Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! blew me away for many reasons. But the things that have been lingering with me the most are Cyrus’ reflections on beating their addictions and moving towards a sober life. About 2/3 of the way through the book this character explains:

“Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It meant learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and fuck and worse than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You’re moving into a house the last tenants trashed.”

Their explanation that going sober is like relearning to live, building an entirely new personality, and getting born again is something new to me. Reading this paragraph for the first time put me in a state of mild shock: it clarified that there are two people I have to deal with on my path: the one I was before I was sober and the one after.

Once that realization came through, I put the book down and asked myself why this had never come to mind before.

The past

Cyrus here portrays their addict self as a total stranger, an unidentifiable tenant of the flat you just moved in. They also portray the newly sober person as a baby, someone walking through life for the first time, having to learn everything for the first time.

In the same chapter, Cyrus characterizes their past drunk self as follows:

“For a drunk, there’s nothing but drink. There was nothing in my life that wasn’t predicated on getting drunk—either getting fucked up itself or getting money to get fucked up by working or slinging this drug for that drug or that drug for cash.”

This brutal portrayal is something I have done before.

Coming to terms with your own addiction often involves a sentiment of disgust towards past or current behaviors. The difference I’m seeing here is that those feelings I cast towards myself even after going sober, whereas Cyrus dissociates from the sick person they presumably used to be.

I had never thought about it this way.

I had never thought of building a wall and clearly delimiting the before and after. While I don’t behave the same way I used to, I can recognize that this is still in me somewhere. I have a hard time telling myself that this is all behind me now, though this might be a better way to advance.

Transition

One of the reasons I struggle to identify with this strict vision of before and after is because getting sober has never been a definite point in time. I started my journey through sobriety in 2019 and I can say that I was only fully sober five years later, in 2024.

Looking back, I now realized the importance of this transition. One of the things I was coping with during this period is the fact that I would become a different person once this transition was done. I wasn’t really reinventing myself as a sober person as much as I was progressively saying goodbye to the person I used to be.

This isn’t to say that this period wasn’t productive in my journey. During those five years, I took all the steps that led me to take the final step of committing fully to sobriety. What dragged on in this transition was the realization that sobriety is not only a change in my personal habits but also a change in everything that is related to it.

In the end, I think that it took five years to gestate the new sober person I would become. And this is a realization I’m just making now.

Anew

It has now been two years that I have been “fully sober”. This was not a goal per se when I started this journey, but it ended up being the only natural step I could take after all the steps taken before. Every milestone came naturally and on its own, without a grander scheme or path I was following, or at least nothing I could clearly see then.

The lesson I am learning through this book is that I have been rebuilding from scratch, that it is okay to leave more behind than to keep carrying baggage over.

Learning how to be from a blank slate is scary. It is way too easy to default back to who you were, and the freedom to reinvent is vertigo-inducing.

The process I am going through right now is one of acceptance of being someone different than I was before.

Digesting this separation is central to taking the next step, and this is where I am now.

And though much anxiety is stirred up, I need to remember to be kind to both of me.