The Rocky and Imperfect Road of Midlife Sobriety
Is sobriety really worth it? One wine-loving woman details her rocky path to a non-drinking life.
This box of wine was my undoing.
During the pandemic, I discovered this organic boxed wine that didn’t taste like ass. And it was cheap. Soon, I had a mini keg of “healthy” wine in my fridge. The mere hit of a button would fill my oversized wine glass in mere seconds. The box lasted 4x longer than a bottle and no clank-clank on recycling day. Perfect.
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As the years passed, I realized my overall intake had increased. At-home drinking became the norm (why socialize when you have all you need at home?). I love cooking so of course, wine just seemed part of the pretty domestic picture I created for myself.
Then I got Covid last November. I was so sick, I could barely eat let alone drink booze. A week went by when I realized:
This is the first week I haven’t had alcohol in years. Wow.
So I rolled with it and remained sober. This is what some call spontaneous sobriety. There was no “hitting a bottom.” No DUIs. No forced rehab or awkward interventions. Since I hadn’t planned it, I had no idea what to do next.
So I did what any red-blooded American does when unsure: I Googled “now what accidental sobriety?”
Apparently, one needs a community for support for continued success. So I found an online group of women (that don’t subscribe to AA philosophy — more on this later) who simply realize that drinking isn’t working for them anymore.
The first Zoom meeting provided me quiet relief: many women like me — working professionals who live relatively normal lives. They just had a secret that was creeping into consciousness: over-drinking.
With each passing day, I learned more about gray area drinking.
Alcohol is addictive.
Alcohol is addictive. That’s just a fact. And when you’ve been drinking for decades, you slowly (or quickly) become addicted to it. No one is immune.
Yet we live in a world that conveniently distances itself from this very obvious fact. We think it’s a character flaw when people get hooked on alcohol. A decent and measured person can drink moderately, right? And if you can’t moderate, well…what’s wrong with you?
This method of blaming the person and not the substance has a long marketing history, detailed substantially in Holly Whitaker’s groundbreaking book, Quit Like a Woman.
“Alcohol is the only drug in the world where, when you stop taking it, you are seen as having a disease.”
The myth of moderation
No one thinks you can moderate cigarette smoking or cocaine. There is no “safe” amount. Yet booze is so socially acceptable, we think moderate intake is just fine. And at first, it is! Listen, some of the best times in my life involved booze. I don’t regret that nor do I feel ashamed.
Pictured below, I’m drunk as hell, doing an at-home photo shoot with my friend Amber. We laughed hard, drank harder and I probably smoked a cigarette or two to top of the night. Would I take this night back? Hell no.
I might take this next image back though. Looking pretty drunky here.
I knew early on in my abstinence: moderation would not be an option.
I always finished my drink before others. The idea of “just one” seemed like a cruel tease. Frankly, I’d rather not drink at all than suffer the internal wrath of “one drink” frustration. I, like many others, lost the chance to moderate. The addiction has taken a foothold and it does the deciding for you.
Aging didn’t help. As I got older, even when I did drink “moderately,” I still felt like shit the next day. Two glasses of wine were easily enough to disrupt my sleep and cause irritation and brain fog the next day. The recovery time took longer, sometimes as many as two days.
Drinking and the middle-aged female body
Experiencing menopause (or perimenopause) is a hormonal rollercoaster ride akin to puberty. You experience a range of changes as hormone levels drop in your body. Add to that a toxic world that continually disrupts our endocrine system. Booze only exacerbates this complicated hormonal disruption, which I could no longer afford.
Case in point: my breasts often ached during perimenopause. Doctors told me it’s common cystic activity that happens during menopause. But it always scared me. A particular location on my breast hurt the worst — an incision spot where I had a minor biopsy years ago. Fear would overwhelm me when that spot began to ache again. Was it cancer?
Since I stopped drinking, the breast pain has dropped considerably, if not completely. The overall inflammation from booze was now gone. No doctor would confirm my hypothesis that alcohol cessation helped heal my breasts. Hell, doctors have suggested drinking was good for me. They are often part of the brainwashed masses that believe the “anything in moderation” myth.
