How to Outrun a Black Hole

Pandemic-Era Reflections on Traveling in Sobriety

Three years after I quit drinking, my best friend died from alcohol dependency. There was no car crash or stomach pumping. No accidental drug cocktail she should have known to avoid. Just a slow, unglamorous slew of complications you’d expect in someone who’d miraculously made it to their seventies. She was 27.

A few weeks before her death, she’d texted me in a panic—beside herself with regret after her doctor broke the news that she may have developed type 2 diabetes and he wanted to run tests.

Hey. It’s okay. It’s not a death sentence. I texted back. No response.

She didn’t tell me her real fear: that if she had to stay overnight and wasn’t honest about her alcohol use, she’d be forced into full-blown withdrawal. She’d already survived a tumultuous bout with heroin. Still the stigma of addiction as choice paralyzed her into privately suffering sepsis.

And next I heard she was dead.

I spent that summer playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz at a dinner theatre in rural Kentucky, living every day in an underwater depression, still reeling from the memory of staring into the plastic bag of her ashes at the memorial service a month earlier. (I’d also just discovered my one-that-got-away-ex was in love with someone else via ingenious Venmo stalking, so that didn’t exactly help my disposition.)

Before and after every rehearsal, I’d spend hours manically researching El Camino de Santiago—the impulsive endeavor for which I’d already declined several acting gigs and which I was convinced would instantly heal every bit of pain inside me screaming for attention. Classic.

The show closed that August, and with a handful of absurd expectations (and only a couple thousand dollars to my name), I made it happen: my first solo backpacking trip. My Quarter-Life Crisis Self-Actualization Adventure.

My memory of those first couple of weeks in Spain are a blur of sunrises and ugly crying as I sped past the other pilgrims, outpacing my grief and staring ahead toward some nebulous salvation I’d convinced myself would wash up on the Atlantic coast. Dandelion fields cropped up along the trail and I couldn’t bear to give them more than a darting glance, haunted by the memory of my best friend’s Facebook cover photo: the glowing silhouette of a single dandelion against a fading sunset. Eventually I developed a habit of walking with my eyes closed.

Sometimes my steps would align with those of strangers, and they’d cry with me while revealing even greater losses than a breakup and a best friend’s death. Then we’d part ways a few hours later, and I’d be left again with nothing but my spinning thoughts.

Camino Torment on a patch of grass in León

Two weeks of silent bunk beds and self-pity, and my only Grand Spiritual Realization was that I’d probably die alone.

October morning along a vineyard in Molinaseca, Spain

Then, 250 miles in, I made a new best friend.

Who happened to be a self-proclaimed alcoholic.

He joked about being a shell of a person, but to me he was a ghost. He had her turquoise-yellow eyes, her passion for complex melodies and melodramatic lyrics, her ambivalent and all-consuming attachment style. Aside from her, he was the only person for whom I’d ever felt that electric, friend-at-first-sight lightning strike.

It was too easy. He quit drinking cold turkey the day after we met, so I was perfectly content to let the friendship free fall into mad infatuation and pretend it had nothing to do with my need to process Survivor’s Guilt.

And every night when we’d sit down to eat with a room full of tipsy strangers, I’d join in the camaraderie as I graciously passed on the carafe of free, bottomless red wine. It felt like the lightest thing in the world and still I held it with such care, as if splashing any of the liquid on myself would burn my skin down to the bone. The image of her reflection sitting across the wooden table—his forced smile as he clutched a tumbler of water in an act of white-knuckled will—only made the stakes that much higher to pretend I never longed for the oblivion she and I had discovered in my grandfather’s liquor cabinet one summer a million years ago.

When the Camino ended, the sobriety thing just kept getting easier. Every subsequent time he and I traveled together and he went back to drinking like he always did, I was constantly reminded of exactly why I quit.

Because I drank just like him.

The solo pregaming. The constant self-consciousness as I calculated my number of sips. The elusive blackout schedule I could never keep track of and yet somehow became comfortably accustomed to. The casual defeat at the end of the night when my resolve inevitably ran out.

His behavior reminded me how lucky I was never to have discovered I could travel on a broke artist’s budget until well after I stopped drinking.

And while I was rarely disciplined enough in his company to make other friends in *cough* international church basements with stale coffee and sugary snacks, the threat of relapse always felt perfectly balanced: distant enough to fully embrace life without a filter, and close enough on the horizon never to take for granted the freedom my dead best friend would never know.

