five years without alcohol
Every former drinker has a quitting story, and mine is boring. I was driving south on 95 after another 3am family karaoke-until-someone-starts-a-fight Thanksgiving and I realized I was just done. I had quit for stretches before - Dry January etc. - enough to know that life got exponentially better without drinking, but then I would feel guilty about not drinking with my family, or at a wedding, or some other event where I would "let someone down." I was hanging on to drinking to avoid an awkward conversation with someone else about why I wasn't drinking.
And if you have a family that stays up until 3 am on Thanksgiving, that's probably not a crowd that has a healthy relationship with alcohol. I drank the least of my siblings, so me quitting first (at two beers on the average day, no less) meant something about them. And eventually I just let that be their problem to ruminate on, not mine.
There will be other anniversaries to talk about the how and why and process of quitting, but what feels relevant right now is that I was drinking about the same as my peers until 2016. The election spiraled me out, shook the floor of my life, and I spent the next few years trying to reel it back in. I cut back drinking dramatically with spreadsheets and trackers and "allowances," which had me drinking less but thinking about drinking almost all of the time.
2020 was rough. My compulsions are more than drinking - they are overworking, compulsive news and "take" consumption, and at that point a whole lot of Instagram as I ran a successful art business through it. Without being able to throw myself into work, I unraveled pretty quickly. The election cycle made me a shell of who I was. (I played 500 hours of Stardew Valley because I missed going to work, talking to people, and being productive - and honestly this was my healthiest coping strategy at the time.)
Getting sober is its own thing - I used r/stopdrinking mostly, and lots of books and podcasts - but that's its own subject and lots of people have shared their stories around it. I mostly felt compelled to write because I cannot imagine not being sober for the times we are in right now. I cannot imagine reading the news hungover. I don't know where the brain space that I was using to "moderate" my drinking would come from - probably from the brain space I use to text friends when I think about them, or planning weekend hikes, or drawing. If I was trying to moderate my drinking, I would be taking away from my own efforts to cope with the breakdown of the societal contract.
Not drinking hasn't solved everything, but it's helped me see where else I need to clean house. My nervous system was shot from the real external stresses and the internal ones I was creating, and I really have to be proactive to avoid clinical burnout. I can only read the news in the morning when I have a lot of capacity - I have a lot of rules and app blockers and time limits on my internet activity. I wake up at 5:45 to write for half an hour before I do life every day. I check in with a small recovery group online each day. I don't think about alcohol almost at all, but I know that if I let myself spin out I will. I protect my peace, which is increasingly hard to do these days.
When it feels like there is so little we can do these days, building capacity for the ongoing chaos and collapse is all we can do. The external problems are real and frightening, but there are a lot of powerful people banking on individual learned helplessness to keep that power. When we build individual capacity and ease our own suffering, we strengthen opportunities for collective capacity.