I’m constantly reminded of reasons I’m grateful to be sober — and they always seem to show up in the least expected places. Sometimes it’s in a quiet moment with my kids. Sometimes it’s in a chaotic group chat. And sometimes, it’s a woman with a deeply southern accent on “The White Lotus” sighing, “I don’t even have my lorazepam. I’m going to have to drink myself to sleep.” Been there, girl.
The most recent reminder came courtesy of a Pentagon-level disaster: when news broke that Trump administration officials had shared classified war plans in a group chat — which accidentally included a journalist — I was instantly transported. Not because I’ve ever endangered national security, but because I remembered there was a time in my life when I couldn’t be trusted with a cell phone, a secret, or the fragile structure of my own well-being.
I’m a sober mom and a debut novelist now — not someone in a position to unravel global diplomacy — but I know what it feels like to be the source of a breach. My own breach. Emotional homeland security, if you will.
I know the incomprehensible demoralization that comes with realizing you’ve overshared something personal, raw, or reckless — and now it’s out there. Screenshot-able. Interpretable. Permanently public. A digital slip turned into a living, breathing source of shame.
My drinking was never casual. From early in my life, alcohol was a way to escape the parts of myself I didn’t yet know how to live with — grief, anxiety, shame, ambition. It started in high school, escalated in college, and, by my late 20s, I had stopped trying to convince myself I was in control. I drank to numb. To silence. To disappear.
On the outside, I was holding it together — married, trying desperately to start a family, working as a special education teacher — but behind the scenes, it was chaotic. Toward the end of my drinking career, I started needing to eject the poison from my own body just to function. Inducing vomiting became part of the routine. I found it easier to throw up at home before work than in between passing periods. I was going to have to puke either way — better to do it from the comfort of my own bathroom. And I knew I’d have to do it all again the next morning. That’s how far gone I was.
Before I got sober, I lived in a near-constant state of digital dread. I’d wake up in full-body panic, reaching for my phone before I even registered where I was. What did I post? Who did I text? Did I message my boss something unhinged and deeply earnest at midnight because I was “feeling brave”? Did I send a long, confessional message to my ex because a Taylor Swift song made me “realize some things”?
Sometimes I went further. I’d hide my phone from myself — toss it in a closet, shove it under a pile of laundry, bury it at the bottom of a drawer like a ticking bomb. I even changed the passcode during blackouts, convinced that would save me from myself. And then, inevitably, I’d spend the next morning crawling around in a cold sweat, trying to find the Post-it notes I’d left behind with the scribbled-down numbers — my own version of nuclear launch codes.
I treated my phone like it was a live wire. Swipe. Scan. Delete. Regret. Repeat. The evidence was sometimes laughable — a slurred voice memo I couldn’t bring myself to open — or sometimes quietly devastating: fractured friendships, passive-aggressive stories, vague declarations to “change everything tomorrow,” or flirtations that read more like cries for help. I spent my days trying to do emotional triage, cleaning up after a version of myself I barely recognized — but who had used my name, my voice, my heart.
There was a stretch of time, before I got sober, when I desperately wanted to get pregnant — but we weren’t. Every month felt like a quiet kind of grief, and I didn’t know how to hold it. So I drank. And during blackouts, that grief slipped out sideways.
I’d wake up the next morning with hazy flashes of having told people. Friends. Acquaintances. A woman I barely knew at a birthday party. “We’ve been trying,” I’d say, glass in hand, like I was toasting to my own disappointment.
I’d overshare about ovulation kits, about how I’d convinced myself this was the month, about how broken I felt when it wasn’t. And the next day, I’d scroll through texts, check social media, and try to piece together what I’d said — and to whom. Were people avoiding me out of pity, or were they just politely pretending to forget?
When my best friend had her baby, I went to visit her in the hospital. We’d met on the first day of kindergarten, and she’s one of the few people who knows all my strange little quirks — like how I refuse to eat foods of the same color at the same time (no orange slices and cheddar cheese on the same plate, ever). So of course I showed up, trying to act normal, trying to be present. But I wasn’t.
