When change beckons, something has to give. Enter sobriety

Ending a toxic relationship to find my way home to myself

Like so many others, in 2020-2021, in the heaviest, darkest years of the pandemic, I found myself at the cliff’s edge. I had two choices. I could peer down at an abyss that is unfathomable, so you don’t dare jump. Or I could look skywards, take a leap of faith in myself, let go of things keeping me stuck, and I just might land on my feet. That meant admitting to myself the stickiest spot of all: my toxic relationship with alcohol.

Quarantine drinking

For a long time, I was marooned in the first of those choices. Jumping was far too scary. Better the devil you know, as they say, even if it’s hurting you. But during the pandemic, something began to shift. I was suddenly confined to the four walls I shared with my husband, with a growing but not yet fully acknowledged unhappiness with our marriage. No more business trips for me, no nights out with girlfriends. It was just the two of us. In full avoidance mode, we both upped our alcohol intake. Remember all the memes of the day drinking while ostensibly working from home? Cocktail hour couldn’t come early enough for me. A virtual wine tasting group was the highlight of my week, the opportunity to go to my favorite liquor store and stock up on the selected varietal. Even healthy coping activities, like a kayak ride over to our beach for a long walk, had to include a large thermos of chilled wine or gin and tonic. It didn’t feel good to need the alcohol that much. It didn’t feel good emotionally or physically. But I couldn’t stop.

A child of the ‘60s, the Madmen era

As for so many of us, the seeds of my relationship with alcohol started early. I grew up in the 1960s “Madmen” era, with a father who worked on Madison Avenue in advertising with a bar tray in his office, a stay-at-home mom who greeted him at the door with a martini fixed just the way he liked it, with “a whisper of vermouth.” On the nights they entertained at home, at age eight or nine, I would peer through the wooden railings of the staircase at the women in their sleek dresses like real-life versions of my Barbie dolls, and the men with their slicked-back hair and suits. I yearned to understand the mysterious life of adults, and those cocktails seemed part of the sophistication, the sparkle—the key to unlock all the secrets of adulthood.

Source: rogerwilkerson

Release my inhibitions

By my early teens, I was drinking beer in the basements of friends’ homes, which naturally released inhibition for those early explorations into sexuality, the make-out sessions on a scratchy couch, kids coupling up in various parts of the room. We were all finding our way and alcohol seemed to light a path in the darkness, make us less afraid, more daring. Alcohol’s magical power to overcome my shyness and relax me, allow me to be part of the group, even popular, was an invitation into adulthood I readily accepted. And so it went, throughout high school, college, early adulthood, marriage and early parenting (how I longed for my nightly wine and episodes of “Sex and the City” in the early ‘90s after putting my little girls to bed, wishing I had my Cosmo, too) and then into empty-nest and middle age—wine was my go-to most nights and eventually every night. My identity as someone who was social, fun, always up for a party or the intimate shared bottle of wine in a heart-to-heart with a girlfriend was completely intertwined with alcohol. By 2020, one or two glasses a night wasn’t enough. It was far too easy to finish a bottle of white all on my own, and to hear the call of an uncorked one.

Time for a breakup with “Al”

In early 2021, I finally began to recognize it was time to break up with “Al,” as I came to think of this possessive, gaslighting boyfriend called Alcohol. He was inside my head, telling me, “You don’t have a problem with alcohol. Look at your life! All you accomplish. It’s because you work so hard, strive so much that you need me.” At the time, my marriage was breaking apart at the seams, in ways that I wasn’t ready to think about. But my actions spoke the truth. I was taking my nightly bottle of wine into the guest room, avoiding the landmine of the marital bed upstairs. I would wake up to the empty bottle in the trash can, a blistering headache, berating myself for having done it again.

The scary question: Am I an alcoholic?

In my growing anxiety over my inability to simply quit (I had tried, several times, on my own, lasting sometimes just a few days before reaching for a glass of wine, the longest period of abstention lasted three months), I started googling the question I was terrified to ask, “Am I an alcoholic?” I looked over the questions, wondered how honest I was willing to be, then shut down the computer. But the Facebook algorithm started sending ads my way and a video from a woman named Jenn Kautsch who had started a group called Sober Sis popped up. She spoke of “gray-area” drinking, women who seemingly had it all together but for this one thing—they did not have control over their drinking. She offered a 21-day reset, to examine your relationship with alcohol. I signed up. I reasoned, if I put down some money, I’d follow through.

