My Last Alcoholic Drink
I don’t remember the night before I quit drinking.
This essay originally appeared in the Exploring Sobriety newsletter.
What’s the last alcoholic drink that I ever had? The truth is that I don’t remember.
You might expect my final night of drinking to have been an all-night binge, a wild party, or a big last hurrah, but the reality is that my last night with alcohol was just another boring night.
“Last” Drinks
Before getting sober, I had already spent years of my life thinking about getting sober. I had myself convinced that I was right on the verge of quitting drinking, even though I was a daily drinker and showed no signs of changing.
In retrospect, this sounds crazy, but most nights that I drank, I truly believed that I was going to get sober the very next day.
It didn’t matter to me that I had thought the same thing the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that. It didn’t matter that every time I had promised myself I’d quit drinking, I ended up breaking the promise the next day.
It didn’t matter because I ignored my obvious patterns, and kept on believing that sobriety was right around the corner.