Just a few weeks earlier, I had gotten drunk alone during spring break and decided to repaint my living room. Somewhere in the haze, I slipped off the ladder and tore my knee in three different places. That should’ve been a wake-up call. Instead, it only deepened the spiral. I found that mixing my SSRI medication for anxiety — which was already being exacerbated by my drinking — with the newly prescribed painkillers skyrocketed me into a new form of complete oblivion.
I wanted to be a mom more than anything in the world, but standing in the parking lot of that hospital, about to witness my best friend stepping into motherhood — something I desperately longed for — I swallowed painkillers just to get through our visit. To numb the ache in my chest that she had a baby… and I had a problem.
I don’t remember holding her daughter, though there’s a photo that says I did. I’m sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, cradling a newborn, smiling like it means something. And later, still in that fog, I posted some incoherent, blubbering mess on social media about the experience — without even asking my best friend’s permission. I turned her deeply personal moment into yet another casualty of my addiction. I wish I could remember the weight of that day, but the truth is, I was too far gone.
It wasn’t just the not-getting-pregnant that broke me. It was the loss of privacy around it. The way alcohol turned my most sacred, painful longing into cocktail party small talk. I didn’t get to choose who I shared it with — my shame did.
Sobriety has changed me in a thousand ways, but maybe the most profound is this: I’m no longer afraid of my own digital trail. I go to bed remembering what I said, what I posted, what kind of damage control I won’t have to do in the morning. I wake up without dread. I don’t brace for impact. I don’t scan for wreckage. I don’t have to send follow-ups that start with, “Sorry about last night…”
What finally led me to stop drinking wasn’t a big public rock bottom — it was the quiet ache of living every day as a warning sign. On the last night I drank, I had humiliated myself at a backyard BBQ celebrating my sister-in-law and her husband’s new home. I told myself it was a big enough occasion to let loose, to not hold back — because hadn’t I earned that? The next morning, I crept into the guest bathroom — the same one where I used to make myself throw up before school so I could feel halfway sober enough to teach. I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize what I saw. Haggard. Bloated. Diminished. And then I heard a voice — quiet, firm, not my own — say, “Haven’t you had enough yet?” And I had. I walked back into our bedroom and told my husband I had a problem with alcohol. That night, I went to my first 12-step meeting. It was May 2, 2013. I’ve been sober every day since.
The miracle isn’t just that I stopped drinking — it’s that I stopped leaking. Emotion, shame, secrets, desperation — I used to hemorrhage it all, hoping someone would notice and fix me. Now, I can log off in peace. My life isn’t boring — in sobriety, I’ve had three daughters, I’m about to go on a national book tour, and I no longer throw live nukes into my own life just to feel something — but it’s stable. Held. Mine.
I worked like hell to stop being my own liability. I made peace with the past. Learned how to stay. How to shut up. How to trust myself again.
The cringiest things on my phone these days are Facebook memories from 13 years ago — time-stamped proof of a girl who was spiraling and calling it personality. I am sober and responsible for my actions because I finally care about my own name enough to protect it.
Sobriety gave me back my credibility — with others, yes, but mostly with myself. And when I think about the woman I used to be — the one frantically deleting texts, terrified of her own trail — I don’t judge her. I want to hug her. She was doing her best. She was just trying to survive.
She’s safe now. She’s here.
She’s not leaking anymore.
Originally from the Bay Area, Jessica Guerrieri lives in Davis, California, with her husband and three young daughters. Jessica has a background teaching special education but left the field to pursue a career in writing. Her debut novel, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” won the Maurice Prize for Fiction from her alma mater, UC Davis. With over a decade of sobriety, Jessica is a fierce advocate for addiction recovery. Connect with her online at jessicaguerrieri.net; on Instagram @jessicaguerrieriauthor; on X @witandspitup; and TikTok @jessstayssober.
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