This is a surreal thing to write: As of today, I’m one year sober.
In some ways I feel like an impostor for using that language. It’s true I haven’t had a single sip of alcohol in 12 months, but it’s not like I was a full-blown alcoholic who went to rehab or AA meetings. I didn’t go through major physical withdrawal, and I never relapsed. I quit on a regular day without any help or support — just like that.
Still, this milestone feels astounding when I consider how much of a role alcohol played in my life up until last summer, and how much I had always expected that to continue.
Who am I without alcohol?
I didn’t start drinking until college, but I quickly discovered that, like magic, a few cocktails (or, more likely, shots) could loosen me up into the fun, adventurous person I’d always dreamed of being. Bonus points if I couldn’t remember my poor decisions in the sharp light of the following morning. Like so many others, I reveled in the opportunity to escape, to get out of my head. I remarked often over the years that getting drunk was the only time I felt happy. So it goes.
By the time I had graduated, moved to a different part of the city, and started working full time, I was drinking heavily and regularly. After all, I was 21; I could supply my own liquor.
I fell into a routine with work, my boyfriend, chores. Every day held the same, and again and again I wondered, Is this all there is?
My job grew more intensive, requiring more labor and more hours. My responsibilities doubled, then tripled. Soon I was not only editing but writing, managing a team, planning content, coordinating social media, and engaging with the community. There was no feasible way to accomplish everything during regular Monday – Friday work hours, so I usually worked nights and weekends, too. I’d do the mentally challenging tasks (writing, editing) at the office, and save the emotionally challenging tasks (responding to emails, writing messages) for home, where I could drink.
After a 15-minute commute and a quick dinner, I’d make myself a drink. (Served in a 8-oz. glass, “a drink” is probably misleading, as it would contain anywhere from four to eight shots of liquor.) I so distinctly remember that feeling of taking the first sip after a long day. It was like healing liquid fire sinking into my heart and then exploding throughout my body. Maybe only really good sex can rival that pleasurable warmth, the way it swallows up all the bad and sings goodness in my bones. Not that I miss it.
My mood vastly improved, I could set about doing the worst part of my job: sending warm, genuine, heartfelt messages to people who were suffering, grieving, contemplating suicide. (This was required of my team despite a lack of training or certification in anything resembling counseling.) I worked, and I drank — every night of the week.
On bad days, I surreptitiously poured beers from the communal fridge into my stainless steel coffee thermos. At company retreats, I stashed bottles of whiskey in the trunk of my car and snuck out to take pulls throughout the day. I stopped being able to get drunk. I could barely get tipsy.
Still, I drank and drank, under the impression I was somehow surviving, until one night, nearly blacked out in a taxi crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, I looked out the window at the Manhattan skyline and thought, God, please don’t make me go back to my miserable fucking life.
Two days later, I quit my job, and two months later, I was living in Colorado.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as fleeing the blinding, monotonous heat of the valley. Isolated, unemployed, and trapped by the pandemic, I once again relied on alcohol to get me through the next year. In fact, I didn’t even hit my lowest point until my first spring in the mountains.
So maybe it affects my health
Perhaps because I was reaching a critical low, I reached out to doctors and a therapist and started getting my life and health in order. My mental state was likely the most alarming, but I couldn’t ignore the wide array of physical health issues that had been cropping up, either. Autoimmune flare-ups, migraines, a long list of symptoms that couldn’t be accounted for … I was barely holding it together.
In a nutshell, all this resulted in forming a local team of specialists, ensuring I was on the proper medication, trying several new treatments, starting Prozac for depression, and making some significant lifestyle changes.
Cutting out alcohol was at the top of that list. My GP cautioned me that Prozac and alcohol might not mix well, and it would be in my best interest to quit the latter before starting the former. I’m not sure if I’d have been so willing to follow through on this recommendation if it weren’t for the additional adverse effects that alcohol was having on my body.
I’d long been in denial that drinking triggered many of my health issues — or maybe I just didn’t care enough to stop. Stuck in isolation with nothing else to focus on, it had become very clear over the past few months that alcohol would immediately lead to a migraine, a flare-up of my hidradenitis suppurativa, a flare-up of certain Behcet’s symptoms, and/or a worsening of my depression. Not to mention the regular ol’ side effects of drinking: a headache, a hangover, an empty wallet.
Prozac presented an opportunity. It pushed me to make a decision I’d been laughing off as impossible for years.
