(Content warning: alcoholism, addiction)

Dear Mom,

Today marks one full year of continuous sobriety—the longest I’ve been sober since my junior year of high school in 2005. I want to discuss what that actually means.

The way society talks about addiction is extremely static. There’s the “before addiction,” when the addict was supposedly “normal.” Then comes “addiction,” the phase where dysfunction becomes visible. If the addict “succeeds,” we get recovery and sobriety. And if they don’t, the Big Book sums up the alternatives bluntly: jails, institutions, and death.

What’s always missing from that narrative is that addiction rarely follows clean phases. It’s not a neat arc with beginning, middle, and end. It’s dynamic, fluid, and adaptive. The fact that this is the first full sober year of my life since I was sixteen is important—not because I’ve been a disaster that whole time, but because I spent years living in the “normal” and even “high achieving” phases of addiction.

When using becomes the most important thing in your life, you learn to protect it. You avoid becoming visibly dysfunctional. You dodge the consequences. You stay just stable enough to keep the addiction alive. When hiding your dysfunction becomes impossible, you isolate, often making the problem all the worse. Job loss, legal trouble, financial collapse—these aren’t just scary outcomes. They’re threats to continued use.

Mom, I was a national-level NCAA swimmer. Five days a week I trained with the college team; three days a week I drank heavily with my friends. I graduated with a double major and a double life, achieving athletic and academic success while maintaining a thriving extracurricular life at the bar. During those four years of university, my longest sober stretch was probably one week.

After graduation, I became a teacher. I drank on weekends and sometimes during the week. Then I worked in assisted living—same pattern. To stay active, I started running 5Ks and triathlons. Wisconsin being Wisconsin, every race bib came with a beer ticket. My longest sober streak in those years was maybe five days at a time.

In 2013, I joined the police department and started dating another officer. Binge drinking on weekends became less practical, so we shifted to drinking after work—at first a beer or two, then more. By 2015 I was up to four beers a night, but I also completed an Ironman. My longest sober period that year was probably the three days leading up to the race.

By 2016, four beers became two cocktails, and soon two cocktails became four. By my second Ironman in 2018, we weren’t even bothering with mixers anymore. Drinking liquor “neat” felt like sophistication. I drank the night before completing an Ironman. My longest sober stretch that year? Maybe 12 hours.

I finally admitted I had a problem in 2020—by then fully physically dependent on alcohol. I walked calmly into the emergency room “just to see how bad it was” with a BAC of .32. My liver enzymes were thirteen times the normal range. I was still an active police officer. I went back to work a few days later. Outwardly, life was “normal”. All those years would be referred to as “before alcoholism” by friends, family, and coworkers.

In late 2020, I obliterated my leg in a freak accident. I left policing. Within a year I was so severely dependent I was having withdrawal seizures before even sobering up to a BAC within the legal driving limit. I had delirium tremens. My liver was swollen and early stages of scarring had begun; my pancreas was at crisis levels. I couldn’t keep down food other than soup broth, I was vomiting every morning, and my body shook like a leaf, from my neck down to my legs.

Addiction had begun long ago, yet the notion was revealed to family when more undeniable and public displays of dysfunction surfaced. When criminal charges, repeat hospital trips, job interruptions, and appearing at events noticeably and inappropriately intoxicated started. That’s when the static stage of “addiction” began in the eyes of those around me.

Just as easily, entering AA in 2023 and spending 8 months sober signaled relief, as “recovery” had taken over and the troubles I had caused were over. That is the portrait of addiction that society believes in and wants to be true.

The truth is after 8 months of progress in recovery but virtually no necessary mental health care to accompany it, I relapsed. And herein lies part of the problem with society believing in this completely linear journey to recovery (or failure). Those living within that stigma believe it too.

Relapse signalled to me that I had failed. It told me it was over, and I’d be going back into the hell from which I had emerged. That hell included rapidly physically dying from alcoholism in an extremely emotionally and physically painful manner. We live in a very success-failure driven world. I had failed.

Addiction from that point forward did the least “static” adaptation I can imagine. It switched to drugs. Suddenly, I wasn’t depressed, wasn’t suffering in the hell of physical alcohol withdrawal, was losing weight, had energy, had a social life and was doing something that resembled living, at least when compared to the incessant state of unconsciousness that comes with late stage alcoholism.

But although I was no longer actively dying, drug use also brought me into the criminal justice system at a speed exponentially faster than alcohol had taken. Having viewed the effects of these addictions both professionally and personally, I maintain that all hard drugs (including alcohol) are relatively comparable in terms of the danger and destructiveness that addiction to each brings. The main difference is the legality and social acceptance of alcohol provides an immense buffer to exposure to the criminal justice system, whereas the war on drugs expedites it.

