Reason for Living #2: My Sobriety

guest essay by cody cook-parrott

Today’s guest essay for REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang is by Cody Cook-Parrott , a writer and artist living on the Leelanau Pensinula in Northern Michigan. They facilitate a weekly writing group called Landscapes and teach classes about writing, quilting, and creative practice. They write the weekly newsletter Monday Monday, one of my very favorite newsletters, and are the host of the podcast Common Shapes. They are the author of the books How to Not Always Be Working and Getting to Center. They also self published books about their projects Personal Practice and Friendship Village. Cody has a BFA in Dance from the University of Michigan and is an MFA candidate at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Dance Magazine, The Huffington Post, and more

They have two free workbooks : The Creative Ideation Portal and the Weaving in Our Values Toolkit. I highly recommend that you check them out.

Thank you so very much to Cody for being this edition’s guest essayist. 🩵

Finally, a note from me, Esmé: already a chronically ill person, I have become less able to function after contracting COVID, testing negative for COVID, and developing an additional virus after that. I have an upcoming doctor’s appointment to discuss next steps. Therefore, I am slower with my email and so forth than usual. Thank you for your patience.

In twelve-step meetings you will often hear people say the things they do to protect their sobriety. They go to meetings, have a sponsor, work the steps, have a home group, get on their knees to pray, the list goes on. Recently I heard a person list the usual tools, and then at the end they said—I also have a sobriety date that I protect at all costs. 

I have a sobriety date, and I protect that sobriety date at all costs. It is May 17, 2011, the day that god came into my spirit and said, Enough is enough. 

My drinking is not something I usually write about or talk about. Partly because of how long ago it was and because I have another private space to talk about them : twelve-step meetings. I am always walking a fine line with anonymity and my public-facing self. How much of my sobriety do I bring into my writing and how much of my work do I bring into the meetings. It has been important to me to protect my sobriety as something that is for me and not something I commodify. This is no judgment to the people who do, just a boundary for myself. A hint at How to Not Always be Working, my sobriety stays in the rooms and only lightly weaves its way into my writing. 

I thought this would be a nice space to practice writing about what happened, what it was like, and what it is like now. 

In 2010, at the end of my time at The University of Michigan, I started to really notice my drinking becoming a problem. My hangovers were horrible and I would get so sick, miss classes, miss assignments, and overall my life started becoming very unmanageable. I was the president of the Inter Cooperative Council (the ecosystem of housing co-ops in Ann Arbor) in my last year getting my BFA in Dance, and on the outside really had it all together. I thought: There is no way I could be an alcoholic. I had believed the trope that alcoholics were houseless men over the age of fifty who had lost everything instead of exactly what I had become and was becoming. 

I called my dad from school, and he came and got me from a few hours away and I went to my first meeting. You could still smoke inside and I ripped through my Parliament Lights, sobbing through every person’s share knowing I had come to the right place. The stories didn’t sound like me, though. People had gotten arrested, had crashed cars, had their kids taken away, marriages falling apart. I got home to my parents house and exclaimed “I’M AN ALCOHOLIC!” and they said, Yes… we know ;) Even though it took me another year and a half to give up the drink for good, I am so grateful for that first meeting, I couldn’t undo what I had found out about myself. 

For the next year and a half, I tried abstaining from drinking with no program, and it worked for a few months. Then I tried a friend’s homemade beer because I thought if it was homemade, I wouldn’t “relapse.” I would just be able to have one. The thing about my drinking is I never was able to just have one. One homemade beer turned into many, turned into tequila and drugs, turned into cheating on my boyfriend, turned into hating myself. From the first drink I had at 15 to the last drink I had at 22, this was the pathway. 

I walked in my college graduation but had two Incompletes that I had to finish over the Spring semester, and it took me almost a decade to get my diploma because of money chaos that I owed to school. I moved back to Grand Rapids, the city I am from, and catapulted myself into a full year of pain and chaos. 

