Ask a Sober Oldster #33: Neda Ulaby
"I crawled back to rehab almost exactly 25 years after my first time there."
This monthly interview series is a collaboration between Oldster Magazine and The Small Bow, A.J. Daulerio’s excellent newsletter about recovery and mental health, and appears in both newsletters. Learn more about this collaboration in this Oldster podcast/videocast episode.
Neda Ulaby is a cultural correspondent at NPR who’s worked at the network since 2000. She also hosted the Emmy award-winning public television series Arab American Stories. After stints in Washington D.C., New York and Los Angeles, she now resides in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
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How old are you, and how long have you been in recovery?
I’m 55 years old and just celebrated six years of continuous sobriety. Like a lot of us though, my recovery chronology is choppy and didn’t begin with my current sobriety “birthday.” It feels right to say I’ve been in recovery since the day I pulled a “Temperance” card from a tarot deck in 2019 with a raging hangover, burst into tears and resolved to get clean.
Like a lot of us, my recovery chronology is choppy and didn’t begin with my current sobriety “birthday.” It feels right to say I’ve been in recovery since the day I pulled a “Temperance” card from a tarot deck in 2019 with a raging hangover, burst into tears and resolved to get clean.
How did you get there?
The very first time I sobered up, I was 29. I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and my fiancé had been killed a couple of years earlier by a drunk driver. To be honest, I had been drinking alcoholically before his death, but I reacted to the accident like an addict: drinking as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted. In the middle of horrible Chicago winters, I would speed home from bars with all the car windows open, hoping the brutal cold would keep me sober enough from crashing on Lake Shore Drive. While busily drinking myself out of grad school, I managed to get a job offer from NPR.
Objectively, I understood that my alcohol abuse could maybe ruin this amazing opportunity to work as a producer at a major news network. Going to rehab before taking the job seemed like a smart preventative measure. You see, I was not desperate yet. So I did my 28 days, moved to DC, started work and went to meetings, every so often. I stayed clean for a couple of years. During that brief, shining period of not drinking, I became a reporter. But over time, I drifted away from the program, stopped calling my sponsor and slowly spiraled into hardcore, largely secretive alcoholism. I crawled back to rehab almost exactly 25 years after my first time there.
In spite of my earlier experience, I somehow stupidly thought rehab would just fix me the second time around and I could resume my normal life without making real changes. Like, I would just get off the plane from Minnesota and simply start chugging hot tea instead of cheap chardonnay. I resisted meetings, sponsorship and the real work of sobriety. I kept going to parties and relapsing. To bars and relapsing. To Trader Joe’s and relapsing. I would reluctantly go to maybe one or two AA meetings a week.
My increasingly impatient sponsor insisted I go to meetings every day, but I tuned her out. Attending daily 12 step meetings was obviously beneath my dignity. I was a successful professional, right? Not the kind of loser who went to meetings every day. I’m so embarrassed to think about this now. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the reality that while yes, I had an enviable career, I was also someone whose marriage had spectacularly disintegrated, who wasn’t speaking with half of the people in her immediate family and was regularly—and increasingly—behaving in ways that seriously endangered her life.
At one point, I was alternating a week of drinking with a week of going to meetings, and I thought I had cracked the AA code: I got to drink and reap some benefits of sober life! Of course, it didn’t work at all, and my bouts of relapse became only scarier. And surprise, it turns out you can’t work a program when you’re blacked out half the time.
It took the pandemic for me to sober up. I like to joke that all the bars literally had to close in order for me to get sober. But because I’d actually been attending meetings, people from the program kept calling to check on me during the early days of the pandemic. Often, I would be drinking when they called. I found these people overly earnest and their efforts grimly funny. But one woman was particularly assiduous and difficult to fend off. She became my new sponsor and remains my beloved sponsor today.
I started Zooming into a meeting first thing in the morning, every morning, with a cup of hot coffee, then another meeting at lunch, then sometimes two or three after work. I did that over and over and over, for months. It was DIY rehab. I was truly desperate. After a while, days turned into weeks turned into months, then years. It still feels like a miracle.
The very first time I sobered up I was 29, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and my fiancé had been killed a couple of years earlier by a drunk driver. To be honest, I had been drinking alcoholically before his death, but I reacted to the accident like an addict: drinking as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted.
