The year I quit shame

For nearly two decades, my New Year’s resolution was always the same: drink less. It was a small, quiet promise I made to myself year after year. But this past New Year’s Eve, as the clock edged into 2025, I realized something startling: I had nothing to resolve. It had been 290 days since my last drink, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I wasn’t making a deal with myself. No desperate vow, no half-hearted plan to do better. Just a blank space wide enough to dream in.

In the past few months, I had made it through some rather large milestones — my first sober birthday, my first vacation, my first Christmas — all without clinging to a cocktail like it was a curtain I could hide behind. My body was healing. My mind was clearing. Without the numbness, there was finally space for brightness, and it wasn’t distant anymore. It was here. It was real. And damn, it was beautiful.

What no one tells you about sobriety is how often it leaves you going, “Well… that’s new.” There are so many firsts, even this far into adulthood. So many moments where I’m still figuring out who I am without alcohol in the picture. And this New Year’s Eve gave me another one: I had no resolution to make. Nothing to fix. No damage to undo. It felt strange and kind of exhilarating. So I asked myself, If you could give yourself one gift this year, what would it be? And a voice I barely recognized whispered, quiet and clear: I don’t want to be ashamed of myself anymore.

Ah yes, shame. Alcohol’s cruelest side effect.

Whenever I tried to stand tall in my progress out of addiction, shame tugged at my ankle like a tether. It didn’t matter how many hours, days, or months I lived without alcohol. Shame still whispered that I hadn’t suffered the right way, or enough. That kind of joy was reserved for someone who had done it better. Someone who didn’t get to the edge of death before putting down the bottle. Someone who stopped at the first sign of damage, whether physical or emotional. Not you, it said. You deserve to live in the shadows, embarrassed by your dependency. Alcohol may have been well out of my system by then, but shame had been my constant companion all along.

And yet, here I was. Sober, steady, and quietly listening to the most tender wish I had ever had for myself: to live not just alcohol-free, but shame-free too.

The idea felt almost too big, too bright, too good. But there it was, this little spark of possibility flickering in the quiet. And I let myself entertain it. For once, instead of resolving to be less, I dared to imagine more.

What does living shame-free even mean? How does one go about clipping the tether that you’ve grown so used to wearing? Because let’s face it, it’s been following me around so long I don’t know a life without its weight.

So yeah, I didn’t exactly have a roadmap. There’s no 12-step program for untethering from shame, no workbook, no milestone tracker that tells you when you’ve earned your own forgiveness. All I knew was that shame had been quietly running my show for years. But in early sobriety, it was screaming louder than ever. And I needed it to quit.

I didn’t have a plan, but I had a starting point. I could tell the truth. Not just to myself, I had done that already, but to other people. People who loved me. People I had hidden this from. For most of my drinking life, I lived what looked like a perfectly functional existence on the outside. I was dependable, successful. I got things done. But no one knew how much I relied on alcohol to take the edge off, to silence the noise, to hold myself together when I was quietly falling apart.

Telling my adult children was the hardest. My voice shook. My heart raced. I felt like I was shattering whatever fragile illusion remained that I had always been a wonderful mom. I wasn’t just handing them my story, I was exposing the truth behind the image. That underneath the strong, steady version they had always seen was a flawed, messy, deeply human woman. There were many nights I numbed out instead of feeling. Plenty of mornings I parented through a fog of regret. The version of me they grew up with wasn’t false, but it wasn’t whole either.

And what I feared most was their disappointment. That they might look at me differently. And maybe that was okay. I just hoped, prayed, they would still see me through loving eyes.

Next, I told a couple of close friends about my struggle. Over coffee, I said the words out loud, and for the first time, they didn’t feel soaked in shame. “I became addicted to a wildly addictive substance. One we literally sell in coffee shops.” I smiled, maybe half-laughed. “Alcohol got me good. And now? It doesn’t have me anymore.”

I told them how it started off sneaky, just a glass here and there to take the edge off, and how it slowly slid into something darker. I told them about the hospital bed, the tubes, the fluid my liver could no longer process. I told them about the transplant consults. And how, even after all that, the real work wasn’t just surviving. It was rebuilding a life I actually wanted to live.

I shared all of these things with my kids and my friends, and something amazing happened: no one turned away.

In fact, the more I shared, the brighter I felt. Every time I named what I had hidden, the shame tether loosened just a little. Shame feeds on secrecy. And I had kept it well-fed for years. But with every truth I told, I was starving it out.

I’m still learning what it means to live shame-free. It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in the quiet choices, like softness over self-punishment. I used to think sobriety was the whole story. But it turns out, it was just the beginning.

Because now, every day, I wake up with one bold, beautiful question in front of me:
What if I let myself feel proud?

And I think I’m finally ready to find out.