I got sober on February 17^th, 2022. That means I have 97 days of sobriety under my belt right now. The interesting thing is, over the past few weeks, my desire to get high has been strong. You would think there is a sort of linear drop-off as you quit. The first few days are hard, then the first few weeks are hard at times, but by the time you’ve been sober for three months, you have it under control.

Getting sober has never worked that way for me. Often, it is surprisingly easy in the beginning. Maybe it takes some accident to get me sober in the first place, but during the first few days, even if I don’t physically feel well, my resolve is pretty strong. It’s after a few months that it becomes tempting to romanticize the past, it becomes easy to forget all the misery associated with drugs and alcohol, it becomes plausible—for a moment—that if you’ve quit for over ninety days, then you could definitely quit again. So why not get high once? After all, being a drug addict is miserable, but life is miserable too, at times. I’m not denying that. I just know that I want a different strategy for dealing with misery than drugs and alcohol. I know that long-term, drugs and alcohol compound misery, they do not relieve it.

But I’m not going off on a tangent. I’m just saying that for me, sobriety is not magical and happy. It’s not magical and happy because I remember the war, and I remember that violence and injustice happen to people every single day, and even if they didn’t, I probably still wouldn’t be happy. And I know that if I believe in God—and I do—and if I believe in a God who has given me the gift of sobriety—and I do—I have to somehow accept that God also has values that are just twisted, at least to a human perspective. How do you sit with all this? It seems like, to be happy on earth, you have to accept a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in your relationship to God.

Now, you could say, if you are working the twelve steps, that Nature is your God. And that’s kind of what I’m saying—and it’s exactly my complaint. Nature is beautiful, but it is also brutal, hungry, destroying, and flawed. Did you know that animals can develop PTSD? You probably do, because you may have heard stories about a rescue dog who freaks out when it sees someone who looks like a previous owner. In nature, I don’t know what could be more abusive than another animal trying to eat you. If you think that nature is harmonious, and it’s people who fucked everything up, I’m sorry, but you are naïve. People are no more greedy than other animals, we just have sophisticated tools.

So where does that leave me? Well, I have to believe that God wants us to see something meaningful in this ugly ouroboros. Furthermore, that the world is ugly precisely so that the meaning will stand in relief to the ugliness. But that is hard to picture, and perhaps the face value of the world is what we should take. I don’t know. All I know is, despite what the steps say, AA does not demand that you believe in God. All AA demands is an open mind, and I’m trying to keep my mind open.

Whatever God is or is not, the difference between my sobriety this time around, and previous attempts to get sober, is that now, I think of my sobriety as a gift or a chance that God gave me. Previously, I thought of sobriety as a personal achievement. I replaced drugs and alcohol with a vain sense of my own strength. “Wow, I quit drinking three months ago. I have an iron will!” My self-worth would come from telling myself stuff like that.

And yeah, it’s fine to give yourself a pep talk now and then. But eventually the lie breaks down. I would see that I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be. My achievements—winning a road race, getting straight A’s, publishing a story—could never convince me that I was okay. And I would drink, or smoke dope, or take cough syrup. It’s the cough syrup, believe it or not, that is tempting me the most at the moment. But I’m not going to go to the store and buy a bottle. And it isn’t because I have an iron will, or because I’m better than other people. God have mercy on me, a sinner. I know I can’t stay sober on my own.

It’s amazing how much easier it becomes when I say that out loud, and when I remember that 97 days sober is not something I earned, it’s something I’ve been given. I could have died a hundred times over, either from drunk driving, or an overdose, or a gunfight, but I am not dead. I remember saying the Lord’s Prayer in Afghanistan after the first time I saw a young man die. Why him and not me? I don’t know. But my life is in God’s hands, not my hands. I accept whatever happens next.