The Tipping Point

What made me stop drinking for good.

Well, hiii to all the new folks here who subscribed (presumably) because of the We Can Do Hard Things episodes (Part 1, Part 2) last week. I’m so happy you’re here!

Given the topics of those conversations, I decided to pull over one of the most popular pieces I’ve written over the years over here to Love Story, with a little dust off. This is a bonus newsletter this week; the regular one will still come out on Wednesday.

Reminder: I lead a sobriety support meeting every Tuesday at 8 am ET over at The Luckiest Club—one of over 55 support meetings we have each week. Learn more & join me tomorrow.

---

The Tipping Point

Over the years, I’ve been asked The Question hundreds of times. It gets asked in many different ways, but the gist is this: What was the tipping point? What was the moment that finally, once and for all, made you quit drinking for good?

I, too, went searching for this answer to this question. It’s why I read and re-read all those damn addiction memoirs, went to meetings, and clicked through 90s-era substance abuse forums in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to locate the sticky glue. The key. The secret combination lock that would finally, once and for all, make sobriety stick.

This is my answer.

For me, it’s still about today. I feel my sobriety is for keeps, but I also realize it's a daily grace. This doesn’t mean I live in fear or that it’s on my mind all the time. Mostly I’m just living my life. But it is the first thing I ask for help with each morning and the last thing I say thank you for before I go to sleep.¹ It is the diamond in the center of my chest, the thing I hold most dear, the reason I’m able to do anything else. 

This attitude—let’s call it humility—is born from a deep respect for what it is I have. And that is born from trying to stay sober and failing, despite my own volition. None of the things that pulled me through other tough spots in my life—intellect, willpower, frustration, competitiveness, repression, denial—kept me sober. (They could keep me from drinking for a while, but they could not keep me sober.) There’s a saying in the AA Big Book that alcohol is “cunning, baffling, and powerful,” and to that, I say yes, yes, and yes. Call it a disease, a condition, a bad habit, call it whatever. I came to respect it the way I respect a tidal wave or a grizzly bear. I’m not going to pretend like I can play with either of those things. I cannot fuck with alcohol, and I keep that in the front-most place in my mind.

As for the rest, trying to pin down the one thing that tipped me over is impossible; that’s like trying to figure out which brick is responsible for holding up a house. There's never just one, of course.

I could tell you about the woman in my first AA meeting, who I never saw again, who told me to push off from here.

I could tell you about listening to Earl Hightower tapes over and over in my car, on the train, and in the bathroom at work while I cried. How this unlikely old man’s voice in my ears felt like God.

I could tell you about my wild friend Jen, who called me one morning while I was driving to work hungover. She was screaming into the phone because that’s how Jen talks, like ten cups of coffee, and she told me—pleaded with me—to just hold on because one day the lights will turn on and it will all make sense Laura.

I could tell you about the man who made me feel out of control and wild with lust and desperation and how one warm Sunday afternoon in September, he sat next to me on a curb in a park in Boston and told me as he looked straight ahead, not at me, that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t be with me if I was drinking, didn’t trust me, and how I watched his mouth as he said the words and I wanted to touch his arm, the pale skin below the edge of his t-shirt, and how I knew I couldn’t, that I shouldn’t, and that I would never be able to access the things I really wanted if I kept going. I could tell you that the starkness of this moment—of having something so tangible right in front of me, in such close proximity, breathing distance, and being unable to reach out and touch it—broke me.

I could tell you it was my friend Grant who told me things get better, then worse, then different.

I could tell you it was reading Drinking, A Love Story for the third time, or Lit for the fourth, or Dry, or Drink, or On Writing, or Rilke or Rumi or Mary Oliver.

I could tell you it was the hundredth time I prayed or the thousandth drink I had after promising myself I’d never have another drink.

I could tell you it was the 12-step meetings and how I learned to watch people tell the truth there—how I eventually practiced it myself, tentatively, with a small voice—while sitting on my hands to keep them from shaking.

I could tell you it was the writing, the act of finally doing it, and how it connected me to the thing in myself that I loved more than drinking and how I realized I had to choose between the two.

I could tell you it was watching Seane Corn teach a retreat in 2014.

Or Elena's words.

Or my daughter innocently helping me clean up maroon vomit stains from the white walls of our hallway one morning.

Or my ex-husband, who, in an act of surprising kindness only a few months into our separation, kissed me on the forehead in the doorway of my apartment and told me he was proud of me for trying. How I closed the door after he left and collapsed to the floor, taking in large gulps of air, because he showed me a softness I thought was lost for good.

I could tell you it was standing in front of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco reading John O'Donohue for the first time.

Or the first weekend I spent sober—how it felt like a marathon, something I could never repeat again—but surviving it opened a small crack of possibility.

Or the morning I was carrying a cup of coffee back to bed and spilled a little bit on the floor, and when I looked down and saw my blue toenails, thought, What if alcohol is the thing?

