Four Thoughts and Four Books for 400 Days
I am one of those (irritating?) people who stopped drinking mid-pandemic.
My relationship with alcohol started normally enough — or even more than normal, incredibly restrained. I mostly didn’t drink at all until I was of age, which means I had a few drinks while visiting Canada as an 18-year-old and otherwise waited until I was 21. I indulged socially, on weekends, in the evening: all the signs of an unproblematic drinker.
Things first began to shift when I was 24, living alone while serving in the Navy, and struggling with overwhelm or worse. I would get home late in the evening and drink wine, alone, pouring from a jug.
But then again, I deployed for long periods of time and didn’t drink except when authorized, during port calls or Beer Days (the days when the Navy decides you’ve been out to sea too long and issues you two beers). Nor did I drink while I was pregnant. I gave up boozing for every Lent (but not the Sundays! Sundays don’t count!). But still. And yet. By the time the pandemic rolled around, I realized that I used alcohol to manage my feelings, or not to have feelings at all. And I was finally fed up enough to quit, for real, in earnest.
And so, four hundred days ago, I quit. And I have a few thoughts about it.
- I thought about stopping drinking for about four years before I quit. I thought I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to quit because I was functional and hadn’t hit anything anyone might recognize as ‘rock bottom.’ It was bullshit. I didn’t like the effects of alcohol on my life; I am allowed to stop drinking. I didn’t have to wait for some magical/objective level of bad to happen.
- I drank in part because I didn’t have boundaries, because I thought not having boundaries made me a nice person. In fact, not having boundaries made me a secretly angry, underhandedly vindictive person. Identifying what I want and need and attempting to communicate those wants and needs to the people in my life feels a lot better than continuously saying ‘oh I’m flexible’ and expecting the people around me to read my mind. Disfunction should not be the price of stability.
- The first month was the hardest. I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands and nothing to do with them. (And I was thirsty!) Rituals helped. I made sure to make myself tea and watch the sunset most nights. Even now, I try to journal regularly (which helps with my second point, above). I get up in the morning and move my body.
- Our culture around drinking is really weird. I worried a lot about making people uncomfortable by abstaining, as though not-drinking is a shameful thing that needs to be wrapped in silence. The truth is, most people don’t really care if I drink or not, and if they care about not-drinking, that’s a them-problem. This deal is between me and the universe. I’m not going to be ashamed that I don’t want to ingest a drug that I can tolerate and function while using but that robbed me of joy.*
Besides these four points, I wanted to share a few books that I found useful on my way.
Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker
This book took me over the line I had been tiptoeing for years. Holly is a passionate advocate for rethinking everything we assume about alcohol, alcoholism, and recovery. I also signed up for a forty-day mantra course she wrote that I found very supportive in my early days.
The Sober Lush by Amanda Eyre Ward and Jardine Libaire
Short essays about how much fun it is to live without drinking (seriously!). It’s a gorgeous book to read a few pages at a time and got me excited about my new lifestyle choice at a point when my enthusiasm was flagging.
The Sober Diaries by Clare Pooley
As a mom with a problem that was perceived by everyone as not-a-problem, this book really resonated with me. Clare is funny and brave and turned me onto nonalcoholic beer, which is good, actually!?
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison
I have read this book twice. Two years ago, I thought it was, honestly, a little over-the-top. Jamison’s drinking did not seem to me, at that time, all that bad, and I was annoyed that I had to read a bunch of text about famous literary alcoholics that didn’t separate the art from the artist the way good English majors are taught. The second time around — about a year sober — I read it with completely different eyes, and I thought it was fantastic. And brave, since she probably knew that many people would read it, as I did, and dismiss it with ‘oh, that doesn’t sound all that bad.’
*I’ve been struggling over whether to publish this post since it occurred to me around day 392 to write it. Maybe I’m still trying to believe Thought Number 4. I’m caught between wanting to celebrate out loud or keep quiet. I’ve tried to work out my thoughts via text with a friend, asked another to read a draft of what started as some notes on my phone. Maybe on some level I’m still battling with that phantasm, Moderation, which never materialized but stayed haunting me with whispers of willpower, willpower. Quitting altogether beats deciding every day what kind of morning I’m going to have tomorrow.
The sun has risen. Happy Day Four Hundred to me.
