A Year In Drinking

A year ago I decided to stop drinking. Four months ago I decided to start drinking again.

It’s been an interesting year, and one filled with lots of firsts (like sober first dates) and re-firsts (like being hungover).

When I wrote Drinking, which was my declaration to the world but mostly to myself that I was committing to not drinking, I was truly scared. It was the hardest choice I’d ever made. I don’t know any adults who don’t drink. I have no peers who don’t drink. In making this choice I was embarking on a future that made me different from everyone I’d spent time with my whole life. I had no example. No choice I’d ever made or step I’d ever taken had felt so lonely, and what stands out from the time I spent weighing this decision is a real heaviness that did not feel good at all.

But it was also a decision that had started to nag at me so hard I couldn’t ignore it. The notion of quitting drinking was so present on my mind that I had to give it the time of day. When I made the choice to quit, I finally had an impetus so compelling I was able to sustain it.

I’d started to feel drinking’s impact on my ability to do the things I needed to do. Higher-purpose-type need-to-do. A year into life as a yoga teacher I could feel the permanent weight on my brain and my body that drinking was causing, and how that made it increasingly…