I could tell you it was getting a DUI.

Or meeting Alex, Tara, Jenny, Julia, Caroline, Daisy, Justin, Jon, Shannon, Hilary, Tammi, Mel, Kristen, Michelle, Glenn, Mary Ellen, Tommy, Catherine, Sophie, and so many others, and how each of them added a brick, some mortar, a bit of the foundation.

I could tell you it was any of these things, and that would be true.

But underneath, there is a bit of truth that I don’t talk about too often because it sounds…harsh. Oversimplified. Stark. I don't know. It is my truth, and it was ultimately the fly in the ointment. Once it was there, I couldn't pull it out.

It started with reading part of an essay in Augusten Burrough’s This is How. I read it on my phone while walking home from the train one day in July 2014. The words hit me so hard that I stopped and sat on a curb to finish, crouched over my phone, squinting to see through the glare the sun made on my screen. On this particular day, I was close to caving again.

It goes like this:

Just because you want something doesn’t mean you have to have it.

I know how infuriating that is to hear.

Relapse is the temper tantrum you allow yourself to have when you forbid yourself to stop drinking. To stop drinking, you stop drinking. You pour it out right now.

He goes on…

The thought that precedes relapse—certainly in my case and I bet in many others as well—is, “screw it.” Screw it is an idiom that means, “I no longer care."

Ugh. Ugh. I felt this. I knew it, and I hated him for saying it. I knew it every time I'd picked up a drink in the last year. I had the knowledge by then. I wasn’t physically addicted to the point that my body required alcohol any longer. I knew the choice was there, even as I denied it.

I recommend reading the whole essay as there is more context, but the punchline is this:

In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it:

They didn’t do it.

They just didn’t do it.

You absolutely can stop drinking, right now.

The question is only, do you want to be sober more than you want to drink?

Very few people can answer this question truthfully and reply, yes.

I hope you’re one of them. Maybe you are.

I didn’t think I was.

I’m wary of sharing this because it makes it sound like addiction is a choice, and I don't believe it is. At some point, yes, every person who experiences addiction originally chose to drink (or take drugs or have sex or whatever). But nobody chooses to become addicted; nobody would. It’s one of the many paradoxes I’ve found to be true in this process.

For me, in the beginning, being sober was too blunt. The loss of my identity to drinking—which made up most of who I was—was too large, too painful, too confusing to absorb. How do you alleviate a phantom pain that is everywhere? How do you make sense of a picture that’s been blown into a million molecules of incoherent color? You don’t. You have to wait for the molecules to settle into something else, and in the waiting, you have to rely on blind faith and your own determination to fight for a thing you can’t yet see.

I’m not talking about the first days when I was still so physically addicted that drinking was necessary. I’m not even saying I could really hear the choice. I’m saying after a certain time—and much earlier than I admitted—it was there. Even if it was more faint than the tiniest whisper, it was there. 

It was there when I sat in meetings and took permission to drink again from someone who shared a story of relapsing.

It was there when I said yes to going to an event where I knew the temptation would be too great for me to say no.

It was there when I chose to tell some people I was quitting but not others.

It was there when I blamed the triggers.

It was there when I took my daughter to Bertucci’s instead of Panera for dinner because I knew I could get wine at Bertucci’s. 

It was there all those times I said, Tomorrow.

It was there when I found my car pulling into the parking lot of the liquor store. 

It was there, even though I denied it, and hated it, and wished it away.

It was there.

Admitting this didn’t make staying sober any easier. Quite the opposite. It simply removed the last excuse I had. It crumbled the final barrier between me and the pain I had been avoiding all my life. It was the birth of my responsibility, the truest pulse of humility, the last futile punch my ego could muster.

The answers to the big questions are always both complicated and simple. There was a tipping point, and there were countless moments that nudged me toward it. I needed every person, every conversation, every book, poem, word, mistake, win. I needed the hands of thousands of others who'd gone before me, pressing gently on my back.

But in the end—though I kept waiting for it—the final push wouldn't come from outside. It had to come from within, and it would be quiet and go largely unnoticed day after day. It was me who had to make the brave and consistent choice to own my life.

Love,
Laura

P.S. If you’re in recovery from anything, tell us what your tipping point was in the comments. We all need to find our way ourselves, but the stories help, and also: those of you who don’t know other sober or trying-to-be-sober folks, there are a lot of us here! Speak up!

---

You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).

Comments are open to paid subscribers, and you can subscribe here or give a gift subscription here.

Announcements and Offerings

Registration is now open for The Sober Life. A program for those who are already sober and ready to deepen their emotional sobriety, personal leadership, and relationships. We begin February 5. Learn more and register »

Push Off from Here comes out in paperback on March 5! Buy it now from Bookshop.org or the bad place.

1. When I originally wrote this in 2016, this was true. I don’t ask for help staying sober every day anymore, but I am still always grateful for it: every night, every morning.