Pale Green Moth
Many of you already know my story around getting sober on February 1, 2013. What some of you don’t know is about the text message I received that morning—and the wordsI sent back. This is that story.
As rock bottom goes, I woke in a bad way, in the unfamiliar basement of a house.
Dignity and dopamine had long since decomposed; rotten from the outside in, and then from the inside out. I didn’t know where I was, or who I was. But I did, suddenly, know one thing:
I’m an addict, and an alcoholic, and I need help.
The thought came abruptly. Loudly. Straight from my core to the cosmos, like a brand-new constellation of cognition.
In the dreary dawn light from a cellar window, I rolled over, reaching blindly to the floor, desperate for my phone to be there. My shaky hands found it, and I allowed myself a shallow exhale of relief when I saw it still had battery.
I opened the first text and found the thread that would change everything:
“How dare you,” it read.
The message was from a peripheral friend, Natalie. A former girlfriend of a best friend. As I stared at her words, shards from the night before assembled vaguely into view:
Drinks and wide-bore straws, neon lights and pounding eardrums. I remembered piling into a stranger’s car, and the insatiable itch inside my brain that needed more—always trapped inside a body that could never get enough.
Somewhere during the night, I had messaged Natalie asking for her boyfriend’s number, so I could get his dealer’s number, so I could get a bag that gave me a reason to live—but, ironically, was also paving my path to die.
Her text went on:
“You know that Brian is trying to get clean right now. And you’re going to ask me to ask him for his dealer’s number?”
She was right.
I had tried to use a person—her person—as a tool. Only later would I understand how dangerous merely having a dealer’s number could be; how the weight of a contact could sit in my phone like a loaded gun.
What happened next, as my sponsor would later tell me, was a split second of divine intervention paired with willingness.
“You’re right,” I typed back to her, from a place outside my body. “And I think I need help.”
Then, despite the awfulness of me, she answered:
“Come over.”
After a series of taxis and frozen concrete curbs, I showed up at Natalie’s house—utterly dead, save for the tiny flicker of hope she’d extended in the form of an open door.
From her living room floor, she told me about a friend she knew in a 12-step program.
When I asked Natalie if she thought I was an alcoholic, she said she wasn’t sure—but that she thought I had lost my way.
She couldn’t give me an answer, but she gave me something else that morning; something I’d never had: grace.
Not grace in the way of softness, but grace in the way of prayer. Grace as an undeserved favor. Grace as the spiritual spackle that can only be mixed from a compassionate heart.
That day, I went home and took several “Am I an Alcoholic?” quizzes online.
I went to a meeting that night—circular, candlelit, safe.
I connected with the woman Natalie put me in touch with. We are both still sober today.
Natalie allowed me to say, for the first time, “I need help.”
From there, I could talk to my mom. I could talk to myself.
It started with my realization, but it was shepherded by Natalie’s words:
Come over.