oh em hoyt

It’s taken me 353 days to even start this post.

The last day I drank alcohol was June 3rd, 2024. 353 days ago. It was the day after our 7th wedding anniversary. Dylan (my husband) had to work the day of, so we went out to celebrate the day after. I started drinking as soon as I woke up (not out of the norm for any day at that point), we had to go to his job to stack wood (brutal physical activity), and I pounded beers on every break we took. After killing ourselves for hours at his job, we freshened up, and went to this little dive bar up the street from the house. We took an uber because we knew both of us were going to go hard. I had no license anyway, but I wanted Dyl to be able to drink and not have to drive.

I had been on probation for almost 2 years at this point after getting my third DUI. How I never saw the inside of a jail cell still shocks people to this day. Full transparency, it’s because I learned pretty quickly that with a ton of money, a little bit of effort, and a whole lot of bullshit, how to “get away” with it. Until that day.

That day, all of it caught up to me in a surprise home visit from my PO. We had just returned home from drinking our faces off all day/night and it was obvious to everyone but me that I was hammered. To me, it was just another day of drinking except with the added celebration of the anniversary and slight change of scenery. I was breathalyzed and blew a .34% BAC. For those who aren’t certified medical professionals, I’m pretty sure that is like .01% away from comatose. But I felt fine, “normal”. The fact that I was coherent enough to carry on a conversation with my PO and the EMTs he called, was a clear-cut sign that I hadn’t in fact been abstaining from alcohol whatsoever.

For years, I had been in and out of trouble with the law due to my drinking. I had learned that I could just continue drinking up until a few days before I had to see my probation officer, pee in a cup, feed them a line of BS about how great everything was and go straight to the store and pick right back up for the next 3 weeks until it was time to go again. Here’s where the contradictions come into play.

Although I have always had respect for the law, my drinking and not acknowledging how problematic it was, allowed me to completely disregard the seriousness of what I was doing. I have so many reservations and downright disdain for the way the system works but I do understand the reasons as to why it exists and ultimately, it did end up being the reason I was forced to get sober. But I’ll never fully accredit my recovery to that alone. Because, for so many years, I was able to circumvent it.

My drinking started out like most “normal” people’s do. I had my first drinks as a teenager, just experimenting and trying things because that’s what you do as a young person. Into my college years, it was mostly social; parties and bar hopping on the weekends. At some point in my twenties, it morphed into drinking and going out most nights out of the week. I think in hindsight it was my fear of being alone, or FOMO. There was always a reason to go out and drink with friends; Monday Night Football games, Taco Tuedays, Why Not Wednesday?s, Thursday Night is the start of the weekend, Friday & Saturday IS the weekend, Football Sunday, Boat Days, Days off, Holidays, Spring Breaks, Kickball, Concerts, Festivals, Darts, the list goes on and on. If there was something to be doing, I was doing it and I was drinking the whole time I was doing it.

In my twenties, being social, being seen, and being the life of the party was what defined me. I also got a degree, lived in a house with roommates, held down two jobs, had a couple serious relationships, a lot of flings and foggy one-night stands and boy did I have a ton of fun. I don’t regret that time in my life, cause in a lot of ways, it was the time of my life. I got married to the most incredible human being and made a good life for us with a future I could look forward to.

I’m just still unsure as to where the turning point was. I can’t pinpoint one specific thing, one life-altering moment or moments where my drinking went from social, acceptable, and normal, to excessive, damaging, and out of control.

I suppose it’s in our nature to want to find an explanation, to figure out what it was, to blame something or someone outside of ourselves, to find a reason as to why and how I got to be a 36-year-old full blown functioning alcoholic near comatose and facing up to a year in jail. I still haven’t been able to nail it down and I probably never will. Cause that’s what alcohol does. It’s a poison that slowly, methodically, and unassumingly, takes control of your life piece by piece until you’re no longer the one in the driver’s seat (pun not intended but somehow fitting).

If there’s anything I can say for certain, it is that I was no longer in control and I hadn’t been for a very, very long time. I think ultimately, that was the “a-ha moment” that had been alluding me. It’s near impossible for a self-proclaimed control freak to see how far out of control they truly are.

There was a part of me that knew for years that the time was going to come when I had to face it, I just didn’t know how or what it would look like. I think that’s why I hadn’t done it. I avoided it because I couldn’t see how it was possible. I couldn’t do what I do with every other thing in my life and devise a plan, play out each scenario in my head, and come up with a way to go about it. Drinking had become the biggest part of who I was, it defined me, it controlled every decision I made, every thought I had. I couldn’t envision what my life would look like without it or where to even start. So, I convinced myself that I didn’t need to, that I was fine, and that living the way I was, was just the way it was, was going to be, had to be.

Drinking and being drunk kept me in denial; it made me feel confident, capable, and in control of everything. So given the fact that there were literally not many moments when I wasn’t drunk, still drunk from the day before, or on my way to being drunk again, there was only a small window of time when I’d actually consider that I might have a problem before drunk Emily would take over and be back in “fuck it, I got this” mode.

The few days after my PO showed up and I violated the terms of my probation, are a complete blur. I do distinctly remember the uncontrollable shakes, crippling anxiety, and inexplainable feeling of dread. I also remember the supervisors at probation saying, “you’re going to die” and actually believing them. More so, given the way that I was feeling, that it could happen at any moment. That was the day I knew it was the end, the end of that life.

It sounds so fucking lame and cliche, or I don’t know what word I’m looking for here, but I literally just knew. There just something that clicked. The light bulb finally fucking went on. You’d think that I would have realized it before that day. There were so many reasons as to why I should have quit long before. I knew I was fucked in terms of the law, but that hadn’t kept me from drinking before. The birth of my niece? I was drunk the day she was born. Losing a job I loved? Nope. The fear of my husband leaving me after an affair? That didn’t stop me either.

I’m not going to sit here and continue to run through the list of horrible shit I did and try to excuse those behaviors or blame any of it on being drunk. That would take another whole year. I will say that I think I drank to avoid the guilt of doing those things. And so, we begin to see the cyclical damage that drinking adds/compounds/exacerbates the mistakes we make.

So, call it whatever you want, the lightbulb went on, the switch was flipped. I gave up, gave in, surrendered. I relinquished control. I just knew. I had to stop. That day was the last day I would drink. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but it had to be done, I was done, I was gunna die but not before I ruined everything good in my life. That part of me did die that day.

And that was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life.

Twelve days before my one-year anniversary of being sober, reflection has been on the forefront of my mind. This barely scratches the surface of “the whole story” of the twenty years of drinking I’ve got under my belt. It’s this crazy contradictory thought process because I hate the person I became but some of the best times, and during the most important moments of my life, I was drinking so I can’t say I regret it. That being said, no amount of words can express the insurmountable gratitude I have to be almost one full year removed from it all.