To Count or Not to Count

The evolution of what data means to me (Part I)

I have just rounded the corner of 900 days sober. I almost never check my sober app anymore. In fact, most recently, I thought I had hit 2 1/2 years sober, but when I looked at my counter, it appeared I had miscalculated and I was instead 2 years 5 months sober.

Alas, my degrees are in the humanities.

When I was getting sober, I kept meticulous data of how much I drank or how often I drank.

I would run insane equations. If I don’t drink the rest of the year, that would be 85%, or 75%. I would think things like, if I just drank on Friday and Saturdays, that would be 28% of the days — so that would leave 72% to be sober.

The year before I finally got sober, I was sober 350/365 days of the year. 96%.

---

As I moved in sober circles, some people’s day count was very important to them, and other people didn’t count at all.

“The person with the most sobriety is the person who woke up earliest this morning,” the old joke goes.

And then again, in these rooms filled with love and support and compassion, sometimes you’ll hear this, I went back out.

87 days down the drain, is a common enough refrain.

Here’s what I have to say about those 87 days : you didn’t lose them. You still learned what you learned. It’s 87 days toward strengthening the sober muscle.

Annie Grace calls these smaller, singular relapses “data points” along the journey of sobriety. These one-off’s remind us of the consequences of drinking. And this data provides what we need to draw a conclusion.

The other data that I found for myself was I often didn’t have a “one-off.” I had like, a 3-day-off. And coming off that little mini-bender was rough.

You’re doing the hardest part over and over again, a friend said, when it finally sunk in for me.

My last few data points went like this :

a 40 day stretch between December 12, 2021 and January 2022

120+ days February - July / 3 days drinking

120+ days July - November / 3 days drinking

November - December / 1 night drinking

Once I had cracked the seal — once I took that drink in July, and “got away with it” — once I felt that meh, it wasn’t so bad. Meh, I was away from my kids.

I texted my friend : Maybe I’ll just drink when I’m out of state.

I suppose, she said, as long as you don’t start driving to Virginia to take a drink.

That would be insane, I thought, but then I also thought, Virginia isn’t all that far away.

The increments between became smaller and smaller.

I kept thinking, well, maybe I’m getting away with it.

But I wasn’t. And now, in sobriety, there’s nothing I have to do to try to “get away with it.” And not trying to “get away with it” is a tremendous gift.

That’s why I choose not to drink, ever, one day at a time (which has, as noted, just recently accumulated to be 900+). A friend recently reminded me of the phrase “the comma club,” and I have to admit I am looking forward to crossing the 1,000 day mark in just a few months. I remember looking at my sobriety app, flipping past milestones, and thinking, my god, one THOUSAND days. Impossible.

And yet, here it is.

---

Part of the pain of the day count, though, is to give people a sense of where you’re at. I would say, I am only 3 days today, but I had 64 days.

I had 19 days.

I had 12 days.

I had, I had, I had.

What is time, anyway. My sons asked me that once. An arbitrary measurement, something that accumulates in the way we have assigned meaning to it.

Time is a construct, I would say to my then-four-year-olds (and I wonder why people think they’re weird).

But time is not entirely meaningless. Sure, anyone can relapse. But I think it’s like how it is with accidents on the job. In tree work, you’re most likely to have an accident right around the 7-year mark — when you settle in and get comfortable and start getting sloppy and lazy.

Sometimes I prefer to have those first-year-med-students, or the first-year phlebotomists who are still engaged in the study and not just running on autopilot.

That’s the funny thing about time in sobriety — I feel very settled into my sobriety, but the hope is I remember just enough to remember what a good choice it is for me to stay sober.

---

Later, I came to love the I Am Sober app. This app keeps track of your seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years.

I vividly remember setting back to zero, watching each of those color bars drop back to zero. Restarting. I remember, too, watching when I went to 1 day, and then later, 1 month.

I remember thinking to myself, if I have to restart this fucking thing one more time, I think I’d rather just fucking die.

The conclusion is always the same in recovery. Whatever works for you, works. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Count

Data does it for me because I know that sometimes I can’t trust how I think a thing feels. There was a time once, right after my first husband and I bought our first house, that I thought we should have been saving more money.

He was buying too many chainsaws for our budding tree business, I thought. God dammit, I said. I’ll show him, I thought. I drafted our entire budget on an Excel spreadsheet and, then, upon reviewing the numbers, it appeared that there was roughly $300 a month being spent at the Ross Dress for Less up the road. It was me! I worked in an office back then, and this was in the pre-Covid days, and I did find myself at the Ross quite often, which was right next to the Super One where I bought my wine and beer and liquor.

As a side note -- do you have any idea how many $18 dresses I had to have been buying to be spending that much money in 2014 at a Ross? And it didn’t even occur to me until I ran the numbers.

If counting does it for you, then do it. If it doesn’t forget it.

As always — take what works, and leave the rest.

---

This is Part I of a series about data/numbers/counts — more to come, soon featuring some insights from my lovely friends! If you have a comment about what data/numbers/counts means to you in sobriety/life, I would love to hear from you.