I returned to drinking on January 26th, 2019, after one year and eighteen days of sobriety. I had made a promise myself to not drink for one year, and I made it. The question was, what did I learn from it?
Since then, it has taken me another year and three months to write this article, reflecting on what I learned from both sides of sober, for reasons related to self-image, social anxiety and the stigmas I still associate with drinking. I’ll get into all of that more near the end of this piece.
The Return
To celebrate my successful dry year I had planned to go with my family and girlfriend to the local brewery in Vermont where they made my favorite beer. When we arrived, though, the brewery was closed. Instead, we went to a different restaurant nearby and I ordered a different beer, said something unprepared and inconsequential and took a sip.
It felt anticlimactic.
Should I have waited another day for a better moment to drink? The truth was, I was tired of the whole experiment. I had gone eighteen days past my goal of one year and looked forward to drinking again because frankly, I missed it. I liked the taste of an IPA, I liked how it made me feel. Upon finally taking that sip I felt relief at having made my choice and regret at not having held out for a better occasion, having settled for one that was simply “good enough.” These sorts of occasions, hallmarks of the common drinking habits of many adults, were a major impetus for my stopping in the first place, so it felt ironic that “good enough” would be the feeling that would mark my return.
A Warning
Before I go further- I have met multiple people who stopped drinking/ using because of serious addiction issues, and I have seen some of them go on bad benders when they returned to drinking after extended breaks. I don’t and never did count myself among these people and encourage those that might be seriously worried about their ability to control themselves around alcohol to tread very cautiously. As one friend put it, it can be easier to keep the dragon in the cage than go catch him again.
When I started again, I returned almost immediately to my old habits, which in my case meant about one or two drinks a night. Any drinking I refer to in this article should be thought of in those terms. I could easily imagine others returning to their old habits too, and if those habits were detrimental ones to themselves or others then they might be better off staying dry.
Why had I quit in the first place?
When I returned to drinking, it made me ask myself again why I’d done the experiment in the first place. It wasn’t an empirical study- I didn’t weigh myself before or after, I didn’t check my bank account and calculate how much money I’d saved. What had I been hoping to learn?
What had made me uncomfortable with drinking was the unquestioned habit that I didn’t consider to be unequivocally good for me. I was afraid I might be sacrificing long-term happiness for short-term pleasure without ever checking to see if the alternative was really so bad that I couldn’t make it a few days, or months, or a year, without it.
While I didn’t stop missing it, I was reassured by my ability to keep a promise to myself, but dismayed that changing my longstanding habits turned out to be harder than I expected without my armor of sobriety to protect me from every opportunity to drink.
Hard and Fast Rules
When I started again, I was struck by how easy it was to pick up the old habits. I had spent 383 days turning down opportunities to drink- New Year’s Eve, birthdays, show premiers… It had gotten easy to say no. But once I was presented with the same occasions without the protection of my hard-and-fast rule, saying no became difficult again.
A friend who had inspired me in the first place with her year of sobriety said the same thing:
“Making hard and fast rules is way easier for making a quick change, but I don’t think it’s actually effective in changing long-standing habits or strengthening will-power… It has taken me years to build the will-power to to ask myself first whether I’d like this drink.”
I didn’t miss this constant battle, and I didn’t think the issue would still be so murky when I returned. During my year of sobriety I had thought about having a beer, but as an abstract concept, like taking off my clothes on a hot day in public. Something that might be nice, but that I simply wouldn’t do. With no reason not too anymore, the “why not?” voices got louder.
I had spent a year of saying no to so many offers I became smug in how easy it was for me; but afterwards, it turned out to be just as easy to say yes, especially when there was no good reason not to. Having what I had come to think of as my strong and virtuous nature revealed to me to be merely a facade was frustrating, and humbling.
But I was happy to be drinking again- despite its near-complete permeation of society, alcohol is still a strong drug, and drugs can be fun. Trying to look objectively at the situation, I’d be kidding myself if I said I was able to feel the same in every situation with or without alcohol, and sometimes I liked the drinking better, even when it was just one or two beers that made the difference.
Yet, while there are good times to be had while drinking, the cumulative effect to me was that of a vice rather than a virtue, even with the enjoyment that came with the experience. We don’t often abstain from things we believe to be unequivocally good for us. No one takes a month off kale.
Do I have a problem?
When I consider how hard a habit my light habitual drinking is to break, I ask myself whether I have a problem, and that’s a scary question. When is drinking an indulgence, when is it a habit, and when is it a problem? Are there clear lines for other people that I don’t know about?By most adult standards, including the USA’s CDC guidelines of “moderate consumption” of up to one drink a day for women and two for men, the answer is emphatically no, not a problem. But whenever you ask yourself if you have a problem with something, chances are there is an underlying truth to the discomfort. It worried me that despite being well-aware of the insidious nature of casual drinking, I still succumbed to it almost immediately when I can back.
I have found myself enjoying drinks with friends but also while playing guitar or writing alone. It has been hard for me to enjoy that without feeling guilty, to get over the stigma that says “only people with a problem drink alone”, whereas social drinking is accepted (to a degree) as “normal”. Maybe this is tied to the idea that we more easily accept extroverted activities than introverted ones as “normal” and “positive”, or maybe we tend to be more suspicious of private behavior since it is harder for the participant to objectively judge whether they are being healthy or not, whereas in a public setting they might have some sort of social culpability to live up to. These are the voices that still nag at me in my head, and they prompt me to this day to ask myself:
Where is my line in the sand?
