Four years off the sauce, baby

Cheers to that.

To mark four years of being a quitter, I’m reposting an essay I wrote two years into my decision to stop drinking. This was when I finally trusted that the change was going to stick and felt ready to share with people outside my immediate circle. Rereading this essay now made me a little emotional, tbh. I remember writing it and still feeling so uncertain about where my life was heading. I might write more about this and I might not, but I’m still proud of myself for putting this out there.

—————

Today marks 2 years since my last drink. We were on a camping trip and while Ben was out riding I took the opportunity to cry my eyes out, alone in the woods, and come to terms with my decision to quit. When Ben got back we drove into town for pizza and I cried some more and told him that I was going to take a break.

Photo by Manki Kim on Unsplash

But let me back up a bit. I was 14 the first time I got drunk. I got in trouble but overall it was no big deal — kids experiment and I’m from a big Irish family of heavy drinkers. Over the next couple of years my friends and I snuck booze semi-regularly, as teenagers do, but still nothing out of the ordinary. Then, when I was 16, my dad died, three days later a friend died, and all the most important people in my orbit were grieving hard.

I’d already been flirting with depression but this was a turning point. This is when my desire to get fucked up broke away from normal teen experimentation and group bonding, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I never really felt like I fit in, even with my family and closest friends, and now I had this black hole of grief to contend with. Mixed with grief was an intense guilt for being drunk the last time I saw my dad. I can’t fully remember our last conversation.

I graduated high school and moved to Chicago for what we’re always told will be the best years of our lives. And there were good parts — I loved my friends, I had fun, I fell in love. But I was also very depressed. I never really engaged with school or hobbies or creative endeavors in any meaningful way, and there were moments that should have been major wake up calls. My two constants were getting fucked up and the bone deep certainty that everyone was just temporarily putting up with me, would be glad when I left.

At some point when I was 20 my hangovers started to change. More often than not I could still bounce out of bed, pop a few aspirin, and be fine, but sometimes they were completely debilitating. I’d be laid up all day, throwing up like clockwork well into the evening. This didn’t happen every time, but more often than I’d like to admit. I can still remember the way those hangovers felt if I think about it hard enough. But as soon as it subsided, I’d rally for another night out.

Every time I spent the day throwing up, I wanted to be someone else. Every time I cringed at the memory of what I did and said the night before, I wanted to be someone else. Every time I saw how I was failing to be a good sister and daughter, a good friend, a good student, a good person, I wanted to be someone else. Every time I realized I was stuck with myself — this hurting, empty, lonely person — I wanted to be someone else.

It seems clear to me now that I had a drinking problem in my early 20s. But on paper I was just having the American college experience, complete with a scholarship and nearly straight As.

But some part of me knew this wasn’t how I wanted to live. I moved in with my sister and started to tone it down. After a year I moved back to Milwaukee for grad school and moved in with my best friend. I quit smoking and started distance running — a healthier (but still punishing) attempt to cope with feelings I didn’t want to feel. I met Ben.

I experimented with my drinking and treated it like a code to crack…if I could just figure out what triggered my extreme hangovers, I wouldn’t have to give it up. Maybe it was just wine that made me sick, or beer, or whiskey. Maybe there was some unlucky combination I could avoid. Maybe if I had water between each drink, or a bunch before bed. There was no secret code. If I had more than 2 drinks it was a total crapshoot on whether or not I’d be functional the next day.

As I drank less overall going into my 30s, the days I spent with my head in the toilet became fewer and further between. But on those days the self-loathing of my early 20s came back full force. The disconnect they exposed between who I was starting to become and the fuck up who had to cancel plans because she was hungover again became more intolerable. I finished grad school, I found decent jobs, I started teaching yoga, I married the man I loved. My life was moving forward and I was, by any measure, doing better than I ever had been before. But my relationship to alcohol felt more fraught and I didn’t know what to make of this.

At this point I had 2 or so drinks on weeknights and a few more on the weekends. There were rarely nights when I had nothing to drink. Reading that now, I don’t know if that’s a lot. It felt totally normal by Wisconsin standards and practically teetotaling by my younger self’s standards.

I hadn’t told anyone I was starting to question things yet but I noticed that I wanted to be drinking more, that there were no days off. I kept constant tabs on how many beers were in the fridge. I secretly topped off my wine before dinner, hiding it from Ben for no reason. I kept an eye on how full my glass was when we were out, feeling anxious as it got low. I felt fuzzy and more irritable during the day. I constantly made and failed challenges for myself — no drinks for a month, or a week, or just weeknights, or just before I taught at 6 a.m. the next day.

I wasted a lot of energy instead of making the simpler choice of not doing the thing that made me feel bad. It worried me but I constantly went back and forth with myself because, really, is 2 drinks a night that big a deal? Wasn’t I much worse in college? My drinking at this point really didn’t match our idea of alcoholism. If someone sat me down at 22 and said “you’re an alcoholic” I would’ve told them to fuck off, but I would’ve thought they were probably right. By 31, I had my shit together, more or less. And not in a high-functioning alcoholic way, but in the way that made me feel crazy for the anguish I was feeling over a totally “normal” amount of drinking.

I still doubt myself. Even today I feel strange saying “I’m sober” because I feel like I haven’t earned it, like I wasn’t far gone enough when I quit and it’s insulting to people who’ve struggled more. I don’t have any succinct language for what my relationship to alcohol was or is.

