When I started observing Dissonance – its mission, the brand, the community – seven years ago in 2017, I was three years sober from alcohol. The rooms of AA had conditioned me to share vulnerably and to let whatever voice I gave to my story to just be, in its own right.

It rained for three straight days without reprieve. The canopy of trees with their massive scrolls of leafy greens, sturdy enough to show their elegant structure and flexible in a way that had them bending to the earth to roll off the rain. It was as if they extended a warm welcome and encouragement to flow with them throughout our time there.

I remember loving myself. I was eight. I delighted in playing outside just beyond our house on the hill in the farming community where I grew up. I spent summer days running, heart racing, along the trails in the woods until they curved around the bend and opened upon a rolling meadow. It was exhilarating moving from darkness into light.

The shame and stigma around alcohol use have kept many of those in recovery or working on sobriety, anonymous. Even people who’ve been in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) for decades, who have a level of transparency about their alcohol use in AA or sober communities, do not have that openness in the workplace.

At 10,000 feet above sea level, the air was noticeably thin. It took concerted effort to breath in with expansiveness and steadily and fully exhale. I fought the notion that my calves were overworked and we still had another steep mile to go. Occasionally I paused to look up and stop my forward momentum. It was silent.

Before it turned into a reckless love affair, it was a friendship filled with discovery and possibility. I experienced what this friend could do for me, never asking anything in return. Always there to lift my spirits and unequivocally the one to encourage me to say and do outrageous things my otherwise reserved self would never have dreamt. Some of them I couldn’t even remember.

It’s an inward year and it does remind me of early sobriety. It was a one-year stretch where I remembered the self I got so far away from, nurtured even the smallest inkling that I could persevere on my alcohol-free journey, white knuckled it in the waiting room of sorts – all with the promise of the good stuff just around the corner.

I wrote my story for me alone. It was an attempt to write the shame away and grapple with the language and love I would use going forward. After an initial draft of 2,000 words, my cursor blinked back at me. What did it all mean?

I stayed home for that first year. I consumed books, not alcoholic beverages. I attended meetings of the AA variety. I recoiled at the thought of a dinner out or a meet-up with friends at a bar or restaurant. I knew I was on unstable ground, yet I was slowly building a foundation of sobriety.

How you can show up for your spouse, partner, who is suffering from Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), Alcoholism

The universe sent me a heavy-handed nudge in the spring of 2021: it’s time to create. It’s time to have a voice. It’s time to really put yourself out there if you truly want to serve others.