Coming Back to Myself

Teshuvah didn’t start for me in Elul. It started months earlier, the first time I realized I couldn’t exist while I was drinking. Quietly, slowly, without ever calling it that.

It began with a quiet goodbye to alcohol. An old friend. A false comfort. 

A shield I no longer wanted to carry.

⸻

I grew up Chabad, in Crown Heights. Born into it, steeped in it, fluent in it. 

The kind of frum where mikvah was a weekly (or daily) fact, not a metaphor. 

Where tefillin before bar mitzvah wasn’t strange, and farbrengens were considered wholesome.

It wasn’t extreme. It was just how things were.

Until I wasn’t sure who I was anymore.

I looked the part: davening, learning, mivtzoim sometimes. Wearing the hat, jacket and smile. 

I sat at farbrengens and soaked in words I didn’t know how to live. I meant it some of the time.

But underneath, I was disappearing.

I started drinking around fourteen, away from home in camp and school. 

But the pain inside started many years before that.

Around the same time I started drinking, I began to drift. 

From davening. From learning. From mitzvos.

Nobody asked me if I was hurting. Nobody told me I was numbing. 

They told me to say L’chaim. So I did.

The spiritual silence and the drinking weren’t separate. 

They linked arms. They made a quiet home inside me.

It didn’t happen all at once, but it had already begun. 

It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t rejection. It was survival. 

A slow slip away from anything that asked me to be fully present with what I was holding onto inside. Protecting me.

The drinking felt like the right thing. Like the adult thing. Like what a good bochur does. 

But really, it was how I stopped feeling. How I softened the parts of me that were carrying more pain than they should have. Parts that never got to speak. Parts still stunned by the past.

By nineteen, I had given up on trying to make yeshiva work. 

I wasn’t being defiant. I just didn’t see myself in it anymore.

So I got a job. A solid one. I moved on, or at least pretended to. 

I still showed up sometimes. But inside, I was gone. Drinking nights away. You build up a pretty solid tolerance after so much practice. 

A few times, I blacked out. I didn’t think much of it.

One night, around twenty-one, I was told I came home from a cousin’s wedding and tried to do laundry. Except it wasn’t laundry. It was the bag of cans and bottles from the recycling bin. 

I tossed them in and hit start. I don’t remember any of it.

Thank God the machine didn’t break.

And the drinking stayed. Through my twenties. 

Through dating, marriage, parenthood.

Shabbos meals. Simchas. Work events. Late nights.

I wasn’t the drunk guy (except for a handful of nights that crossed the line). 

I wasn’t reaching for it every week or hiding bottles. 

I was usually the one with the third glass of wine. The refilled cups of whiskey. 

The silent ache that never quite left.

That’s what alcohol did to me. It didn’t wreck my life in any obvious way. 

It didn’t cost me my job or my family. 

It just dulled it. 

I was there, but not really in the room. 

Playing a part. Disconnected from it.

I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t spiraling.  I just stopped caring.

I stopped davening, not just without intention, but altogether. 

One mitzvah slipped, then another. I stopped showing up.

I didn’t throw anything away. I just let it all fade.

The scariest part: I told myself I was fine. 

Working. Married. Functional.

On paper I looked okay. 

Inside I floated, numb, holding stories I’d never told.

⸻

My chosen sobriety? It began with my then eight-year-old son.

Watching him. Sensitive and good. Already starting to freeze the way I used to. 

Holding things in. Unsure how to connect. Shrinking a little.

And realizing with a kind of soft panic that I knew exactly what it was. 

I had lived it. I was still living it.

Around that same time, I started noticing echoes of myself in my father. 

The tone that came out too sharp. 

The flinch before I even opened my mouth.

I didn’t like what I saw. But I couldn’t look away.

We both carried a relationship with alcohol, shaped by a culture that called it connection.

Boruch Hashem, his is in a much better place now than when I was growing up. 

And I wanted mine to be too.

Something opened after that. 

And slowly, I began to feel things again. 

Not all at once. But enough.

I didn’t quit drinking that day. 

But I started paying attention.

My body started speaking, too.

Beer I’d had dozens of times before suddenly made my face flush and burn. 

A few sips of hard cider left me overheated, itchy.

Not drunk. Just off.

I didn’t call it anything at the time. But looking back, I think it was my Neshama, pressing gently through my skin. Letting me know what no longer belonged.

It wasn’t one moment. But it was enough.

A little while later, I stopped.

There wasn’t a crash. No big moment. 

Just a quiet buildup of truth: if I kept numbing, I’d never feel anything again.

⸻

Eight months ago, I put the bottles down. All of them. 

Including the wine at Kiddush.

But the goodbye wasn’t a single night. 

It stretched out, like leaving a gathering slowly.

Two months later, at a Friday night meal for my Zaidy’s yartzeit, I made Kiddush with wine. 

