I moved to Seattle in early Fall many years ago. The days were still long. Seattle is very far north (it is more north than the top of Maine)!  It also sits very far in the Pacific time zone and is closer to the next time zone. At the summer solstice there is 16 plus hours of daylight plus another hour or so of twilight. When the sun sets, and it is mostly dark at 10:30 – that’s when the fireworks of Fourth of July go off because before that it is too light to see them well.

By the time I arrived in early September, the sun was setting about 7:30PM, later than it was in Boston where I had lived, and 3 hours less than at the solstice. The weather was still sunny and warm (not like I believed Seattle would be like).

In the middle of October, the clouds moved in and the gray with drizzle that Seattle is known for started. When daylight savings time ended, I learned that THE BIG DARK (as it was called in Seattle) was starting. The Big Dark starts as the days get shorter and greyer (though there are a few days of sparkling sunshine) and wetter. Seattle gets about 40 inches of precipitation each year. Many places in the US get much more rain/snow than Seattle but there it comes in drizzle with a few storms that go on and on. Almost all the rain is from October 15-May 15. Then the weather changes to dry weather and sunny days with temps in the 80’s making the summer glorious.

I was working hard at a new job and barely noticed the growing dark days. Life was good for the first 5-6 years.  At the winter solstice, the sun sets at 4:10 in the afternoon without any twilight light and the sun doesn’t rise until 8am – barely 8 hours of light and since it’s grey so much it seems like it is dark all day. My good friend made me a calendar that went from November until March to help me see the minutes that are lost each day and then gained after the winter solstice.

It was during the dark days when my drinking got worse (the details don’t really matter) and my life looked much more like The Big Dark all the time. The winter solstice and the December before I stopped drinking and found AA was the worse. (Again, you can imagine). The Big Dark was now in me so bad that I knew I had to do something. I knew I had problems but couldn’t see that drinking had anything to do with them.

In January of 1990 my sister invited me to visit her. She had been sober for a few years. Then my oldest friend also encouraged me to see her as she had also been sober a few years. It was my sister who took me to my first meeting when I visited. I cried and cried and cried. I owe them both my sincere gratitude.

I didn’t really remember what was the actual first day that I did not drink. It was probably one of the last days of January. I did know though that I didn’t drink on February 1, so I picked that day.  Then I learned that February is a very important day in Seattle.  That is the day when the sun sets AFTER 5PM and it becomes noticeable that the light is returning, the Big Dark is really ending.

I came to see that the beginning of sobriety was and is a minute by minute thing. Like the sun after the winter solstice, at first, I did not see the change in the light or in me. By the day I claimed February 1 as my sobriety birthday, I noticed that the Big Dark was fading, and a new light could grow in me. And it has kept growing. Yes, there are cloudy and raining days, but I know now they don’t last.

I moved to Arizona a year ago and even though the sun shines most every day, there are still clouds and rain and wind - that’s life on life’s terms. And with God’s help, by the time you read this I will celebrate 35 years of sobriety.

Thank you, Libbie S