Just Between Us is a new paid series, every other Thursday. Too personal for Instagram, too intimate for the podcast. This one's free.

Six months ago at school pickup, a woman (let’s call her an acquaintance) looked at me and said “Oh my gosh do you remember that party? You were wasted.”

She’s been in my orbit since my oldest was a baby. She knows me from a distance and in pieces. I can count the conversations we’ve had on one hand.

That party was 2,299 days ago. It was the last night I drank.

I felt the shock first. Then the shame —that specific, familiar shame from that night that I thought I’d worked through. And then immediately, underneath it, something hotter. Anger.

I’ve spent six years becoming someone who doesn’t drink. And yet, a careless comment from a woman who barely knows my last name still landed in about three seconds flat.

I'm not ashamed anymore. I did the work. I wrote the book. In The Sober Shift, I tell the story of that night — of nursing my baby in a blackout, and how I finally stopped letting that memory live deep inside me. Mostly. Because the truth is that some days it still does. It probably always will, just a little.

That’s the part nobody tells you about sobriety: it doesn’t make you untouchable. Someone who wasn’t even really there for your worst moments can still drag you back into them, without warning.

She took me back without my permission.

I smiled. Said something forgettable. Picked up my kid and got in the car.

And I’m still a little pissed about it.

Just between us,

— S

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