What Sobriety Feels Like After 8 Years
This is exactly why I fought so hard.
It’s very easy for me to calculate exactly how long I’ve been sober. I quit drinking on December 31, 2016. If you’re reading this on the day I first published it (July 15, 2025), it will be my 3,118th day sober.
That’s about eight and a half years without a drink. (I managed to find the exact number of days with a date calculator—I stopped keeping track a long time ago.)
It’s much harder for me to calculate exactly how long I spent in active addiction. Although my daily drinking habit has a clear end date, it’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it started.
I know that I was already drinking heavily in high school, but back then I kept it relegated to weekend binge drinking. The daily habit started sometime in college, and it was on and off for several years before evolving into endless, year-round drunkenness.
That’s one of the tricky things about alcoholism: It doesn’t appear one night out of the blue. It gradually builds, and it’s almost impossible to tell when we cross the line from recreational drinker to problem drinker to alcoholic.
When I talk about the length of my active addiction, I normally round it to a decade. There’s an argument to be made that I was a heavy drinker for far longer than that, but I think ten years is a fair estimate, and ultimately it doesn’t matter that much.
I was thinking about this today because I realized that soon, I will have been sober for longer than I was a daily drinker. It’s still hard for me to believe that so much time has passed, even though it’s been a busy and fulfilling eight and a half years.
Early on after quitting, every minute went by so slowly, and every day sober was a true victory. Back then, I remember often being shocked by how few days had gone by. When I had only been alcohol-free for a few weeks, it already felt like I had been sober for an eternity.
I don’t remember exactly when that feeling disappeared, but it was certainly gone sometime within the first couple of years. It’s interesting to me that during those early days, I felt so sure the grinding slog would last forever, and these days it’s a distant memory that I can barely grasp.
When I was first quitting alcohol, I tended to think of sobriety in grand terms. As I said, the withdrawal and the mental adjustments felt so painful, impossible, and endless. I thought that my sobriety—or return to addiction—would define the rest of my life.
After eight and a half years sober, life mostly just feels normal.
Don’t get me wrong, my sobriety is still an important part of my life. I’m forever grateful that I was able to quit drinking. I also make sure to devote time and energy to protecting my sobriety, because I know how hard I fought for this life, and I know that a relapse could derail it.
However, with that said, the day-to-day of my life doesn’t revolve around sobriety at all. The majority of my triumphs, failures, hopes, and worries have nothing directly to do with alcohol or sobriety at all.
Yes, of course, sobriety made this possible. But it’s not like I’m thinking much about alcohol and addiction recovery when I’m deciding what job to take or worrying about the weird bump that appeared on my leg.
One of the main reasons that I still write this weekly newsletter is because I know that without it, I could easily go weeks without even thinking about my sobriety. (And I believe that the regular reminder is a good way to keep me on track while sharing what I’ve learned with others.)
In my day-to-day life, I rarely think about sobriety at all, and it gets less and less with every year.
To be honest, I find that a relief.
When I first quit drinking, I worried that my entire life would have to revolve around sobriety until the day I died. I had met some people in long-term recovery who seemed to treat sobriety that way. (In retrospect, I also recognize that many of them probably had more complete lives than I realized at the time; Since I only knew them from recovery spaces, I only saw the side of them that was focused on sobriety.)
I’m glad to have discovered that even after a decade of heavy drinking, I’ve been able to build a fairly typical life for myself.
I was either a daily drinker or sober throughout my entire adult life. So I guess I’ll never know what it’s like to be a “normal” person whose life is untouched by addiction. With that said, though, I have to confess that I imagine it would be pretty similar to the life I’m living now.
It’s true that I’ll never be able to drink like a normal person. I would never again trust myself with even a single alcoholic drink because I know how easily that could spiral and destroy my life.
However, many non-addicts don’t drink either, so even in this respect, my life isn’t so abnormal.
When I was a drinker, alcohol controlled my life. When I first quit drinking, I worried that sobriety would control my life in a similar way.
After eight and a half years, I can confidently say that that hasn’t been the case at all. Getting sober wasn’t replacing one type of control with another—It was freeing myself from that outside control, and allowing myself to finally take charge.