I'm Sorry Alcohol, This Isn't Working For Me Anymore

I Hope We Can Be Friends Some Day

Yeah, I’ve got an alcohol problem - my martini glass is empty!

It actually is, though, and has been for a month and a half. Hooray for me! I’m not writing this to try to get you to change your behavior. You’re doing great. I just want to share my experience because I keep blabbing on about it and I think if I put it into written words I can shut up and move on.

I Love Booze

I drink a lot, often. I love it. I love getting fucked up. I love the first few sips of a strong drink that announce to yourself and the world - if anyone needs anything, don’t bother asking me, cuz brother - I’m gettin’ hammered.

I love beach beers, couch beers, garage beers, shower beers, road sodas, sippy cups, nice whiskey, full bodied red wine, crisp cold white wine, shitty prosecco with a splash of orange juice, I love Dom Perignon, spicy margaritas, and dirty vodka martinis. I don’t think I ever liked taking shots but I finally admitted that to myself a few years ago.

I’m 33. I had my first sips when I was 16. I had my second sips a couple weeks later and ended up plunging through a glass table, landing on a pile of broken glass shards somehow without a scratch (one of those things that makes me wonder). I drank heavily in college and in the summers between. In college I thought it was funny to black out. I haven’t done that in a very long time.

I’ve spent just over 50% of my time on earth with alcohol entering and exiting my bloodstream. I would guess that I’ve had at least one drink 8.5 to 9 days out of 10 in my adult life.

I am not an unhappy person. Actually, I’m pretty sure I’m an unusually happy person. I don’t drink to numb some shapeless grief inside me. I do it because it’s fun, because I love having fun with people I love, and I always want to have the most fun. (I have at times used alcohol as a tool to stave off processing painful emotions, but that’s generally not my reason for drinking. All I’ll say on that for now is that if you try to have a good time when you’re in a Bad Time, you’re gonna have a really bad, terrifying time.)

For a long time, I felt like I’d miss out on things if I wasn’t drinking. That feeling has shifted. I now feel like by drinking to excess, which is really the only way I know how to do it, I am missing out on life. So I’m done. Because I love life, I love being here, and I want to make the most of my little blip.

Why I’m Done

You know how when you go to the doctor because you’ve been having panic attacks and your blood pressure is borderline high and she asks you about your alcohol use and you say you usually have one drink a night but if you’re going out you’ll have three or four and she says, “Hm yeah you might want to cut back a little,” and you’re thinking, “Well shit, the real numbers are three times what I just copped to”?

Well, I do, and during my last visit (the one I wrote about, where I ended up on Lexapro, which rocks), I decided to be honest. I told her I love getting fucked up with my friends. And I told her what I’ll tell you now, which is that I have an active social life in Manhattan and on any given weeknight I will have a glass of wine before I go to dinner, I’ll have a martini at the restaurant, more often than not a second martini, and then a glass of wine/maybe two. And let’s not talk about Saturdays. And she said what I already knew: “You can’t keep doing that if you want to live a long and healthy life.”

I used to not click on links to stories about studies about how terrible alcohol is for you. Not too long ago, I started clicking on them. This didn’t make me want to stop right away, but simply reading about how poisoning myself is bad helped plant a seed.

I do the diet and exercise stuff to be healthy. It seemed stupid to do them as mitigation for my poison intake.

I don’t feel good about where I am professionally. I have projects I’m working on but I am my own boss and writing is hard and requires full faculties (and a little boredom) and I simply wasn’t giving myself enough days in the week with a working brain.

I have friends and family who’ve stopped drinking and they are pleased with their decision.

My lowlight reel - the thing that sometimes plays in your head listing every humiliating thing you’ve ever done - well, I can’t really think of anything on my reel that doesn’t involve the over consumption of alcohol. I don’t want to add to that reel.

I’m closer to being an old man than I am to being a baby. I’ve been me long enough to know that I’ll still be me when I’m sixty. I want to be able to look back and thank myself for taking care of me. I want to have good years, I want to be able to be fully there for the people I love, and I want to be proud of my contributions.

My last drink was on September 24. It was after a long weekend of honestly, pretty responsible partying, and then a fancy event on Tuesday where I too quickly reached the point of “Goddammit I’m shitfaced in a nice suit on a Tuesday.” No rock bottom. I wasn’t disgusted with myself. I was just…sick of it. For a long time I knew what my doctor had said - I can’t keep doing this. And I just had this anticlimactic realization: I don’t want to keep doing this.

Well okay then. I won’t.

The Other Side (So Far)

My sleep. Oh my god, my sleep. It is glorious. I just lay down and fall asleep and wake up eight hours later feeling incredible. And when I wake up, I can feel where my body was doing maintenance and repairs. My poor microscopic work crews have been on emergency toxic waste clean up duty for so long and now they just get to work their regular shifts.

I’m saving money. Booze is really expensive.

I’m getting to know our extensive mug collection. We have a lot of fun mugs and instead of just having one with coffee in the morning, I’m having a second and third mug throughout the day with afternoon pick-me-up tea and evening sleepy time tea.

I’m getting ripped. Alcohol is calorie dense, so I’ve got more room to eat and drink things I enjoy, and I’m not missing days of exercise because of hangovers. I have decreased my caloric intake and increased my metabolic output. Maybe next months I’ll bless you perverts with a thirst trap once the abs take shape.

I’m seeing through alcohol’s bullshit. Alcohol is a scumbag that takes credit for things it doesn’t deserve. When I go out to dinner with friends, I still get all the warm fuzzy feelings that I used to falsely attribute to the cocktails. Turns out, as social beings, that spending quality time with people you love makes you feel good all on its own! Insane.

I thought there was a sort of clarity that alcohol brought. Like, when everything gets a bit blurred, the important bits are all you can see. But it’s not true. With sober eyes you can still see what the important bits are. But you can also see the minor things and not stumble on them. It’s a bit similar to how I would react to weed before I realized that it made me psychotic (more on that at in a future stack, I think): I’d have these epiphanies while I was high that felt really important, so I’d write them down. And then the next day I’d have a journal with things written in it like, “Water is good,” and, “I love learning about my friends’ lives.”

These aren’t divine revelations, they’re just obvious things that when you’re in a stupor feel like touchstones. Or something. I don’t really know. What I’m saying is, by remaining sober I am definitely not missing out on important revelations from on high.

I get moments of euphoria but they’re better. With alcohol, the best I would feel is after the day is done when the second drink hits. It was fleeting, but predictable. It was like I had this flock of beautiful birds in a cage and I could walk over to the cage and be like, “Yep, there are those beautiful birds! Whoop de doo.” I have let them out of the cage. I can’t see them on demand, but they fly by and around me at some point or another pretty much every day. Like, if I go for a run and come back to a nice apartment and a hungry cat rubbing my leg - the birds are there.

My skin got worse but now it’s better. Same with my digestion. I guess my system was just so accustomed to dealing with alcohol that cutting it out threw the whole thing out of balance. Kind of alarming, honestly.

I went to a wedding and it was a bit overwhelming. I think when you drink at a wedding you can kind of just engage autopilot. I loved it and it was beautiful and perfect but I did feel overstimulated and not totally sure what to do with myself. But I’m excited to solve this puzzle. I think I will become more of a rascal. I’ll let you know what I figure out.

It’s going really well. I have no end date on my wagon ride. I don’t love dealing in absolutes but for now, this is the way. I think in the future I’ll be able to enjoy an occasional glass of something without tipping over into goblin mode. But if I can’t, then I won’t. I hope.