I got sober at thirty-one. People who haven't done this imagine it as addition - you add clarity, health, years. In certain ways it is. But there's a part nobody warned me about, which is that sobriety is also a subtraction.

The person I was while drinking was a person. A problematic one with a bad relationship with consequences, yes. But a person with a social identity, a way of being in rooms, a role in groups, a kind of ease that I could turn on with the right input. Getting sober meant losing access to that person. Not reforming them. Losing them. They were partly chemical and the chemical was gone.

I showed up to the same parties, the same bars, the same friend groups, now without the thing that had generated my version of being there. I was a cover version of a song, technically correct, recognizable if you listened carefully, but missing something in the original // recording that I hadn't known was there until it was absent. People treated me the same. I was not the same.

The work of sobriety that no one talks about is not the not-drinking. That's the first thing and it's hard and then it becomes background. The work is constructing a self that does not depend on a substance to become present. That's not a work-through. That's a building project, and I'm still building.

The irony: I'm more here now than I've ever been. Fully in the room in a way I never managed drunk. And yet there are moments in certain company when the person I was before shows up like a ghost and I feel the absence like a missing tooth.

Have you ever given something up that was also giving you up? What did sobriety - from anything - cost you?