Helaina Hovitz | Vox

What the holidays are like for a recovering alcoholic like me

2018-12-25T13:16:08-05:00

’Twas the night before Christmas, and I really, really wanted a freakin’ drink.

During Christmas dinners past, between courses, you could always find me ducking into my room to hide. I felt incredibly uncomfortable at the table, but I never drank in front of my family — my parents knew I had a problem. I usually held tight and counted the minutes before I could escape and meet up with my friends for a drink (or four). As loving as my family is, they have their moments — and the holidays seem to bring a lot more of them. Admittedly, most families are like this, which is why none of my friends punch the air and grin as they declare, “Yeah, I’m going home for Thanksgiving!” It’s usually more of a dejected sigh of resignation. Understandably, many of us either drink to get through it or get through it to drink.

A few years ago, though, the holidays became different for me. At 22 years old, in November 2011, I decided to get sober for good. The timing wasn’t necessarily intentional. In fact, the timing was horrible; a more-than-challenging feat during that matrix of Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and everyone’s favorite amateur hour — New Year’s Eve. The holidays are the time of year when the child in all of us feels the most temptation to overindulge in, well, just about everything.

Throughout college, I was a social drinker who couldn’t stop once I started. I held down an internship and a part-time job as a reporter while maintaining a 3.8 GPA throughout all four years of school. High-functioning, smart, and responsible, I loved that drinking let me throw caution to the wind — it was like a reward. It allowed me to go against my better judgment and act “wild and young,” to be really spontaneous. However, if I tried to stop after one or two drinks, I was either a) unsuccessful or b) left with that empty disappointment that lingers when all of the presents have been opened on Christmas morning and it’s only 10 am. Now what?

The sickening realization that I didn’t drink like “normal” people dawned on me slowly, but I didn’t know how to stop without destroying my social life. As a city girl raised on fabulous, bubbly Sunday brunches and packed, Patron-fueled parties, making the decision to stop for good was terrifying.

So I didn’t make the decision. Instead, I did all sorts of things to try to control my drinking. I’ll stop for a month. I’ll just have one. I’ll just have two. Well, I’ll eat a lot, so maybe I can have three. I’ll switch from hard liquor to wine. I’ll only drink at dinner. These worked temporarily, but I always fell right back off the wagon.

I woke up shaking and throwing up more mornings than I can remember. After two, three, then four times in the emergency room for alcohol poisoning, it was clear that it had gone beyond the scope of a harmless social habit. I began to get violent with my boyfriend when I drank, wake up in places I didn’t recognize, and keep my mother up at night worrying where I was (my phone was usually dead or lost). Long story short, I spent Thanksgiving of 2010 hooked up to an IV, hospitalized for alcohol poisoning once again, and it still took me another year to reach out for help.

Why I finally got help

It’s no coincidence, of course, that sometime between November and early January, a new slew of 20-somethings always find their way into substance abuse recovery programs. Many of us were just social drinkers who knew when to say “when,” but couldn’t. The consequences gradually became greater, especially after the “we’re in college” excuse disappeared. In the midst of excuses to overdo it and shattered expectations of the perfect family Christmas, something happened to make us realize that our drinking wasn’t like other people’s, that we were powerless over the compulsion to drink to excess, and that it was starting to make our lives really unmanageable.

There wasn’t any one “moment” for me. It wasn’t the overwhelming number of days spent crying and throwing up, holding my head in the agony of a migraine, that forced me to say enough is enough. It wasn’t my then-boyfriend’s question, “How long are you going to keep doing this to yourself?” It wasn’t the panic attack I had when I realized that in a drunken stupor, I’d left my BlackBerry in a puddle overnight, or the ones I had when I woke up next to a complete stranger.

It was the gradual realization that I had a disease, one that made excessive drinking look like a choice. No sane person endures so much physical and emotional anguish and continues to drink — that’s why it’s called a disease. What caused me to throw in the towel was the week in late October 2011 when I managed to get drunk night after night, each one worse than the last, after promising myself — pleading with myself — that I wouldn’t.

On the mid-November day that I first walked into a 12-step recovery meeting, I was shocked to see that so many young girls were in the same boat as I was. I thought sobriety was for prudes who did nothing interesting with their lives and had no idea what real problems were, but these were stylish women pursuing amazing careers and attending prestigious universities. I was invited to a booze-free party after the meeting; I was just one day sober when I agreed.

