By Frank · Personal essay · Content updated:
Getting sober didn’t fix my life either.
I know. I’m really selling personal growth here. But I want to be honest about what changed and what I still have to work on. Stopping substance use changed my life enormously. I’m alive. I’m present. I have stability, a home, businesses, and people—and animals—I love and take care of.
My life today barely resembles my life during active addiction. That change matters to me. So does being able to talk about the trauma, mental illness, insecurities, and ordinary difficulties that remained after I stopped using.
Watch: Getting sober didn’t fix my life either
The question that came after stopping
When I was deep in addiction, the substance was such an obvious problem that it was easy to imagine everything would be okay if I could just stop. I could see the damage. I wanted a life that wasn’t organized around getting high.
Eventually, I also had to ask why getting high had worked so well for me in the first place. What was I getting from it? What was I escaping? What wasn’t I feeling while I was using?
Those are uncomfortable questions. Taking them seriously means acknowledging the role substance use played in my life, including the things I was trying to get away from. I needed to understand what happened when that coping mechanism was gone.
My trauma was still there. My mental illness was still there. So were my insecurities and my past. I had to experience those things without the thing I had been using to escape them. Stopping brought me to that work; I still had to do it.
Recovery has required adding things
That is why I make a distinction between getting sober and building a life in recovery. Getting sober meant removing something from my life. Recovery has required adding things I can live with and return to: treatment, medication, accountability, routine, relationships, and responsibilities.
Treatment and medication are part of my life in recovery. My mental illness still needs care. I can recognize how much sobriety has changed my circumstances while also taking that continuing need seriously.
Accountability and routine give me other things to work on. I have to consider how I’m living, what I’m responsible for, and how I respond to situations I used to escape. Learning to sit with emotions is part of that. I’m still working on it.
There is also the question of what I actually want. When so much of life is organized around getting high, removing that priority leaves a bigger question than what I’m going to stop doing. I have to think about how I want to spend my time and what I want to build.
The things I add to my life need attention, too. A relationship, a responsibility, or a routine involves continuing to participate. For me, recovery includes that ongoing work.
The life I can participate in now
I’ve rebuilt relationships and responsibilities. I’ve built businesses. I have a home. I have people and animals I love, and I’m able to be present in a life with them.
Those are concrete parts of what has changed for me. They give meaning to a statement like “my life is different now.” I can point to the life I’m taking part in and the things I care about within it.
I’m describing my own life here. Having a business or a particular kind of home isn’t how I would measure somebody else’s recovery. What matters in my account is that I have more ability to participate in the things that matter to me.
That ability is the change I keep coming back to. I can have relationships and responsibilities while still needing treatment. I can value the life I have and acknowledge that parts of it remain difficult.
I’m still working on how to live
Recovery hasn’t made me perfectly healthy. It hasn’t cured my mental illness or erased what happened before I got sober. Some of the work I’ve described is still work I’m doing.
I want to be able to say that plainly. Otherwise, telling the story means leaving out the part I’m actually living: continuing to figure things out while taking care of myself and the life around me.
That fuller account belongs on Finding True Masculinity. I’m a trans man in recovery, and the life I write about includes mental health, relationships, responsibilities, and uncertainty. Those subjects deserve room alongside the practical questions about transition.
There was no magical moment when everything suddenly became okay. I stopped using. Then came the much longer process of figuring out how to live without using.
Getting sober gave me the ability to participate in my own life again. Learning how to keep doing that is what recovery means to me.
Video script
Prefer to read? Here is the script for the video.
Getting sober didn’t fix my life either. I know. I’m really selling personal growth in these videos. But this is something I think we need to talk about more honestly.
When you’re deep in addiction, the substance becomes such an obvious problem that it’s easy to imagine: If I could just stop using, everything would be okay.
And stopping absolutely changed my life. I’m alive. I’m present. I have stability that I didn’t have before.
I’ve rebuilt relationships and responsibilities. I’ve built businesses. I have a home. I have people—and animals—I love and take care of. My life today barely resembles my life during active addiction.
But sobriety didn’t magically make everything okay. Because eventually I had to deal with an uncomfortable question:
Why did getting high work so well for me in the first place?
Not why was it healthy. It wasn’t. Not why was it sustainable. It definitely wasn’t.
But what was I getting from it? What was I escaping? What wasn’t I feeling when I was using? What happened when I took that coping mechanism away?
Because when the drugs disappeared… my trauma didn’t. My mental illness didn’t. My insecurities didn’t. My past didn’t.
And suddenly I had to experience all of those things without the thing I’d been using to escape them.
That’s one reason I think there’s such an important difference between getting sober and building a life in recovery.
Getting sober is about removing something.
Recovery, for me, has required adding things.
Treatment. Medication. Accountability. Routine. Relationships. Responsibilities.
Learning how to sit with emotions and situations I used to escape from. And figuring out what kind of life I actually want when I’m no longer organizing that life around getting high.
I’m still working on some of those things.
Recovery didn’t turn me into a perfectly healthy person. It didn’t cure my mental illness. It didn’t erase what happened before I got sober. And it certainly didn’t make life easy.
What it did was give me the ability to actually participate in my own life again.
And maybe that’s a less dramatic recovery story. There was no magical moment where everything suddenly became okay.
I stopped using. Then came the much longer process of figuring out how to live without using.
For me, that’s recovery.
About the author
Frank is the founder and primary writer of Finding True Masculinity. His work brings together transmasculine resources, personal writing, and questions shaped by his experience of transition, recovery, mental health, and rebuilding stability. More about Frank.
