I’m Better Like This

On Sobriety, Self-Discovery, and the Courage to Keep Letting Go

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I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in nearly a year, but I don’t really want to tell you that. 

I don’t want you to hold me to it.

Technically, it’s been 291 days. Not the kind of neat milestone that begs for celebration, but it’s significant to me. Because, as of yesterday, it’s been one year since I made a decision to take a break from alcohol — and somehow, it’s (mostly) stuck.

I’ve only had a couple drinks in the last year — a couple glasses of wine while out with friends celebrating my birthday last December —  and it was a conscious, deliberate choice. 

I hadn’t touched alcohol since early October before then, telling myself that I wasn’t necessarily quitting for good; I was just choosing to drink (or not) more intentionally. No more sipping just because I was out with friends or had a rough day. No more turning to it out of habit. I’d check in with myself before every drink and decide if it was truly something I wanted.

Up until my birthday celebration, the answer had consistently been no.

But that night, I drank. Nothing wild, not compared to past celebrations; just something because I felt I “deserved” it. The next morning, I didn’t wake up with a hangover, but I felt . . . off. Groggy, sluggish, irritable, like my body was moving in slow motion. It wasn’t regret exactly, but it was something. 

It hadn’t “hurt” to have a drink or two, but it also hadn’t added anything to an already good experience. I’d been having fun with my friends before I had a glass of wine. And I certainly didn’t feel better for it later.

I realized I had unintentionally run an experiment on a shiny new hypothesis: I could drink in moderation, more intentionally, in the “right” moments, to make my life that much more sparkly, that much more fun, that much better!

But my hypothesis was built on a false premise (one I suspect I already knew was false, but wasn’t ready to admit): that drinking was the golden ticket. But drinking didn’t actually add anything to my life; in fact, all it did was take — my money, my energy, my clarity.

Alcohol wasn’t making my life special; it was dulling my experience of everything that already was.

This isn’t my first breakup with alcohol. Almost exactly six years ago, I wrote about the first time that many years prior:

. . . I was in a personal essay writing class. We had each come to the class prepared with a few topics we might write about. One of mine: I think I might be an alcoholic.

I was scared to share the prompt (and almost didn’t), but I trusted the teacher, I wanted to get the most out of the class — and, to be honest, I wanted a topic that seemed just as dramatic as everybody else’s.

My instructor thought the topic was interesting, worth pursuing. “Maybe you could treat it like a journalistic experiment?” she offered. “Go to a few AA meetings? Really dive deep into what it might mean if you are an alcoholic and start going through the steps of recovery to find out?”

I diligently jotted down her ideas, but I disregarded the topic as soon as the words had left her mouth.

Go to AA? Start the process of recovery? I would never go that route.

I already knew what I would find out.

“We used to sit out back, behind the bar,” my mom tells me on one of my recent trips home. The older we both get, the more she shares with me about our family; about her experience of them growing up. “Grandma and grandpa would have us wait out there while they drank inside.”

“Because that was safer than just leaving you home alone?” I scoff.

“Because that was safer than leaving us home alone,” she repeats, a faint smile on her lips. The kind that comes from knowing now what she couldn’t have known then. “Then they’d drive us home.”

The insinuation underlying those long ago inebriated trips home hangs in the air between us.

I think to myself that I didn’t stand a chance. I am connected by unseen origin to overdoing it, to making bad decisions, to not knowing when to stop; to avoiding the feelings we want to cover up or the conversations we can’t bring ourselves to have by numbing them away instead.

I’m ready to cut ties.

I sometimes wish I quit sooner.

Now, nearing a year that I haven’t busied myself with drinking (and recovering from it), I’ve read more and written more; I’ve had hard conversations and repaired when I got it wrong; I’ve been more attuned to my body and honored what it asks of me. Nothing is perfect, of course, but there’s no denying that I’ve felt more creative, more prolific, more present, more me.

But my journey is my journey, and I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye for good until this year. 

And still, even now, I’m afraid to write “for good”. 

I don’t want to drink ever again, and I don’t want to close the door on the possibility that I might. 

I don’t want to say I won’t, and then disappoint myself (or someone else). I don’t want to take away my agency to choose differently at some point in the future. I’m not entirely positive I had a “problem”, so why should I have to give it up forever?

I don’t want you to hold me to it.

Because what if I want to drink again, and I’ll have to go back on this grand proclamation? Part of me believes I only made it (nearly) a year without drinking because I didn’t make a big deal of it —  because I was taking things a day at a time; because in every moment that I had the urge to drink, I simply checked in with myself (and the answer was no); because each time I said “no”, my conviction only got that much stronger. 

So why say anything now?

Perhaps because I’m not actually proclaiming anything so much as I’m letting myself be witnessed exactly where I am right now; in both the pride that I feel for myself and in the fear that I may still mess it up.

I’m honoring how I didn’t ignore the discomfort I felt about my drinking a year ago, and I actually did something about it. And I’m letting this moment — however unusual a milestone it may be — serve as a reminder to me when I do inevitably wonder again if I don’t need to keep this up any longer.

Because nearly a year in now, I know for certain — alcohol didn’t make anything sparklier, fun, better. Letting go of it did.

I’m writing this to remember: I’m better like this.