy, and less fear and uncertainty and a true blossoming of expanded love and self-confidence.

Awareness hell is being confident something needs to change while fully understanding that merely hoping and wishing for things to be different will make no impact. I had to become the change I wanted to see in my life. That meant embracing the unfamiliar, taking risks, being massively uncomfortable at times, and releasing aspects of myself that were no longer serving me, even when others preferred I remain the same. Being dedicated to change in this way feels consistently unnatural at first but eventually our bodies surrender to something new and the new way of being becomes second nature over time. If you want a new life, you don’t wait and hope for it to come to you. You courageously step into it by actively and intentionally becoming someone new.