Sobriety Has Brought Me Face to Face With the Damage I Have Caused

By Gogo Bathini Mbatha

There is a cruel contradiction in getting sober: you can finally become the person you should have been, only to discover that some people will never know that person because they are still living with the memory of who you were.

I have had to learn that sobriety can give you your life back without giving you your past back. It can clear your mind, steady your hands and return you to yourself, but it cannot return the years you surrendered to alcohol, rebuild every relationship that collapsed beneath its weight or erase the things people saw you do while you were drinking.

You can wake up sober and remain, in somebody else’s memory, the alcoholic you used to be. That is perhaps the deepest wound alcohol left me with.

My dignity vanished with alcohol. I do not mean that I lost a little of it, or that there were parts of me I was ashamed of while other parts remained intact. I mean that I lost it completely. The only part that seemed to survive was the dignity given to me by people who had never met me in person, people who knew me from a distance and therefore had never been close enough to witness what alcohol was doing to my life.

For those who had been close to me, I watched my dignity disappear in front of my own eyes, until I could almost see it going down the toilet with my drunken piss.

What makes that memory so painful now is that I can see the destruction with a clarity I did not possess while I was drinking. At the time, I was not standing outside myself and watching a life being dismantled; I was inside the addiction, moving from one drink to the next, gradually becoming less concerned with what I was losing.

Now, with sobriety, I can look back and understand that alcohol was not merely taking my health or consuming my time. It stripped away what I had spent years building: my relationships, my reputation, the trust people had placed in me, and, eventually, my own self-respect.

Relationships that meant the world to me broke down. Big clients left me, and some are only coming back now. There were also newcomers who came to me because they believed I could help them, people who were prepared to spend their hard-earned money on my work as a healer, who told me they would return but never did. I understand why now.

When someone comes to you seeking healing, they are not simply buying a service; they are placing a measure of trust in the person they believe can help them. And there is something deeply contradictory about asking another human being to trust you with their healing while you are losing control of your own life to alcohol.

Those newcomers had every reason to hesitate. Why would they want to spend their money on an alcoholic healer? Why would they return to someone whose own relationship with alcohol made him unreliable when what they needed from him was steadiness, presence and trust?

I cannot resent them for walking away.

I was not a functional alcoholic. I did not function at all in the way I was required to when dealing with people. My work depended on people believing in me enough to come to me with their problems, their hopes and, sometimes, deeply personal parts of their lives. That kind of work demands a person who is present, grounded and trustworthy. Alcohol steadily took those qualities away from me while I was still trying to occupy the role of the person who was supposed to help others.

That is part of what makes those years so painful to remember. I was losing people at precisely the same time that people were coming to me because they believed I could help them.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I lost myself as well.

I lost my self-respect. I reached a point where I did not care what people thought of me, and looking back, I understand that indifference differently now. It was not confidence, and it certainly was not freedom. It was what happens when shame becomes so familiar that you stop fighting it. I had become so accustomed to disappointing myself and other people that their disappointment no longer seemed capable of reaching me.

What I did not understand then was that there would come a day when the drinking would stop, the fog would lift, and all the things I had managed not to feel would be waiting for me in the silence. While I was drinking, I could keep moving away from the consequences; I could drink through embarrassment, drink through broken relationships and drink through the growing awareness that my life was slipping away from me. When I stopped drinking, that escape ended. I have to face what I did, what I lost and, most painfully, what I can never get back.

That is when regret entered my life with a force I had never known before, and it remains with me.

I realised that I had not merely lost days or weekends or a collection of opportunities that might have worked out differently. I had lost years. Whole years of my life had passed while I was drinking, and they were not waiting for me when I became sober. There were parts of my own life that I had been too intoxicated to notice disappearing.

There is a particular cruelty in grieving time because time cannot be negotiated with. You cannot apologise to a lost year. You cannot make amends to a relationship that has already ended and expect the past to reopen itself. You cannot return to the person who needed you then and ask them to wait while you became the person you are now.

I can remember what I did, but I also understand what those actions did to other people. The past is no longer something I can drink away; it is a collection of faces, broken promises, lost trust and unanswered questions that I have to carry in a clear mind.

Then came another, even more painful part of losing my dignity: being reminded of who I had been by the people who had known me during those years.

There are moments when someone tells you about something you did while you were an alcoholic, and you are standing there completely sober, perhaps having spent months or years trying to rebuild yourself, while they have no idea that the person in front of them is no longer the person they remember. They are speaking to the man alcohol made me, while I am standing there as the man I have fought to become.

It is a peculiar kind of pain because, in that moment, two versions of you exist at once. There is the man you know yourself to be today, and there is the man another person remembers, and both are real. I cannot tell them that their memory is wrong because it is not. I cannot tell them they misunderstood me because perhaps they did not. They have every right to remember what happened to them.

And the painful truth is that they may not care that I am sober now. Why should they?

They were not the ones drinking. They were the ones who had to live with me while I was drinking. They were the ones who experienced the broken promises, the disappointments, the embarrassment and the gradual disappearance of somebody they had once trusted. They carry their own memories of those years, and I cannot demand that sobriety erase them simply because I have finally found my way out.

This is the part of recovery that nobody can do for you. I have to accept that becoming sober does not give me the right to demand that everybody else see me through the same eyes with which I now see myself. I know what has changed inside me because I have lived through that change, but the person I hurt did not necessarily live through it with me. They were left with the version of me I gave them, and I cannot fault them for remembering him.

That is the contradiction I continue to live with: I have changed, but I cannot make other people change the memories they have of me.

I can apologise. I can make amends. I can live differently. I can remain sober for the rest of my life. But I cannot climb inside another person’s memory and remove the version of me that hurt them.

I can sadly say that the scars of alcoholism are permanent in other people.

My sobriety is my responsibility, but what other people remember is theirs. Other people were wounded along the way, and some of those wounds may outlive the addiction itself.

Alcohol took my dignity from me, but sobriety has forced me to confront what that loss meant, not only for me but for the people who trusted me. I cannot undo those years, recover every relationship or ask those I disappointed to pretend that nothing happened. What I can do is take responsibility for the man I was and refuse to let alcohol turn me into that man again.

I used to think the greatest loss was what alcohol had taken from me. I now understand that some of the heaviest losses were carried by other people, who had to live with the consequences of my drinking without having chosen any part in it. My recovery cannot erase their experience, and my regret cannot demand their forgiveness.

I cannot change what people remember about me. But I can decide what I give them to remember from this day forward.

Gogo Bathini Mbatha: Founder of Sober Beings/Traditional Healer/Researcher/Spiritual Educator