On 1000 Days of Sobriety, or Sinking, Swimming, Neither.

by joeparslow

Today marks 1000 days of sobriety. After the first year, the milestones get less frequent, so I’ve added a few more in, like today, and “2 Years, 8 Months, 3 Weeks, 5 Days, 11 Hours, 33 Minutes and 19 Seconds Sober” just does have the same ring to it. Marking these milestones has been important for me to check in with myself and, admittedly, to show off. I’m not above needing approval; who is?

I’ve always found that writing has helped me to process. I’ve found the last week or so to be a little challenging not because I’ve wanted to have a drink (I’m not sure when I last had a deep craving for alcohol, but it was a while ago) but because I think I expected a milestone like this to be momentous and it feels mundane. On reflection, this is what I wrote just over 8 months ago in my post about being 2 years sober where I listed all the small ways sobriety feels for me in ways that weren’t big and bold but quotidian and small. It is, perhaps, both depressing and enabling to look back at past writing and realising you’ve already said the thing you want to say, and I’m again facing a desire to write without really knowing what I want to say. So here it goes again (and get ready to read another one of these on 22^nd August 2023 when I mark 3 years of sobriety).

Water seems to be on my mind a lot lately, so I’ll start there. I started swimming in my local Lido over the last week and, as I am consistently overtaken by women in their 70s, I’ve been trying to allow my brain to wander where it needs to go, half hoping it will finish a current chapter I’m writing, and half hoping it will think of something profound to say in this post. It doesn’t; instead, I keep staying in my body, aware of my movements through the water and my breath. Breath is something I come back to again and again in my writing about drag and queer community, where being able to take a deep breath is vital for hope and imagination, follow Sara Ahmed’s idea in The Promise of Happiness. The last few weeks as I’ve been approaching this milestone, and as I’ve had the luxury of a sabbatical to finish a book, have been about having more space, a more capacious moment, to think and breathe. I have been slow, slowed down, and in slowing I have spread out and, however briefly, settled like water filling a container as the reverberations fades and the bubbles clear. In the smooth surfaces of my still waters, reflections of pasts, presents and futures form, dispersed by the slightest disturbance.

I think about this feeling of slowness and spaciousness as a stretching out in space and time, and turn to theory to help me make sense of it. For Elizabeth Freeman, the desire to belong has been beautiful reconfigured as the desire to “be-long” or ‘to long to be bigger not only spatially, but also temporally, to “hold out” a hand across time and touch the dead or those not born yet, to offer oneself beyond one’s own time’ (2007: 199). Neatly enough (perhaps too neatly), Freeman turns to drag performance and lip sync as an example of this, a live body summoning or willing a past body into the present through their performance. For me, these ideas stick (and I follow what sticks to me and what I stick to – thanks to Steve Farrier articulating for these sticky commitments), as I try to understand how sobriety and queerness are connected for me but also how in slowing down I have started to feel more connected to my body, to those around me and, perhaps in a clichéd way, to a deepening desire to be closer to nature and the natural (facilitated in part through losing our wonderful dog, Blake, and turning to Donna Haraway’s writing to think (through) this). In trying to embrace this slowness, I’m trying to allow myself to spread out, to accept (and not just understand) that I am in-common, in-conversation, in-process, in-love, in-life, in-between, in-excess, in-desire. Accepting this means I don’t have the answers and I don’t need to; I don’t have to solve myself and I cannot; and I don’t have to do it alone and I should not.

So, in dialogue with myself 8 months ago, as I reach out and touch that them then and that them now and that them in a few months’ time when I reach 3 years of sobriety, I want to note what now feels like for me, what 1000 days feels like, with the hope that here these feelings will feel-with my past self and future self and also feel-with you. It feels like 7am (well… 7:15am) swims and not feeling guilty for having a day off swimming. It feels like an increasing comfort with tonic water and the occasional ginger beer (and still not learning that I can’t have 2 Coca Cola’s without having an awful night’s sleep). It feels like waves and still water. It feels like a growing obsession with birds, and reverberating memories of my Dad knowing all the birdcalls near our house by memory. It feels sad sometimes; not a deep ache but a friendly sadness, a recognition that it’s never going to be what it was (but it maybe it never was any way). It feels like another attempt to find a good non-alcoholic wine, and stubborn refusal to accept that no one will ever make one good enough (because I probably miss the alcohol, not the taste of wine, don’t I?). It feels like resisting the notions that I’m done. It feels like slowing down at dinner, forgetting to slow down at dinner, wolfing it down and trying to stop eating at my desk. It feels like stopping before I get too full (of food, of air, of feelings, of life). It feels like monotony and constant changes, and being in a web so tangled it might just be a dot on the page. It feels like sucking in deep gasps of air as I break the surface, learning when to keep swimming, when to tread water and when to sink. It feels like failing metaphors and similes. It feels like learning that sometimes neither sinking nor swimming are good enough and deciding to get out of the pool; it feels like giving up and carrying on, like trying hard and not having to try at all; like binaries and beyond (where beyond isn’t a binary of binary but truly another way of doing); like bright colours and brighter mornings and brighter nights; like waistlines and wasting and chipping my nail polish on the first day of painting them; like leopard print shirts and love.

Whilst I would have ended this there, I do want to just leave a generic, but important thing: if you ever want to talk about sober things, booze things or hope things (or any things) you can always contact me either on twitter or insta (@joeparslow) or on email (joewhparslow@gmail.com).