I Wrote a Popular Book about Going Sober. Then I Relapsed

Here’s the truth. I drank. Probably before I met my boyfriend at the Toronto Island ferry. It was the summer of 2020, and I was always buzzed. Sometimes I drank a whole carton of wine on the other side of the lake before getting onto the boat. Sometimes I’d show up early on the island and sit in a park and down a mickey of vodka before seeing him, and then I’d gently twist his proverbial arm, and we’d have more drinks at the restaurant’s tiki bar. My boyfriend and I in Muskoka chairs on the lawn by the bar, with beers or ciders, watching and occasionally talking to whoever would stop by to say hello, sometimes the mandatory six feet apart but often not. These weren’t my friends, nor anyone who knew me as the author of an addiction memoir.

The pandemic and social media made it easy to keep tabs on each other, but there was little risk of anyone familiar seeing the poster girl for sobriety having a big ol’ drink. Another cider and the day fading into evening, the music a little louder, the laughter more hysterical—theirs or mine, I don’t know—and then more cider, and the contours of trees, people, my feet, his face, all of it blurring, slowly losing the contours, bleeding into itself, my words gummier and clunkier in my mouth, my hands more erratic, my rage swirling somewhere in my belly, my long hair out and in my face or in his face, my steps stumbly, the stairs steeper, my ankles rubber, a splinter in my palm slipping on the railing, my balance a no balance, the evening a night, the night a pool of liquid no longer distinguishable from the one in my hand, my belly, the lake, the sky. I’m awake, and I’m not, am I what? And then I am gone.

That night everything moved even faster than usual; it got too black too quickly.

At some point, I got on the bike. I torpedoed ahead. When drunk, I’m often in a war. I challenged my boyfriend to a race, except there was no race, just him trying to catch me as I lunged forward. I felt otherworldly, the way alcohol makes me feel sometimes, as though I had special powers, as though my feet were wings. The truth, of course, was that I was a heavily intoxicated forty-three-year-old on a bike in red flats and a princess dress, and alcohol was fuelling every cell of my euphoria or my rage—it doesn’t matter what you call it. Suddenly, my feet did turn into wings but only temporarily as I flew in the air, none of which I remember, just as I don’t remember the wings falling off and then smashing into the concrete, then crawling into a ditch once I’d crashed. Did I crawl into the ditch to die? Die in a ditch—isn’t that what happens to drunks?

My boyfriend rode past my abandoned bike near the wall, my body abandoned a few metres away. When he reached the end of the boardwalk, he rode back, slowly, this time looking around until he spotted my remains.

He locked my bike and then picked me up and walked/carried me back to the cottage. He said he walked me along like a puppet, then up the steep stairs to his studio. He sat me in his bed. I was conscious, talking and arguing as he took my clothes off and tried to wash me and dress my wounds. I begged him not to call an ambulance; I knew from experience that I’d have to spend the night in a plastic chair with other drunks in the waiting room instead of staying here and crawling into a nice bed.

I didn’t have to fess up to being a drunk; I could continue the lie.

This part of the story checks out: it’s something I’d definitely suggest. Also, he’d been drinking too—he’d often drink too much to keep up with me—and he was worried about the optics and about my so-called reputation as the author of Drunk Mom who’d been officially sober for so many years. I didn’t seem too hurt, I talked with him, and I bled, and then the bleeding stopped. Neither of us was thinking clearly, and he was a man who was only just now realizing he’d been dating Chaos herself. I felt grateful for his acquiescence. I didn’t have to fess up to being a drunk; I could continue the lie. The story of a morning ride and a front wheel wedged between two boardwalk planks and an unfortunate but sober impulse that propelled me to smash my body into pieces is the only story told up until now. This is the real story. And it’s a story about Shame.

When I began to relapse—slowly, then instantly—I had a big conundrum. Most addicts, unlike me, haven’t told the entire world of their sobriety and then published a book about it. Still, this doesn’t mean my situation wasn’t relatable—I later realized that I chose that as my unique excuse only because it was the easiest explanation. And I did genuinely feel Shame about first going public about my recovery and then relapsing . . . repeatedly.

Shame, however, does not discriminate. Consumed as I was by the fear of being considered a hypocrite, I also let the Shame about it eclipse everything. Crippling shame is a universal experience—you don’t need to deceive thousands of witnesses to live it.