Camino intersecting with million-year-old cannibal stomping grounds in Atapuerca.

Still, my drive to make sense of that freedom clouded any objectivity I might have otherwise had about the role of travel in my career-oriented world. All my other dreams unraveled in favor of this one pursuit. Gradually, it became my only evidence for the worth of a life I didn’t believe I deserved, especially over anyone else who wasn’t lucky enough to wake up hungover one morning like any other, but this time with the sudden, unsolicited clarity of a second chance.

In other words, I would do everything in my power to stop wondering why it wasn’t me instead.

So began several years of drinking-game nights in bedbug-ridden hostels with Pamplemousse LaCroix in hand, countless awkward and not-so-awkward alcohol-related conversations with millennials from around the globe (just like back home), and a lot of late-night one-on-ones with other backpackers confessing their desire and seeming incapability to stop drinking.

This last one happens so frequently it’s become my private inside joke—always one person per country, sometimes more—reminding me how often I’d wished for the same willingness; my mind cueing up the familiar flashback of an empty wooden booth, eyes glued to a woman across the bar laughing like the life of the party with nothing but a lemonade. How I’d look away, hold my breath, and take another glug of my girlfriend’s rum and coke before shaking off the idea that maybe I should go talk to her.

Obviously the courage of these strangers pouring their hearts out as they stumbled up the hostel steps never ceased to amaze me.

Watching paint dry on a mausoleum in Sumpango, Guatemala

Eventually my replacement best friend and I stopped speaking. Turns out projection only digs the grief-hook in deeper on both ends.

Meanwhile, my performative sobriety became routine: Book an acting gig somewhere in the US—escape as soon as it’s over. Come back and tour the country in a fog of multi-show days and crisp Hilton sheets, then tour the rest of the world on my own dime at the same unforgiving pace; the event horizon always looming as I slip into a different bed each night, lulled to sleep by the fear of my own shadow swallowing me whole.

My post-drug-induced psychosis (pre-COVID) office

Then, a few months before the pandemic, I met someone new, and started traveling with this different type of alcohol enthusiast—the kind a doctor might label an abuser rather than dependent. After years of living my Wildest Dreams™, I’d finally found the thing that threatened to unravel the precarious sobriety upon which I’d learned to tread very lightly if I wanted to continue this anonymous lifestyle.

For six countries, I spent night after night uncomfortable in my own skin, afraid I really was defective for choosing to opt out of my new companion’s favorite pastime. Without realizing it, I’d begun to internalize all those little awkward silences, all the sideways glances and lighthearted yet condescending comments he’d make when I’d politely decline because my life depended on it.

An omen I couldn’t quite articulate in Montserrat, Catalonia

The thing is—even if my life didn’t depend on it, even if I’m being dramatic and paranoid and naive about the ways a brain can adapt throughout years of adulthood—there is no universe where anything in my current life is worth trading for a social lubricant (and yes I even mean this shitty, mind-numbingly-boring-at-times unemployed COVID life). Nothing is as fun, poetic, liberating or trippy as long-term sobriety.

And of course, in my years without drugs and alcohol, I have filled the addiction void with travel. Like any addiction, it takes more and more to elicit the heart-racing wonder that stepping off a train in Paris once did. But—bizarrely—the awe I feel on a daily basis typically eclipses even the most profound experiences I had before I quit, so there’s more than enough to spare.

Pleasantly surprising morning view post-blackout on a mystery beach in Baja California. — Not a bad view after waking up post-blackout on a mystery beach in Baja California in 2010.

It’s why I was able to spend months on end surrounded by hippies, friends and coworkers in Central America who were constantly smoking weed and tripping on various hallucinogens—two activities in which I’m bafflingly no longer desperate to partake.

It’s why I’ve been able to date people who have the perpetual lingering taste of alcohol on their tongues without drinking again (not that those were good choices on my part).

It’s why the last several years have been defined by this absurd, adventurous lifestyle—not only because it’s easier to backpack on the cheap when I’m not paying for alcohol (or constantly losing my phone/wallet/mind), but because I’ve been able to maintain far better relationships with theatre companies than I ever could in the past. So, I come to the U.S. and go as I please, knowing there will always be work and always be and new and meaningful friendships to make with couches to crash on abroad.

And then, you know, when COVID hit, I lost everything I’d gained in sobriety.

My career evaporated overnight, my passport reduced to a scrapbook. It haunts me to think about what this year would have looked like if I were still drunk and high all day every day.

I still spent the year wallowing in self-pity, but used my clear(er) head to show up for my time on Earth and gained a few things in the process. I wrote a 200-page draft of a book. I improved my forgiveness/foreign language/French meringue skills. I lost my dream job, and then my day job, but found a cheap, beautiful apartment in Mexico and managed to live abroad for months while doing everything humanly possible to keep myself and others safe—something I was only capable of because I spent my 20s actively learning how to trust myself and act with integrity as a member of a planet that doesn’t revolve around me (wild).

Maybe most importantly, the last seven years of staying present have allowed me not to screw this moment up. It takes a lot of attention not to revert to the ways we’ve behaved our entire lives before everything turned upside-down; to go against all our instincts for connection and denial and instant gratification. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.

But, hey, you probably came for the snackable blog content:

Here are a handful of situations I’ve escaped/avoided/at the very least not repeated while traveling sober:

Rainy afternoon in Ljubljana brought to you by organic cigarette papers paired with cold brew in a wine glass. Because, you know. Harm Reduction.

Vomiting on the street.
Going over budget.
Social anxiety. Especially the kind I used to mindlessly rely on a couple of drinks to soften.

Forgetting all but a few fleeting memories of my first time in a new country (like my very first trip abroad, which—according to the photos I allegedly took—was a beautiful experience).
Forgetting about the weed in my pocket while going through international airport security and getting roughed up by Border Patrol and permanently banned from my new love interest’s home country (this happened to one of the aforementioned characters in this post).
Getting deliberately poisoned in Paris and…assaulted? Trafficked? Robbed and left for dead? Who knows, but it was a spiked rosé I would have gladly shared if I were still drinking and he was smooth and subtle until I had to fight him off with my bare hands. (Living in a misogyny dystopia is…slightly easier to navigate in sobriety.)
Any sort of repeat of the time I got blackout drunk on a long-distance train ride and dry humped my girlfriend in broad daylight.
Or that time I got followed by a masturbating stranger four times my size in a big, unfamiliar city, ran into cops on the street, begged for their help, and stood there in silence while they laughed in my face and shooed me off because I was obviously high.
Embarrassing myself any worse than that one time at a gelato shop in Krakow when I accidentally put all my used sample spoons in the clean spoons bucket.
Hangover poops. Plus I’ve only gotten bad food poisoning once in sobriety and it was thanks to a taco stand that was so delicious I went right back as soon as I felt well enough to walk again. Which I suppose cancels out my final bullet point.
Impulsive decision-making. Fine, that’s a massive exaggeration. But it’s gotten a lot better.

Just out in here Montreal making memories I’ll actually remember.

My goal with this list is not to convince anyone that sober travel > “normal” travel, but to show that it is not only possible, but thoroughly enjoyable and maybe even a little more special because of the perks. Before this massive life overhaul, I always assumed people who didn’t drink or use drugs recreationally were not only boring, but regularly missing out on all the deep conversations I’d find myself in with strangers [who I assumed were] as inebriated as I was. Quite the surprise to discover there was an entire world of people around me having just as deep and interesting conversations while…fully…present.

Epilogue

(Do blogs have epilogues?)

My best friend died without a passport. She would be 31 today.

I used to dream about traveling with her, showing her everything I loved about my life on the West Coast, integrating her existence into every landscape and new friendship and favorite restaurant. I imagined us sitting side by side in plastic folding chairs, nodding and laughing along with the rest of the room as some faceless podium speaker with 20 years sober detailed his outlandish logic.

Eventually I found myself doing the same with her Camino ghost. I would imagine I’d said yes when he brought up the idea of visiting me in the US, imagine I’d show him all my secret hiking trails, drive down Highway 1 singing along to the tiny background instrumentals on Alt-J’s first album, forgetting we’d never hit play on the first track. Somehow it didn’t occur to me me that I’ve done everything in my power to escape this place from the moment I stopped drinking. That California has become synonymous with harrowing psychological burden, that all my energy has gone toward shaking it off and all my hazy memories with it. I’ve always hated the phrase, “You take yourself wherever you go,” but she’s a part of me, so now she’s seen the world.

I’ll leave you with the admittedly irreverent but pragmatic question I ask myself any time I want to spend money on a vice:

How much trdelník could I get with that?

Travel HacksLeah SanginitiFebruary 7, 20216 Comments