The people at this party could have easily been gathered together inside the hottest club West Chelsea has to offer. Not only did they look cool as hell, but they were the happiest crowd of people I’d seen in a long, long time, and the most cheerful I’d ever seen sans alcohol. All of them were in the program — some had five years, some five months, others had decades.

I stood awkwardly in the doorway clutching a red plastic cup full of seltzer and watching dozens of people laughing, chatting, dancing, and singing, doing everything they normally would have if there had been vodka in the punch. They looked like they were comfortable with themselves. The laughter was real. The friendship was genuine — you could feel the warmth and the love radiating out of them — and they all had this ease about them that, even at my drunkest, I couldn’t quite cultivate. Best of all, none of them looked like they were dying to escape.

“I felt so awkward I wanted to die,” one attendee later told me, laughing. “I didn’t realize how socially anxious I was until I didn’t have a drink in my hand.” I could relate.

That’s how a lot of us feel, but didn’t realize it, because 20-something binge drinking is so normal in our culture.

How SantaCon made me glad to be sober

Case in point: SantaCon, a Christmas disaster that can only be described as a calamity on 34th Street — and every other street in New York City. (Sadly, it’s now also a nationwide epidemic.) College kids (and children of all ages) dress up as Santa or scantily clad Mrs. Claus and take to their city’s bars and restaurants, later spilling out onto the streets, where they continue drinking.

The original idea for SantaCon started off as a very merry concept: People would dress up and parade through the streets spreading goodwill and good cheer, singing Christmas carols, and giving out gifts to strangers. Unfortunately, it has been completely overhauled into an event in which adults act like out-of-control kids and hundreds of thousands of people confuse Christmas “spirit” with “spirits.”

I had about 30 days of sobriety under my belt when the SantaCon “parade” took to the streets in 2011. The “SantaConers” start as early as 10 am, and that year, by lunchtime, my Lower Manhattan neighborhood smelled like one big brewery. Last time I checked, walking down the street and drinking from clear plastic cups full of beer was illegal, but it seems to be tolerated on SantaCon day.

By 1 pm, people were urinating in public, passing out in the street, keeling over on the sidewalk, screaming profanities, and throwing up on subways and in parks. My elderly neighbors were pushed and knocked over, and children were shoved aside. Many SantaConers needed to be taken care of, pulled away from a fistfight or carried home, passed out from all the excitement like small children after a wedding.

As people dodged profanity-screaming elves and belligerent reindeer running amuck, I heard one little boy ask his father, “Daddy, why are Santa and the reindeer acting like that?” Another little girl hid underneath her mother’s coat, and others literally ran away crying, repeatedly looking back over their shoulders in terror as the crowds gained momentum.

As the Christmas-themed pub crawl of college-aged clowns clamored through my neighborhood, all I could think was, “Holy shit, I’m glad that’s not me.” Not that it would have been me — I was more the type to drink in lounges and wine bars than partake in out-on-the-street reveling. I wouldn’t have been caught dead at a pub crawl. Still, as someone who understands the need to take a mini Christmas vacation from reality, I saw something familiar as I looked into the glazed eyes of one slutty Mrs. Claus: the need to get obliterated, and what a mess it looks like when you do.

For a long time, I was the one wearing a costume — and I wore it all the time. I liked my tiny, boozy escape from reality, a carefree feeling I’d chase and chase as it slipped right through my hands. I couldn’t get enough when I drank: more, more, more. I kept chasing that warm feeling I got when I hit that perfect level between tipsy and drunk — but I just couldn’t stop there. As a result, I ended up sick, ashamed, absent, or blacked out more times than I can recall.

Seeing how disgusting SantaCon was affirmed my commitment to never drink again. However, I had to admit that the tamer members of the bunch looked like they were having a great time, and that triggered something I had struggled with my whole life: fear of missing out.

Such a feeling was an evil Grinch that presented itself whenever something was going on without my involvement. The Grinch pointed a big hairy finger directly at my fear of what other people thought of me, whether I looked popular, cool, or pretty enough. I had so little confidence in myself that I put all of the value on the external. Watching them parade by, erupting in laughter, I heard my aunt’s enabling voice in the back of my head:

“You’re young; you’re supposed to go out and have fun,” she would say. “When I was your age, I had a thousand friends and we went out every weekend. This is your time.”

