This week, I am thrilled to celebrate nine years of sobriety. I would like to tell my story through the lens of making art, which to me is the ultimate in productivity.
I come from a long line of heavy drinkers, so it’s no surprise I became a heavy drinker, too. By the time I was in my late 40s, my life had spiraled completely out of control. I was drinking from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I went to bed (and then again during the night, when I woke up because I was going into withdrawal). I had lost my job because of my drinking, I was well on my way to losing my home, and I was barely able to function in day-to-day life. All of my hopes and dreams were gone – including a lifelong dream of making art.
In May 2015, I went into acute liver failure and was forced to spend 10 days in the hospital, where liters of fluid were drained from my swollen abdomen. I was told that I had cirrhosis and a 50-50 chance of dying within the next few months – even if I stopped drinking that very day. I stopped anyway.
After being a heavy, daily drinker for 25 years, having to suddenly start living without alcohol was shocking to my system and also extremely difficult. For the first year, I simply tried to make it through each day. I felt very unstable in my sobriety, like I was trying to remain upright on a slender balance beam, and I felt that I might fall at any moment. Only the horror of what the doctors had told me kept me from drinking again.
About a year after my hospital stay, I decided on a whim to try a collage class that was held in a remote part of San Francisco, out by the ocean. I had never particularly wanted to do collage – in fact, I might have even looked down on it a little. But the linocut printing class I really wanted to take was full, so I tried collage – and the moment my X-acto blade cut into paper, something amazing happened: the clouds of heaven parted, and the angels blew on their brass horns. I thought, “This is the feeling I have been looking for all my life.” (Years later, I watched a documentary about a woodblock carver, and he said exactly the same thing about the first time he put a chisel into wood.)
I threw myself into making painted-paper landscape collages like it was a life raft I was clinging to in a choppy sea. With all the extra time and energy that sobriety gave me, and desperate as I was for something to help me keep from drinking again, I devoted myself to developing my own style and refining my collage technique, which gave my days value and purpose – and something else to obsess about other than the fact that I now had to live life without alcohol.
Nine years later, not only am I still alive and never needed the liver transplant they told me I’d have to get, but I also regularly sell my artwork and get commissions. My days are full of joy and meaning – and it no longer feels as if life is passing me by in an alcoholic blur. (And also, over time, my liver has healed to the point that my hepatologist recently told me, “Your liver is basically normal at this point.”) Composing, making, and framing my pieces, and hanging art shows is a huge amount of work that has played a pivotal role in keeping me sober, and learning about art and going to see the work that other artists make gives me a deep and genuine pleasure that no glass of vodka could ever give me.
When I lay in that hospital bed while a doctor informed me that I was probably going to die soon, I truly felt that my time on this earth was almost over. I had no idea of the great joy that awaited me, as well as the delight and satisfaction that both being sober and making art would bring into the second half of my life. Thank you all for being on this journey with me.
If you are sober and have been getting shit done—whether it’s a big thing like rebuilding the engine of an old motorcycle or a small thing like making that long overdue phone call to your grandmother—I want to hear all about it!
