On (Not) Drinking
In 2015, I wrote an essay on my experience with drinking. I’m linking to it but refusing to re-read it, for the same reasons most of us hate listening to our own voice played back to us. I find a certain kind of cringe in reading any of my past writing, particularly this one, as it is — as was the trend of the time — painfully over-indulgent. In it, I talked about my past relationship with alcohol, particularly around the time I first started drinking in 2003, through the heaviest drinking of my life in my early twenties. I talked about my reasons for drinking, why I loved alcohol so much, how it made me feel big and expansive and expressive and flirty, and how destructive it was for me at that time. I blamed my drinking on a lot of different things – the patriarchy, a need to take up greater emotional space, growing up in a household with zero tolerance for underage drinking, etc.
What I left out then but what I understand now, is that I drank because I romanticized drinking. I was a writer and a drinker, and somewhere along the line I had received the message that embodying this archetype was something sexy, mysterious, intriguing, messy in a not-totally-chaotic way.
Unfortunately, this inward feeling never quite matched my outward expression. Instead, I found myself regularly blacking out throughout high school and college and generally making a fool of myself. The worst while abroad visiting my cousin in Scotland, running on two hours of sleep and a heroic amount of liquor, saw me wholly incapable of understanding the logistics of an airport. I can still barely recall how I found my way onto the correct plane, but I do remember passing out completely upon finding my seat, being shaken awake before takeoff by a perplexed-looking flight attendant asking me to please put my seat upright.
As Leslie Jamison writes, “My ability to find drunken dysfunction appealing – to fetishize its relationship to genius – was a privilege of having never really suffered.” Here, here.
I’m lucky, truly. Drinking never took over my life the way it so easily can others. At some point, it was no longer fun to be physically unable to use my legs to walk home. Maybe I got sick of blacking out, tired of worrying or feeling shame about what I may have said or done the night before, sick of vomiting, exhausted from ruining half of a weekend in the daze of a hangover. Whatever the reasons, at some point I began to make a series of decisions to reduce how much I drank, to the point I’m at now: a near complete removal of it from my life.
Up until recently, I had very strange views of people who didn’t drink. Beyond being prudish, or worse, religious, I would find myself saying with some regularity that I “didn’t trust” people who didn’t drink. This is a ridiculous statement. Why on earth did I even care if someone else didn’t drink? How did this impact my life in any possible way? It was a detrimental narrative that kept me from ever even conceiving of the possibility that maybe I also didn’t need to drink. I could have been a lot happier a lot sooner had I realized this was not only a possibility, but something that would bring me genuine peace.
My foray into sobriety started modestly with a month-long alcohol break, something I can say with honesty I had never done in the nearly twenty years since I began drinking. There was nothing dramatic that preceded me deciding to do this. I didn’t get wasted at my best friend’s wedding and sing bad karaoke all night or text an ex-boyfriend. I didn’t end the night vomiting into the toilet. By that time, I had developed what I considered to be a much more casual relationship with alcohol: I still enjoyed wine with dinner, my then-boyfriend/now-husband and I went out for appetizers and drinks on a weekly basis, and I had semi-regular happy hour dates with friends. Like most 30-somethings, I was aware that my hangovers were coming easier and becoming much more acute — it was the reason I’d sworn off liquor a few years earlier. Instead, I paused my drinking for fantastically selfish reasons: I had my own wedding coming up and I wanted my skin to look great, damnit.
I wouldn’t have even known that the little red bumps that had since my late twenties plagued my cheeks, the tip of my nose, and the space between my eyebrows could even go away without alcohol if it weren’t for a brief abstinence following dental surgery earlier this year. (Alcohol, among other things, inflames rosacea.). But then there I was, bragging to the group chat about my baby-smooth skin after just 10 days, those little bumps seeming in permanent retreat.
Skin-smoothing benefits aside, that first medically-imposed period of abstinence was hard. I wanted wine with dinner. I wanted wine to complement my couch-laying on weekend nights. I wanted wine to help me get through how shitty I felt from the surgery. Every day of that three-week period I felt.