What are the best things about being in recovery?
My baseline is gratitude, not fear and chaos. Carrying a constant, quiet sense of liberation that comes with acknowledging on a daily basis that I cannot control my drinking. Not having secrets, especially from my husband. I’ve repaired important relationships with people I love and who love me. I’m able to set boundaries in a non-reactive way. My body has mostly healed from the abuse I put it through: another miracle. My life is orderly in ways that were frankly unimaginable six years ago. Most importantly, I’m shame-less, in the best manner possible.
What’s hard about being in recovery?
Look, I still want to burn everything down on a semi-regular basis. And while it’s become much easier to sit with myself, that doesn’t mean I always enjoy it. I still chafe at “having” to do recovery work. My emotional sobriety has come a long way, but I continue to miss some of the bad stuff about drinking: the thrills and chills, the feeling of just vanishing into bottles of wine, the false bravado. I love reading Sober Oldster profiles and feeling inspired by people with so much time who just seem so enlightened. I’m not one yet. Maybe one day, I’ll get there.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the reality that while yes, I had an enviable career, I was also someone whose marriage had spectacularly disintegrated, who wasn’t speaking with half of the people in her immediate family and was regularly—and increasingly—behaving in ways that seriously endangered her life.
How has your character changed? What’s better about you?
As a Virgo as well as an alcoholic, being able to let things go is an astonishing new superpower.
What do you still need to work on? What “character defects” do you still wrestle with?
Oh my god, so many things. Restraint in pen and tongue comes immediately to mind. I am utter crap at inventories. I’m so fucking judgmental. Every time I walk into a meeting, I’m like, “Yep, this is why I need to be in a meeting.” And even after having worked the steps multiple times, I’m still procrastinating on making a number of my original amends.
What’s the best recovery memoir you’ve ever read? Tell us what you liked about it.
Like countless other women, my relationship to alcohol was changed on a molecular level by Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story. But allow me to plump for a few others:
The Night of the Gun: A reporter investigates the darkest story of his life. His own, by the late great David Carr. A darkly hilarious New York Times reporter, Carr applied investigative journalism to his own long and terrible history of active addiction. His memoir is amazing: risky, rigorous, filled with surprising twists and compulsively readable.
Another is actually a TV series, Single Drunk Female, which was brilliant and super important to me in early recovery. It’s inspired by the actual life of the showrunner, Simone Finch, and is the only show I’ve ever seen that truly nails so many aspects of my own experience as a woman in recovery. I’m still so mad it only had two seasons. Simone Finch deserves all the shows!
Also, right before I went to rehab in 2019, I randomly picked up a few recovery memoirs to take with me. One of them, by a comedian I’d never heard of, took up residence inside me. Amber Tozer wrote Sober Stick Figure after only two years of sobriety. I’ve since heard it said that people should never, ever write sobriety memoirs so early in their recovery. But precisely because she wrote it at a time of real rawness, her memoir meant so much to me during my own time of unhinged, fearful confusion and vulnerability. Sober Stick Figure is perfect for newly sober people, the ones my friend Trevor calls “crispy.” I’ve never met Amber Tozer or reached out to her, but I check in on her social media sometimes and it looks like she’s staying sober and doing great. Amber Tozer, thank you.
It took the pandemic for me to sober up. I like to joke that all the bars literally had to close in order for me to get sober…I started Zooming into a meeting first thing in the morning, every morning, with a cup of hot coffee, then another meeting at lunch, then sometimes two or three after work. I did that over and over and over, for months. It was DIY rehab. I was truly desperate. After a while, days turned into weeks turned into months, then years. It still feels like a miracle.
What are some memorable sober moments?
When a friend dragged me to an AA dance, I had been single for ages and was just beginning to date again after a couple of years of sobriety. The very notion of an AA dance seemed dismal and pathetic, but I dutifully dressed up in a chartreuse velvet dress and prepared to suffer. Of course, I ended up having an incredible time. I was hanging out with a bunch of raucous lesbians, a feminist drag queen and a really cute, charming, curly-haired guy who was loose on the dance floor and tight with all the gay gals in recovery. I invited him for coffee later that week, and learned he was a former Marine and a former Peace Corps volunteer with 29 years of sobriety doing amazing work helping people who had lost everything in disasters. Now—tadaa!—we’re married.
