Sobriety Gave Me Back the Time to Finally Do All the Things I Always Said I Would — Here’s the List

Priya had been sober for four months when her therapist told her she needed to find one thing to do each week that had nothing to do with her recovery. Not a meeting. Not journaling about her sobriety. Something purely for her. Priya had said, without thinking very hard about it, that she had always wanted to try pottery.

She almost talked herself out of signing up. It felt frivolous when she was still in the middle of the serious work. The classes were on Thursday evenings — the time slot that had previously been reliably difficult. Friday was visible from Thursday. She found reasons the pottery could wait.

Her therapist said: go to one class. You can decide after one class whether it was worth it. She went. She was terrible. The clay went in directions she had not intended. She laughed at herself for the first time in a long time. She signed up for the next session before she left.

By month six she had a Thursday that she looked forward to instead of dreaded. She had a group of people who knew her only as a person who showed up every week to make things with clay — not as someone in recovery, not as someone who used to drink. Just a person at a pottery class. The normalcy of that was more valuable than she had known to expect.

Thursday used to be the hardest night of the week. Now it is my favourite. I am still not very good at pottery. The bowls are lopsided. The mugs handle differently to each other. None of that matters. What matters is that I have somewhere to be on Thursday that is mine, that does not involve thinking about drinking, and that produces something I made with my own hands. I did not know that was going to matter so much until it did.

On day 30 of sobriety, Marcus sat down with a notebook and made a list. It was a list of things he had said he would do someday. He had been saying someday for years. The list had been building in the back of his mind while the drinking had been consuming the front of it.

The list was longer than he had expected. Learn to play the guitar. Run a 5K. Try surfing. Read the stack of books he had been buying and not reading for three years. Take a woodworking class. Cook an actual Thanksgiving dinner from scratch. Visit his sister in Portland. Call his old friend from university who he had drifted from. Plant something and keep it alive.

He put dates next to each item. Not firm deadlines — just approximate intentions. Guitar started in month two. He was bad at it and found it deeply satisfying anyway. The 5K training started in month three. He finished his first race in month five and cried at the finish line, quietly, in a way he did not bother to hide. The books started immediately. The woodworking class happened in month seven and produced a lopsided shelf that he keeps because it is real.

He has not done everything on the list yet. Some items have been crossed off and new ones added. The list is now three pages. The list is the evidence that sobriety gives you your life back — specifically, the version of it you always said you would get to someday.

I used to think sobriety would be defined by what I gave up. The thing I did not expect was that it would be defined by what I got back. Time. Energy. The ability to follow through. The mornings that do not have to be survived. I spent a lot of years saying I would do things someday. Sobriety is the only reason someday started arriving.