When I get examined, the doctor comments on the gash in my forehead, how it’s not a fresh one. I repeat a story about a morning bike ride. I can tell she doesn’t believe me, or maybe she’s just tired and impatient as I blabber on. She decides against stitching the gash as the blood has coagulated already. I am sent for various scans and X-rays. Possible concussion. Something about sinuses, and some of my teeth are definitely loose. My clavicle has splintered like a twig. My occipital bone and cheekbone have been broken and chipped too (“multiple facial contusions, fractures involving the zygomatic arch, orbital floor and orbital wall,” reads the report).

There are bone fragments everywhere in the upper left side of my body (“a closed clavicle fracture that is comminuted”).

Over the next few days, the left side of my face swells, and the white of my left eye fills with red. There’s a deep black and purple bruise stretching along the cheekbone and spreading over my eyelid. A dark yellow stain pools below my eye. (I will not fully regain sensation in parts of my face for years to come—along the left temple all the way down to my upper lip—but I will get used to the permanent feeling of dental freezing.)

My left shoulder is pushed forward, the sling supporting the useless arm; there’s something broken-wing-like about the way it’s protruding. I also have to have dental work done or I’ll lose three molars.

The X-rays show the impact was so great that some of the bone has splintered and pieces of it are strewn about inside me; more frighteningly, there’s a knife-like edge pressing against my skin from the inside. Till the surgery, I’ll have one persistent fear: waking up one day and finding a bone tip poking through my skin.

At the end of the summer, I post a GoFundMe link on my Facebook page for what promises to be expensive dental surgery, several thousand dollars at least.

I’m back on the rickety rollercoaster of sobriety and hurtling inevitably toward a slip. I would like to say that it’s up to me to stop this trajectory, but it’s not up to me; I am strapped and stuck and as days go by, I feel more dismissive about my problem. Yes, I want to stay sober forever, but like every alcoholic, sober or not, I’m obsessed with the idea of being able to drink with impunity. Maybe not all feel that so close to the surface of their skin—I’m thinking of sobriety dinosaurs with thirty, fifty years clean—and none would say they miss it, but all see their life through a prism of a rainbow breaking in a glass. Or more accurately: people who are not alcoholics don’t think about alcohol.

Because let’s be honest: Would anyone donate a cent knowing I’d smashed into that wall while drunk?

Every night I check the GoFundMe page, but as money accumulates, so does the guilt I feel. A dignity, a dollar. I didn’t lie about my injuries, but I whitewashed my dirty story. In it, I’m a victim of terrible luck and a few bad decisions, but none of them corrupt, which is how we see drinking too much—as a moral failing. I’ve told people about wearing the wrong shoes, riding a bike in a dress, going too fast. But it’s as if I put my audience into a selective, collective half blackout, and they’re missing the most important details. Because let’s be honest: Would anyone donate a cent knowing I’d smashed into that wall while drunk? Would I donate to someone like me? I’ve gone from manipulating my loved ones to manipulating strangers. It’s been five years since my first relapse—five years that could be divided into elevations and dips, sober, drunk, sober, drunk, the rollercoaster speeding faster, the sober periods shorter until I’m reduced to days and not months, until one week feels like a monumental achievement.

My son is thirteen, and he needs a mom and not an unmedicated bipolar roommate, and he’s been crying at school, and some kids and the teachers have noticed. Do you know what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old boy and be caught crying to yourself at school? I don’t, but it’s not hard to imagine.

When my son’s teacher approaches him one afternoon, he tells her he’s anxious. For him, the anxiety lives in his stomach and takes his appetite away. He learned to recognize it in one of the groups I used to take him to, and he’s well-versed in describing what’s happening to people close to him. Except, that afternoon, he also tells the teacher about the reasons for his anxiety—and this is a teacher he doesn’t even like very much.

It’s the day after Halloween. He’s due to stay with me that night; our schedule is two nights on, two nights off. He tells the teacher he doesn’t want to stay with me, and I don’t know what else is being said, but I do know that, not surprisingly, this teacher, like most of his teachers, is aware of my addiction (if only because they’ve googled my name). Over the years, a few teachers have let him know that they’ve read my memoir, but no one has ever made him feel bad about it, and he hasn’t received any special treatment.