As it happens, my husband Tim is the kind of recovery nerd who loves AA dances and plans vacations around recovery roundups. In 2024, when we decided to drive from DC to Lake Erie to see the total eclipse, he was adorably enthusiastic about a stop I did not want to make: “Let’s drop by Akron, Ohio to see Dr. Bob’s house!” I’ll admit to rolling my eyes. That house is where Dr. Bob and Bill W. co-founded what would become AA in 1935. Now, it’s a museum and a pilgrimage site for people in recovery. I was like, whatever, we’ll go pay our dumb respects to Dr. Bob’s dumb historic house. When we arrived, a smiling docent opened the front door and exclaimed, “Welcome home!” I immediately burst into tears. And proceeded to cry throughout the entire tour. I cried when I saw the old black typewriter they used to write the Big Book. I cried when I heard people saying the third-step prayer in the bedroom on the second floor. And to be clear, I’m an atheist. Tim will tease me about my Dr. Bob breakdown for the rest of my life.
Also, I didn’t mean for this section to be so long, but in recovery, I got to connect meaningfully with a writer I revere, Sasha Frere-Jones, who covered music for the New Yorker and the L.A.Times. His wonderful memoir Earlier touches on his addiction and recovery. I interviewed him for an NPR story pegged to Dry January. The idea was: there are lots of great songs about the excesses of drinking and drugging. What are great songs about not drinking? Turns out there are plenty. It was an absolute gift to talk with Sasha about this, about Elliott Smith, Charlie Wilson, Kenny Chesney, Pink, many others. Charlie Wilson ended up hearing the piece and got in touch because he was so tremendously moved about Sasha’s story about listening to his music in rehab. If you want to listen to the piece, it’s here.
Are you in therapy? On meds? Tell us about that.
Nope, not in therapy now, but I got sober with the help of a gentle therapist who nudged me into recovery. Years before she and I started working together, back when my drinking had really spiraled out of control and after my first marriage imploded, I made an appointment with another one, a fabulous Buddhist therapist recommended by a fancy sober friend, a woman who was a real star in the DC media world. I went to see that therapist and was honest (or honest enough) about my raging alcohol abuse so that she just kicked me out of that first appointment. “I don’t see active addicts,” the Buddhist therapist sniffed. “Come back when you’re in recovery.” Today, that does not strike me as unreasonable, but I carried a giant resentment against that therapist for years.
The therapist I saw later, the one who actually got me into recovery, wasn’t an addiction expert. When I started working the steps, she was a little startled by my talk of character defects and shared my ambivalence about the religious stuff. But she gamely rose to meet me where I was and educated herself quickly. She was super supportive, and got me through my first few years of recovery. I’m not on meds. But I do self-medicate with ice cream, far more than I should.
I’ve repaired important relationships with people I love and who love me. I’m able to set boundaries in a non-reactive way. My body has mostly healed from the abuse I put it through: another miracle. My life is orderly in ways that were frankly unimaginable six years ago. Most importantly, I’m shame-less, in the best manner possible.
What sort of activities or groups do you participate in to help your recovery? (i.e. swimming, 12-step, meditation, et cetera)
I moved from DC to Michigan a couple of years ago and have not yet settled on a home group around Ypsilanti. I still go to some of my old DC meetings on Zoom. But I’m actively involved in sponsoring. I’m an atheist who prays. Tim and I say the St. Francis prayer together every morning—we learned that sober trick from an older couple who are also both in recovery.
And every single morning, I wake up and write down five things I’m grateful for and send that list to a handful of friends, who send me their gratitude lists as well. That daily connection anchors my day, every day. Especially right now, it reminds me that I don’t have to drink at all the injustice and cruelty in the world. Staying sober is, for me, a critical act of daily resistance.
My goodness. The timing of this...I was just sitting here with my coffee, thinking of how wisdom comes in the most unexpected places, and that we must stay curious. This is an example. So many nuggets here. Thank you for sharing.
I really loved this one, especially being a huge fan,Neda!