10 Thoughts on Sobriety for New Years Day
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about today, but I’m enjoying a beautiful, sun drenched New Years Day on vacation in South Alabama, which I wouldn’t be doing if I hadn’t gotten sober three years ago, so that seemed like a promising place to go. I’ll put this out on social media because the milestone of a new year combined with the traditional excesses of New Year’s Eve probably have many people out there questioning if sobriety if the direction they should be going. So please feel free to share this with anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Without further ado, here are 10 thoughts about sobriety for New Year’s Day, 2025.
For a long time, drinking worked for me, and by and large I don’t regret that time. Then it stopped working, and for a while, I tried to get it under control and couldn’t, so then I quit. So if drinking is working for you, that’s great and I’m super happy for you on that. If you recognize it’s getting out of hand and are able to cut back or otherwise control it in a way that makes you feel better, I’m happy about that too. But if you try to get it under control and realize you can’t, the best thing to do is reach out to others, AA or otherwise, for help.
The absolute worst part of my drinking was the period of time in between deciding my drinking was a problem and when I quit for good (well, for three years and counting at least). Not drinking entirely is so much easier than all the time I spent making deals with myself and others about how I was going to limit it, quitting for short periods of time and then changing my mind, drinking in secret and being ashamed, etc.
In the moment, quitting for short intentional periods of time felt like I was accomplishing something, but I really wasn’t. I used to do the occasional dry January or something similar, and it made me feel like I was doing something positive about my drinking. But really what I was doing was giving myself cover to keep drinking as hard as I wanted to—- I could point to short periods of sobriety when others, or I myself, questioned my drinking as evidence that I could get it under control if I really wanted to, and then I could keep drinking in a totally out of control way for a while longer.
I’ve been sober for three years and around three months now, and I keep learning new things about myself and about sobriety every day. Again, when I would take a month of from drinking, at the time I would congratulate myself about all the self discovery I had done over those four weeks, but it’s nothing compared to what I’ve learned over the months and years since that point.
It took about six months for me to reach a place where I no longer felt like I could just step back into my old drinking life. I got sober in October of 2021, and in March of 2022 the NCAA tournament got started and I was strongly tempted to sit outside and work on a six pack. At that point, I could have just become who I was before. I’m never going to be out of danger of starting to drink again, but after those first six months I think it would feel like I needed to become a different (frankly worse) version of myself again.
I still think about drinking and sometimes I still miss it, but only in the abstract. I find myself wishing I could change the way I feel or get rid of stress and anxiety and so drinking comes to mind, but only as a means to those ends, not as something I actually want to do in and of itself. And I continue to work on finding better ways to manage those feelings that don’t involve reawakening my addictions.
I don’t regret a single moment of sobriety. There are times when I think to myself that I want to drink again, but it’s easy to remind myself that in the past three years and change, there isn’t a single moment that I could point to and say, “If only I’d been drinking then, things would be better.”
I learned that drinking is connected to the most selfish aspects of my personality. By the end, the number one thing I wanted when I was drinking was to be left alone. I wanted to sit in a bar or on the couch in my basement and drink as much as I wanted, the way I wanted to, and not have any put any other requirements or expectations on me. Now that I’m sober, I spend less time feeling that way, and when I do feel that way I don’t enjoy it and I recognize it for what it is.
Most of the psychological barriers I put up to stop myself from quitting ended up being made out of paper. I used to tell myself that I couldn’t imagine going to Wrigley Field on a hot summer day without drinking a beer, and then I would give myself permission to get drunk in my garage on a random Wednesday. I used to tell myself that all my friends were people I liked to drink with and I would be so lonely if I stopped drinking, and then I would desperately scroll through my contacts looking for someone I didn’t really like but who would be willing to go drink with me. Since I quit, I’ve enjoyed plenty of baseball games and had plenty of good social interactions with friends. I was telling myself lies in the moment to justify behavior I knew was hurting me.
The longer I stayed sober, the more various feedback loops start to work to my advantage. For me, a big one was exercise—- quitting drinking helped me lose weight and gave me a lot more free time, which made it easier for me to go running. Going running helped me lose more weight and made me feel better about myself, which made it easier to stay sober. Etc. But I’ve seen the same effect with things like my relationship with my family—- being sober makes it easier to have positive interaction with my wife and kids, which makes it easier to stay sober. Etc.
There you go. I don’t pretend to know everything about sobriety, but those are 10 observations about things that happened to me. If you found this helpful, great! If you want to share it to someone, please do! If you think I’m full of shit, please just carry on living your life as you were before and be happy. If you did read this far, please consider donating to the fundraising project I’m managing on this website—- I’m training to run 5 half marathons in 5 states next July as a fundraising campaign for the National Diaper Bank Network. Even small donations help! You can use the Donate button at the top of this page, or donate directly here: https://gofund.me/d1b71826 Thanks!