Regardless, I found myself in jail. I’ve spoken about my time in “seg”, about being transgender in jail, and about the need for incarceration reforms.

Today, on the one year anniversary of my sobriety, I’d like to reflect on sobriety in a police uniform versus a jail uniform. As I shared with a number of young deputies in the DCJ, “That uniform goes on you as fast as this one went on me”. Or, more universally stated by inmates of the jail, “You are just one bad night away from sitting where I’m sitting”.

With that notion in mind, it’s no wonder that a cop breakroom and a jail dayroom are far more similar than different. The familiarity of high quantities of addiction and trauma being first and foremost navigated with incredibly dark senses of humor made the difference almost imperceptible, but for the color of the shirts.

One of the first conversations I had in jail about the intersections of life in addiction and life as a former first responder was about ice cubes. And if you have an addiction history and/or a first responder history, you probably already know where this is going.

“My best friend died from a heroin overdose in 2014. Narcan wasn’t around much, we just tried covering him in ice to wake him up,” she told me. It didn’t work. He died on the way to the hospital.

I could’ve told them it wouldn’t work. I went to my first heroin overdose on day three of being a cop, in field training no less. It stands out to this day; the initial shock of realizing you’re up for assisting with life-saving measures, surrounded by total chaos, and for some odd reason, there are ice cubes everywhere.

Her best friend screamed, “Please don’t die!” As I knelt down to start chest compressions, I felt an ice cube crunch under my knee.

To this day, I still remember the moment my rookie cop tunnel vision snapped back to reality with the same ice cube intended to save a young woman’s life. It didn’t. I recalled that odd detail in an MPD break room in 2014. I retold it again in the DCJ dayroom in 2025. Mom, it was a nest of crossed paths everywhere I looked in jail.

In jail, I’ve sat with two registered nurses, a phlebotomist, a former corrections officer, two daughters of U.S. combat veterans, a paralegal, and two people I once arrested and took to that jail. Every AA group I’ve been a part of has had a first responder in it. In NA, I’ve met a CEO and a law clerk.

Mom, as I sat in the jail that bore so many similarities to a precinct water cooler, I wondered to myself how I could spend eight years in a room full of first responders; so similar to the people I sat with behind bars, and find the environment so profoundly adverse to open discussions of our substance use and struggles. In every cop breakroom, men and women were all too often finding the end of their last traumatic call not with a “10-8” on the radio, but instead at the bottom of a bottle. In a cop breakroom, aches and pains from 35 pounds of gear your waist wasn’t built to awkwardly hold was sometimes quietly treated with Percocet from the doctor. But those are not “work conversations”.

When you sit in a recovery meeting and say, “I am an alcoholic” or “I am an addict,” your healing can begin. When you sit in a jail, you’ve lost the option to volunteer that privately; your public rap sheet tells the world for you. Regardless – you’ve left the shadows. To be able to talk openly about it is where the true path to freedom begins.

Therein is where the difference lies. One of the most important survival tools I learned from my time as a first responder was not firearms training, nor chest compressions, but compartmentalization. But with that compartmentalization comes distance. There is such a protective barrier between the trauma and chaos that’s “the job” and your own life that almost always, the connection to shared human experience is lost.

The idea of “static” stages of addiction thrive in communities where our first responders work and live. The fast paced environments of medical professionals, police, fire, and 911 communicators are inundated daily with living examples of “life gone sideways”. It is an absolutely natural human response to put up a wall between the problem that is your job to fix and any connection that problem has to your own life. To categorize addiction and recovery as linear stages rather than a dynamic evolution is protective to those exposed to it.

But if we can talk openly and comfortably about addiction and recovery in our jails, prisons, and gatherings of derelicts and drunks outside, why the hell aren’t those conversations being prioritized by the ones tasked with “protecting us” from it? Studies consistently show alcoholism and addiction rates amongst first responders are about twice those of the normal population.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

― Friedrich W. Nietzsche

It becomes a very strange line to cross, as I did, finding myself in one room of addicts criminalizing addiction, only to be locked in a similar room of addicts, having our addictions criminalized. However, crossing that line taught me perhaps my most important lesson yet. There is no line. Life is not static, life is not compartmentalized, life is not linear, and we are not made to occupy one singular coordinate on a graph.

With that, came the freedom of realizing my journey through life, addiction and recovery more closely resembles a Jackson Pollock painting than a quadrant chart. At one year sober, I can relax knowing that anniversary splotch fits exactly where it’s supposed to, regardless of the trajectory it took to get there.

Still me (a year later),

Eli