Alcohol free Anniversary!
It has been over 5 years now that I have taken a sip of alcohol. And my decision to take action on this began with a question- one that stood out to me then and it stands out to me when I hear it from others now. The question: ‘What else is there to look forward to?’
And it's interesting to think back on this progression. When I was growing up, I used to think drinking was the absolute coolest thing. I couldn’t wait to drink, to party and to have fun. When I finally could, I found myself wondering, ‘is this what life is really all about?’
A small group of people clinking glasses together in celebration.
My roommate at the time had commented about her little brother who was in middle school at the time, she was so excited for him and his life and where he would go. I remember thinking… ‘What else is there to look forward to?’ And to be honest, that question really stood out to me. I now know this is one of the first times I recognized what depression can sound like internally. After some therapy and medications, I started to see myself in a healthy manner and, yet, I continued to drink.
In those early years though, I made a commitment that I was not going to drink around my niece and nephews nor at family gatherings. I thought separating drinking me from ‘normal’ me was healthy. And it was healthier. I was adamant about not wanting the kids in my family to think that drinking was normal, as I had. As I grew older, my drinking slowed some. But even as I worked as a parole officer, supervising people who were not permitted to drink themselves, who had committed crimes while intoxicated or otherwise under the influence, I continued to drink. And I always felt a contradiction within myself about this. Eventually I would drink maybe once a quarter. Inevitably, I noticed a pattern. Something was coming to the surface—a memory, an emotion—and rather than giving it space, I would grab a beer or a margarita, drink a bit of it, and move on. I don’t think I could name this at the time, but I was interrupting my own natural way of processing things.
An image of a margarita.
Another thing happened, and it happened to all of us. Covid-and it hit me. Hard. Despite a decently healthy diet and lifestyle, I lost my sense of smell and taste for nearly 6 months. Normally, my dog and I would go on long daily walks and hikes throughout the week. And for a while after I recovered, we had to stick to short predictable walks because of the extreme fatigue I faced. A thought occurred to me as I was introducing normal food and fluids back into my diet during the recovery. I realized that coffee, which I had been drinking daily at the time, felt very hard for me to consume in my recovery. If coffee, which I had been drinking daily, suddenly felt difficult for my body to tolerate, what would alcohol do? I didn’t want to find out.
So in 2021, I officially made the decision that I was done drinking. A short time later, when I started to formally study Ayurveda, I found a language that really named what I had started to experience for myself. Ayurveda considers alcohol a form of visha-or toxin. This isn’t meant as any type of moral judgement, it is a visha because it can disrupt clarity and throw us off balance. Related is another Ayurvedic concept called prajñāparādha which can be understood as a ‘crime against wisdom’: consciously knowing what is healthy and best for ourselves and doing the opposite. It is this disconnect between what we deeply know and the actions we take that Ayurveda describes as one root causes of physical and mental illness.
I share this because when any of us are contemplating change, we may remain in that place of ambivalence for years. Part of us recognizes the perception of what we may gain from an action (drinking in my case), while another part begins to notice what it costs us.
One of the unexpected gifts of this decision has been discovering how many people quietly make the same choice. Some identify as sober. Some don't. Some came through recovery programs. Others simply decided alcohol no longer fit the life they wanted to live. Finding people who didn't need an explanation for my choice felt like a quiet relief. And there is such beauty in that relief!
