I’m Struggling to Stay Sober. AA Zoom Meetings Are Keeping Me Afloat.
Maintaining sobriety can be extra challenging during a pandemic. Group meetings remind me I’m not alone.
Anyone who has traversed New York after hours is familiar with the ominous state we now find ourselves trapped inside. Wide, empty streets and the eerie silence that now extends well past dawn — the foreboding of still being awake during that fleeting antisocial hour used to be a secret handshake among hard partiers. Now we’re all in it together.
I’ve lived in New York City for the past 15 years. Throughout many of them, I went out every single night. When I first arrived here from Boston, where I went to college, I had a job in fashion. I was young, eager, and more streetwise than I let on. I always made it a point to know the person who could get me the thing that I wanted. I wasn’t after sex or money or fame — I was just trying to use the high voltage of the city to breathe life back into my youth. It would catch up to me by the end of each week. On Sundays, a day reserved for a family dinner, I’d crawl out of a hotel suite, a loft in SoHo, a brownstone in Brooklyn, or a former factory in Bushwick then hurry to meet my disappointed sister, and we’d make our homecoming in silence. Struggling to sober up on the New Jersey Transit…
