"She Felt Like a Stranger in Her Own Land" by Maggie R.

Getting sober in San Francisco was weird. So much of my geography of the city was built around places I drank–even neutral zones like parks and a bus line here or there were colored by memories (or lack thereof) of bottles and cans in brown paper bags…

When I started AA it was like wearing a new pair of glasses. Now I was going to meetings in places where my previous experiences were blurry memories, but trying to reorient my brain to see them differently. There were whole new networks of people where the boozy friends once were. I had to learn how to interact with humans sober–how does one exactly start a conversation? How do you show you're interested in what a person is saying? What do people, um, do when they aren't drinking? 

On top of that I had to interact with my old friends in new ways. Maybe go over to my friend's house who just had a baby and give the baby a bath, maybe show up for a (sober) writing group. There was a lot more to life than sitting around at a bar refusing alcohol while everyone else drank.

I still feel like a stranger to my old self in some ways, still learning to walk steadily in my new land. Maybe it will always be like this, but I hope it won't.