Breaking Up With Booze
Moments in my convoluted path to sobriety
Nearly five months ago, I broke up with booze.
I didn’t have a traditional rock bottom moment. My quitting drinking wasn’t a dramatic climax, but rather a soft whisper that grew louder over time. A little voice, a little nudge, telling me there was more for me. There was better for me.
I didn’t blow up my life before I started to rebuild. I just started.
I was fourteen when I had my first drink. My friends and I were huddled together in an empty playground, the swings and slides standing guard around us like sentries in the night. The quiet hung in the air, heavy and oppressing; in the silence, our nervous laughter seemed much too loud, like a blaring siren giving away our position. I shivered slightly in the chill of the early summer’s evening — in the thrill of anticipation.
In our small, sleepy town, under the cover of dark and starlight, we were rebellious. We were cool. We were grown up. We drank straight from the bottle — green apple vodka. It burned on the way down.
I liked the sensation of fire in my throat and belly. I liked how it blurred the edges. I liked the dream-like quality the night took on.
Right from the start, I liked it too much.
Almost instantly, I realized I could be someone new with alcohol.
I was a shy kid. Introverted. Painfully self-conscious. I wanted nothing more than to be like the normal kids: confident, outgoing, comfortable in my own skin (Cute that I for some reason thought it was abnormal to be a self-conscious teen, right?).
I learned pretty quickly that alcohol could give me that — that it could ease my social anxiety and turn me into someone I had no business being. Outgoing, sure. But also obnoxious, rude, dishonest and disloyal.
I acted out of character, out of alignment with my values, time and time again. And yet I somehow believed that alcohol transformed me into the real me.
I thought I was destined to be a social butterfly, the life of the party. And I learned, far too young, to depend on alcohol to assume that persona. To depend on alcohol to have fun, to be social, to be me.
Unfortunately, I carried that lesson with me far into my adult life.
In the early years, through high school and university, I mostly had fun. I drank like everyone else drank — we went to parties, laughed, sometimes overdid it. But nothing tragic ever happened.
One time, in my teens, I got wasted at a house party. I was blacked out and throwing up, and a concerned friend called my mom to pick me up. That was the first and last time I ever got grounded. I learned my lesson: keep better friends. Keep friends who have your back.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that maybe that friend did have my back. Maybe she was trying to help me, protect me, save me. I didn’t see that way, and maybe that was a sign — an omen of what was to come.
I wanted to be reckless. Wild. Carefree. I wanted to have fun above all else, and I was determined to keep company that would support and enable that.
During my third year of university, I was introduced to solo drinking for the first time. A friend shared, almost boastfully, that his favorite form of self-care was getting drunk at home alone and spending quality time with himself. I vividly remember feeling uncomfortable. Although I was a social binge drinker, drinking alone seemed like a step too far. It felt weird and problematic — like it was crossing some invisible line.
Despite my initial concerns, I tried it for myself a year later — and suddenly, I understood. What a way to unwind and relax. What a treat.
After I graduated, I traded in my party lifestyle for full-time casual drinking; instead of getting sloppy at a bar after too many shots, I got sleepy on the couch after too much wine. I told myself and others that I hardly drank anymore — because going out and drinking at home were two completely different things in my mind.
If I wasn’t getting wasted, it didn’t count.
I regularly joked about my partner and me being old and boring because we liked to stay in more often than not. “We just can’t deal with bars and partying anymore,” I would smugly say, as if I was better than everyone because I didn’t feel the need to go out. Why go out when you can drink a bottle of wine at home?
On the rare occasions that I did party with friends, it was usually disastrous; I almost always got too drunk. I blamed it on the fact that I “never drank anymore” (not true) and therefore my tolerance was lower (also not true).
Throughout the years, the voice in my head that told me I needed to be careful was omnipresent. After particularly bad nights, it would get very loud. I would sometimes listen to it — I’d take a short break, moderate or set rules for myself. Sometimes, I’d even consider whether I needed to stop altogether.
But then time would pass and the embarrassment from the bad night would fade. I’d go back to ignoring my internal voice, because I didn’t have a problem. I was completely in control. My drinking looked like everyone else’s drinking, after all. Everyone took it too far sometimes.
