300 Days Sober

Let me preface this post by saying, I acknowledge there are people out there who are having real, challenging, perhaps even life-and-death struggles with alcoholism. I am extremely lucky to be able to drop in and out of indulging in alcohol, as I have done at various points in my life. But not everyone has this ability. I want to be very clear I am not judging anyone who drinks alcohol, for whatever reason and to whatever degree. As anyone who knows me knows, I have enjoyed alcohol and the drinking life greatly. I still hang out in bars and spend time with people while they are drinking. I simply reached a point in my own personal journey where the drawbacks of drinking were consistently outweighing the benefits. And so it was time to take this (very long and possibly permanent) pause.

300 days is, beyond a doubt, the longest I have gone without a drink since I started drinking way back at a much younger age than I would like to admit. It has not been easy. But I have learned a few things. 

Here they are:

• Most of the drinking I was doing was out of habit. Booze is so much a part of social life that it's almost a reflex to order a drink when you're out with friends, co-workers, or at a concert, whatever. Likewise with food. There was a point in my life where I would not have dreamed of eating a nice steak or an Italian dinner without red wine. Why? When you really drill down, it's about habit, more than anything. Much of giving up alcohol was, for me, just about breaking the habit. 
• The only way I was able to get to 300 was to give up alcohol completely, and to count days. I have tried to quit drinking before, to varying degrees of success. The difference between then and now was simply that this time I gave up booze completely. There was no: "I'll just have a glass of wine at such-and-such occasion," or "I'll allow myself one beer this week," etc. That approach always led to a complete relapse. The other thing was counting days. I have a weirdly strong competitive streak (with myself, more than others necessary). Once I turned it into a competition, I had the motivation to stick to it.
• Quitting booze is not a cure-all. No, I do not wake up singing every morning. People ask me all the time: "So do you feel great all the time now?" No. Simply quitting booze in and of itself is not a magic pill that's going to make you feel great all the time. In fact, because you'll be feeling the full weight of your thoughts and emotions all the time, without being buzzed, drunk, or hungover, you may actually (I'm sorry to say) feel worse a lot of the time. But to me, the satisfaction of knowing I'm dealing directly with my thoughts, emotions, and my body's processes, without throwing booze into the mix, to me is far greater than the momentary euphoria I would feel from drinking. 
• Having people who support you is vital. I could not have come this far without a few key people in my life who enthusiastically support what I'm doing, and who have been there to prevent me from back-sliding. Sometimes you need to find people to cheer you on and sometimes those people need to overdo it with their praise, making it seem like you have landed on the moon or split the atom, just because you made it through one more day. I'm not someone who generally needs this kind of support in life, but having a few people that I can report my progress to and (to their credit) receive lavish and enthusiastic praise poured upon me, has been absolutely vital.
• It does not get "easier" necessarily, but you get used to it. People say the first 100 days are the toughest, or the first 90 days, or the first three weeks, or the first time you go to a wedding, or whatever. What I've noticed is, there is no such formula that you can rely on in this process. You have to have as much discipline on Day 271 as on Day 2. There is only one time you can ever have a drink, and that one time is "now." And if your "now" is at a reunion with a bunch of college friends who are partying their asses off, or you are home alone with a bowl of popcorn and dying for a beer, or you're on vacation and you pass a local winery that looks like something out of a movie, it does not matter where you are in the process; it is always going to be a fight. But you develop your techniques and your system of rewards, and you remember why you're doing it in the first place, and you lean on some people that support you, and you find it within yourself to get another day under your belt.