I was three months sober when my therapist asked me to describe what I was feeling right then, in that exact moment. I opened my mouth to answer and realized I was already analyzing what I should feel next Tuesday.
This happened on a Wednesday afternoon, the kind where heat makes everything shimmer outside the window. My mind had already jumped to my upcoming performance review, then to whether I should text the woman I’d matched with on the dating app, then to whether my sponsor would think three months was too soon to be dating. Anywhere but that chair, that room, that specific slice of time.
My therapist waited. She’s good at that.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “I’m here but I’m not here.”
She nodded like I’d just explained something profound instead of confessing that I’d been emotionally absent from my own life for the past three months. Maybe longer. Maybe always.
The Engineering Problem with Time
Early recovery does this thing where your brain becomes a bizarre time machine. You’re either stuck in the past, cataloging every embarrassing moment from your using days, or you’re racing into the future, trying to calculate when sobriety will finally feel less like exposure therapy and more like living. The present moment becomes this thin, uncomfortable space you’re trying to speedrun through.
I built my entire career on forward thinking. Engineering depends on projection—modeling outcomes, predicting stress points, optimizing systems for future performance. You take current conditions and extrapolate. You identify potential failures before they happen. You solve problems that don’t exist yet.
This worked brilliantly for designing renewable energy systems. It worked terribly for staying sober.
Because recovery happens exclusively in this moment. Not in the well-planned future where you’ve figured everything out. Not in the regret-soaked past where you’re still trying to make sense of who you were. Just here, in this specific right now, where you’re awkward and uncertain and very much still figuring it out.
My first sponsor used to say that my “one day at a time” looked more like “one day at a time while simultaneously planning the next six months.” She wasn’t wrong. I had spreadsheets. Color-coded calendars. A five-year sobriety plan that included projected meeting attendance, anticipated emotional milestones, and a timeline for when I’d finally feel like I had my shit together.
At three years sober, I still don’t have my shit together. But I’m better at being here while I don’t.
What Actually Happens When You’re Checked Out
The substances were my first escape from the present tense. Alcohol and pills let me exist in this soft-focus nowhere—not quite past, not quite future, definitely not dealing with right now. Using gave me permission to be anywhere but in my actual life, my actual body, my actual circumstances.
Even sober, I still catch myself doing this—performing “woman in recovery” or “functional professional” or “good daughter” instead of just being whoever I am in this unrehearsed moment.
When you’re never actually present, you miss everything. Not just the bad stuff you’re trying to avoid, but the texture of your own life. You miss small moments of genuine connection. You miss the quiet satisfaction of solving an actual problem at work. You miss your body telling you it’s tired before you hit the wall. You miss the early warning signs that you’re heading toward a spiral.
I missed three months of early sobriety while I was busy projecting into a future where I’d already figured out how to be sober. I went to meetings but I was really at some imaginary future meeting where I knew what to say. I talked to my sponsor but I was actually talking to a future version of myself who had this whole recovery thing mastered. I sat in therapy but I was scheduling all the ways I’d eventually feel better rather than feeling whatever I was feeling right then.
My therapist kept bringing me back. “What’s happening right now? In your body, in this room, in this moment?”
I hated that question. Still do, honestly.
The False Comfort of Future-Tripping
There’s this cognitive pattern where your brain convinces you that if you can just plan well enough, you won’t have to feel uncertain. If you can project every possible scenario, you’ll never be caught off-guard. If you stay three steps ahead of your own life, you’ll maintain control.
This shows up everywhere in early recovery. You future-trip about whether you’ll always feel this raw. Whether you’ll ever date again. Whether family dinners will always be this tense. Whether you’ll spend the rest of your life explaining why you’re not drinking. Whether being sober means being boring. Whether you’ll ever stop thinking about using.
The mental time travel feels protective. If you’re worrying about next week, you don’t have to sit with how hard today is. If you’re already planning how you’ll handle your next difficult situation, you don’t have to acknowledge that you barely handled this one. If you’re focused on some theoretical future version of yourself who has recovery figured out, you don’t have to be this current version who’s mostly just trying not to fuck up.
But I learned something from debugging systems at work: when you’re so focused on projected outcomes that you miss current conditions, you end up solving the wrong problem. You optimize for a scenario that doesn’t match reality. You build contingencies for futures that never arrive while the actual present moment requires something completely different.
My five-year sobriety plan didn’t account for major life changes that I couldn’t have predicted. It didn’t include space for realizing I needed medication for anxiety. It didn’t predict shifts in career direction or evolving relationships with family. It couldn’t have anticipated which friendships would deepen and which would fade.
The future I was planning for wasn’t the present I was building.