Fast forward a few years and we were suddenly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like seemingly everyone else, I was drinking more than ever. “Airport rules apply,” I would joke with my boozy friends. Translation: drinking at any hour of the day in whatever quantity you want is not only acceptable, but encouraged.
My coworkers and I would meet up at the end of the week for afternoon virtual hangouts. The first question after we said our hellos was unfailingly “What is everyone drinking?” We would share our respective drinks proudly, wearing our problematic coping skills like a badge of honour.
I would be drunk by 4 p.m., irritable and argumentative by 6 p.m. I would keep drinking well into the evening. It became uncommon to make it through a Friday night without a fight with my partner. Unsurprisingly, it was always me who started it.
This pattern went on for months. The one saving grace was that I never got into the habit of weeknight drinking. My unravelling was special to me; I saved it for the weekends and looked forward to it all week.
In a boozy, blurry blink of the eye, spring, summer and fall were behind me and the holidays had arrived. With a fresh lockdown in place, my partner and I spent our first Christmas in our new (and first) house alone. No family, no friends, just us.
It was the first Christmas I had ever spent without my family, and I was devastated — so I drank. I drank every day for the two weeks I was off work. I felt tired and run down; my body didn’t want to drink anymore, but my mind craved it.
In January, when it was finally over, I felt relieved. In the wake of that messy holiday season, my sober curious journey began.
I started slowly, with rules. First: no more than three drinks on Fridays and Saturdays. Then: no more than three drinks on either Friday or Saturday. Finally: no more than three drinks every two weeks.
By the spring, after dipping my toes into quit lit and sober podcasts, I decided to take a break. I didn’t set a timeframe; I just wanted to try. I wanted to see if I could do it, and I wanted to see how it would make me feel.
It felt great.
I felt alive — really alive — for the first time in a long time. I relished waking up hangover-free, anxiety-free, feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. I felt happier. I felt powerful. I was present in my life, in my body, experiencing all the little joys with gratitude. My pink cloud was glorious.
I decided to drink again after two months. In hindsight, I’m not sure I even wanted to drink. But my parents were visiting and it felt like something I had to do to celebrate our reunion after being apart for so long.
Drinking again didn’t feel good. After having just a few glasses of wine on the night they arrived, I had a terrible sleep and woke up feeling drained and irritable. And yet, I still felt pulled toward alcohol and repeated the drink-regret-drink cycle a few times that week (although not every night, which I proudly counted as a win).
I didn’t go back to weekend drinking after my break; I saved it for special occasions. But on those special occasions, I quickly slipped back into old patterns.
I binged for three days straight during a cottage weekend with friends.
I greyed out at my bachelorette party.
I drank much more than I wanted to at my wedding.
My wedding, in fact, was my last straw.
During the weeks preceding the big day, I had contemplated not drinking. Being present at my wedding — experiencing, savouring and remembering every single moment — was extremely important to me, especially after what I had learned from my booze break.
But as my friends and family started arriving during the wedding week, I got caught up in the celebration and excitement. In the end, I couldn’t fathom not marking the day with a champagne toast (or ten).
While the wedding was incredible and perfect in many ways, I had a pit in my stomach during the days that followed. It was a complicated emotional state: I was happier and more grateful than I had ever been, but I was also unbelievably disappointed in myself.
My little voice got louder and more insistent than it had ever been before. It told me: If I couldn’t moderate at my own wedding, I couldn’t moderate.
In the deepest part of my soul, a knowing emerged:
Alcohol is not for me.
A few weeks later, on Halloween weekend, I had my last drink.
It felt different.
It wasn’t fun or exciting or relaxing. It made me feel guilty and out of alignment with what I had come to know. It was the proof that I needed — closure. I knew that what I had discovered and decided after my wedding was true.
Alcohol is not for me.
Although I’m early on in sobriety, I can confidently say that giving up alcohol is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. My life is expanding in ways that I never thought possible, and I couldn’t be prouder of the person I’m fighting to become.
This journey hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been right. And there’s so much more good to come.
