I don’t know how many times I quit drinking. Dozens? Over a hundred? But I always slid back into drinking, usually a few days or maybe even a week later if I really had some gusto. But to paraphrase an old Japanese proverb, I was in the mode of “Stop drinking 7 times, start drinking 8.”
Here, look at this, an excerpt from my journal on December 12, 2013:
I learned that I have a real problem turning away from alcohol. Maybe that's depression related, or habitual, but it's there and it's real and I recognize it for what it is.
I’d been talking about quitting the shit for nearly a decade before I got lucky and things finally clicked. You see, I had no real intention of quitting for good on February 8th 2021. In fact, if you had asked me on February 8th what I wanted, it would have been along the lines of
“Just not this. Not this cycle of feeling like I’ve lost the battle again in the morning, this cycle of getting beat up by life, this cycle of feeling devoid of purpose, this cycle of drinking to glimpse happiness through the shattered lens of a crashing dopamine buzz.”
What I learned is that you don’t try to quit drinking because you don’t like alcohol anymore, you try to quit because you start to not like yourself anymore. Or maybe more accurately, because you don’t like yourself again, or don’t like the person with the problems you (now) have.
And after trying to quit for years you start facing the prospect that you may never be able to quit or that quitting might not help you find happiness or fix anything else you want it to. And losing the hope and motivation to quit actually starts to feel scary, because you actually feel like you’re flirting with the brink, the abyss, the void.
Because you’ve tried to quit before, and those few days of sobriety were the worst shit you’ve ever felt because of withdrawal, and here all you wanted (more like needed) was to feel better.
That’s where I was in early February of 2021. Scared. Tired. Anxious. Sad. Sometimes happy, but always with some haunting and prevailing dread about the boring consistency that life had taken. So what changed, and how did I get lucky enough to escape?
The Last Big Break
February of 2021 wasn’t the first time I gave drinking a prolonged break. I took a break in May-June of 2020, after several liver-wrenching months of pandemic drinking.
A quick aside: The pandemic was a phenomenal time to drink. It was widely accepted, even expected, that we drink alone, at home, or “virtually” with others. We started offering alcohol carryout everywhere. It was fully embraced by our culture and this created new bad habits for a lot of people, and if you were like me, simply amplified the current bad ones.
I took a 30-day break (as did my wife) with the help/inspiration of The Alcohol Experiment by Annie Grace. The first couple weeks were really awesome sucked something awful. The pangs were evident. But I hit the 30 day mark and proudly vowed to myself that my relationship with alcohol had changed. (Narrator voice: It hadn’t.)
About a week after the 30-day mark, I returned to drinking feeling like I had finally sorted out the demons. I eventually resumed to drinking nearly every day. This wasn’t the first time I had failed at quitting drinking, but what was interesting was that this break felt different because it was the longest, created some real mental/physical changes, and took the most work to sustain. I quit for another 3 weeks or so in Sept-Oct, only to return for the holidays.
How It Stuck
By 2021, I had read a lot about the health effects of alcohol, so the longevity of this habit was now top of mind as I approached 40 years old. And as mentioned above, I had practiced two decent-sized breaks from alcohol, which were much longer than previous attempts that maybe hit a week or so. And by this time, I had learned some methods that worked for me to quit and some inspiration to keep with it. (In my next post, I want to share some of the things I found helpful.)
But I think more than anything else, I was getting worried that I wasn’t excited to wake up in the morning anymore. I had drowned and muted the vibrancy of life, and collapsed the infinite and the possible into the boring and the improbable. Life was no longer precious, it was tedious. I didn’t quit drinking specifically because of the alcohol, but more because of the product of what alcohol had created.
The point, however, is that persistence paid off. It was years in the making, with multiple failures and lots of negative internal dialog, but still, some bizarre hope, some unwilted and small optimism kept saying that it was worth another go. I think Camus said it better than me:
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
So, failure is an option, as long as you’re not done trying. As long as you know that tomorrow is new, even if it doesn’t seem like it will be today, and that tomorrow might hold the key you’re searching for. Tomorrow is inevitably different and possible.
I’m not a doctor and none of this is medical advice. If you are struggling with substance abuse, reach out to the SAMHSA helpline.