When someone hits this milestone in my recovery circles, we say they’ve “joined the comma club.” They’ve hit quadruple digits. They’ve earned their comma. It’s a big deal. Because none of us forget that our journeys each began with a Day One—sometimes hundreds of those until we managed to find a foothold from which we could climb. As a writer and word nerd with “comma” on the brain, I’ve been thinking about punctuation this week. And I’ve fallen in love with the comma— that small, softly bent punctuation mark so prevalent in our written world that we tend to overlook it. Sure, we recognize when a comma is misplaced, misused, or missing entirely, as this can result in clumsy, confusing, or unintentionally cannibalistic sentences (e.g., “Let’s eat, Grandpa!” vs. “Let’s eat Grandpa!”) But upon further reflection, the humble comma is foundational to our everyday lives and communication. It clarifies and connects. It slows and separates. It provides structure and tempo and tone. In a word, it is vital. So, it makes perfect sense to me that I associate it with the work of recovery. Apparently, there are 14 commonly used punctuation marks in the English language (I googled that.) But before going online to better inform myself, I journaled a bit on my own, concluding that none of the other characters would have been quite up to the role. . First, there’s the period. The full stop. The end. This is the direction I was heading with my drinking: a runaway train barreling down the wrong track. For a long while, my train looked pretty good—at least to bystanders waving back from the platform. But regardless of how things appeared, the reality is that I had faulty brakes and a one-way ticket to a final, premature stop. What is true for any person trapped in addiction —whether it’s gray-area drinking or full-blown, In July 2023 I celebrated 1,000 days sober. I no longer feel compelled to check my day count often, but I knew this one was coming. And I must admit, seeing this number felt as good as I’d imagined.
Iblack-and-white destruction—is that their period will come earlier than it should. For some, that will mean literal death. For others, perhaps it means a life unlived. Blotted out dreams and a numbed-out existence. It’s ironic that the substance we most often rely upon to ease and enliven social situations is the very thing that can silence and disconnect us from our true inner voice. Perhaps for some, that premature period feels like the dread of dependence. The feeling of falsehood. The gnawing nag of “not this.” Perhaps it’s the inordinate amount of time spent drinking, thinking about drinking, thinking about not drinking, or recovering from drinking. It was all these things for me, plus years of wearing an invisible scarlet letter of shame, pinned under the skin but close to the heart. I didn’t know how to remove it. I didn’t know so many things. I didn’t understand that becoming addicted to an addictive substance is just one of many things that happens to a perfectly normal, perfectly imperfect human. I didn’t know that freedom was possible or that I held the keys or that I’d even want what was waiting on the other side of that cage. That’s the beauty of getting the comma and not the period: today I get the chance to know. Next, we have the exclamation point, which simply feels inadequate here. Maybe even inappropriate. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big (ab)user of the exclamation point in daily life—it gets the job done quickly and effectively in conveying excitement, joy, outrage, surprise…pretty much any big emotion (and honestly, aren’t they all big?) But to me, the exclamation point is often too big, too bold, with the power to obliterate the many nuances of reality. A bulldozer of a punctuation
HOLA SOBER | MADRID
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