After years of drinking at work, getting high every day and even marrying a heroin addict club door-guy, a sober and peaceful morning feels good.

I woke up this morning and meditated with my boyfriend. It was glorious listening to the birds and whatever those chirping insects are around here. I moved in six months ago, and even though the beginning was a little rough—having just left living in New York City for 17 years—we are good and enjoying our sober life together.

NYC is where I hit my bottom and it took almost a decade for me to land—starting with 9/11 and slowly drifting and floating to my bottom in 2009. In the fall of 2005, I made a big swoop towards my bottom, marrying a bisexual heroin addict who was a door guy at a club I performed at. I had formed a plan earlier that summer: get married, buy a computer, grow up. I was drinking every day at work and getting high all day long, I didn’t have a boyfriend and my comedy career was sliding away from me. But marriage was what was going to help! I met him at the door one night at the club, and after the third time we had sex, he proposed! The Laws of Attraction in action!

I started doing stand-up late in 1999 and had done fairly well, but by 2005 I had gone from doing 6-8 sets a week to a few, and sometimes none. Some weeks were good and I got lots of sets in, but most of the time I was getting wasted before the show or during the show, waiting to go on. If my spot wasn’t early enough, I was half gone by the time I went up and it was awful.

After 9/11, my comedy had taken a punch, but the hard work I had done the two years before that kept me going. That was the beginning of my bottom but I was still producing shows and doing shows. I got a couple of TV acting spots and I was writing. As I know now, this is a progressive disease and it slowly got worse. Drinking before shows, during shows, and so much after, kept getting more frequent. And the marijuana! Getting high was the worst way for me to perform—it completely disconnected me from the audience and made me so self-conscious. I could not judge how the audience was receiving jokes—thinking I killed when I bombed and the unexpected laughter was traumatizing (as if they were laughing at me, not with me). The laughter would hurt my feelings! I just couldn’t stop myself from getting high in the morning, during the day and at shows. Sometimes I could keep from doing it, and I guess that’s how people kept putting me on stage. I would rally some weeks and get myself together, not get drunk and high during the day, and stay sober till my sets were over. Read more “the fix”…