Third Time's Just Another Time

I am now on the 4th draft of a letter to my brother who recently went to rehab in Florida. I figured now is as good of time as any to procrastinate just a little longer. It’s been 29 days, 688 hours, and 13 minutes since I’ve had a drink myself. But who’s counting? Me. I’m counting.

I can only remember two attempts at long-term sobriety. And by long term, I mean more than a week. My first try was a few years ago. A handful of people I knew and some public figures (Joe Rogan, to be specific) took on the popularized “Sober October” challenge. Feeling consciously defiant yet subconsciously influenced to hop on the bandwagon, I compromised with trying it out during the November that followed. Okay, not all of November. Just the first three weeks. Thanksgiving without wine was simply a joke. I was about a week and a half in when my friend texted me that she got box seat tickets at the Hollywood Bowl to see Morrissey. It was a BYOB show. The idea of restraining myself at something like that was ten times more blasphemous than at a Thanksgiving feast.

The second “attempt” could hardly be considered an attempt at all. I was under a stint of forced self-care after being smashed by a car that left me unconscious in the middle of the road. It was a hit and run. In the weeks that followed, with the help of some truly amazing friends, I nursed myself back to health in the warm and sunny city of Palm Springs. People always say the desert has healing powers. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but recovery came pretty easy while sitting poolside under the loving care of palm trees and a blazing sun. I think I went ten days before adding a cold glass of sparkling white to perfect this already pretty perfect moment of time (minus the PTSD and brain fog).

Now, here we are. Third time’s a . . . well . . . I can’t say charm. February first is still two days away, and by true definition, that saying only works when the third try is actually successful. I never like to speak too soon. In pursuit of further procrastination (at least making it worthwhile), I just looked up the origin of this phrase. According to theidioms.com, “The phrase [three time’s a charm] is associated with ‘Holy Trinity of Christianity’ and this is to be believed that something that comes at number three always brings the fortune.” If this is true—if good fortune is around the bend—I guess it’s for the best I failed twice before, right? Whatever we have to tell ourselves.

I always thought dry January was kind of lame. Maybe not lame per se, but it always seemed too “basic” or “mainstream” for me to be a part of. I blame social media. I remember a line from the movie Into the Wild about a guy who purposely fell off the grid in the effort to ditch society, only to die by way of accidentally eating a poisonous fruit. It was based on a true story. The guy’s name was Christopher McCandless. Right before he died, he wrote, “Happiness is only real, when shared.” While this familiar phrase is a sentiment that still rings true, it seems we have took it and turned it into something entirely different. Yes, happiness is better shared, as long as we’re sharing it Instagram. I don’t know if Christopher was buried in a grave, but if he was, he’s definitely rolling in it now.

It is now day 31, hour 735, minute 23. In spite of my hard-pressed defiance, I decided to try dry January for a lot of the same reasons why so many other people try it. The obvious benefits of a booze-free diet go without saying but are worth mentioning nonetheless. Achieving mental clarity, physical purity, and just an overall cleanse of the mind, body, and soul are reasons that are overstated but valid in their own right. These are undeniably good motivations. It’s also no coincidence that the chosen month for this fad is the first one of the year. We all want to start the new year off right, and what better way than to indulge less in the sauce and more in the the rewarding benefits of cutting it out.

There is another reason I think a lot of us do it that we don’t talk about as much, and that’s to prove to ourselves (and others) we don’t “need” alcohol. At the very least, it’s a good opportunity to evaluate our relationship with it and attempt to navigate social settings, stressful situations, and sheer boredom without picking up a drink to make it all just a little bit better. As my friend so eloquently put it, it’s like raw dogging life.

There’s the soft sense of the word “need” and there’s also a real sense of it. I come from a family of certain members who at one point absolutely did need alcohol or they would die. My brother is one of those members. Over the past year, he’s been in and out of the hospital from seizures caused by his drug and alcohol abuse. These episodes come at a higher risk during periods of withdrawal. Getting him to agree to detox and spend at least a month in a wellness center was proof that pigs can fly, but making sure he actually got there was a whole new task in and of itself. In the effort to make sure he got on the plane in one piece, my mom gave him five dollars to buy a pint of whatever he needed to keep him out of the ER. There’s some real dark irony in the truth that alcohol can kill you just as easily in its absence as it can in its presence. After a lifetime of witnessing the struggles of my brother and those of my mother— also a recovering addict— I’ve been blessed with an ongoing PSA that is telling me to, as my mother puts it, “save my drink tickets.” Hers ran out. My brother’s ran out. If I took precautions now, maybe I can make mine last. Despite the obvious perks of sobriety, and even the personal motivations that hit close to home, I still couldn’t tell you one real, honest reason as to why I gave dry January a chance. I figured by the end of it, I’d have a clearer idea of what it was all for.

