Life After 6 Months Alcohol Free
We tend to talk about drinking in one of two ways — something special, or something shameful. It’s a celebration, enjoyment of a craft, a way to bond. Or, it’s dark, secret, and sloppy. “HEY LOOK AT MY DRINK” or “don’t look at the drunk”. For something so entangled in our highest, lowest, and most mundane moments, we lack a real nuance in how we relate to our friend the bottle.
When I stopped drinking in January, I was sick, and also stopped eating sugar and drinking caffeine and started doing pelvic floor guided meditations. It was a whole thing. But, while my occasional, deliciously sweet cup of English breakfast has returned, I always planned on keeping drinking out permanently. I didn’t identify as an alcoholic. It was less a feeling of despair about drinking, more that I didn’t need it anymore. We were 9 months into lockdown, and I was no longer hanging around with people in casual social or stressful professional settings.
Huh, I thought to myself as I came to this realization. I’d been reading a lot of stories about people stopping drinking, and “not having to be around people therefore not needing it anymore” wasn’t showing up. But whatever, I was happily, and without a craving in sight, alcohol free and just taking better care of myself generally. Onto dealing with whatever revelations sobriety had in store, I figured, not realizing that needing to drink to be around people was the revelation. I just didn’t have the whole picture yet.
That came when I stumbled across ADHD Twitter and found that the threads about things ADHD adults wished they’d known or received as kids contained the best parenting advice ever. Being a savvy middle-aged social media user, I also started to dabble in #actuallyautistic Instagram. Also useful! And, interestingly, unlike the stories about reasons people stopped drinking, where I never really related, I was super-relating to the experiences of neurodivergent advocates. Not as a mom, as me.
Hmmm, I wondered, could all this be connected?
Reader, it was. I am neurodivergent AF. Not to be confused with neurodiversity (which is the concept of there being more than one way a brain works), neurodivergence is a different way of processing than what’s considered the norm — including, but not limited to, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, some folks include things like complex post traumatic stress disorder, and a few other specific neurotypes. Many of these things co-occur or are confused with each other. It’s a lot of business, and likely not something I’ll ever try to explain with any semblance of expertise. Consider that my disclaimer and encouragement for you to google.
What I know is, it’s me! And it explains an awful lot. It was not what I was expecting to come across this year, my 43rd year, or ever. And to be honest, I probably never would have. It took global-pandemic level isolation and stress to burn me all the way out, the only likely place this discovery could have been made, I imagine.
I also know I’m not the only one realizing as an adult they spent a hefty portion of their life feeling broken, and coming up with some pretty impressive tricks to survive in the wild whenever they weren’t allowed to be at home recovering from having to do all those tricks. In my case, being assigned female at birth, being privileged (white, cis, straight), getting labeled gifted, and masking like a champ kept hidden the reasons I had such a hard time figuring out what seemed so easy for everyone else. So I was quirky or intense, so what?
By the time I got to the age of drinking, I was already working hard to pull off “standard teenager,” and it’s clear now I was not as successful as I thought I was at the time. But, drinking — especially if there was a dance party — made the social side of it a whole lot easier. And any faux pas had a cover story: one too many. Even if the only one I was telling the story to was me.
Having kids should have been a great way not to have to socialize in quite the same way anymore. Instead, post-kid, pre-divorce, I drank interesting things so I could have something to talk about during the frequent moments of adult time that involve talking about drinks even if we’re not drinking. To sit with the fact that I never have to contemplate a craft beer again is what I like to imagine really good praying feels like. To realize I don’t have to do any of the things related to drinking again (like going to parties without dancing), and knowing it’s for the best, is such a huge relief.
It’s not all as tidy and tied up in a bow as I might be making it seem, but I don’t quite have the words yet to describe what it’s like to clear your mind and find out something that changes almost every aspect of your life (despite having written 40,000 words of notes during my obsessive research phase. If you know, you know.). I’m figuring out the details, knowing there are better ways to keep myself safe, relating to my kids in an entirely new way, and cherishing with newfound certainty the things that are beautiful about the way my brain works. Not bad for a metaphorical 6 month chip, I’d say.
