“The World’s Going to Hell, I Should Be Alert For This”: 5 People on Being Sober in Quarantine

I quit drinking in February 2016, which, as you may recall from that November, turned out to be a hell of a year to quit drinking. So was every year before and since, though 2020 might be the ninth circle of the Inferno.

When the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic first set in, I braced myself to get hit with the desire to drink my way through it. It wasn’t that my commitment to remaining sober from alcohol had wavered—I knew, on a cognitive level, exactly how everything could and would unravel if I started drinking again—but I wasn’t exactly emanating rays of sunshine and gratitude either. Back when it was possible to move throughout the world, I came to dread the first warm spring day in New York City: walking by rows of buoyant and bare-shouldered people gathered around sidewalk tables, laughing over glasses dewy with condensation. “Fuck your pét-nat,” I’d think, wishing I could join them for just a single glass of wine, even though I had never once sat an outdoor café and breezily enjoyed just a single glass of wine in my entire life.

This is all to say that I was mildly surprised when, learning that we would be facing months of isolation and boredom and roiling anxiety in the face of unknown devastation, my instinct turned out to not be “I wish I could My Year of Rest and Relaxation my way through this” but “Thank God this didn’t happen five years ago. What an even worse nightmare it would be if I were drunk the whole time.” (And then: “I should order as much refined sugar as is legally allowed in the continental United States.”) A whole Christmas display’s worth of light bulbs that read “PERSONAL GROWTH” flashed on and off in my brain. So this is what I was working towards, even if I didn’t quite realize it.

While alcohol sales have spiked significantly during the pandemic, and I can’t begrudge anyone who turns to it for comfort, there is a whole portion of the population that is going through this while recovering from an addiction. For those who are newly sober or rely on regular meetings to stay that way, isolation can feel insurmountable. For others, sobriety and the work they’ve done to get there has brought them to a place where they feel more equipped to handle the crisis at hand.

Here, GQ talks to five of those people about navigating a pandemic while sober and navigating sobriety during a pandemic.

“The world's going to hell, I should be alert for this.”

I cannot imagine going into something like this drinking. I know that's probably the opposite of what people assume. My mind immediately went toward what my life had been like when I was left unchecked and alone. When I could drink the way I wanted, I was never more miserable. I just would lose hours and lose entire days. There's a lot of my drinking life that I look back on fondly. Drinking alone is not it.

The last catastrophe I can really remember is the recession of 2008 and I was really drunk. In fact, I was trying to quit drinking during that time and I felt entitled to start drinking again because I was like, "The world's going to hell and I'm going to stay drunk for it." With that in mind, it's really interesting to take the yardstick to that emotion 12 years down the line. The logic of “the world’s going to hell, so why don't I just get drunk?” seems so silly to me. I will never blame anyone for saying it, it's just that I don't feel that way anymore. It’s like: “The world's going to hell, I should be alert for this. There's all this stuff in the world that I can't control, which is true and it's awful. But what about the stuff that I can? What if I put my energy there?"

I was fighting a lot of loneliness before this happened. Probably the most surprising part of the quarantine was feeling like I had company in the solitude, that everybody was going through it. I, in the weirdest way, felt like I had been prepared for this. All around me I was seeing people flip out that they couldn't control this and everything felt unmanageable and that their life wasn't going the way that they wanted. That's what I felt like 10 years ago when my whole world came to a crashing halt.

I think anybody who gets sober has the thought, "This is the worst time to get sober." Because you don't want to. When I was trying to get sober, I had this fantasy that the world would stop and the bars would close and that nobody could be on the sidewalk cafes drinking so that I wouldn't be forced to look at everyone else's happiness. I felt like I'd been pushed off the party barge and everybody got to keep moving. Whatever strange circumstances have brought us to this place, we are now living in a world where that is very much the case. A lot of people's lives have had to be put on hold. I think it's the best time to get sober. The planet is in lockdown. The scene in the movie where you have to go into the basement and do pushups and the jumping rope reps? That's now. You can do that and nobody will even notice you were gone. Because the world is gone too.

— Sarah Hepola, Writer and author of the memoir Blackout, sober for 10 years

“My sobriety involves thinking of alcohol as boring. I’d rather do something fun in a crisis.”

I think sobriety has definitely helped equip me for a moment like this. Getting sober helped me figure out what I actually liked doing. Drinking had become my one hobby, and so when I stopped, I was like, Wait, WTF else do I actually enjoy? It was hard to think of anything, so I did that thing that the internet tells you to do, which is to think back on what you enjoyed doing as a kid and try that out again. Because of that, I got back into stuff like knitting and drawing and reading fun novels. All of which are great to have now, during this stay-at-home time.

When you stop doing something, you need a host of other stuff to shovel into the void. It was nice to force myself to figure out what that stuff might be. I’m grateful to have figured some of it out. I think the idea of handwork is really important. Making stuff by hand. I also picked up running after the pandemic started and I feel like I’m late to the “I’m sober and now I love running” party. But, it’s so great.

My approach to sobriety has meant that big events haven’t really threatened it so far. I got sober in part so that I could get to and be present for new life phases, and I really don’t want to undo that. My sobriety involves thinking of alcohol as boring. I’d rather do something fun in a crisis.

