255. Whenever I Feel Afraid - Sarah Levy
Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)
In my early months of recovery, I grieved my old life and the party girl persona that allowed me to mask insecurities.
I have always been afraid to fail. At a school choir performance when I was six, I stood up on a piano bench and launched into a solo rendition of “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” from the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I. All eyes were on me, and I was nervous. In a home video, my voice shakes as I start to sing, but the lyrics carry me forward.
Whenever I feel afraid / I hold my head erect / And whistle a happy tune / so no one will suspect / I'm afraid
Two decades later, I had perfected the art of faking it. I was in my early 20s and frequently found myself waking up on sticky couches, dazed and hungover in the aftermath of blackouts. No one suspected I had a problem with alcohol; I was young, accomplished, and partied socially, never alone or first thing in the morning. Despite my external facade, a voice deep within had started whispering the same refrain: You need to stop drinking.
I tried and failed to quit. A two-week stint at 23, a dry month at 25. These starts and stops were frustrating, but essential for ultimately surrendering to sobriety at 28.
In my early months of recovery, I grieved my old life and the party girl persona that allowed me to mask insecurities. At the same time, I started to cherish the seeds of sobriety I was planting. At three months sober, when I ordered a virgin Bloody Mary at brunch in New York City, the waitress accidentally served me the alcoholic variety. I felt the vodka burn as I took my first sip, but it was too late to spit it out.
Out on the sidewalk, January wind whipping across my cheeks, I called my dad in tears. Did I have to start over? My dad reassured me that the sip didn’t count as a slip. I hadn’t intended to drink, therefore my sobriety was intact. His response was comforting; I couldn’t bear the thought of failing at this again.
I started writing about my road to recovery, and a few years later, my memoir, Drinking Games, was published. In going public with my sobriety, I discovered a beautiful community of people who related to my struggles. I no longer worried about drinking; I didn’t miss the way alcohol left me feeling shriveled like a prune. Instead, I feared that my sobriety would get stale as the sheen of early recovery started to wear off. I worried about setting a good example or failing my readers.
My instinct was to fake my way through and whistle a happy tune so no one would suspect I was afraid. But over time, I began to reframe my fears of failure as powerful pieces of information. We are afraid to fail at the things we care about. My fears of failure are a beautiful reminder of everything recovery has given me—everything I fought so hard to gain and don’t want to lose.
- Sarah Levy