For my entire adult life, I’ve been watching someone I love descend into severe alcoholism and I don’t want to make their suffering about me. I don’t want to come across like I know what they’re going through. I don’t, I never will, that’s clear. Their struggle is very, very different from mine, I know this. But in trying to understand them, I kind of stumbled into facing my own problems. As I read quit-lit and journal articles and listened to sobriety podcasts, alarm bells started ringing.

There was overlap in what I was feeling and what I found in these discussions. Not 100%, but enough. I went from thinking, “huh, that’s useful” to “oh shit…I could use this.” When I eventually found the concept of gray area drinking, things really started to click. It was such an unflattering relief to see myself reflected in these discussions and to hear that I didn’t need to burn my life to the ground to justify making a change.

Then I was flooded with a new kind of grief. I mourned what I had to give up and all the time I’d wasted so far. I felt a genuine sadness over how I’d let myself hurt for so long. I was angry with myself for failing the people I loved by failing to get my shit together, for holding back. I was scared to take an honest look at everything I’d swept under the rug. I couldn’t imagine what it meant to give it up. As a kid I was creative and goofy, yes, but I was also a true weirdo who usually felt like the odd man out. I didn’t know how to be that as an adult, without any kind of balm. But I felt like I had to find out to move forward.

I don’t think everyone who drinks has a problem. But I do think my relationship to alcohol is a problem because it’s the most effective tool my self-loathing ever had. The effort that goes into trying to wield that tool in a non-harmful, “normal” way is simply not worth it. The constant negotiation and monitoring was a waste of brain power. I wasn’t weaving elaborate lies around my drinking, but it fed a furtive impulse. When I quit, I told Ben that I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, but that I could see the outline of it, could see how I could eventually go from A to B (or go back to the B of my 20s). I don’t know if that’s true but it’s what I felt then.

It’s genuinely harmful for my body and I understand now that it’s just as harmful for my mental and emotional health. It makes me bored and boring. It zaps me of all creativity, genuine experience, and connection. I don’t engage with or participate in anything fully — internally or externally — when alcohol is involved. It dulls all my senses and keeps me from myself, which was the point all along, but somewhere along the way that separation became untenable.

It gave me some relief when the full weight of my grief was too much to bear, and for that I do owe it a debt of gratitude. On some level maybe it kept me alive past the worst of it, not having to feel the full intensity of that pain. And I do have a lot of genuinely fun memories and stories that were fueled by alcohol, I don’t regret all of it. But in the long run it only exacerbated my more existential pain. Maybe there will be a time when it fits into my life again, but probably not.

Every major experience, celebration, and loss in my adult life was marked by alcohol (most minor experiences too). The past 2 years have been full of firsts for me. Engaging with the world in your 30s is much different than engaging with the world at 16. Even something like dinner with my oldest friends was a new experience. Engaging with myself at this age is very different than it was at 16. I experience my emotions and thoughts differently now and have more life experience to help contextualize things.

I’ve learned to navigate all sorts of things — from parties to a pandemic to relentless news cycles to intense family pain — without alcohol as a release valve but also without its cumulative negative effects. My depression has lessened dramatically. I still find life to be thoroughly exhausting sometimes and looking to the future (on a global level) frightens me, but I’m well within the normal bounds of stress and anxiety these days. I’m excited about my future on a personal level. One of the best parts of the past 2 years has been feeling like the days are longer, that I have more time with the people I love, more time to live, less of it wasted.

I don’t know how to be fully vulnerable yet — how do you do that? How do you risk rejection without a built in excuse for why you were rejected, why you risked it in the first place? Haha I didn’t really mean that, I was just drunk. I’m still working on examining my shame around who I am and learning to share those parts of myself anyway. I don’t really know how to do this. I get overwhelmed when I try. I’m getting better at treating myself with compassion, but letting someone else in on the process is still terrifying.

I’m starting to understand how estranged I let myself get from my body and what it feels like to actually inhabit my body. I’m learning how to nourish it and how to repay it for all I’ve put it through. I make more time for basic self care and pay better attention to my health. My skin and eyes are clearer. I get better sleep, no more night sweats. My gut is happier. My sense of smell has gotten better. I have more energy. I haven’t thrown up in TWO YEARS.

Some of my anxious habits have cleared up. Now I recognize a craving for whiskey in the same way I do a craving for a cigarette or a steak — it’s usually a sign I’m stressed. My impulse to triple check that I turned my straightener off or locked the door has vanished. I don’t think everyone’s mad at me all the time (or at least not as often). Quitting was the single best decision I ever made for my all around health and happiness.

Obligatory soul-searching-in-nature picture.

I feel more content and compassionate. I’m less reactive, more patient. I’m learning to be less self-centered and to put things in a broader perspective, to not take things personally. I take more pleasure in little things. I’m getting better at addressing things that upset me and sticking up for myself. I want to feel all the things I feel, even the hard stuff. I cry now! I’m excited and hopeful about who I’m becoming, even though I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life (maybe it’s enough just to live it). I feel more confident in my decision to quit. I’m proud of myself.

I’m still terrified of being unwanted and rejected, but I came across a Thoreau quote the other day that spoke directly to the loneliness that’s at the core of all this. I know how cheesy it is to wrap this all up with a Thoreau quote, but I’m also learning to embrace what works without worrying about it being cool. Anyway, he said, “I am not alone if I stand by myself.” At the center of this entire process, I feel like I’m finally on my own side.