That all being said—it’s easy to say I have a logical approach to sobriety, but there are still those human moments where I’m like, “Well, yeah, but what if I just destroyed it all because destruction is fun and I want to show the world and myself that I’m still out of control and a fucking bitch who follows no rules?” And in those instances, I think to myself, “Well, yeah, but: your skin. Don’t ruin your skin again.” So there are tiers of don’t-drink reinforcement. There are all the big ones—the stuff I’ve gained, the life phases I’ve entered into, the people I’ve become close to, and just how good I feel—and then there are the littler things, like that my skin looks better.

It’s controversial, maybe, but sobriety doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be a weight you carry about and worry about and think about all the time. It’s possible to rewire some things in your brain—to change your beliefs—by being open to change and feeding yourself new information. Once your beliefs change, new behaviors become effortless. This happened for me and it remains one of the closest things to a magical experience I’ve ever had, but it was just normal. It happened.

— Edith Zimmerman, Writer and illustrator, Drawing Links, sober for four years

“This is a good challenge to go through with a clear head.”

This is probably the longest I've ever stayed in one place in years and years. I think there is some anxiety involved in that. The sobriety part of it didn't necessarily cross my mind, initially, but then, a couple of weeks in, you start to think, “there's a lot of time to fill here.”

Previously, I would have been zonked out, of course, but also, it would have been like, "Okay, how am I going to get this?" Because I wasn't into drinking. I was into pills. It would have been a very different experience and I definitely would have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about trying to procure what I needed In situations like this, for alcoholics specifically, you can go buy [booze] at the store. That's a very easy thing to do, it's a very easy thing to indulge in. If I wanted to go get a hundred Oxycontin pills right now, I couldn't do that.

I've gotten super into running, which is probably the easiest thing to do right now. And the most high you can get is when you finish 10 miles when it's cold outside. That's about as good as you can feel from exercise from what I've experienced in my life. You're pushing yourself. It's goal-oriented in a lot of ways, which I think is also a way to keep focused on something positive.

I think boredom and the unknown is a bad combo for drug use. Luckily, I think I've had enough time to learn how to process those feelings in a sober way. So, I know what I'm getting into and how to go about that if I'm starting to feel something I don't like. I think this is such a big shift for society. And I think that this is a good challenge to go through with a clear head. That's the biggest thing I've learned from sobriety, in general, is just you feel everything at a very different level than you did before when there's nowhere to hide.

— Chris Black, founder of Done to Death Projects, sober for three and a half years

“I no longer feel like I'm weakened or I have a handicap because I'm an alcoholic, but that I have sort of a minor superpower because of it.”

The house I live in here in Phoenix is almost 100 years old. And my plan when I moved here was to be on the road four months out of the year every summer to avoid the worst of the heat. Everything that I had lined up for the summer—my entire European tour, teaching at Yale—just went in the shitter and I was like, "I'm just going to be locked down in this baking inferno for months and months and months and my brain is going to eat itself."

I think that sober folks already have the toolbox to deal with all this shit because we have dread and anxiety and panic attacks and freakouts come up because, "Oh, it's Tuesday." We're used to having to manage your own mind, having to manage your mental health, having to manage your insecurity, the small swings between euphoria and self-loathing. I'm in this space of sobriety now where I no longer feel like I'm weakened or I have a handicap because I'm an alcoholic, but that I have sort of a minor superpower because of it. I've lived through some shit. I've had a lot of upheaval in my sober life. What I realized early on in isolation was my life changed very little and I was like, "Oh, this is a sign that I need to not live like this. I need to go out every day and engage with people every day.” I resolved to change that going forward.

If people are feeling like they're bottoming out and thinking, "there's never been a worst time to get sober,” well, that's not true. There is no good time to get sober. Many people get sober in prison—that’s one of the things that I think is worth remembering is that in the United States, we legally incarcerate people for no good reason. To be on lockdown, you're not in jail, you're not prison, you're not in solitary confinement. I would encourage people who are trying to get sober to see that there's a silver lining here.

— Mishka Shubaly, writer and musician, author of Cold Turkey, sober for 11 years

“It’s gotten me reconnected to my sobriety in a way.”

I honestly have not been going to meetings very regularly for a while. Which is dumb, it's always dumb, and it's usually how I wind up getting in trouble, eventually. But one of the cool things that happened is that I, in Zoom, did get into a couple of meetings. I got invited from some old friends of mine and now I'm going to meetings based in Philadelphia.

I feel like I've been to some edgy places, both in terms of addiction and mental illness. So a break in normal doesn't feel absolutely upending, for me. Also, I've been in the arts and entertainment my whole life. There's not a lot of stability there, even in the best of times. I do feel, in some ways, I am better prepared than a lot of people for this and sobriety is a big part of it because you do have to get into your big issues there.

I think if it had hit me in early sobriety, especially when I was still resisting the program, like an idiot, for an inordinate amount of time, that it might've gone the other way. It really helps that I'm isolating with sober people. I could see that with any other number of people in my life, past and present, if I were isolating with them it would be different.

It’s gotten me reconnected to my sobriety in a way. I do tend to grind at my work and family stuff, and forget to take care of that. It’s been a lifelong struggle to keep doing the work, even when things are going pretty well. I think it's made me recommitted to it and I look forward to going to in-person meetings again someday.

— Bill Corbett, writer and comedian for Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax, sober for nine years

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Originally Appeared on GQ