Experiments in Sobriety
It all started innocently enough with one of those very bad days. I needed a drink, and I met my friends at a bar for a margarita. They invited me to a party that evening, and I thought it was a splendid idea.
At the party, a man welcomingly shoved an ice-cold beer in my hand. Then, someone was mixing margaritas, freehandedly pouring from a high-quality-looking tequila bottle. Would I like one? Sure! Oh my goodness, someone brought rum cake? I love rum cake. Wait, they also brought coffee-flavored rum from a small mill they owned!? Really? Wow, sure, I’d love to try some.
The last thing I remember, I was talking to some guy I just met. I must have given him my number because the next morning I saw a text that read, “Where are you? There’s more tequila to drink!” I vaguely remember spilling myself into the backseat of a friend’s car.
Oh, my head. I looked at my throbbing right palm: cactus needles. I must have fallen at some point in the night. I think I remember that. It was outside my front door.
Groan. I remembered something else about the front door, which was hanging wide open. I lifted my head wearily from the pillow. I remember vomiting off my front step. I was half-naked. Thankfully, I was also all alone and somehow made it into my bed.
But I knew then, something had to change. It was time to give sobriety a try.
Those dreadful nights of rip-roaring drunkenness were out of character for me, but still. Once every couple of years was still too often to blackout, that horrible condition when you simply cannot remember the previous evening, even though people tell you later how you were hilarious and engaged and somehow standing. As an adult, it’s bad form. As a single female, it’s really bad form.
I never felt like I had a problem with alcohol, however. Over the previous few years, I had even followed what I considered very healthy abstinence for a month at a time. The old “Dry January” even turned to two months, separated from months of drinking whenever and wherever I felt. I liked to follow intermittent fasting regimes as well; fasting from calories meant that I wasn’t drinking them, either.
I had it under control, and I still do.
After all, I’m a writer. Hemingway was a drunk, and look at him! He’d stumble home from Capt. Tony’s in Key West and crank out a masterpiece. You think Samuel Clemens — good ole Mark Twain — didn’t enjoy his whiskey while playing billiards with friends in the writing room of his Connecticut mansion? The reality is that I could have a glass of fine wine or a craft cocktail in the middle of the afternoon, file my article for the day, and my world would keep on spinning just fine.
You can’t argue with results: I had a great career, and I loved myself. Well, except for how I felt on that morning in January 2021. I felt like a fool. I was 43 years old, and for some reason, I thought I’d be able to shake off a bad day by drinking like a teenager? I was sheepish as I appeared to my friends the next day, ready for them to be disgusted. But they weren’t. They didn’t judge me at all.
Instead, they laughed and cracked a beer. It was a beautiful, sunny day!
But I didn’t want to be a person that got so wasted she stumbled into cacti and vomited out the front door. That’s not what I’m going for. At that evening’s happy hour get-together, I watched my friends drink beer after beer. I nursed one. My stomach hurt, anyway.
At the same time through my writing work, I happened upon the concept of the microbiome. These are the “good” and “bad” bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microscopic critters that line our gastrointestinal tracts and skin, dying when we take antibiotics and rejoicing when we eat yogurt. Evidently, researchers call the microbiome a “secondary organ,” because this colony, each unique to an individual, is that important. I learned drinking alcohol kills the microbiome.
My last drink — now 11 months and 11 days ago — was a chilled glass of white wine, waiting for me at the end of a bottle at a dog-sitting gig in an oceanfront mansion outside Cabo San Lucas. I poured it and relaxed into a cushioned chaise lounge. I took a sip. It was highly unsatisfactory. It tasted kind of like chemicals.
I downloaded an app called “I Am Sober” and started counting the days, just to experiment. This time, I had no end date like when I would quit for a month only to return to my normal drinking patterns.
It helped that my most interesting male suitor at the time didn’t drink either. We’d attend full moon parties on the beach and drink warm spiced chai lattes with macadamia nut milk and local honey. Sometimes we’d drink yerba maté, although I noticed he didn’t follow the same generous protocol of sharing I learned when I lived in Argentina. Still, with the sober company, I could see that it was possible to hang out and make new friends without hiding behind an alcoholic beverage in my hand.
When the maté habits served as foreshadowing and my visa was set to expire, I made my way north up the Baja. I eventually landed in San Diego with another friend who happened to be sober as well. We’d go to a local bar to see a Grateful Dead cover band and drink iced teas and seltzer water with lots of lime, the latter of which became my go-to bar drink. His drunken friends would lean in close to yell something barely coherent as a way of kindly bringing me into the social scene, but I wasn’t sure I wanted in.
It was like I was seeing with fresh eyes. Sobriety from alcohol was clearing my vision in more ways than one.
It didn’t take long to recognize how pervasive and normalized alcohol is throughout the world. On Facebook, I’d hide all the ads for alcohol that showed up in my news feed. There were so many. Eventually, I started getting ads for pharmaceuticals instead.
I also started to lose weight. I already enjoyed a whole, plant-based diet and intermittent fasting regime, but I had been carrying around extra pounds above my fighting weight for years. I just presumed the uptick on the scale had to do with my sedentary career and simply love of food, along with the fact that I wasn’t getting any younger. But suddenly I was getting younger. I’m currently 20 pounds lighter than I was when I rocked up to that alcohol-fueled party now a little over a year ago.
A week ago, I had a dream that I drank a glass of red wine. That’s been the one thing I’ve missed, as I’ve shared a few romantic Italian dinners with handsome men. I woke up in disbelief, at first a little disappointed that I almost did it, almost made it to a year. I immediately forgave myself and felt proud I had lasted as long as I did. Then I realized it was a dream.
The best part of the dream was noticing how I didn’t mentally beat myself up over the slip-up. I have stopped doing a lot of things that were in general poisonous to my overall well-being. I’m now able to more quickly identify and address relationships that don’t make me feel good. I exercise much more consistently, and I’m creating more art, too. I haven’t woken up feeling as awful as I did that fateful morning, and that in itself is progress.
“There are no downsides,” my friend said about steering clear of alcohol.
Sure, I may someday savor a nice glass of Montepulciano. I am headed to Italy soon, anyway. They say, “When in Rome …” but I know now that I’m free to make whatever decision I think is best for me. You can’t argue with results.