Prozac kicks in, alcohol washes out
At the time, I made no promises about how long my newfound sobriety would last. I knew I had to at least give the antidepressant time to work, but I was imagining weeks — maybe a few months. Never a year. Certainly not more.
But then, the Prozac kicked in, and the last traces of alcohol were flushed from my system.
As temperatures rose through July, I craved the cold fizz of a Modelo or the sweet and salty tang of a margarita. This is just temporary, I told myself. Soon.
When Phillip died one sticky August morning, I didn’t flood my system with booze, as every instinct in my body urged me to do.
Instead, I spent weeks outside hiking among golden aspens in the thick afternoon heat, and curled up with a blanket outside at night to watch the stars. I took in the silence and the stillness and learned to breathe around the sharp corners of clarity that poked out of me at new, odd angles. The surge of emotions was heavy and strange and hard to bear, but with each day that passed, I found that I could, increasingly, bear it.
The weeks ticked by, and I felt myself softening, expanding, welcoming the two-way flow of light and color through the newly opened channels in my veins. I cried easily; I felt deeply. The creativity I’d foolishly thought would vanish with the alcohol swirled through my head more intensely and readily than it had in years.
Before long, I’d hit the six-month mark. I knew then that I’d have no trouble making it to a year.
And, well, here I am.
Life in color
By now I’m accustomed to going about my days and weeks without alcohol. The thought of it actually nauseates me a bit and triggers all sorts of hallucinated pains and ailments. (Whether a single drink would really cause those, I don’t know.) In other words, I’ve hit this milestone, this completely unreal goal, but it’s also just a Thursday (of course it’s a Thursday) and I see no reason to change up the good stuff I’ve got going.
The thing is, I often worried that cutting out alcohol would mean cutting out a major source of fun, adventure, and spontaneity. I thought I would lose that bold and reckless side of myself.
But if this past year has taught me anything at all, it’s that I don’t need alcohol to be insane.
Before, I relied on drinking to draw out certain personality traits, to feel comfortable doing certain activities, to weather certain emotions. And under the influence, I only got to be and experience those things to a partial degree. There was Sober!Paige and Drunk!Paige, and reconciling the two wasn’t always easy.
Now, there’s just Paige. Whole, unified, and perfectly capable of doing impulsive, ridiculous things with a fully conscious mind. It’s empowering not to need a crutch, and I’d be lying to say it’s not fun to pull drunk-person antics in the clear light of day while stone-cold sober simply for the hell of it (or because I’m mentally ill, take your pick).
There are also the health benefits, though these are more nebulous in that I mostly just have to have faith they exist. I still struggle with my fair share of symptoms and flare-ups, but I know alcohol would only make these worse. Every time I wake up with nausea, vertigo, dizziness, and a pounding head from a migraine, I’m thankful that at least I don’t have to worry about a hangover compounding that godawful feeling. At least it’s not my fault I feel this way.
Still, it’s clear that I’ve grown healthier and stronger over the past year. I’m less puffy and inflamed, I’ve lost weight, I have more energy, and I can walk and hike farther. While alcohol, to be fair, is only one factor among several, it was the first domino that nudged the others to fall. I don’t know that I would’ve had the year I did, with all its positives, if I were knocking back drinks every night. It seems unlikely.
Now what?
When I quit drinking, I thought it was an insane choice to make mid-pandemic. At the time, solo evening cocktails were very much a part of the quarantine culture. Every other subscription email I received suggested some creative gin recipe or an exciting new product I needed to step up my home bar game. Backing out of that felt preposterous.
Of course, it was as simple as unsubscribing from a few lists and dumping the rest of my beer stash at my parents’ home in the mountains. I quickly realized I wasn’t missing out on much.
But now, as life resumes and I start going out for the first time since I stopped drinking (well, long before that, really), I’m realizing it will take me a minute to adjust. It’s not that I’m nervous about being tempted or slipping up, though I am, a little. It’s that socialization has always seemed to revolve around drinking, and I don’t know how to fill in those gaps quite yet. I used to love going to bars, hanging out at breweries, doing wine tastings. What will those activities look like now, if anything?
I still can’t say for sure how long this spell of sobriety will last. I don’t intend to start drinking again anytime soon, but I think I’d panic if I started throwing around words like “forever.”
So, we’ll see. For today, I’m celebrating one year of sitting with myself, embracing what I feel, and being unafraid to survive a little more.
