Quit it.
Or “How I Quit Binge Drinking & Learned Some Self-Respect”.
Let’s be clear: I was a binge-and-coping mechanism drinker from August 2006 to August 2014; a smoker between 2010 and 2015- kind of a poseur in the nicotine world. I still have drinks but now I can stop after a few. “I need a drink” is such a rare impulse, it’s easy to turn down. I’m not a real alcoholic. I don’t always have good boundaries around sobriety.
It has definitely been easier to do this because all my drinking buddies moved away. Moving houses twice has helped. It coincided with my starting full-time university for the first time in more than a decade. I had to literally change my life in order to change my life.
Some of this might be kind of self-indulgent. But addiction writing is one of the few times that your catharsis can be helpful and interesting for others. So here’s a listicle.
All my relationships are different now.
I don’t anticipate trips to the liquor store anymore. Booze is off my mind in general. Abstaining in every day life is no longer novel or tender-
-but going out is. All my party friends think I’ve moved away. I kinda either work towards being a better human or I go out and party with my friends. It’s either/or right now. And by ‘either/or’ I mean my bedtime is 10pm. If you’re a musician trying to maintain your career while quitting drinking: I would suggest drawing, micro-dosing mushrooms, and soda water. Soda water. Soda water. Alcohol helps people screw and be friends. I think we all know that. Getting sober also seems to do that, but in a different way.
My relationships are different now. It’s my third year in university. I’m finally making friends and talking to the people around me. Being there made me feel like a feral cat for the first two. As the fog of what I’ve been running from lifts, it’s easier to think of myself as a human and not a monster.
Shameovers still happen
I don’t do shitty things while I’m drunk anymore. My brain is just catching up to all the shameovers I should have had Much Worse back in the day. Or alcohol is a depressant that makes you feel like shit after you drink it? I’m not a scientist.
I still don’t want to hear your ‘I drank so much’ stories.
WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THEIR LIVER? The first thing I hear when you rev up your ‘how I got my hangover’ story is a cry for help. I’m not trying to judge you- but here we are. If you don’t pathetic-brag about it, I will assume your drinking habits are none of my business.
Don’t swagger your self-destruction machismo at me in general. Lately I don’t want to hear about how much gross junk food you ate either. (Vegans, come at me for that dried pork inside a squid I posted on Instagram the other day, I am definitely kind of a hypocrit).
I know what kind of bad drunk I am now.
And I don’t like her. She’s got some really close friends that are awesome- like ‘nursed three drinks in good company’ Devo, who is the only one in here who can make proper eye contact with other humans.
Bad Drunk Me is still just two or three decisions away though. She loves spending time with me- I’m the one who decides if she does.
I still smell kinda bad.
But at least I don’t smell like hydrogen sulfide anymore. The Montreal metro smells Fucking Gross after a weekend of people beer farting on it.
My rock bottom still bothers me.
When you make it easier to deal with your shit, the shit you need to deal with comes into more gruesome focus. Since writing my first thing about drinking, I’ve re-evaluated the depth of some of my shame trenches, and have re-evaluated what my lowest point was. You are not weird or regressing if you need therapy years after you’ve quit. Things come back to you when you’re ready to deal with them.
Quitting is all about doing it one day at a time.
That movie ‘What About Bob’ is just a classic. Baby Steps? So. Real. People on the internet are really into these metaphors about building houses One brick at a time. I’m trying to structure my life so that every day feels like I did a little more to make things better. And making things better is all about making about a dozen subtle choices throughout the day.
Things like:
-eating breakfast before leaving the house (meal planning in general);
-doing homework right after class, instead of “later”;
-going to sleep at a reasonable hour instead of buying a bottle of wine;
-generally getting shit done, even when I don’t want to.
(NOTE: That all sounds No Fun in your 20s. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be? Whatever. Not-wrecking my body and mind didn’t become a priority until just recently. I don’t care that you drink or why you do it tbh.)
Quitting can look like eating celery with your vodka- it’s all about the incremental boundary setting. At first quitting was being conscious of my intake enough to say ‘no’ when I was already drunk. That took a few months to get down- normally it involved taking myself out of a situation just before I got too drunk to start doing dumb shit. Then it was drinking a glass of water for every booze drink (I peed constantly). Then it was setting a drink limit with myself. Then it was giving away my last drink. Then it was slowing down my drinking. Then it was lowering my drink limit even further. Then it was resisting the urge to buy booze in the first place.
Once I got used to drinking booze on my terms (not my addictive impulse’s), I started learning to say ‘no’ to liquor cravings more effectively. It wasn’t until I’d stepped myself down that I learned to start abstaining for whole weeks at a time. And even then, at first it was because I was too busy and broke to afford alcohol, not because I had a lot of willpower and free time on my hands.
I mean, I’ve seen people quit cold turkey before (usually by skipping town or getting really sick). Different strokes, different folks. Some people love dealing with their entire festering whale carcass of Reasons For Getting Blotto head-on right away and fuckin’ Wow to them. I Coulda Never.
Once you’ve built up your resistance by setting boundaries and tapering your habit-indulgence, invoke your inner Adult.
Once you’ve built up your boundaries enough that you’re ready to really throw down with your habit and the reason you formed it, start treating yourself like a child you love who wants to play with fire. Take it away. Find something else to do. Distract that kid from doing the bad shit. Tell it no and let it have a tantrum.
At first you have to be tricking yourself every moment of every day into not doing what your id wants you to do. So give yourself new things to do. Replace your bad habit with something healthier and make it really easy to do that something healthier instead of whatever you’re trying to quit. Even incrementally healthier habit changes are proving to yourself that you can set boundaries and make the rules. Don’t discourage yourself. This is waaay harder than it sounds when you’re someone who loves indulging their id.
Binding your bad habits is totally different than banishing them.
In other words, refusing to be a wasteoid is not the same thing as getting sober. You can stop being a wasteoid and not entirely deal with the things that gave you the bad habit to begin with. Lots of people who go super Christian or become health addicts are basically just replacing the focus of their addictive neuroses and need for external reward. I’m not bashing it. We all need different things from sobriety. But you haven’t healed your fragile ego or let go of the trauma you’re keeping sedated. See Gabor Mate talking about his addiction to buying music. Some people don’t need to/aren’t ready to do that though, so whatever.