Finding my soul sisters in sobriety

The reset began Feb 1, 2021. I knew I was finally ready to kick Al out of my head and my out of my house, and I was right. I have been sober every day since then. It wasn’t easy at first. There were cravings for weeks, months. Every new occasion that had usually been accompanied by drinking was a challenge. I found non-alcoholic substitutes for cocktail hour in those early months. Gradually, I didn’t need them.

What made all the difference in the Sober Sis program was not the daily emails exploring different facets of alcohol and its effect on us or the virtual support in a dedicated Facebook group (although both were helpful). It was an algorithm setting us up with a group of women in a Marco Polo video group. To this day, seven of us are still in that group. We call ourselves soul sisters. We are from the United States, Canada, and Australia. We have met in person—all except our Aussie sister. Yet that doesn’t make her any less a part of our bond. The lifeline we created started with a desire to quit alcohol but became so much deeper.

This makes sense to me—because once you remove the gauze of an unhealthy dependence on alcohol, so much is revealed. We can be more honest with ourselves and with each other. We have to confront our hurt and our pain, our losses and our grief. But there is also more vividness to life, more beauty, energy, possibility. In sobriety, I have found clarity. And better health, which is no small thing. I sleep solidly, I wake early without a headache and my early bed times are an invitation for tea and a book, not the wine, snacks and TV that were my previous nightly routine.

Photo by Carli Jeen on Unsplash

The teachers who helped me take the leap

In this newfound clarity, I gathered the courage and strength to tell my husband in September of 2022 that I wanted a divorce. I would not have found my way there had I not put down the bottle of wine. I was also able to let in the words of so many wise teachers sharing their own journey with sobriety, including the books and courses of Laura McKowen, founder of the sobriety community The Luckiest Club with the Substack newsletter Love Story; author Holly Whitaker with the Substack newsletter Recovering, and Annie Grace. I devoured all their books in 2021.

I welcome the more open atmosphere around discussions of alcohol. I know I wasn’t alone among those who saw their drinking ramp up during the pandemic, prompting soul searching and life style changes. It’s an important conversation to have, as author Courtney Maum pointed out last week in her thought-provoking Substack newsletter, “Do wine and I need a conscious uncoupling?” So many of us here in Substack and elsewhere are exploring these questions, openly and beautifully, like Allison Deraney in her Substack Dare to be Dry, and of course, the wisest of souls, Cheryl Strayed, in this letter from Dear Sugar (thank you, Courtney, for leading me to this letter again).

Let’s keep this conversation going. Let’s not be afraid to explore our relationship with alcohol. Let’s be willing to take that leap of faith. We never know what we might find on the other side.

Reading list for the sober curious:

Push Off From Here and We Are The Luckiest by Laura McKowen

Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker

This Naked Mind and The Alcohol Experiment by Annie Grace

Dana Leigh Lyons’ Sober Soulful Substack including a SoberStack, an annotated directory of Substacks devoted to addiction recovery and sobriety. Lots of goodness here!

Question for the week: Have you examined your relationship with alcohol and what have you discovered as a result? Share in the comments!

3 Songs for 3D

Divorce

“I Drink Wine,” by Adele: On my pandemic beach walks, my chilled wine in hand, Adele reminded me of what I had lost—and what I could still reclaim.

How can one become so bounded
By choices that somebody else makes?
How come we've both become a version
Of a person we don't even like?

When I was a child
Every single thing could blow my mind
Soaking it all up for fun
But now I only soak up wine

Dementia

“Days of Wine and Roses,” Frank Sinatra: My parents’ favorite singer, so emblematic of 1960s sophistication around the elixir of liquor. Turning away from that legacy of drinking allowed me to step fully into my role as my mother’s caregiver.

The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play
Through the meadow land toward a closing door
A door marked "nevermore" that wasn't there before

The lonely night discloses just a passing breeze filled with memories
Of the golden smile that introduced me to
The days of wine and roses and you

Destiny

“Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls: A brilliant rendering of all the ways we search for some definitive truth when none exists, especially not, for me, in a bottle of wine.

I stopped by the bar at 3 A.M.
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before
And I went in seeking clarity

There's more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine