Recovery after divorce taught me who I was without the bottle

My marriage and my drinking ended in the same year. Not because my wife gave me an ultimatum — though she probably should have. They ended because I finally connected the two things I'd been pretending were unrelated.

Recovery after divorce is its own kind of grief that most people don't talk about. You're not just quitting a substance. You're rebuilding an identity that was built around being half of something. Who am I without her? Who am I sober? Those two questions arrived at the same time, and there was no roadmap for answering both at once.