My aunt was a party girl at my age — think Studio 54 — who knew all of the right people and was out every night. She’s still a party girl now. She lives on the Upper East Side with my uncle, and I would see her and speak to her often. So I regularly found myself on the defensive, bracing for questions about what I’d been doing and whom I was dating. I was especially careful not to divulge compromising information that would welcome more unsolicited opinions.

But of course, then there was the big Kahuna. The most challenging night of the season for me was not SantaCon but Christmas dinner with my relatives — every single one of them.

My first sober Christmas was challenging — but my new friends helped me through it

Throughout the day, my mind replayed old tapes of Christmases past, churning up anxiety and forming negative expectations that created a nice big bubble of dread in the pit of my stomach. The criticism, the judgment, the well-intentioned yet unsolicited advice salted the wounds of my own insecurities, and last year was no different.

“Are you going to any parties?” my aunt asked as she spooned her baked ziti onto my plate. (She knows I don’t eat pasta.)

“Yes,” I said, my voice cracking with hesitation. “There’s a party at this girl’s house.”

“What kind of party? Is it on the Lower East Side? Where are the cool people going these days?”

In hindsight, I see that telling her it was a sober party was a mistake. I know that now.

“What are you going to do, have no life anymore?” she cried in response. “Those people are lame. Go do something fun. Live it up!”

Fortunately, I had been given one of my gifts early: nearly 20 new numbers in my phone, all belonging to friends and other women in my support network who would listen, laugh, and help me feel true relief. Calling in their support was more comforting than any amount of Baileys. After my aunt’s comment, I furiously texted Allie, who reassured me, “Soon, you and I are going to be able to go anywhere and do anything we want, living lives fuller than we ever could have imagined.”

“This is a very short period of time,” Allie said, “that we are using to get ready for the best years of our lives.”

Throughout the night, I surreptitiously and periodically backed away into my room, but this time not alone; I reached out to girls who knew how to turn off the valve that began steaming inside me when my uncle raised his voice. When that happened, my friend Claire and I ran through a list of what I was grateful for.

“It’s easy to see what’s wrong and get annoyed, but it takes practice to start learning how to see the good in people and in each situation,” she said.

Perhaps even more useful — for many of us — is the advice that Phoebe, another friend from my recovery group, gave me: “Hum a little tune and pretend that you’re watching and listening to someone else’s family.”

Learning to be patient and to accept my family as they are, instead of how I wish they would be, took time. They’re human, I realized eventually — fallible and flawed, just like me, just like all of us. When I stopped expecting them to be anything else, I started seeing the best in them, which wasn’t hard once I had the right lenses on.

Eventually, I was able to stay present, no longer jumping out of my skin or champing at the bit to escape their clutches and flee the situation. Despite temptation, I continued making my own transition to adulthood, gripping reality tightly even when I wanted to let go through hot toddies and spiked cider.

My first sober New Year’s Eve, my favorite midnight kiss didn’t take place on a vodka-soaked dance floor as champagne rained down from above. I was sprawled on my bed, sober, getting smooches from my then-boyfriend’s dog, Nayla. I was finally growing up, facing my choices, and moving through the stress of uncomfortable family dinners and social situations without picking up a drink.

I can’t say I miss the taste of alcohol, because I always shot it back like medicine, hating the flavor of booze but loving the effect. I’ll admit there are days I wish I could drink up a bit of that warm, fuzzy feeling of relaxation to take the edge off, but the trade-off is more than worth it.

I’ve found what Allie said to hold true: I can go anywhere and have a good time, and I never feel like I’m being shortchanged just because I’m not drinking. Now my nights are filled with authentic laughter and fun, sometimes at a “normal” party, sometimes at a sober one, sometimes at a dinner party full of drinkers. Regardless, I know for sure that I’m definitely not missing out on anything.

As for the holidays this year, I am incredibly grateful for a family that, despite their kinks, loves each other unconditionally.

