My dear reader.

Today I celebrate 15 years of sobriety.

This means that I have not had a drink in 5,479 days. I whispered that number to myself when I first woke up this morning — five thousand four hundred seventy nine days. If you want to know the definition of a miracle, to me this is it.

The most honest thing I can tell you about the day I quit drinking, though, is that I did not want to quit drinking. What I wanted was a different answer — literally any other answer — to the question of how to no longer be in so much pain while still remaining alive.

But as I once heard Carmen Spagnola say, “You probably already have the answer to your question, you just hate the answer.”

I hated the answer of sobriety so fucking much.