A 50th Birthday and the Belated Gifts of Sobriety

Letting go of “I’m fine,” acknowledging childhood hurts, choosing accountability and loving attention

“On a perfect day, I know that I can count on you.
When that’s not possible, tell me, can you weather the storm?”

— Lyrics from Can You Stand the Rain by New Edition

I am a child of the Sun, a Leo, born in Seattle in August—a reliably beautiful time in a city known for rain. You can count on the skies to be an almost unreal neon cerulean blue, the perfect backdrop to Mt. Rainier's glaciated white slopes, the tall evergreen trees, and the sparkling blue-green of the Puget Sound. Want to schedule an outdoor wedding? A family reunion? A camping trip? You can rely on the weather in August.

The August I turned 50, the weather was the only reliable thing in my life. It was 2020, and my mental health nadir and alcohol use peak were meeting in a perfect conjunction, generating a storm that would mar that perfect sky. My mind terrorized me day and night, calmed only by the white wine or vodka soda I would sip throughout the day—sometimes forgetting I had already poured one, so I would end up with two: wine disguised in a coffee cup and vodka disguised as water.

My internal world was similarly disguised beneath an outer illusion about to collapse. My son had called 911 a couple of months before because I was unable to move my limbs and felt like I was about to die, yet the emergency responders told me I was fine—maybe just a bit of anxiety, lady. To be fair to the EMTs, they responded to a woman in running clothes in an expensive condo in an expensive city, self-reporting that, although I’d had at least ten drinks the night before, I had been planning to go on a run that morning. How could I not be fine in such apparent physical and financial health?

My three-month-old Akita puppy, who was so cute that people would stop me in the middle of the crosswalk so they could take her picture, made ugly bruises on my arms and legs with her teeth and I had no idea how to make her stop.

I had quit my job on a whim a month before my birthday. And by “job,” I mean my 25-year career. (I returned six months later, after a brief sober stretch, yet still profoundly unwell and soon to be drinking again.)

And of course, there was the pandemic.

My 50th birthday celebration (small, of course, because: pandemic) started out sunny enough. Perfect weather—check. Sisters bringing several bottles of wine—check. A dog-friendly restaurant within walking distance with outdoor seating (and more booze)—check.

We laughed through the afternoon until the conversation somehow turned to prejudice and racism. Unlike the sun in August, my mind was highly unreliable during that time of undiagnosed burnout, panic attacks, and alcohol use disorder. So, I don’t know exactly how the storm started, but what I felt was that my family was not acknowledging the reality of the racial trauma or rape I had experienced. What I wanted was to finally feel seen, safe, loved, and 100 percent accepted.

But in the state I was in, it wasn’t possible for me to communicate that to anyone, not even myself. It wasn’t possible because I was told repeatedly that I was “fine,” and because I wanted so much to actually be fine, I believed it. On top of that, it was likely a deeply inconvenient time to bust the illusion held by my family that I was and always had been “fine,” coming at them like a bull with a broken leg.

I had a tantrum, crying and shouting at them to leave me alone. I felt and acted like a spoiled child who didn’t get the gift she wanted. And, like a small child, I ended up alone in time-out. If I could’ve fit into my puppy’s crate, I would have crawled in there—with a box of wine and a box of Kleenex.

Recently, as I was writing an astrology piece about the Sun and Moon in our birth charts, what came to me is that for many of us, being stuck at home (the Moon can represent home) during the pandemic was triggering. On top of the new fears of those times, it stirred up old childhood memories that we thought were buried.

The feeling of powerlessness was reminiscent of childhood. And for some of us, our childhood home was the last place we would choose as a refuge, yet here we were, feeling like children—powerless and locked in our homes. Many were with their own children 24/7 for the first time, which prompted unwelcome comparisons to their own childhood.

But while the quarantine may have ended, I’m not sure we can escape facing what it unearthed from our childhoods.

Maybe some of us have rewritten our childhood stories with rose-tinted nostalgia, keeping only the happy parts in our consciousness. Others have locked the entire time period away somewhere because it is too painful to face.

I was somewhere in the middle. I knew it was dysfunctional, but I didn’t realize just how much I was lugging around—mental U-Hauls full of psychological boxes waiting to be unpacked, processed, and integrated.

When the cognitive dissonance of having to drink a substance that I knew would eventually destroy me finally broke my brain, I was left with accountability and responsibility—in their purest forms. Unable to begin anew, I had to gain some perspective that would allow me to account for all the pieces of myself and my life—and the ability to consciously respond.

I found that framework in evolutionary astrology, where we look at a birth chart to interpret the lessons the soul intended for this life. As I unraveled what I was recovering from and for (a.k.a. “My Why”), I had to dive into why my soul chose my parents, the time in history I was born, and the place I was born—because all of these inform my life’s trajectory and enable my soul to work the lesson plan of this life.

Again, with the frame of accountability and responsibility. Not with the aim of assigning names (or blame), as one would in a RACI chart, but instead using the actions that the words, broken down, uncover: ability, to account, to respond.

There was no way I could have done this while numbing out with alcohol—or its companion in my existence, productivity.

Yeah, that same productivity that paid enough money to land me in that expensive condo in downtown Seattle turned out to be just another numbing agent. Sober, I could no longer deny that my productivity lacked personal meaning and was an insult to my authenticity.

In the pandemic, it turns out I had discovered a freaky loophole of physics that allowed me to be both paralyzed and constantly in motion. I suspect many other people did, as well, as it seemed that one day we were working from the kitchen table in sweats and the next we were running from thing to thing again, but also amped up on the adrenaline and cortisol we never quite regulated. Yet, while my physical self zoomed back into productivity mode, my emotional self remained in lockdown, unable to make sense of what had happened and how that related to the child me.

When I finally left my corporate career to create a different existence in 2024, the thaw from the numbing and paralysis began to go deeper. Not only could I apply the lens of accountability and responsibility to my recovery in an analytical way, but the iceberg-sized chunks of childhood confusion and sexual abuse trauma began to thaw under my loving emotional attention.

With each piece of earlier life and trauma I account for, I am finding that my response often involves changing my current beliefs and behavior, because there are definitely lingering behaviors and beliefs that stem from the traumatized me and are not authentic to the present me.

And that present me is becoming as reliable as the Sun in August: no longer a frightened child, nor a frozen adult. No longer a child of the Sun, but an adult of the Sun.

How about you?

We’d love for you to share in the comments:

• Have childhood triggers come up for you in sobriety? How do you respond to them now?

• How has your response to old emotional wounds changed since getting sober?

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Maria Luz O'Rourke

left a 29-year career in pharmaceuticals to start a healing and helping practice that includes spiritual guidance sessions, astrology, hypnosis, and psychic mediumship. She writes the newsletter

Astrology, Alchemy, & Honest Recovery with Maria Luz

and is the host of the podcast Maria Luz’s Conscious Curiosities. Through these creative projects, Maria shares hope for living authentically and empowers people with the wisdom of astrology and their own unique energy.

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