I raised the cup and quietly said goodbye to the family and community pattern of drinking, the way alcohol had been woven into farbrengens, simchas, and home.

A couple of weeks later, at a close friend’s house, I lifted a small glass of wine to toast his new child and new home. And there too, I said goodbye to the friendship and social pattern of drinking, the way alcohol had so often been at the center of how friends gathered, celebrated, and connected.

I wasn’t saying goodbye to family or to friendship. 

I was saying goodbye to alcohol’s place inside them.

Choosing to learn how to show up as myself. Without it in the middle.

Part of me was also reminding myself that I could still drink gently, not only lose myself in it. 

That if I ever wanted to say hello again, I could.

But I haven’t. And right now, I don’t want to.

At first, it felt strange. Quiet. 

Like I’d stepped out of a background noise I didn’t know was there.

But I stayed with it. 

And things started to shift.

⸻

It wasn’t the first time I had changed something. 

Between walking away and returning were years of back and forth.

Shabbos, yes. Then no.

Tefillin, yes. Then no.

Sometimes both. Sometimes neither.

But the drinking was there too. 

Not constant. Not out of control. 

Just always hovering.

There were months with more, months with less. But it was never a choice. 

Not “I’m doing this because it’s good.” Not “I’m avoiding it because it’s bad.”

It was just the default. Going with the ebb and flow of life.

Now, for the first time in a very long time, I’m back to Shabbos yes and tefillin yes. 

Not because I have to. Because I want the weight of them back.

And drinking? None. Because I want the weight of it gone.

A Niggun I hadn’t sung in years started to hum in my chest. 

Something I hadn’t thought about since yeshiva came back with new meaning.

I opened a sefer, not because I was supposed to, but because I was thirsty. 

For something real.

I picked up a pen.

Some seforim.

And my soul.

Not to teach. Just to breathe.

And I started speaking. Telling the stories I’d never told. 

Some that had lived in silence for twenty-plus years. 

Some that even my parents had never heard.

Not because I was hiding. 

Because I didn’t know how to feel safe enough to open up.

That’s what sobriety gave me. Not perfection. Not performance. Just access. 

To myself. To presence. To Teshuvah.

⸻

Not the dramatic kind.

Not the Elul panic.

But the Teshuvah I actually choose.

Teshuvah as slowing down enough to hear what had been waiting beneath the noise.

Teshuvah as turning, carefully and truthfully, toward the self I left behind.

Teshuvah as returning to my story, letting my voice come through.

Teshuvah as forgiving those who hurt me, and apologizing to those I’ve hurt.

Beginning to forgive myself, too. 

Whispering I’m sorry for the years I went missing. 

Letting compassion reach the boy who carried too much. 

And the man who thought numbing was the only way to survive.

Learning how to live in ways I never really learned before. 

To feel what I’m feeling instead of numbing. 

To speak it out loud. To stay connected, even when it’s uncomfortable.

I’m doing this for myself. And I’m trying to model it for my kids too. 

Not perfectly, but honestly.

And yeah, it hurts sometimes. But it’s real. 

And I’ll take real every day.

⸻

For a long time, I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. Faith had slipped away quietly, the way other parts of me had.

But in the stillness that came when I stopped numbing, I began to notice God again. 

Not as an argument to win or a set of rules to follow, but as presence. A word. A glance. A perfectly timed moment.

Quiet reminders that I’m not alone. That something’s still guiding me. That the whole messy path has been held. That there’s still room for me in the Book.

I believe in waking up.

I believe in using my voice.

I believe that stories can heal, especially the ones we kept hidden too long.

And if you’re in your own fog, quietly carrying things, trying to act fine, I want you to know:

You’re not too far.

You’re not broken.

You don’t have to fight your way back.

You don’t need the perfect words.

You can begin by telling your truth, even if it starts in a whisper. 

Sometimes Teshuvah is as simple as a soft “I’m sorry,” or a quiet “I forgive you.”

Some of the deeper inner work comes before those words, some after. It’s not a single moment but a journey, the slow work of feeling, facing, and learning how to live more whole. That is what makes even the smallest words real.

⸻

What am I doing now?

I’m returning to myself.

I’m speaking what used to stay silent.

I’m letting my story live in the open.

In hopes that someone else might find their way back to themselves too.

And I hope more of us will start to ask what kind of culture we’re creating for our children to inherit.

This is part of my Teshuvah.

Goodbye, old friend.

You carried me when I couldn’t carry myself.

You promised comfort and connection, and for a long time I believed you.

Thank you for keeping me safe when I wasn't strong enough to heal. 

You never brought me to ruin, but you kept me from being whole.

But safety turned into silence. And comfort into absence.

I had to let go of you in order to let go of my pain.

Now I want to be here fully. Awake. Present. Alive. 

With nothing between me and the people I love.

L’Chaim! To Life.