“The Moment of Surrender”
I drank for twenty years.
That sentence sounds tidy. It isn’t. Twenty years is a graveyard of mornings I don’t remember waking up to, nights I barely survived, conversations I half-heard and half-destroyed. It’s years of telling myself I was fine because I still had a job, a family, a life that looked intact from the outside. It’s learning how to rot quietly.
That night wasn’t special. It didn’t feel fated. It started the same way so many others did—with an argument that escalated too fast and went too far. Words sharpened by alcohol. A look on my wife’s face I’d seen before: hurt layered over exhaustion, like she was already grieving someone who hadn’t technically left yet.
I walked out.
I didn’t pack. I didn’t think. I just drove until I landed in a hotel room that felt anonymous and temporary, like it existed for exactly this kind of moment. The carpet smelled damp. The lights were too bright. The air felt stale. I should have stopped drinking there.
I didn’t.
I drank alone, the way I had perfected over two decades. I drank to drown the anger first, then the guilt, then the panic creeping in once the alcohol stopped working. I drank out of habit. I drank because I didn’t know what else to do with myself when everything went quiet.
Eventually my body had enough.
I ended up on my knees on the bathroom floor, sweating through my clothes, gripping the edge of a toilet that felt like ice. Vomiting—again. Violently. Emptying myself of something that had already hollowed me out years ago. The taste was bitter and familiar. The room spun. My stomach cramped. My throat burned.
It was the ten-thousandth time.
That’s not exaggeration. That’s muscle memory. Same position. Same tile. Same porcelain. Same moment of humiliation where you promise yourself things you won’t remember keeping. I listened to myself breathe afterward—wet, uneven, animal. Like something injured but not dead enough to stop.
And this is where people expect the story to turn beautiful.
We imagine epiphanies as clean moments. As revelations. We picture clouds parting, light pouring in, some divine clarity washing everything away. Angels singing. Meaning arriving fully formed.
That’s not how it happens.
It never is.
This moment wasn’t beautiful. It was ugly. It was raw and degrading and stripped of dignity. My skin was slick with sweat. My mouth tasted like bile and booze. My eyes were bloodshot. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold myself up. There was vomit in the bowl and streaks of it where I’d missed. The mirror reflected a man I didn’t recognize—or worse, one I recognized too well.
There was nothing cinematic about it.
And that’s when I broke.
I cried—not softly, not gracefully—but the kind of sobbing that feels like choking. The kind that rips out of you because you’re too tired to hold it in anymore. My forehead rested against cold porcelain, and through shaking breaths I said the only honest thing I had left:
“I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
I didn’t say I’ll quit tomorrow.
I didn’t say I can handle it.
I didn’t say this is the last time.
I said I didn’t want this life.
Because alcohol hadn’t just been something I did—it had become the way I existed. It dulled my presence. It stole my patience. It made me unreliable in the moments that mattered most. It turned love into something fragile and conditional. I was there, but I wasn’t there. I was alive, but barely participating.
That moment didn’t redeem me.
It didn’t clean anything up.
It didn’t erase the damage.
Sobriety didn’t begin with strength. It began with surrender—on a filthy bathroom floor, soaked in sweat and vomit, finally admitting that the illusion of control was dead.
But that ugly moment told the truth.
And sometimes the truth doesn’t come with light or music or meaning. Sometimes it comes when you’re on your knees, exposed and exhausted, with nowhere left to lie—to yourself or anyone else.
That was the night I stopped pretending.
That was the night I chose to stay.
However, not everything is a happy ending.
Devotion Without Witness 