For the record, I’m far from a prohibitionist. If you can hold your liquor, by all means, go ahead. I toast you with my rum-free eggnog! Peace of mind, I now know, is what I’d been looking for all along — I just never thought I could achieve it, ever, let alone without a bottle of wine to create the false, quickly fading feeling for me. The realization that I finally know what real peace and happiness feel like — well, that’s a very merry feeling.

Helaina Hovitz is a born and raised New Yorker who has written for the New York Times, Teen Vogue, and Salon.com, among other publications. She is currently writing her first book and has the unshakable notion that she can help save the world.

Melissa Mendes is the author of the Xeric Award–winning graphic novel Freddy Stories. Her current comic series Lou is being published by Oily Comics. She lives and works in western Massachusetts.

This essay originally appeared on Narrative.ly in 2012.

My husband’s Orthodox Jewish family pressured us to call off our wedding

2017-12-27T09:00:04-05:00

I wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that my fiancé’s father had announced he would “wear black to mourn our wedding day.”

I’ve never met the guy, but I knew enough about him not to expect anything different. We had hoped to have the support of my fiancé’s mother, who, just weeks before, had come into our home, embraced me, and said, “We’re family now. You have us.” She’d even sounded excited when we called to tell her how the proposal went down on the phone. But not 24 hours after our little engagement banner flickered across Facebook, the celebratory comments were edged out by a hysterical phone call.

“How could you do this to me? To the family?” his mother cried. “Why did you have to announce it publicly? You’re so selfish!”

She had, apparently, already been flooded with calls herself — even accosted at the grocery store — in their modern Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey.

“What a shame,” people said to Lee’s mother when they heard of our engagement. “This is so terrible.”

So in turn, she told him, “You’re going to realize you’re wrong. You’re making a mistake.” The groupthink had won out.

When she added the less-than-comforting caveat, “This has nothing to do with Helaina. It’s not personal,” she was telling the truth. It’s not personal. It’s just because I’m only half-Jewish.

During one of my regular late-night scrolls through Pinterest, weighing the differences between high-top and low-top floral arrangements, my aunt’s name popped up on my caller ID.

“You’ll never guess who just called me,” she said.

It was the long-lost love of her life from 40 years ago, who had left her instead of marrying her because his Jewish mother threatened to disown him.

“He was carrying on about how he was so stupid, that he’s divorced now and miserable,” she relayed. “He kept saying he made a huge mistake.”

The year was 1973, and my aunt Fran, from my mother’s Italian (and non-Jewish) side of the family, was 23. A young man named Sam selling cosmetics approached her at the gym, saying, “I know you. I saw you at a club last weekend. I noticed you. I remember exactly what you were wearing.”

My aunt shrugged it off with a smile. She was used to every guy on the block approaching her to dance, even when she was taken. She was that girl. She was on the scene back in the disco days of New York, the life of every party. To this day, she has not met a party she doesn’t love.

Sam tried several times to get her number, and when she finally gave in, they went to a place called Adam’s Apple, a club on the Upper East Side, for their first date. He ordered fish and explained that he was “kosher.”

“I looked at him like he had 14 heads,” she told me. “I didn’t know what kosher was, but he explained it. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t care. I ordered a burger.”

What began as a game of hard to get quickly spiraled into an intense love affair: They went to Las Vegas to see Frank Sinatra, they went to see Little Anthony and the Imperials perform at the Waldorf Astoria, an occasion to which Sam wore his best green corduroy suit — which was in, back in the day, my aunt assured me — and to see boxing matches at Madison Square Garden.

Within a few weeks, he told her: “I could never marry you because you’re not Jewish.”

“What did I care?” my aunt said. “I was 23. I wasn’t looking to get married.”

As months turned into years, my aunt’s feelings about marriage changed, but Sam’s did not, and neither did his family’s.

“I thought I was going to be able to convince them to accept her. I was young and thought I could do anything I put my mind to,” Sam told me. “I believed in the end it would be okay, and that if my family didn’t come around, I’d be strong enough to marry her anyway.”

But the ultimatum did finally come, and Sam spent months in a depression, feeling stuck, unable to choose between the love of his life and the family he loved — and the religion he truly believed in. No matter what he chose in this situation, it could be a “huge mistake.”

There was only one way to find out: make the decision, the same one my fiancé found himself faced with years later.

I met Lee in the fall of 2013 after he pitched me one of his clients for a story. He worked in public relations, and I was a freelance journalist.

