I Was An Award-Winning Teacher By Day. After Dark, My Behavior Was Increasingly Troubling.

And the awards. A $10,000 travel grant from Fund for Teachers for a summer learning Spanish in the Dominican Republic. A $30,000 leadership grant that allowed a team of other accomplished teachers and me to hold a culturally responsive teaching conference. An award from the U.S. Department of Education for our same team to hold another conference, this one focused on quality writing instruction. 

And the class projects. One year, my students took 10 field trips around town and wrote about welcoming community spaces. The nonprofit 826 Boston published their writing in a book called We Hope You’ll Visit: A Neighborhood Guide to Dorchester. U.S. Rep. Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts wrote the forward. 

The more I honed my teaching skills and pushed project-based learning, the better my students did on state exams. The central office started showcasing my classroom to visitors. Some of my students exited ESL within a year. Some earned full scholarships to a summer academic program at an insanely expensive New England boarding school. Many have now graduated from four-year colleges. 

My most public recognition of all came from Lady Gaga. Her Born This Way Foundation awarded me $5,000 to fund a mental health project I had submitted. In the application, I wrote about the need for this work to support my students in coping with all the stressors of leaving their home countries and starting their lives over in the United States. I used the money for supplies to integrate the arts with social and emotional learning.

Gaga’s mother, Cynthia Germanotta, praised my work in newspapers and online publications. Her words truly touched my heart: “Her project really resonated with our core message, which is all about making a kinder and braver world.”

As a longtime Gaga fan, I felt so honored, recognized and seen for the work that I put into supporting my students. Yet the irony of winning a mental health-focused award never escaped me. Impostor syndrome sank in. Teachers should be role models, and, with my problems, I knew I could never be one. 

Between the start of my career and the end of my drinking, I had some long periods of sobriety. I stayed sober from New Year’s of 2013 until the Boston Marathon bombing in April of that year. But after the shelter-in-place order lifted, the bombing functioned as a great excuse to hit both the bar and the liquor store. I didn’t drink during my pregnancies, or in the first couple months of my daughters’ lives. 

For years, I maintained a strict rule: No drinking until dark. I often stayed late at work grading, cleaning, crossword puzzle-ing, killing time until dark. I loved watching the sun’s descent reflecting off the glass of the Prudential Center downtown before I went home, where I could immediately drink.

I hated the days I had to white-knuckle through preschool pickup and family dinners. I hated the end of winter because of all the time it took to get dark in the summer. I stayed up after everyone went to bed so I could drink as fast as I wanted, keeping the bottles by my side for easy refills. I often blacked out on the couch, though I usually climbed into bed at some point in the wee hours.

But by 2021, I drank as soon as I got home from work, even if the sun was shining. And my behavior while drinking got really weird. For years, when my family was awake, I had sipped slowly while marking up huge books from the canon, like The Divine Comedy or East of Eden, as if wine was simply a casual accessory to my studies. 

But, a month before the day I dropped the marker, I stayed up until 1 a.m. on a school night dancing along to a YouTube video of the Doors’ “Live at the Hollywood Bowl.” After an hour of continuous dancing, I danced to the whole thing again. I then drunk-dialed family members that I rarely saw, always beginning with, “I really wanted to catch up.” My phone indicated that the calls lasted 90 minutes, yet I couldn’t recall much of these conversations.

The night before the day I dropped the marker, I sent over two dozen DMs and Facebook messages to people I knew from the music scene, inviting them to get together, to meet my children, to ask why I hadn’t seen them in years. 

I used alcohol for so long to tamp my energy down, but it came to a point where I couldn’t go to bed before 3 a.m. What was even more startling was that when I woke up at 7 a.m., I felt fine. That was what terrified me: the lack of sleep coupled with the drinking along with the fact that I fully functioned in my workday.

That day I dropped the marker was the first time my alcoholism interfered with my teaching. But it didn’t completely surprise me. In the months prior, drinking had stopped working, no matter how much alcohol I guzzled down. That date, May 6, 2021, became my sobriety date and I have not had a single sip since. 

That summer, for the first time in years, I did not teach summer school. Instead, I spent the summer at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, walking while listening to audiobooks on recovery, reading and re-reading Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering, crying as I remembered people I had hurt and people who had hurt me. I watched The Sopranos for the first time and felt jealous of how Tony could act out his anger and I couldn’t. 

I’m not gonna lie: Facing feelings and thoughts that you don’t want to deal with sucks. Sobriety will not solve all of your life problems. But, as a sober person, I don’t push issues away anymore. I have the capacity to handle them without so much anxiety and sorrow.