The truth about sobriety? Here's my answer

Empty glass sits on dark brown wooden table next to brick wall and window

By Madeline Cash

Dec. 31, 2024 3 AM PT

“The Shining” (book 1977, film 1980) is about a white-knuckle alcoholic’s descent into his disease and its effects on his mind, career and family. I didn’t learn this until recently. I just thought it was about how scary it is to be married to a writer.

I moved from L.A. to New York City three years ago as a writer and representative of a small literary magazine that I ran out of my downtown apartment with my friend Anika. As editors we oversaw the publication of seven issues, each culminating in what felt like a truly awesome (biblical sense) response followed by a truly awesome (colloquial sense) party. Each issue wrapped with a toast and a well-earned drink.

“It’s insanity,” they say in AA, “doing the same thing and expecting different results.” Alcoholics have a lot of sayings. They say that alcoholics like to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. They say, “You know what it’s like when you drink. You don’t know what it’s like when you stop.”

But I don’t always know what it’s like when I drink. I’ve lost conversations, birthdays, weddings, a car. Once I drove home so drunk that I parked in someone else’s driveway. In the morning, when I didn’t find my car in its car spot, I assumed it had been stolen and filed a police report.

I had my first ever drink at age 12, a hurricane, then a signature of the Olive Garden. The laminated, yellowing menus read, “When you’re here, you’re family,” so I sat with my new family drinking hurricanes until my mouth turned blue.

I’m not a quitter. I still have MoviePass and some money in Bitcoin, and until recently I had all of my Beanie Babies saved for a rumored value increase. Running a magazine so rooted in nightlife, I didn’t want the party to end. I didn’t want to quit.

It took years into my tenure at the magazine before I found myself in an overlit church basement for my first meeting. I had been going to the same parties, expecting different results. Something had to change. When the alcoholics told me to pick a higher power and pray, I said I didn’t know how. They said: Just get on your knees. They told me that the spiritual part of the program is like the wet part of the ocean. It’s intrinsic. This was the hardest pill for me to swallow (and I loved swallowing pills). Who would be my God?

In the beginning, I searched for sobriety loopholes. What about micro-dosing? What about drugs with which I never previously had a problem? What if I just drank on weekends and municipal holidays or after 5 and never alone? I tried to further escape myself. Can I get a dog? Get bangs? Get 90 days, said my sponsor.

Six weeks into AA and I found myself at my local bar in a Chinatown basement promoting the magazine. I wasn’t asking for permission or forgiveness. I was asking for a cigarette from a man who’d been expelled from college for sexual misconduct. The desire to rejoin the party was burning. It felt like I was on fire. I went to the bathroom of the bar and got on my knees. Unlike the other times I’d knelt there, throwing up into the stickered toilet, this time, I prayed. I told myself that in one year, I’ll have been sober for one year.

Stephen King took offense to Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of “The Shining.” The book was a rounded portrait of a man fighting his alcoholism. The film is less sympathetic to its protagonist. At the end of the book, the hotel blows up, and at the end of Kubrick’s movie the hotel freezes. That’s the difference: burning vs. freezing.

Every surface of my apartment was covered in packaging materials and back issues of the magazine stacked into neat towers. Each was a well-earned drink, a testament to a prolific career in partying. As I got my footing in the program, I understood things would need to be different. Only then did they start falling into place. The car I’d drunkenly lost was eventually discovered in the driveway of an abandoned house, half on the lawn. The catalytic converter had been stolen, so some theft had occurred, in the end.

I made more changes, giving away my Beanie Babies to a neighbor kid who’d never heard of Princess Diana but appreciated them all the same. To the kid, they were just bears.

Shopping, caffeine, work, exercise — everything has become my higher power. I’m still lost. The designations I once had for myself — “editor,” “party girl” — are overwritten by less favorable ones. I don’t know what comes next, for the magazine or myself. Hi, I’m Madeline and I’m a _____.

It burns less every day. Twelve isn’t that many steps; I still live in a five-floor walk up. I walk into each meeting and know I’m in the right place. When you’re here, you’re family.

The truth is that it’s hard. The truth is that sometimes I can’t get out of bed and I’ve lost 20 pounds and I have to deal with the wreckage from all of the hurricanes in my past. But I’ve found new basements to hang out in and I can remember names and nights and holidays and weddings and I’m here if you need me, because now I can be.

Madeline Cash is a writer and founding editor of Forever Magazine. Her debut novel is forthcoming in winter 2026.