Finding Creativity Without Alcohol
How I get past my writing inhibitions without turning to booze.
I quit drinking a little over four years ago, after a decade of struggling with alcoholism. Quitting wasn’t easy. I struggled to even admit that I had a problem. Before committing to getting sober, I spent a lot of time going back and forth over whether I really wanted or needed to give up alcohol.
When I was debating sobriety with myself, I always looked for justifications to keep drinking. I desperately clung to any excuse I could come up with to put off sobriety, or even to give up on it entirely.
One of those excuses was that I needed alcohol to spark my creativity. It’s a common myth, and one that I really bought into back when I was a drinker.
More precisely, I believed that alcohol was the key to lowering my inhibitions enough to write. When I was sober, I’d get writer’s block, second-guess every sentence, and worry about how readers would respond before I’d even finished a first draft. When drunk, I’d stop stressing out and the words would just flow. At least, that’s the myth that I told myself.
The reality is that I actually wrote very little during all my years of drinking. Although alcohol lowered my inhibitions, it also made me lazy. I’d put off writing projects day…
