Why I quit
On retiring from trying to "figure out" alcohol
I’ve been sitting with a few questions including “Do you miss drinking? Are you really quitting for good?” and “What are things people say ‘to be helpful’ that are actually hurtful or annoying?”
This week it’s “What made you decide to quit?”
I wanted the story of mastering alcohol for the sake of my kids. If I was going to break the cycle, it’d look like red wine with spaghetti on a Thursday and a casual bourbon hobby. It wouldn’t smell anything like fear, avoidance, or quitting. Winning the battle would mean figuring it out.
“I don’t get it,” she shuffled in her seat, swirling around her last sip. “After this glass, I’ll be done. I don’t get why some people—why she—can’t just have one and be done.”
She and I were discussing the drinking habits of a mutual friend, someone we both loved.
I was losing the war with moderation myself at this time, or at least with keeping up appearances, and I don’t remember what I said in return. Those people. I am those people.
Today I’d answer, “Because that’s not how it works.”
Matthew Perry summed it up in a response to Joy Behar when she asked if he’d noticed the “red flags” in his initial drug use: “A lot of people take pills and it makes them feel sick to their stomach. For me, it felt like for the first time ever the world made sense. So, why wouldn’t I take more?”
I can’t dazzle you with stories of stints in rehab, DUIs, or Damascus Road experiences. I can, however, hang with the best of ‘em with the scrawnier details: the padding my stash and hiding my trash, the hangovers, the hairs of the dog.
Alcohol and I met in earnest around my early twenties, and I remember the one day in particular we struck up a covenant. 1) It was one of those “chart-topping” bad days and 2) I discovered gin could speak. During my years of attempting moderation, I wrote this:
I called a couple friends to meet me for drinks—I needed a quick dose of forgetfulness and people who didn’t ask. Our server passed me my order, the lone utility drink in a mix of sweet and sticky daiquiris. Before taking a sip I looked down, side-eyed, at my eight-dollar selection: “I need you to do something for me.” If martinis could speak, the cloudy mixture answered audibly, “You don’t even need to ask.” The bridge of some love song coaxed me as I opened my mouth and sucked in a shaky breath of anticipation. My heartbeat burst out of my eardrums. I got it over with. My bones let down. I looked into the glass for another answer and caught the olive juice mingling with the gin just right, cloud-wisps curling in a late afternoon sky like when I’d speak with God. Tonight I spoke down to my personal cloud. A few minutes ago it was me and Martini against the world, and now the world softened and circled around me, warm and muffled. The world held and rocked me and I softened into its robotic arms like a fetus. I opened my new eyes and everything was beautiful. “See, I’ve got you. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
I mostly drank alone. It wasn’t a daily compulsion yet, but when I did drink I noticed a similar pattern to how I consumed sugar as a kid—alone, in the dark, and by the gulpful. And once I started I couldn’t stop. (A stomachache was welcome relief from the compulsion to keep eating. Case in point: when I was a kid my family attended and served in a Colorado Springs megachurch with a food café, and I always purchased a row of Starbursts or a bag of Skittles, sometimes both, often consuming them to completion before service was out. My mom said to me one Sunday, “You know, this isn’t a movie theater.” I felt my face turn red. Even then I realized the absurdity of my kid-addiction. Or perhaps I vowed to myself to hide it better. Maybe both.)
By my late-twenties I was hitting ‘reset’ with alcohol often, challenging myself to mini-fasts and extended time away, sometimes committing to journal through the process. I named one sober-journal “The Jesus Medicine: What will happen if I trade my afternoon Heinekens for a double-dose of the Most High?” No surprise, my absurdly cliché experiment was short-lived.
I had a previous sober date in 2019 and made it through COVID and a health diagnosis for my middle son with white knuckles and jelly beans. I’d considered myself more “sober-curious” back then. (I was afraid to claim SOBER! for the same reason I was afraid to say I was permanently quitting sugar. I tried that for Lent one year, and three days in I ate a whole box of Samoas. Why must Girl Scouts do the devil’s work around Lent, I thought.)
The on-ramp to recovery was slow, beginning in 2016 with Melody Beattie and Geri Scazzero on Audible. Even as I continued to mute Witching Hour with red wine and cookie butter, their words gave me something in a form I’d never felt before: freedom, hope, choice.
I continued medicating but I itched like I’d never itched before, for my inner and outer worlds to match—for a life of “congruence” as Eugene Peterson puts it. I wondered what all this fighting and pretending was for. I quit drinking (again) on December 31, 2021. This is not the story I wanted to write but I accept it with joy.
Words to bring with you
In his book Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, Fr. Richard Rohr quotes the poet W.H. Auden:
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
What a powerful gut punch of an essay in all the best ways, Jaime. Wow. Thank you.