In that time I loved many people very much and hurt them all over and over again. I would drink, cheat, lie, steal, and all-around my alcoholic behavior consumed my life and the lives of the people around me. Today my continuous sobriety is a living amends to those people, many of whom I am still lucky to have in my life. 

My last drink of alcohol I didn’t get drunk but I had a few beers and I was walking up to my front doorstep and the checklist started to go off in my head. Do I have more gin in the cabinet? Is the liquor store still open? Will I be hungover at work tomorrow? Will Marie notice I smell like vomit? Will I disappoint everyone? I was single, hopeless, crushed, lonely, hated myself, and didn’t know how to keep living. I touched the door handle and turned it to go inside instead of going to the store, and in that moment god touched down. I can’t fully explain what this moment was other than a complete divine intervention. At that moment I knew I must never drink again. I knew that god had better plans for me and that there was a solution. I went back to the same Al-Anon club the next day for my second meeting. 

I hated the language, I hated the literature, I hated the steps, I hated that I had to go. It took me a long time to settle into the relationship I have with my program today, one that I protect at all costs. I still don’t agree with everything and my relationships to other substances sometimes can be seen in conflict to an old-timer view of sobriety. What I do know I have today is the disease of alcoholism and the only way I have been able to recover is complete abstinence from alcohol for over thirteen years. 

We have a line: our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. When I start to doubt my work, my life, my relationships, my worth, I come back to this sentence. This is not only my primary purpose within my program, but within my life. This is my reason for living, to serve my own version of a higher power through bringing creative acts into the world, and being a resource to the addict who still suffers. 

The last thirteen years without a drink haven’t been easy, but the times that I have been diligently working my program have always made the hard time bearable, more meaningful, and less painful. When I am engaged with other alcoholics, moving our way through recovery, I am a lighter and more loving version of myself. 

Today I own my home, have a job, own my car, raise my dog, am in graduate school, and have a life I am proud of. My money story is messy, I get addicted to shopping, I eat a whole pint of ice cream at once, and my codependency and anxious attachment can still really flare up. My adhd and biploar are medicated and under control, something that in early sobriety I couldn’t quite get the hang of. The goal for me is not to live perfectly, have a perfect life, and have no problems. The goal for me is to tend to my sobriety in a way that expands my life instead of shrinks it. 

Today my sobriety comes before everything else, because without it I lose everything. I lose my house, my car, my job, my love, my good spirit about myself. I don’t think relapse is the end of the world, and I have seen many addicts slip and come back. I have a healthy fear of drinking today. I know I don’t have one drink left in me. I have a slew of drunks, a long list of yets awaiting me, and death on my doorstep. Today I am alive because of my program, my higher power, and my sobriety. It is my reason for staying. May you find your own. 

Links : 

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/codycookparrott/
Website https://www.codycookparrott.com/
Substack https://codycookparrott.substack.com/

10% of the proceeds from each REASONS FOR LIVING newsletter go to an organization of the guest essayist’s choice. Cody has chosen Morris Home in Philadelphia, which “supports transgender and nonbinary individuals with a gender-affirming and supportive environment as they develop the knowledge, skills, and supports necessary to promote sobriety, manage emotional and behavioral difficulties, choose and maintain safe and healthy lifestyles, and develop healthy relationships with peers, family and the community.” Please consider donating to Morris Home here.

If you enjoyed this free edition of REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive two bonus personal essays by me per month, as well as a chance (also twice a month) to receive a hand-painted Bird of the Day postcard. We also have monthly Fireside Chats, which are gatherings to discuss, play, and learn about creativity and limitations.

What the Living Do
Mary Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn
it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Art by Brendan Burton

Cody states that sobriety is the thing in their life that comes before everything else. What is that thing, for you? Has it always been that way? Where did you find it, and how?

Please feel free to journal privately about this prompt, or to share it in the comments section below.

If you enjoyed this free edition of REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive two bonus personal essays by me per month, as well as a chance (also twice a month) to receive a hand-painted Bird of the Day postcard. We also have monthly Fireside Chats, which are gatherings to discuss, play, and learn about creativity and limitations.