Honest Conversations
I needed to have an honest conversation with myself about what I liked and didn’t like about alcohol itself, and another conversation about how I felt about the situations in which I found myself drinking.
When discussing abstaining from drinking, one of the subjects that frequently came up was the benefits of saving money and losing weight. Both are valid and good reasons to stop drinking: in my year of sobriety I ended up spending more late nights (and money) climbing in the rock gym rather than in the bar, which helped out in the fitness department, and while I don’t know how much money I saved on not buying alcohol, I was happy to be putting that money elsewhere.
Money and fitness are good reasons to try out not drinking, and you could stop your introspection right there if that was all you cared about- frankly, even if you care about other things they’re great reasons to consume less. However, for me this conversation with myself was the easier of the two- it’s pretty apparent that both your wallet and your waistline stand a chance to benefit if you reduce your consumption.
The Second Conversation
The second conversation was harder. It involved taking a good look at my personal psychology and relationship to alcohol, as well as the the social norms surrounding me and asking myself the role alcohol played in the various situations in which I found myself consuming it.
In some situations alcohol felt like an enhancement of life- the old “social lubricant” that led to good times and reduced inhibitions, in the best sense of the term. In these situations alcohol felt like a positive. In other situations alcohol acted as a crutch to prop up my courage when I felt uncomfortable or awkward, or as a way to give myself permission to relax and say I had done all I could for the challenges of the day. In these latter situations I asked myself if alcohol was standing in for a skill or character trait that might be difficult for me and was therefore was all the more worth developing.
While not drinking for a year I don’t remember a single instance of being pressured to drink. Not once. This made me think a lot of the social anxiety was in my head, and an excuse that I was making for myself in order to keep drinking.
In some circumstances over my life alcohol has made me feel more easygoing and friendly. Sometimes it has made me act in ways I am ashamed of, and I now try very hard to avoid getting to anyplace with my drinking where this could be the result. You run someone over with a car while drunk, it’s still your fault.
Probably the clearest lesson was that I found that the situations I didn’t like, namely loud bars with lots of people, I disliked equally sober or drunk, so I was happy to extract myself from those situations more often and not worry so much about missing out, or what people would think about me. I did my best to either enjoy them or, if possible, keep myself from ending up in those situations in the first place. Now that I’m drinking again, I’m conscious of how the people around me influence my decision to drink or not, and to try to be proactive in creating environments that will reinforce how I want to live my life.
Ego
I haven’t written/ posted much on this blog since I wrote about my one year of sobriety. I think in a big way this was because of ego. I felt that by not drinking for a year I had done something special or noteworthy, something different. I felt I had insight into a perspective held only by a small minority of adults (forgetting, in my hubris, that it is the norm for pregnant women to abstain during their pregnancies) and this made what I had to say worth sharing. The stigma attached to drinking also made me less eager to share my reflections from this side of things than when I was sharing the ‘noble deed’ I had accomplished.
People had shared positive and thoughtful reactions to my original post, many of which led to great conversations about society’s relationships to substances and addiction, as well as people sharing their personal experiences with alcohol and other drugs. Those connections felt good. In an ironic case of social media anxiety however, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to A Sober Mind left me doubtful and scared to write this one.
I didn’t want to follow that previous, “successful” post with the boring admission that the experiment was over: I had returned to the majority of responsible adult drinkers. It felt anticlimactic. I have grappled with what to take away from my transition back to drinking, and I didn’t want to let down the people who had shared their stories of sobriety and courage with me by writing a piece about returning to “normal” adult life without some worthwhile insight from the journey back.
I would hope these people would tell me that everyone’s relationship with substances is different and not to worry too much about what others are doing or thinking; to be honest with yourself. In that sense I do feel that I am more conscious and deliberate about the drinking I do now: I avoid loud bars, and in the year since I’ve been drinking again I still haven’t taken a shot. I try to be conscious of when my drinking becomes more habitual than what I’m comfortable with, and to live an examined life; but also not to hold the reigns so tight that I can’t get a little lost now and again. I would hate to only ever end up where I’m trying to go.
Conclusions
Maybe justification comes when deep down you believe the thing you’re doing is wrong and you’re trying to convince yourself otherwise. I know personally I am susceptible to what others think of me (or what I imagine others might think of me). In that vein I think some of my feelings about alcohol and what is ‘good or bad’, and ‘healthy or ‘unhealthy’ comes from the social anxiety that I am somehow ‘getting it wrong’- that people will judge me.
For this I remind myself that my sober year was my experiment, and I carried it through to the end. I’m proud of that.
Despite my efforts, I still haven’t found a black or white answer to my relationship with drinking, or with happiness. Maybe that’s the takeaway from this whole thing: Be honest with yourself, and keep working to find the shade of grey you’re comfortable with.
Should you stop drinking, or abstain from something else? Giving something up is a good way to learn about yourself and to have new conversations. One value in abstaining from something is that it shows you what you miss- and what you don’t- about that thing. With any luck, that absence will be an emptiness that you can fill with a different version of yourself. If you don’t like it, you can always change back. Hopefully you’ll bring something from the experience with you.
Take care of yourselves out there.
-Eric
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This post is a follow up to A Sober Mind, which focuses on my experience of not drinking for a year.