Anniversary

In October I turned 34. definitely not a big milestone, but the day after I hit 5 years without drinking.

As the legend goes, I woke up the day after my 29th birthday with the kind of hangover where you're mad AND sad and also your physical body is failing you, and said to myself "I need to stop drinking.” Then if remembering correctly, I ordered a burrito on Seamless and stayed in bed the entire day thinking about what it would mean to actually do that.

I'd definitely thought about quitting before that. I knew that I had almost freakishly strong willpower when I was really serious about something but before that day I just wasn’t really ready to say that I was done forever. On that particular day, I tried something new, framing it simply as an experiment- what would happen if I just... stopped. For a while.

To be honest the pro and con list for taking on this experiment was hugely lopsided. The only real potential downside was that I'd have to go on first dates without drinking, and if I'm honest I was right to be dreading that, but I still do it. I did think it through. This was going to be annoying at best, I knew from that moment I’d be constantly having to turn down alcohol in pretty much any social gathering and be expected to explain why.

Before that day, I repeatedly placated myself with the idea that I wasn’t a classic alcoholic. It was never an issue of volume, or even frequency. I never showed up to work drunk, or found myself craving alcohol in the morning. I never got wasted more than once a month. But if I ever opened a second alcoholically gifted beer it was a guaranteed brown out. None of this should have been shocking. You take someone who gets completely depleted by other people but still needs them to like her at any cost, and you add a love of IPAs and a maintenance routine of Wellbutrin, Seroquel and Trintellix, and you get what can only be described as a ticking time bomb. It honestly would have been mind blowing if I didn’t have some level of a problem with alcohol.

I’d gone through periods of "cutting back" but it was always so stressful trying to decide exactly where the line was. What if I just took it off the table completely, so to speak? What then?

From my perspective, I was a pretty pleasant drunk, never actively mean or angry. But I was careless with my words, and with my actions. I hurt a lot of people over the years, and embarrassed myself more than a few times.

For whatever reason I woke up that morning and very suddenly realized that I could actually do something to make sure that never happened again. Embarrassing myself is one thing, God knows I do that sober, but I just didn't want to be the person who hurts people she cares about. My having a social crutch wasn't more important than the happiness of the people I love, or might one day.

I don't actually get upset when people ask me why I don't drink, it's a fair question, but I do feel awkward and bored giving them the explanation. I feel almost like I'm letting them down. It's not a good story; there was no organized intervention or night in jail. In fact I even feel a little weird here calling out the fact that 5 years have passed. It's a milestone, and I'm proud, but it was also just something that I had to do, like breathing or not eating cake for every meal, and talking about how long it's been tends to remind me how much further I could be in my personal life if I hadn't let myself off the hook for the preceding 29 years. I knew better. I knew in my gut that I was better than I was presenting.

I don’t have to be a perfect person. I tried for a long time and it turns out all those people saying perfection is impossible were 100% correct. it is not. I’ve more or less come to terms with this but I do just need to feel like I’m clawing my way forward, always getting better, even if it’s aggggggonizingly slow.