It’s February first, and I’m staring out the bedroom window of my family’s cottage on Lake Michigan. I’ve been living here for almost two months now. It’s been almost a year since I’ve had a job. The hotel I worked for in Downtown LA started cutting hours at the end of February. The layoffs followed in Mach. Restaurants and bars were to shut down completely on March 15, just two days before I was to turn thirty. I knew leaving my twenties behind would mean slowing down, I just didn’t think it would happen overnight. Though depressing at the time, it was such a poetic part of life that the romantic part of me can only feel gratitude for now. I know I can speak for so many others when describing COVID as a chapter that serves as a personal renaissance. Despite the many negative circumstances surrounding this part of history, a lot of us have found ourselves in a moment of opportunity to shift the gears we’ve been keeping idle. As a concierge by trade, partier by night, and writer by whatever days I felt like writing, I became pro at maintaining a perpetual and cyclical state of anxiety over the shortcomings made possible only by wasting time. To this day, the inadequacies seem to surface the most when sleep is only minutes away. But when the distractions of the devil's playground (LA) were stripped away, and when time was served on a gold platter to fulfill the creative aspirations I’d been sitting on for almost a decade, that "now or never" feeling had never been greater. I can safely say that this all-or-nothing mentality has yet to render any successful results.

The sun is shining on a thick coat of white snow. The lake is calm, though moving. This place has served as a crucial component of growing up in Michigan. After so many summers up here over the years, it feels like a totally different space now in the winter. The water level has reached a record high, causing us to lose mostly all of the beach. Last year on New Years Day, the house next to our cottage fell into the lake. The entire house literally just fell in. It looked just like Dorothy’s house in the Wizard of Oz. In hopes of preserving our place, my dad and uncles cut the deck facing the water in half and hired a company to place gigantic sandbags on what’s left of the beach to buy us some more time. They say the shrinking and growing of the beach is cyclical, and that this happens every thirty years. How’s that for some more poetic irony? While my time up here has been fulfilling, I still can’t help but feel unsatisfied with what I’ve accomplished so far creatively. Not only is it still the perfect time, I’m in the perfect environment to pump out good material. But I’ve got nothing.

Today not only marks the end of a dry month, but the beginning of indoor dining in Michigan. In an hour, we’ll be driving into town where I’ll finally send this letter to my brother. After, I’ll have an ice cold beer. As I sit here now and reflect on the last thirty-one days, I’m hitting a wall. I’d be lying if I told you how much better I feel or how much happier I am. I’d be lying if I said the third time was a charm. Yes, I was successful and I take pride in finishing out strong. But if we were to dissect the phrase on a literal level one more time, the “fortune” that is supposed to come at number three is still up for scrutiny. I hate to keep quoting online definitions—I know it gets old—but this will be the last time. The Oxford Dictionary defines fortune as “chance or luck as an external, arbitrary force affecting human affairs.” Whatever positive thing came from a month of no alcohol is anything but arbitrary. And believe me, luck has nothing to do with the happy feeling of achieving something, no matter how easy or hard.

My innate desire to romanticize everything created high expectations of some kind of profound awakening after this. I can’t say I’ve had one. But maybe that’s the point. It’s a eureka moment that feels less like a light bulb turning on and more like a soft and steady sunrise. I’ve learned through this that it wasn’t just about changing my relationship with alcohol and my dependence on it. It was about something bigger; It was about changing my relationship with time. It only dawned on me today the real reason for taking a break from booze that I completely forgot about until this very moment. It’s a reason that is making itself blatantly apparent as I try to wrap this piece up at eleven p.m., an hour before the deadline, with a hangover the size of Mount Everest (it’s February 2, by the way). My poor relationship with alcohol was never really about the wasted nights; It was always about the wasted days. I’d likely feel ten times better about this piece if I didn’t feel the way I do now.

If the big takeaway from all of this is learning how to value the sanctity of time, then it’s important to acknowledge a few things. My mom didn’t stay sober after three tries, and there’s a chance my brother won’t either. But that’s okay. It might take three times, it might take twenty. At the end of the day, the third time is just another time. Valuing time requires the acceptance of its indifference toward us. The important lesson and overall theme I hope to carry into the new year is that if I really want to make time count, I need to stop counting. Maybe thirty-one days of sobriety is just that and nothing other than something to simply feel proud about. Maybe ten months of not having a day job was a divine gift from the universe, a gift of space to create some kind of groundbreaking masterpiece. Or maybe it wasn't. I'm learning that the larger successes of our lives will happen when they happen as long as we do the work to make them happen. A lot of us hoped that 2021 was going to somehow save us from the prison of 2020, but in reality, time doesn’t care about the parameters we’ve set around it and the pressure that inevitably follows with those self-imposed boundaries. If for no other resolution than to get a little better sleep at night, as I look forward to 2021, I am no longer counting on time as some sort of tool to measure success. Instead, I'll let it do its thing. Meanwhile, I'll keep doing mine.