Our relationship was healthy and exciting and honest from the beginning, and we bonded over many of our shared values. As we walked around the outskirts of his Brooklyn neighborhood and passed Hasidic couples or families — this was before I knew exactly how strict of a background he came from — Lee would often comment on the faults many religions have, that they push people apart and keep them separate.

“I went to Sunday school, I celebrate Hanukkah with our little electric menorah, but I’m not really religious,” I told him. “I enjoy a lot of Buddhist teachings and principles, but I don’t even know if I’d define myself as a Buddhist. I just believe in being good to other people and to yourself, being generous, open … stuff that just seems kind and human.”

“Thank you! Exactly!” he practically shouted, kissing me gently on the mouth. It was as if he had found someone who agreed with him for the first time in two and a half decades.

I later found out that was precisely the case.

If Lee actually practiced the religion, his family’s objections might be easier to understand. But he doesn’t. He left that community years ago — quietly, though, so nobody outside his family really knew.

One day, about six months into our relationship and long past saying “I love you,” he started to act a little strange after a trip to his family’s house for Passover, and it took me a week of relentless journalistic digging to find out what was up.

We were sitting on the bed in the apartment he shared with his former college roommate in a second-story walk-up in Brooklyn. The window was cracked open, the clouds and the setting sun frozen behind the stone angel that topped a nearby church. The windowsill was lined with a couple of open cans of Pepsi, his watch, a bag of Cheez Doodles, and seashells from our first vacation together, when we knew that yes, this was it.

My heart raced as I waited for it. Something bad happened. He doesn’t love me anymore. He’s been diagnosed with a horrible disease.

“My family told me if I ever married you, they would disown me, because you’re not Jewish.”

“That’s all?” I asked with a smile and visible relief. He was stunned that I wasn’t flipping out, and I explained that, if anything, I was concerned for him; that I didn’t want to break up his family and wouldn’t make him choose.

“You’re not going to make me choose, but they are. And if they’re going to force me to choose, that’s the easiest choice I’ll ever make,” he said.

The most common reaction when I tell people what’s happening with my fiancé’s family is shock and disgust.

“Hello, what year is this?” they gawk. “How can they do this to him? That’s honestly just sick and sad. I’m so sorry.”

I tried to arrange visits with his mother, brother, and sister, hoping they would come around. I never got to meet his father, who outright refused. We showed up, going to a couple of Lee’s friends’ Orthodox weddings, and met several dirty looks and whispers with smiles.

When we began planning our own wedding, we chose a Sunday for the ceremony so they could all attend (no traveling on Friday night or until sundown Saturday), and made sure kosher meal options were available.

One of Lee’s friends declined the invitation to be a groomsman because, “Well, you know. You understand.”

Lee told his friend that, yes, he did understand, texted him back, “All good,” and went back to watching the basketball game.

“It’s not all good!” I said, hand on my hip, standing in front of the TV, practicing for wifehood. “What does that mean, ‘He discussed it with his wife’s family and everyone thinks it’s best not to’? Why the fuck is it anyone’s business? He’s your friend! Their families aren’t even going to be there!”

I knew better than to drive a wedge between a man and his childhood friends, but I still wanted to angrily Sharpie through their names on our invitation list.

The whole fiasco, while disappointing, had a silver lining: the opportunity to see Lee communicate his own strong convictions in a rational and respectful way.

Toward the latter half of Sam and Aunt Fran’s six years together, the pressure began to build. At 27, she was thinking about marriage, and whereas Sam once believed he would be able to convince people to come around, that he might even have the strength to break away from the entire community and accept it if his friends disowned him, now he was literally pulling his hair out.

He was feeling pressure from both sides to choose either the love of his life, my aunt, or his family and the ability to attend his relatives’ birthdays and graduations.

“I don’t know what to do,” he would sob. “I don’t know what to do.”

My aunt offered to convert to Judaism, but even then, they would not be accepted since the bloodline of their children would not be fully Jewish.

In that relationship, my aunt says, she felt like she was the other woman and Sam’s wife was his religion.

“Some people have the strength to walk away, and other people can’t,” she said.