What Changed (Slowly, Imperfectly)
I can’t tell you there was some revelation where I suddenly understood how to be present. Recovery doesn’t work like that, at least not for me. It’s been this gradual, frustrating process of catching myself mid-time-travel and dragging my brain back to right now.
Sometimes this looks like my sponsor asking me what I’m feeling and me actually staying with the question long enough to find an honest answer instead of the answer I think I should give. Sometimes it’s noticing I’m holding my breath during a difficult conversation and making myself breathe. Sometimes it’s being on a date and realizing I’m already planning our breakup instead of seeing whether I actually like this person.
Therapy helped. My therapist taught me to notice when I’m narrating my life instead of experiencing it—when I’m already drafting the story of this moment rather than being in it. She taught me that analyzing feelings is different from feeling them, and I’m really good at the first part while actively avoiding the second.
Meetings helped too, especially the ones where I could just sit and listen instead of performing competence. There’s something about hearing someone else describe their current struggle—not their past horror story or their future hopes, but their actual right-now experience—that gave me permission to exist in my own present tense.
Certain meetings especially. There’s less performance pressure when everyone in the room understands what it’s like to spend years being someone you’re not. Being present means being yourself, and that’s easier when you’re not constantly wondering whether you count as enough of anything.
The Small Mechanics of Showing Up
The “stay in the moment” advice sounds simple until you try to actually do it. Then it’s this impossible ask: how do you stop your brain from doing what it’s always done?
You don’t, completely. But you can interrupt the pattern.
I started noticing my triggers for mental time travel. Uncomfortable feelings send me straight into planning mode. Uncertainty makes me project every possible outcome. Sitting with my family makes me either rehash old arguments or rehearse future ones. Being alone too long sends me into elaborate fantasies about a life I’m not living.
When I catch myself doing this now—and it’s when, not if—I have a few tools that sometimes work:
I name where I actually am. Out loud if I’m alone, silently if I’m in public. Just facts, just location, just this moment. The physical reality of where my body exists right now.
I check in with my body. Not in some mystical way, just practical inventory. Am I hungry? Tired? Holding tension somewhere? Do I need to move or eat or sleep or call someone? Present-moment needs that I’m ignoring while I mentally time travel.
I text my sponsor or someone in my sober friend group. Not with some profound crisis, just “I’m in my head again.” Usually they text back something equally simple like “yeah that happens” or “want to talk?” Just knowing someone else exists in the same present moment helps.
I notice what I’m trying to avoid. Usually when I’m future-tripping, there’s something happening right now that I don’t want to feel. Loneliness. Anxiety. Disappointment. The low-grade grief that shows up in recovery. The fear that I’m not doing this right. Whatever it is, naming it makes it less powerful.
The Mathematics of One Day at a Time
My engineering brain still wants to optimize this. Find the most efficient path to being present. Calculate the exact formula for staying grounded. Build a system that guarantees I won’t get lost in past regret or future anxiety.
But recovery happens in human time, which refuses to be optimized.
Some days I’m mostly present. I go to work and actually focus on the problems in front of me. I have conversations where I’m listening instead of planning what I’ll say next. I notice small details I usually miss. I sit in a meeting and feel connected to the people there instead of wondering how many more meetings it’ll take before I feel better.
Other days I’m barely here at all. I go through the motions while my brain runs disaster scenarios or escapes into elaborate futures that will never happen. I performance my way through hours without landing in any of them. I attend my life without inhabiting it.
The practice isn’t achieving some perfect state of present-moment awareness. The practice is noticing when you’ve left and choosing to come back. Again. And again. And again.
Three years sober and I still catch myself projecting into some imaginary future where I’ve figured out how to be present. The irony isn’t lost on me.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Recovery keeps dragging you back to the present moment whether you want to be there or not. You’re sitting somewhere ordinary—your apartment, a coffee shop, your car before work—and you realize you’ve been mentally anywhere but there. Planning conversations that haven’t happened. Replaying ones that have. Calculating how long until you feel normal. Wondering if you’ll ever feel normal.
Then you catch yourself. You name where you are. You notice what you’re feeling. You come back.
This is the work. Not dramatic. Not a breakthrough. Just this specific slice of time where you’re sober and alive and still figuring it out.
I spent my using years trying to be anywhere but here. I spent early recovery trying to engineer my way to a future where here would be more comfortable. Three years in, I’m slowly learning that here is all there is.
My therapist says I’m getting better at it. My sponsor says I still have a long way to go. They’re both right.
The substances promised escape from the present. Recovery keeps insisting you show up for it—uncomfortable, uncertain, unoptimized, and somehow survivable. Most days that’s enough.
Some days it’s more than enough. I’m learning to notice those too.