It’s not just inflammation; many middle-aged women have autoimmune disorders. I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, a chronic thyroid issue. My energy levels can wane to dangerous levels at times. I can wake up feeling completely run-down, even without any booze in my system. It can be safely said: alcohol certainly isn’t helping me manage this disorder.
The poor misunderstood liver
Nobody sends you a memo when your liver stops functioning as well as it used to. Sure, I got normal blood results and assumed that my liver was “still going strong.”
But blood tests are notoriously unreliable when it comes to liver damage. In fact, liver function tests can be normal at multiple stages of liver disease. In short, you often don’t know you have serious damage until it’s past the point of return.
Here’s one irrefutable fact: drinking alcohol damages the liver. Each time your liver filters alcohol, some liver cells die.
The liver literally begins to stiffen with continued alcohol use, making it less able to do its critical job in today’s dirty world: cleaning toxins out of your body. This means more hormone disruption, sugar deregulation and a multitude of other illnesses that accompany a poorly functioning liver.
Learning to be a sober social being again
Like many, booze had been my go-to social lubricant. I’m not shy but I’m not a raging extrovert. So booze became a crutch for me socially. It helped me enjoy conversations that would otherwise bore me. It helped me embrace social situations that didn’t enliven me.
Since my sobriety, I have had to rediscover who I am without booze. I won’t lie: it’s a bit weird and wobbly, a fawn finding her footing.
But I have also come to realize: if a social situation needs booze to make it better, then HELLO, I SHOULDN’T BE IN THAT SOCIAL SITUATION. This, of course, leads to many nights at home with White Cat, watching Netflix and wondering what’s next for this sober woman in her 50s.
Occasionally, I have a successful night where I have fun without booze. And like a teeny seed, I hope it grows. After all, I started life sober, right? I didn’t need booze to have fun in my childhood. We just had fun, naturally and organically. I only hope I can still recover her.
Sobriety and the re-emergence of pain and anxiety
Whether consciously or not, most of us use booze to suppress anxiety and pain.
It’s almost comically simple but when you quit drinking, anxiety and psychic pain re-emerge, often with a vengeance.
In the last few months, I’ve cried about:
- The loss of my mom and dad decades ago.
- The loss of my grandparents decades ago.
- A multitude of pets I miss.
- Friends who are no longer friends.
- An old sweater I loved that I accidentally ripped.
- Trash by the side of the road.
- A song that reminded me of 4th grade.
- The depressing threadbare carpet of my childhood home.
- The kind face of my grade school nurse.
The grief surged out of me, convulsively at times. When you stop drinking, it’s as if your brain has been refreshed (it has been). It works better than before. This isn’t always good but necessary.
One could argue: who the hell would want that? Well, I would. It’s there anyway, dictating my life in a myriad of ways. I’d rather release it, not store it, thank you.
And it’s not just grief. If you’re newly sober, expect a surge of anxiety (since booze allayed it). This has been the hardest part for me. Anxiety can feel so real, so pervasive, that you almost don’t realize you are under its spell. A grocery store visit suddenly felt as overwhelming as visiting a crowded stadium event. An unexpected bill in the mail meant financial doom.
My sober Zoom friends remind me of the importance of exercise, even a walk, when the anxiety surges. Or deep breathing. Or running on a cold and empty beach in my granny panties and old sports bra as evident below:
AA is not the only game in town.
Like many, I assumed that when you quit drinking, you are an alcoholic. Start searching your area for an AA meeting.
I don’t think I am an alcoholic, frankly. Nor do millions of others like me. Truthfully, there’s no need to define yourself at all these days. Simply wanting to quit is enough.
Go on Instagram and search “sober curious” and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of posts dedicated to people who continue to drink but are examing this sneaky habit out in the open. They’re not alcoholics but sober curious. They’re not waiting to “bottom out.” How intelligent, right? It’s a new age.
