90 days ago today, I stopped drinking. I also quit caffeine, chocolate, bubbly beverages, and acidic foods. I hugely reduced my fried/sugary/refined carbs intake. And I started meditating daily. Which is to say, I didn’t stop drinking as an isolated choice — time to quit drinking! I stopped doing a lot of things that were making me sick.
Really sick, lying in bed all day, crying because of the pain, lost in a haze sick. And the only relief to be found for it all was to treat my body with way more TLC than she’d had in a long, long time. So I stopped doing a lot of things that were bad for me, but the stopping drinking is the one that feels more complicated to talk about. Even though the reason for all of those lifestyle changes were the same: stop the pain.
In my social circle, Whole 30s and fresh, local meat and produce are all the rage — along with craft cocktails and microbrews. We’re feminists and engaged parents and take family hikes. Drinking happens outside at neighborhood cookouts, or around fire pits. It’s wholesome AF. I however, have a bit more of an unwholesome background with booze.
In my youth, I was a party girl, wild and free. I lived a lot of life I’d never trade. But I also collected my share of bad experiences. I uncovered mental illness and did more work than I could ever describe to, if not heal, protect myself better. Drinking was how I let my guard down when being wild was the aim, and later on, when I felt like I wanted to be more open, but my protective layers were too well constructed. I didn’t use it to forget, I was perfectly skilled at natural disassociation for that. So, I didn’t crave it. It wasn’t a physical addiction, it was a really bad habit.
Taking breaks isn’t quitting but it helps
This wasn’t the first time I’d quit. I had two full term pregnancies where I skipped the wine with dinner and went for water without question. I didn’t make the boys’ dad stop drinking in solidarity or because I’d feel left out. Did I celebrate successfully creating human life with a beer when it was all over? You betcha. But even then, I was nursing, so drinking wasn’t really on my mind.
During the pandemic, I stopped drinking unintentionally at first. I was keeping perfect quarantine and had no desire to break it by walking into a liquor store. Eventually, my neighbors delivered me a bottle of bourbon, and I had cocktails and nightcaps for a while. Then, nothing. Then I realized I could order cases of wine online. So, every couple of months, I’d restock a variety of vintages and make my way through it all. At the time, I was doing my best to keep a social life going with cocktail hours with friends and chatting with men on the apps. By the time I stopped drinking, it was just me, drinking. Since that’s not what my relationship with alcohol was all about, stopping on purpose made sense.
I’m still the most locked down person I know, so maybe as the world opens up and I dine out or go to a wedding I’ll have something different to say about that. But it is reassuring not to be obsessed with sobriety, and instead be focused on my overall health, which, though still not perfect, is certainly vastly improved from where I was 3 months ago. I can get up and do things, carefully, checking in with my body along the way, all day long most of the time now. That it still takes effort makes it really easy to choose not to poison my body with ethanol.
Quitting is forever
Shortly after I realized I had stopped drinking in a way that felt like forever, I listened to the audiobook version of Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker in a single day. Very few things motivate me like undermining the patriarchy, and I knew this particular quit lit tome had a strong feminist leaning. And while being alcohol free as a feminist act is definitely appealing, the book’s description of the science behind the dangerous impacts of alcohol on your body, as I was so desperate to heal, put it over the top for me.
Of all the lifestyle changes I made, the only one without any flexibility is drinking. One day, I will treat myself to a fountain Diet Coke and its sweet, bubby, aspartamey burn, then I’ll go back to not drinking soda for a while. I’ll say, “I don’t really drink soda,” with that little escape hatch adverb. But, booze is different. People don’t invite you out for Diet Cokes. One rarely centers a social event around soft drinks. If someone offered me a soda, and I said, “no thanks I’ll take a water” they wouldn’t say “come on, just have one, I don’t want to drink my soda alone.” So, I’m hedging my bets.
Side effects of quitting
Quitting something forever is a wild experience. As a divorced person, I can say this with a certain kind of authority. It changes you in surprising ways. Here are some of the things that have happened to me these past three months:
- I started sleeping like a rock. I can barely wait until my children are in bed to go to sleep myself most nights. Then I crash hard and sleep soundly. I’m even starting to remember my dreams again.
- Some of the things I’d been protecting myself from the past two decades found their way to the surface of my mind. Those old shadows thrive in sobriety. And so, I’m tossing in some healing along with all that protection. If there’s no shortcut to letting my guard down, I need to find ways to lower the gate safely.
- I read other people’s sobriety stories as part of my daily Medium consumption. I keep looking for one I can relate to and not finding it, that’s why I’m writing this. It’s not a crazy, dramatic tale of sleeping on the curb and kindly AA compatriots taking me out for coffee and pancakes. It’s just a matter of fact kind of thing. Maybe it’s what you needed.
- I mute people on social media who post a lot about drinking without any other kind of content that makes me feel good. I cringe at endless cocktail posts, and never really cared about treks to breweries anyway. And I find I get a little annoyed at people who post about health food and booze now. On account of how there’s no such thing as healthy booze. But I keep it to myself.
- Sugar is the thing I really crave. Quitting alcohol and caffeine (which almost always came with sugar in some way) and chocolate all at once, and cutting back on sugar overall was intense. I actually celebrated my 90 days of taking better care of myself with a glazed donut. No regrets. On the other hand, I am so freaking hydrated, it’s bananas. Waking up in the morning after 8 hours of not drinking any water is the new hangover, apparently. But I don’t miss booze in the least.
Quitting is cool
It’s been a long, hard, lonely year, and then some. When I was at my worst physically, it’s because I was at my worst mentally. I wasn’t the most depressed I’d ever been, I was the most exhausted. Being the only person responsible for my own and my kids’ mental and emotional and physical wellbeing during a global crisis while we waited to see if Trump would succeed in starting a civil war was really fucking stressful. I ran out of reserves. Whatever I had left, I focused on the kids until I could barely do that. It wasn’t a drinking rock bottom, it was a pandemic life rock bottom. No one was coming to help me, so I had to help myself.
And so, like the badass I have been since my wayward youth, I did. But I only told 3 people about it. There are a few reasons for that.
- I didn’t want to make anyone feel bad, or feel like they had to justify their own drinking or act like they were thinking about quitting, too.
- I didn’t want to look like a person with a publicly mocked, pitied and derided problem. My ego was not into that.
- I wasn’t sure if it was for real.
- I wasn’t sure how to talk about it yet (see reading other people’s stories and not relating)
- I didn’t want to seem like I was bragging
Some of those things are in perfect conflict with others, right? Something we consume is mass quantities as a culture shouldn’t be so complicated to talk about. But here we are. So, as a writer, in the most healing thing of them all, I’m celebrating these healthy choices — sobriety at the top of the list — by talking, no, bragging about them.