But then something shifted. When it was all over, and I could finally drink again, I found that I didn’t love it in the same way I thought I had. The previous fall I’d made a pact with myself to consciously drink less. Pandemic drinking was making me feel exhausted and worn-out, so I decided to only drink Thursdays through Sundays. At some point that became Wednesdays through Sundays, sometimes Tuesdays. But after three weeks of not drinking, I didn’t feel the need to drink quite so much again. I reverted back to my original plan: Thursdays through Sundays only, no more than one drink per night.
In March, before my full month off, I was planning to attend a yoga retreat in Costa Rica. It felt like the right time to take another full week off. I was almost successful in this, but on day three, after nearly jumping off of a 25 foot cliff but then talking myself out of it, my nerves were shot and I couldn’t find any other way to get my cortisol to relax than to have a beer with lunch. Which, of course, didn’t help my stress and did not leave me feeling better.
Coming home from the retreat, I came up with a new plan: I’d drink only if I really wanted to, which is a really hard game to play with oneself. Did I really want this wine? Or would I be fine without it? I was at happy hour with friends, did I really want to have a beer, or was that just what I should do given the social context? I was back in an ambiguous space, unable or unwilling to put up the boundaries I really needed.
The night before deciding to take a month off, I went to an indoor climbing gym with friends. After, someone suggested getting a drink nearby, and soon we were seated at a table each with a tall beer in front of us. The beers were strong. I felt myself getting tipsy only mid-way through my first drink. I told myself I didn’t need a second, and that I should instead head home. It was a Tuesday night and I wanted to have dinner and get enough rest to not be hungover for work the next day. By the time I finished the beer, however, my friends were ready for a second. Knowing I shouldn’t, but caving to social pressure, I agreed to a second.
(Something I know about myself: it’s almost always easier for me to say no to the first drink than it is to say no to the next.)
That night, I got home late, woke up in the middle of the night sweating and thirsty, and knew then I’d be hungover in the morning.
The next day was the 19th of April. My wedding was on the 21st of May. Had I not woken up feeling so shitty, I’m not sure I would have come to the decision to take the month off. But good god, I’m so glad I did.
Because what I discovered is this: I feel better without alcohol. Measurably, demonstratively, unbelievably better. And I thought my baseline was already pretty good! I consider myself to be a fairly positive, happy person! I’ve gratefully never dealt with mental health issues, but man, without alcohol I am on a whole other plane. I don’t have any other way of describing it than to say I’m at a higher frequency. Things in my life just feel good. I feel extremely comfortable in my own skin, and after a few weeks without alcohol, I am simply vibrating.
When I began drinking at 16, it was an active decision. I wanted to do it because I wanted to fit in with the popular kids, and it worked. Then I wanted to be popular in college, which worked less. In the last ten or so years of my life, I allowed drinking to become a passive decision in my life. Rarely ever did I stop to ask myself, “Do I really want a drink right now?” Given how often we’re expected to drink without questioning, it’s easy to see how that happens. But now, choosing to drink or not drink has to be an active decision. It has to be something to which I affirmatively say “yes” or “no.” Which makes sense. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that making active, intentional choices is what has brought me to a more positive place in my life.
I want to be clear: deciding to go from 5 to 7 drinks per week to 0 to 1 drink per week was an active decision that felt personally simple enough, but is harder in the context of the ubiquity of alcohol (easier to notice once you decide to cut it out of your life). Given this, I’m not yet sure how to describe this to people. “I’m not drinking at the moment,” should be good enough, I suppose, but then I worry people will assume I’m pregnant, or in recovery, or what have you. At some point I’m sure this won’t affect me, the concern of strangers or casual friends, but for now, I’m still figuring it out. I can be honest about that. For now I’m settling on some kind of version of “No, thanks. I don’t really drink.” This makes me feel powerful and in control, and also (if I’m being honest) kind of badass?
But will I drink again? Yes, I’m a realist. But through this process, my entire framework has shifted. Drinking just to drink, or in any kind of excess, now feels juvenile to me, like something one does before they’re smart enough to know better.
So, I guess this is where I am, in this kind of new and different space. A woman in her mid-thirties who doesn’t really drink, who feels empowered and happy because of that decision, but who is still honestly figuring it out; every day evolving and growing and changing. If I could say something to the young woman in that essay, I’d tell her to just hold on. One day, you’ll meet yourself and truly love who you’re becoming.