My Messy Road to Not Drinking

He had periods where he didn’t drink, but this dry January felt different. I hid in our basement office, balancing my laptop on a laundry pile, my cup of coffee nest in the sockbill. The welcome chart for the Zoom class illuminated the dark room: “Take advantage of sobriety.”

Almost everything I had heard about sobriety landed in two cubes: my friends who stopped drinking because they could “take it or leave it” and alcoholics. I was firmly in the “I will take it in the camp, please, especially if it’s red wine”, but I didn’t feel like a person with a problem. I had no duis or fights fed with alcohol with my husband, but I noticed within me a resistance to any thought of decelerating. I worried enough that I enrolled in a group of women curious sober to take me through dry January (100% guarantee that I had some wine glasses before clicking on the purchase) and I found myself in my basement, my laptop Cattywampus in the deflated laundry stack.

On the screen of the slow sides, the instructor explained that EFT, or “technique of emotional freedom”, could anchor and calm our nervous systems with smooth palmotas and taps by our index and median fingers. I laughed at the phrase “Pats and Taps”, but I closed my eyes according to the instructions. I exhaled, thinking about my poor nervous system. I touched my forehead, trying to ignore the sound of my children up, arguing about Color. I touched the upper lip; Trying to ignore the fact that my fingers smelled to an old kitchen sponge. I took advantage of my armpits (not my favorite), and I hit my clavicle (my absolute favorite). I closed my eyes, trying to take advantage of the right order, touch touching, trying not to think about what I was really thinking: how many days were in January, how many drinks everyone could have had that month, how many reasons I could find to continue drinking or stop. I felt, simply, for that.

And so, I reached my cup. There in the socks, my cup of red wine, which I had poured despite (or by?) This is a sobriety workshop. I had poured it for one of the many reasons why most of the nights of the year had poured it: because I was anxious for the event I was going (tonight: playing), because I was bored by parenting elements (Color), and/or because I felt that I was doing everything possible and I might need a little help (always). I took a long and strained sip in red wine on my laptop. I quickly cleaned the keyboard with a sock. I felt relieved, if I’m honest. But I also felt that I had failed.

The buzz around sobriety is still stronger, but feels disconnected from my reality. TresSie McMillan Cottom recently wrote about the growing tide of “performative abstinence” and sobriety as shorthand for a clean and perfect lifestyle (Nytime gift link). When reading his opinion article, I could not stop thinking about how my experience of stopping drinking was more or less the opposite of the perfect white funds and the “clean” language of life, so asthutically critical. For me, the process of stopping drinking can only be described as a messy disorder (rent).

Now I have almost two and a half years of alcohol, and nothing about it has felt performative; It feels private and prosaic. There were no pristine posts or manifestos of clean life; Instead, I was hitting the necklaces between sips of wine, then doing the class next time without wine. It was a mixture of many years of sober (leave as a woman) and audiobooks (this naked mind) and travel and therapy of girls soaked with wine, both with a therapist and with brides.

When I tell people that I do not drink, I have the feeling that they assume that it was a secret alcoholic or randomly stopped me. When I too, I only saw those two cubes of sobriety, I couldn’t see where I fit them.

And so, I would like to present another cube, a messy medium. From time to time I recognize it in nature, but it can be difficult to detect. Lately, however, he has been presenting my girlfriends. At the last minute of the night, (sometimes tensely) they will ask: “Why did you really drink drinking?”

This is what I tell them: the evidence about the risks of alcohol is convincing (Nytime gift link) and, like most of my friends, I was drinking more than the recommended maximum of seven drinks per week. But that is why I stopped. And it was not the hangover, or the fact that my children had given me gifts related to wine for my birthday, or the small change in my liver numbers. It wasn’t even how I answered the question of whether or not I had a problem to drink. It was the presence of the question itself, and the space I occupied in my brain. I hated how much I thought about it. I stopped drinking because I didn’t want to waste more about my inner life.

And when those girlfriends ask how I finally moved out of the mid -cloudy to drink, I tell them that it was that group of women with whom I took advantage of when I was curious, and some sessions with a sober coach who took me to the place where I was ready to try not to drink completely. It was not fast; He took 10 months from the tapping class, almost a year of reading, thought, drinking and not drinking. I really wanted to drink casual to work, but I wanted the space in my brain to return more.

In terrible news (that was a joke, companion soverers!), Stop, instead of moderating, my drink worked. My brain feels calmer, more mine. It is not always easy, but, for me, not drinking means less effort.

My recovered mental space is felt as the opposite of a bleak basement, but I can track its origins back to that failed attempt: I, touching my clavicle skepticism, the fingers smell like an old kitchen sponge and spilled wine. What felt so dark and humiliating makes me feel tender now. I felt like the worst version of myself in that laundry stack, but looking back I was not at all. I was messy, but this is how I got here, for the tranquility of my brain and the blow of my keyboard. And I wonder what changes are you making and if they feel messy? If so, I am encouraging you.

Kathleen Donahoe is a writer and poet who lives in Seattle. She has written about how her diagnosis of EM informs her upbringing and the worst gift she has received. He is currently writing his first novel and warmly invites you to follow his free subportation bulletin, a small laugh.

PD: More publications to drink, including “my mother was an alcoholic” and “how I changed my relationship with alcohol.”

(Photo by Sasha Dove/Stocksy).