As for the guilt she would have felt if he did choose her over his family, she doesn’t think it would have been as bad as he thought it would have been. But the forbidden love affair had become a source of strain and tension, always in the back of their minds, lingering over every kiss and every day that passed, as more and more of their circle of friends got married.

In Sam’s apartment on 31st Street, the dozens of conversations finally came to one final talk, one final night they would spend together. Holding each other, crying, knowing that this night would be their last, it was more painful and tormenting, perhaps, for him, than it was for her, because he was the one making the decision.

“I prayed that night, for her to be healed, for myself to be healed, and I wondered, and still do, why am I suffering?” Sam said. “Why am I being tormented? Why can’t two people just be in love and be happy?”

Sam spent a year grieving before he met another woman — a Jewish girl, just 17 years old to his 28. She was nice, but, he says, there was no doubting it was “different.”

After he got married, he contacted my aunt several times. My aunt will tell you that just six months in, he asked her to go away with him, to skip town, which she turned down. He will tell you that he reached out to her over the years just to say hello, that he missed her, that he wanted to see how she was doing.

“I wouldn’t trade those six years for anything,” my aunt says. “We had what most people didn’t have forever. I know what a soul mate is, and what’s what we were. Most people just say they were, but we were.”

My father called Lee’s mother to ask whom invitations should be sent out to, even if there was no chance any of her family members would attend. It was, of course, a gesture of respect.

“Will it be a religious ceremony?” she asked him.

“No, the kids want to choose a nondenominational justice of the peace,” my dad said.

After three weeks without a response from his mother, Lee finally called to ask her himself. I believe her answer would have been “no” even if we did have a rabbi and a chuppah.

Like my aunt, I accept it, and I understand it, and that does not mean I’m okay with it.

When things really came to a head, I overheard him in the other room.

“This is why I can’t stand this religion. Can’t you see what it’s doing? You love Helaina, I’m your son, yet somehow this is distressing for everyone? It’s crazy,” he said. “I don’t understand why the opinions of strangers matter to you so much. I’m sorry you feel it’s selfish, but we literally aren’t doing anything wrong or anything hurtful.”

He was standing up for me, and for us, but really, he was standing up for himself.

Sam’s marriage ended in divorce, but not before Sam and his modern Orthodox wife had three children together. And when they got divorced after 19 years, he called my grandmother to try to track down my aunt.

I was 11 at the time, and I remember the way my grandma said in that sweet, angelic way, that Sam had called, saying his name in a way that was playfully mischievous. Whoever he was, she liked the guy, and she got a kick out of the fact that he’d called.

My aunt, by then, was married, having just officially tied the knot in Las Vegas on a whim after a common-law marriage that spanned nearly two decades.

“Maybe I was lonely; maybe I just wanted to reconnect with my first love,” Sam says of that decision to make the call.

One thing was unmistakable: He told her he felt that he had “made a mistake.”

Perhaps he had already attended all of those family events he would have been banned from, or perhaps, with enough decades to reflect, he knew he did make the wrong choice, and was hoping for a second chance.

Out of curiosity, I asked Sam: “What would you do if one of your three children wanted to marry someone who wasn’t Jewish?”

“I wouldn’t approve of it,” he said. “I was brought up with these values, and it’s been in my blood. I would tell any young man that’s part of the Orthodox religion not to get involved with a non-Jewish woman. The pain is too much, as is the family destruction.”

After some more consideration, he added, “If it was the only way, and one of my children loved them, I think I would want to try and understand, have them convert or whatever. I don’t know how to think differently.”

While Lee’s ability to think differently has ended up estranging him from a select few people, it has ultimately solidified the feeling that our decision to get married is the furthest thing from a mistake either of us has ever made. We believe that if you’re not actually harming anyone or anything, pursuing your own happiness is nothing to feel guilty about.

As for the wedding itself, we’re looking forward to dancing an entirely secular hora with friends and family who have no qualms about celebrating with us.

And we did end up choosing a Jewish man to marry us: a standup comedian who has his own dog rescue and could not be more perfect.

Helaina Hovitz is an editor and journalist living in Lower Manhattan who has written for the New York Times, Glamour, Salon, Vice, the New York Observer, Forbes, Teen Vogue, and others. She is the author of After 9/11 and co-founder and editorial director of Headlines for the Hopeful.

This essay originally appeared on Narrative.ly.