a crash course in not drinking

almost everyone reading this knows at least part of the explanation for why i don’t drink. maybe you’ve heard that i shouldn’t mix alcohol with my meds or that i don’t trust myself to drink because i’m a walking list of risk factors or that i’ve had experiences that have scared me away from it even years after the fact. maybe i’ve rambled about my weird highbrow leftist idea of sobriety being a personal boycott and i just don’t remember doing it. to unpack all the reasons would require a good ten minutes of uninterrupted talking and a lot more vulnerability than anyone’s getting out of me in one interaction. 

i stopped drinking in june of 2024. that doesn’t mean i ever fully lost the desire to do it, or the obsessive thought cycles i’d find myself in that first gave me pause to consider my relationship with alcohol. those thoughts used to send me into a spiral until i’d accept any amount of alcohol i could find to dampen the racing thoughts as much as i could. i used to drink vanilla extract just to shave off even the tiniest bit of the distress the racing thoughts brought along.

i’ll swear blind that i’ve never been a bona fide alcoholic, but i shit sure didn’t approach drinking in a healthy way.

i’ve wanted to write more about sobriety for a long time, but it’s a subject that involves walking a lot of really thin lines- not sounding judgmental or paternalistic, going through what i write obsessively to correct any unintended tones of self-importance. but i figured now, with lent just beginning, the relevance is enough to push past my fears of coming across that way. it’s also more personally relevant right now. today marks two weeks and two days since my cousin ben died driving drunk and two days shy of four years since i lost a different cousin to a different drug.

beyond that, i’ve had a lot of people in my life consider drinking less lately, and i guess i’m an obvious person for them to voice this to. i’ve had several people come to me for advice on how to slow or stop their own drinking. i don’t look down on anyone who does drink or do any kind of drug, especially people who are able to moderate it in a way that i know i’m not capable of doing. i don’t blame them for it in the slightest. to judge anyone for it would be a pretty shitty thing to do even if i’d never known anything but sobriety. i’m not pushing anyone towards it unsolicited, but i’m always happy to support people who are considering it. i respect that i’ve had one of the easiest routes to sobriety imaginable, and whatever someone’s reasons for cutting back or stopping, i respect their self-awareness and their desire to make the change. and i know full well that it isn’t an easy one to make or keep.

it’s not like my urge to drink vanished into thin air in june of 2024. there’s still days that i notice the early stages of those racing thought cycles that always find their way back to “god, just one drink would make this so much easier to deal with”. there’s some days i get fairly far down into those cycles before i catch myself.

what i’ve learned since i stopped drinking is that you can’t keep yourself from wanting to drink. thinking “damn, i could go for a drink right now,” and then beating yourself over the head for thinking that is just going to make you feel worse, and that’s how the spiraling starts. at the end of the day, you’re still thinking about drinking. still giving it space and attention and energy. 

you don’t quit drinking by beating yourself up for wanting to drink.

complicated multi-step methods for handling the thoughts might work for some people, but i’m not one of them. i needed a strategy that i could remember quickly, a nice simple one that comes to mind readily and easily. 

what’s worked for me is the sum of a lot of ideas around quitting anything unhealthy, boiled down to be easily accessible as possible as i go through my day. 

have the thought. acknowledge it. let it pass. 

it’s sort of like running into an ex in public, at least some exes. you see them, make eye contact and maybe nod, and then go your separate ways. remember what you were trying to find on the shelf in front of you. 

look for something else to think about. 

the more time you devote to analyzing the thought or forcing it out, the louder it gets. 

usually what i hear in my mind after “fuck, maybe just one drink?” is a deliberately neutral “huh. i’m thinking about drinking.” 

it’s an observation. not an allegation, not a criticism, an i-guess-objective fact. 

i can’t claim it’ll work for everyone, but it’s a strategy that i’ve been carrying through life for the last almost two years, and because of it every time i have had a drink within those two years, it hasn’t been at the bottom of a desperate attempt to quiet my panicky thoughts. only once has it been celebratory but it’s otherwise been a less frantic “sure, i guess this is a special case.” 

inevitably i’ll think more about drinking in the days and weeks after those instances. that’s when i lean more heavily on have-the-thought-acknowledge-it-let-it-pass. it isn’t a miracle cure; i’ll probably still feel guilty about breaking my sobriety, but dwelling on that only brings me closer to disrupting it again. 

i can’t say if this strategy will keep working once i’m twenty-one. frankly, i’m a little scared to find out. being underage definitely doesn’t make it easier for me to start drinking again. neither does having a reputation for being sober or being in situations where i feel staying sober protects my friends in some ways. i’m grateful to have set up my life in a way where i have a lot of external guardrails i can lean on. 

again, i make no promises about if this strategy will work for other people or for how long. but for now this strategy works, and i’m willing to share it in the hopes that it might work for other people too. whether you take it or not isn’t my business, but it’s there if you’d like to.