5 Things I Know After 4018 Days without Alcohol
- Reality is hard
— I was at a place where I didn’t want to be what I was. And even after I quit drinking I stayed that way for a long time
— Alcoholics have an overly aggrandized idea of who they are in the world that’s at odds with reality
— Once you get comfortable with reality things start to get better.
2. Alcohol is a drug, but it’s not medicine.
— I tried to use alcohol to fix what was wrong with me; social anxiety, depression, regular anxiety, fear of the future, the difficulty of the past.
— The longer you take it, the more you need.
— Eventually it exacerbates all the issues you’re trying to cover up with drinking.
3. Society wants you to drink.
— Drinking is a kind of social contract. When everyone is drinking, we believe we have a get out of jail free car for uncharacteristic behavior.
— Drinking makes it easier to be around people without the need for being truthful about who you really are.
— Drinking creates shame, which creates weakness, which undermines agency.
4. It took me 10 years to not feel wrong in my skin without alcohol.
— Alcohol changes your brain. It takes years for your brain to reset to a “normal” state, if that’s possible.
— Early on, I felt like an exposed nerve. Everything was painful and it stayed that way for years.
— In my 10th year of sobriety, a switch flipped and I was able to feel better in my own skin. I started to have a more balanced perspective on the world and my place in it and I stopped seeking the dopamine hit of approval from others. I started to become enough for myself.
5. I still struggle.
— I don’t like to be around people who are drinking.
— I still get overstimulated and have anxiety attacks.
— I still take a handful of pills every day to balance my brain chemistry, but I realized when I went for a med management check up the other day that even though this has been the most challenging part of my professional life since I started my business I feel better and I’m less depressed and less filled with dread.
Some of this is likely part of getting older and having a wider, deeper perspective on life, but some of it comes from not feeling so desperate all the time. I don’t think we talk about the sense of desperation people feel when they’re drinking. Drinking is an act of desperation. Becoming an alcoholic is admitting you have no control over that desperation.
I’m not better, as in “cured”, but I am better. Better than I have been in my adult life. I honestly never thought I would get here. I thought life after alcohol would always feel like less. For the first time this year it started to feel like more.