Besides, I’ve only ever shown up to school drunk once, and it was a long time ago. And yet they’re on alert. Imagine?

The teacher tells the principal who tells my ex-husband who tells me. By that time my son is at my ex-husband’s place, having come home from school early that day.

“He’ll stay with me indefinitely,” my ex-husband says to me on the phone or in a text, I can’t remember. But I remember panic and protest. The panic that this time I’ve really done it. And the protest that every addict is familiar with when people finally confront them, the How dare they! that flashes in our stupid heads when the words ring true, the words that strip us instantly of any argument.

This will die down, I think to myself. We’ve all overreacted. I neither call nor text my son. I don’t dare. In any case, I don’t know what I would say.

I know I don’t deserve him, and it’s pathetic, but my building despair over his rejection stops time as I think of everything that he is. He is a million, billion seconds filled with sweetness, and laughter, and sun-dappled shallow kiddie pools, and impromptu kitchen dancing parties, and soccer, and fast race cars, and Tintin and Thomas the Tank Engine. I think of his beauty, his love, and his pain, too—the pain of his sadness over me, my pain over my inability to stop causing the pain—and his forgiveness, the immensity of it.

I know already that there is no power in this universe that can take back the transgressions I’ve committed against him because of my addiction. No books with dedications telling him I’m sorry, no heartfelt apology can now make up for my taking his mother away and replacing her with a walking corpse. What my boy needs is love in action, not Shame and remorse, as useful as they might be when we have the luxury of time and space for reparations. I don’t send him a message because there are no words big enough to substitute for a mother’s acts of love. I don’t send him a message because I am simply too ashamed.

I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. Logged into Zoom and anonymous, my name spelled phonetically, listening to people from San Francisco or Paris or Barrie talk about the usual stuff they talk about in meetings.

I first share at a virtual agnostic meeting out of Montreal. For a moment, I worry that I’ll run into someone I know, but, again, that’s just one of those cons outweighed by the pros, all part of what I’m doing here. What am I doing here? “My name is Yoveeta, and I’m a person with a substance use disorder,” I say, following another person’s lead in using the more inclusive introduction. The Zoom people in their little squares—most of them with their cameras on—say hello, Yawayta. Even with my phonetic spelling and clear pronunciation, my weird name is a problem. But not for me; I don’t care and would introduce myself as Avocado if that’s what it took.

The next time I introduce myself I say, “My name is Yoveeta and I’m an alcoholic from Toronto, Canada.”

Waves, thumbs up.

“This is what we do these days, don’t we? Reclaim our shames and turn them into strengths.”

I say how I’m back after a long break where I was doing some “research,” a euphemism for relapsing. I talk about being a chronic relapser too. But then I pause, think for a moment, and say, “I don’t want to call myself anything, give myself labels. If I tell you I’m a chronic relapser that’s what I’ll become to you and that’s not what I am. I’m many other things. Which is also why I used to balk at ‘alcoholic’ because I didn’t like how I had to identify myself by my . . . pain. But it’s fine, I can reclaim it in a positive way—this is what we do these days, don’t we? Reclaim our shames and turn them into strengths or something.”

At some point early on, I decide to force myself to share in every meeting I attend. This is so much easier than it used to be while sitting in a room full of flesh-and-blood people—people who’d turn around and frown or smile or make noises while I performed my shares, women I’d try to convince to be my friend, men I’d try to seduce with clumsy cuteness, assholes I’d try to offend, secret Drunk Mom fans with starry eyes I’d try to ignore. And sometime later, all these people, whether real or imagined, every single one of them I’d have to lie to. Because I could never share about my relapse, because I could never tell them that I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of whichever sad room we’d be gathering in so that I could hide with my secret—that the sad room wasn’t a haven but rather a place exactly two blocks west or one bus stop north or a twenty-minute bike ride away from a liquor store.

The online meetings bring people together from all over the world at any time of day or night. Meaning I’m having a hard time coming up with excuses for why I shouldn’t attend them. As long as I have the time and enough energy to click a couple of keys on my keyboard, I can join one, which means that the only excuse not to join one is that I’m sleeping or that I’m dead. For the time being, I go to at least four meetings a day. I even have a chart where I write notes about what I liked or didn’t like about each one, with stars next to the ones I want to repeat. I begin attending one semi-regularly, a daily 9 p.m. meeting that calls itself “Sane Heretics,” plus a Sunday meeting out of Los Angeles.

