If I Could Help One Person — Part Forty-Eight  ·  By Kristen

Waiting

On not knowing who is coming through the door, and the small deliberate acts of tending to yourself in the middle of someone else's chaos

May 2, 2026  ·  12 min read

He went out drinking today.

I know that sentence lands differently depending on who you are. If you are a person in recovery reading this, you felt something shift in your chest just now. A familiar tightening. A particular kind of dread that has no clean name but that you would recognize anywhere, because you have lived inside it.

We have not been getting along. That is the honest version. The longer version involves all the ways two people can share a home and still feel like strangers — the silence that has settled between us like furniture, the absence of touch, the nights when we lie in the same bed and the distance between us feels like a geography. We have become roommates. Polite ones, mostly. But roommates.

So he went out. And I understand it, in the way that I understand most things I do not like. He needed the release. He needed to be somewhere that was not here, with a drink in his hand and the particular loosening that comes with it. I do not begrudge him that. What I sit with is something else entirely.

Who Is Coming Home

What I sit with is the question of who is going to come home.

There are two versions of him when he drinks. There is the version that is fine — relaxed, easy, the edges softened. And there is the other one. The one that is looking for something to push against.

I never know which one I am getting.

That uncertainty — that waiting — is its own kind of exhaustion. It is not dramatic. Nobody writes about it in the way they write about the big moments, the blowups, the scenes. It is quieter than that. It is just a woman sitting in her clean kitchen, her hair wrapped in a deep conditioner, a giant mocktail on the counter beside her, listening for the sound of a car in the driveway and trying to read her own body for what it already knows.

The Repulsion

I will tell you something I have never said out loud in quite this way: I find it repulsive.

Not him. I want to be careful here, because I am not talking about the person. I am talking about the state. Drunk. Buzzed. Sloppy. The particular quality of a person who has had too much — the way the eyes go soft and unfocused, the way the sentences lose their edges, the way everything becomes slightly too loud or too slow or too much. I find it deeply, genuinely unattractive. It is one of my biggest turn-offs. It always has been, even before I got sober. Sobriety has only sharpened it.

I think about what it means to be attracted to someone. To want to be close to them. And I think about what happens to that wanting when the person in front of you is not quite themselves — when the version you love has been temporarily replaced by something looser, something less precise, something that smells like a bar and talks too loud and cannot quite track the conversation. The wanting does not survive that. It goes somewhere else. It waits.

What I Did Instead

He is also driving.

I am not going to spend a long time on this because I do not have to. You already know what it means. You already know the math. I know it too, and I know that knowing it does not give me any power over it, and that powerlessness is its own particular kind of fear — the kind that sits in your stomach and does not move.

So I walked the garden instead.

I walked the garden and looked at what is growing and what needs water and what the light is doing at this hour. I cleaned the kitchen until it was exactly the way I like it. I ran a hot bath and stayed in it longer than was strictly necessary. I deep conditioned my hair. I made myself a giant mocktail — something cold and bright and entirely mine — and I sat with it and I breathed. And then I baked. A practice I now find so gratifying — the measuring, the mixing, the quiet focus of it, the way the house fills with something warm. It is mine in a way that nothing else is right now.

This is what self-care actually looks like, by the way. Not the version they sell you in the wellness industry, with the candles and the affirmations and the carefully curated aesthetic. The real version. The version where you are scared and frustrated and lonely and you do not have a drink to take the edge off, so instead you take care of your body because it is the one thing you can actually do something about right now. You water yourself. You tend to yourself. You give yourself the thing you can give.

The Pattern

Here is what I know about his drinking that I have not said yet.

He has been moderating. I will give him that, and I give it genuinely — it is not nothing, and I know it is not nothing. During my sobriety he has been careful in a way he was not always careful before. He has been present. He has been trying.

But I have watched this pattern enough times to know what moderation followed by a long gap actually produces. When the episodes are spread far apart — when weeks go by without a drink — something happens to the inhibition. The tolerance drops. The body forgets. And then when the drinking happens, it happens too fast, too much, all at once, because the body has lost its calibration. I have seen it. I know what it looks like. The moderation is real, and the binge that follows the moderation is also real, and both things can be true at the same time.

I am not predicting tonight. I am saying I have seen enough to know that the gap between drinks is not always the protection it looks like from the outside.

So I am here. In my clean kitchen. With my mocktail. Waiting.

And I want to say something to whoever is reading this who knows this particular kind of waiting — who has sat in a clean room they made clean because it was the only thing they could control, who has taken care of their body because their mind would not quiet, who has made themselves something beautiful to drink because they needed something in their hands that was entirely theirs.

You are doing it right.

Not because it fixes anything. It does not fix anything. He will come home when he comes home, and he will be whoever he is tonight, and I will deal with that when it arrives. The garden does not change that. The bath does not change that. The mocktail does not change that. The bread in the oven does not change that.

But you are still doing it right.

Because the alternative — the drink, the numbing, the checking out — that changes you. That costs you something you cannot get back. And what you are doing instead, the small deliberate acts of tending to yourself in the middle of someone else's chaos, that is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

That is the whole practice.