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How to Stay Sober at Parties
(And other alcohol-fueled events.)
When I quit drinking, one of my biggest fears was going to parties and other social events while sober.
I was scared that people would judge me for abstaining from alcohol, and I was also terrified that being around so much booze would lead me straight to a relapse. This latter fear was extremely well-justified, because in the past I had ruined many sobriety attempts in exactly this way.
Fortunately, this time around I’ve managed to stay sober, now going on five and a half years. A few years ago, I started blogging about my sobriety, and “Staying Sober at Parties” was one of the first topics I ever wrote about. At the time, I was almost exactly two years sober.
I’ve been rereading some of my old blog posts lately, and it’s interesting to me to see how some of my approaches to sobriety have changed, while others have stayed remarkably consistent.
In that old post, one of the first things I said was that “If I’m ever faced with a social situation that I think might put my…