I try to figure out when to part with the half litre of Grey Goose I still have: Should I pour it down the drain, should I make a ceremony of it, or should I just give it to one of the lovely, stumbly people on the street who need it more than I do?

For now, I keep it in the pantry, understanding that this is akin to keeping a bomb in the house. I’m simply not sure I want to say what I’m doing yet with going to those meetings.

• My Struggle with Sobriety
• I Lost My Son to Addiction. No, Privilege Didn’t Protect Him
• Seeing Myself in My Mother’s Addiction

My come-to-Jesus moment happens at a 1 p.m. Saturday Zoom AA meeting for women. I don’t turn my camera on, the way I never do when I attend a meeting for the first time. My name is spelled phonetically, the way it always is.

There’s a Lead Share, a typical Every-day-is-a-good-day-because-I’m-sober speaker, which I don’t mind. I’ve become one of those people, too, sharing about my own joy, probably pissing someone off in the process.

I don’t know if it’s the Lead Share’s self-deprecating but optimistic talk, or the share that follows by a mother of two who has a lot of guilt about raising her children while drunk, but I’m suddenly hot, and my heart is beating fast. That new pressure inside me becomes more intense, as though I’m being filled with fire that absolutely must escape. I click on the little hand-raise icon even though I have no idea what I’m going to say. For once, I haven’t prepackaged my emotions, although I feel them so close to the surface that, if I don’t release them, I’ll have to claw them out.

I listen to an older woman, a pretty, white-haired witch with a cackling witch laugh and jangling bracelets and crystal necklaces, who talks about her grown children who’ve only recently trusted her with babysitting her granddaughter. She is twenty years sober. I listen to another woman whose daughter, older than my son, has told her in therapy that she’ll never trust her. I watch a bawling mom who had her children temporarily taken away. In an almost whisper, she says she hopes her daughter is still young enough not to remember. Finally, a woman shares about going through postpartum depression, saying she needed to hear what she heard because, right now, only the fear of becoming a drunk mom is stopping her from giving up.

When they get to me, I turn the camera on, begin to speak, and everything that’s been building inside me blows up. It’s the most beautiful explosion—so much fire that it cauterizes whatever Hydra heads might threaten to emerge.

I tell the group that I’m not just an alcoholic and a mom, but that I told the world a prolonged lie that trapped me in my Shame. That I am a hypocrite. That I hid.

It doesn’t matter. That Shame is alive and well until I name it.

I say that I relapsed twenty times.

I tell them my son has refused to stay with me since Halloween.

I don’t name-drop the book, but I do tell them about it, and how it’s probably going to be impossible to pretend forever that I’m “Yoveeta”—if only in my own deluded belief that more people know about who I am than actually do. It doesn’t matter. That Shame is alive and well until I name it, and if I’m right about my delusion, then even better.

I tell them how this is the first time I’ve said out loud everything there is to say. Which is the truth. I search inside me to see if the fire has been extinguished, and it has. In its place is a wide, open space, a calm like deep sleep.

And then I’m done. It’s as if I can finally breathe again. I feel humbled—not humiliated, as I thought I’d feel. I’m humbled because everyone smiles and sends private messages that say “Thank you” and “Welcome,” and for that one afternoon, I’m finally known as I really truly am.

I plan to go back to the meeting the next weekend, and so I arrange with my son to come in the late afternoon instead. This represents another tiny win—it’s the first time in a while that I’ve dared to ask for something, when I’ve risked having him ditch me as a mother for good.

Which, of course, doesn’t happen. The worminess I feel is my own; it has nothing to do with him. When I tell him about the women’s meeting, he’s happy to oblige and makes plans to see a friend again.

And then he texts, “I just want you to know I’m proud of you lol.”

“Lol,” I text back. And cry a little, of course.

Excerpted from Unshaming: A Memoir of Recovery, Relapse, and What Comes After by Jowita Bydlowska. Copyright © 2026 Jowita Bydlowska. Published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.