You can go to virtual meetings that have nothing to do with AA. Or you could attend an AA meeting in LA even though you live in Philadelphia (if local anonymity matters to you).
Not ready for any of those steps? Create your own sobriety path with the help of TED talks and YouTube videos or read some of the best in “quit lit” (as it’s called) in the privacy of your home. Journal, meditate, go to therapy, fast, cleanse — it’s your choice these days.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a questionable model with some benefits and some serious drawbacks, especially for women. It is a largely white male-centric philosophy. As author and sobriety, expert Holly Whitaker points out:
The truth is, A.A. may be the foundation of global recovery, but it wasn’t made with everyone in mind. It’s a framework created in the 1930s by upper-middle-class white Protestant men to help people like them overcome addiction. Its founders believed the root of alcoholism was a mammoth ego resulting from an entitled sense of unquestioned authority.
She believes we women don’t need to tamp down our “mammoth” egos. One could argue it’s our shrunken, deflated egos at the root of their addiction in the first place.
Feeding the hole.
Without booze, you are left with a hole. And that hole is hungry. Literally. I craved sugar during the first few months as if my life relied on it.
A friend brought me over a bevy of baked goods for my birthday a few months ago. For most people, this multitude of sweets would have lasted a week. I ate everything within one day.
Frankly, I’ve always been like that. I eat quickly, I drink quickly and I generally keep sweets out of the house because I don’t just eat them, I inhale them.
What is this about? Fuck if I know but from what I’m learning, some people crave that dopamine hit wherever they can get it. If I can’t get it from booze, I will turn to food, more specifically sugar. The sugar cravings have waned a bit but not enough for my liking. Right now, I’m just allowing it to be.
The L Word
Many studies have supported the fact that loneliness is often at the root of addiction.
“The opposite of addiction is connection.”
No surprise there. But what is one to do? Wave a wand and have a supportive, loving community magically appear? As a single, middle-aged female, being alone is often the norm. Am I always feeling lonely? No. I wish I was feeling lonely more often. That might propel me to do more socially.
This Instagram meme made me chuckle but also scared me a little.
Is this me? When I adopted my beautiful White Cat, one of my friends (at the time) made a joke about me becoming a “cat lady” within days of ownership. It hurt me and pissed me off. I have a loving companion by my side for the first time in years, and now I’m supposed to be ashamed of it, lambasted for it. What women must endure.
Here’s my version:
The imperfect path of recovery.
I still smoke pot (called California sober) occasionally. I have an unhealthy attachment to coffee. I take Kratom daily (an herbal substance that can produce opioid and stimulant-like effects) to help with my crippling fatigue.
Technically, that’s not sober! I could be on a slew of doctor-prescribed medications and that would be acceptable to most. But not for me.
So it’s been imperfect, this whole process. A lot of what is purported to happen when you quit drinking didn’t happen to me.
What didn’t happen when I stopped drinking:
- I didn’t sleep better.
- My hair didn’t become lustrous.
- My complexion didn’t improve.
- I didn’t lose weight.
- I don’t feel like taking on the world.
- I don’t feel wildly positive and elated about sobriety like so many others on Instagram.
What did happen when I stopped drinking:
- I became more organized.
- My memory and recall improved.
- I crossed off more things on my weekly to-do list.
- I began to speak more cogently, saying exactly what I thought.
- I got in touch with old pain and released some of it.
- I sought therapy and use it to get old shit out of me
- I feel cleaner (for lack of a better word) and lighter overall.
- I started meditating again, this time more seriously than before, even buying my first meditation pillow.
So that’s my highly imperfect path. I hope you find yours. If you’re unsure as to whether you have a drinking problem, quit for a week. If you can’t do that, well…you probably have your answer.
But if you decide to go sober, don’t do it for the lustrous hair or the deep sleep. Don’t do it for weight loss or a more sunny outlook on life. Because that may or may not come. The whole process is kind of a rude awakening…but it’s still an awakening. There’s a rightness to it that can’t be denied. Nobody regrets getting sober, after all.
And that’s what I lean into when all the superficial benefits fall through.
