100 Days of No Excuses

It's been 100 days since I had a drink. Here's how I got there. (And what I've gained from abstaining.)

I have hundreds of photos of drinks I’ve drunk through the years... they just meant that much to me.

I stopped drinking 100 days ago, after about, oh, 20 years of reading other people's "100 Days" posts and knowing I had to quit.

But I didn’t have a “drinking problem” — meaning, my drinking didn’t disrupt my life, and I didn’t bend my days around how or when I was going to have my first drink — so it took me a really long time to understand I had a drinking problem.

And then, when I did finally peel back enough layers of self-perception to realize I definitely had a drinking problem, I invested a lot of emotional energy in rationalizations that allowed me to keep drinking:

• My friends didn’t think I had a drinking problem

• I almost never had hangovers

• I never missed work, major events, really anything because of drinking

• When I lived in the city, I was ferried around by taxis and car services and subways, so I didn’t have to even think about the risk of drinking and driving. (Did that change when I moved out of the city? Yes. Did my drinking change? No.)

• I would stop drinking for long periods of time to prove to myself that I could go without alcohol — but those breaks only actually served to reinforce the permission I was giving myself to keep drinking.

• My friends didn’t think I had a drinking problem, and when I would casually mention that I thought I had a drinking problem, I would thirstily drink up their reassuring responses — and ignore any of the intelligent responses my friends made that put the responsibility for making that call firmly back on myself.

Decades ago — literal, actual decades, when health insurance still paid for things — I even mentioned my concerns about my drinking to my doctor, who very matter-of-factly asked, “Can you have just one glass?” And I replied, instantly, “Almost never.” And she said, “Well, listen to that. That’s a drinking problem.”

She followed up with, “Just stop drinking, then. You don’t need to drink.”

I ignored her. I did need to drink. Because I was deeply, profoundly, emotionally addicted to drinking.

I bought a book called “Almost Alcoholic” in 2015. (Yep, 10 years ago.) I read it the same way I watch certain horror films — kind of halfway, through splayed fingers partly blocking my vision. I didn’t want to see myself in there — but, obviously, I had bought the book because I knew I would see myself in there.

I talked with my therapist a lot about being an alcoholic and also talked with her a lot about how I had my alcohol use under control. My therapist, of course, has a Ph.D. in knowing when I am lying to myself. I think I partly thought by saying it out loud in her office that I was doing The Work and getting closer to admitting I had to manage my drinking problem.

But friends, that went on for more than 20 years.

I stopped drinking 100 days ago for two intertwining reasons: (1) I was having a really hard year, and working too much to make up for being unemployed for almost 5 months. I responded to that stress by — no prizes for guessing correctly, sorry — drinking a lot. Guess what? It didn’t magically make anything better or easier. Because I was working so much, I also wasn’t: walking, meditating, exercising, going to the gym, breathing, partaking in any hobbies, being present in my life.

So at some point? NOT doing something — anything! — became the only way for me to try to claw back some sense of taking care of myself. I didn’t think it would be mentally possible for me to leave my computer for 20 minutes a day to take a walk outside. (Stress lies; we know this.) And I was waking up every day thinking, “Welp, that whole entire bottle of wine was dumb.” Starting every day chastising myself for not being an adult and doing the right things sucked. Deciding to stop drinking was my laziest effort to start pulling myself out of the dungeon I had built in my mind.

Weird, right? Whatever, brain. You do you, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to outwit you.

The (2) reason I stopped drinking was a recovery post I read by amazing human and vulnerable sober storyteller Jason Mayo. In the post he asks the question that haunted me: “How the hell am I going to not drink forever?” Right. That’s the question that always caused me to stumble when I would be making my gabillionth plan for quitting drinking. But the holidays! But Theresa and Frank are coming over in two weeks! But there’s that wedding! But the new beaujolais will be out! But craft cocktails come in cans now!! And because I believed I didn’t really have a real drinking problem, I could just keep going on the I’m-Lying-to-Myself merry-go-round. But this post crisply brought that merry-go-round to a screeching halt, as Jason wrote about being in a meeting, and a woman came in, raised her hand, and said, “My husband died last night and I’m not going to drink today.”

I’ll let Jason take it from here:

Those words woke me up like the world’s loudest alarm clock. I’m not talking about some dinky chime from your iPhone. I’m talking about the Dream Machine circa 1983. The beige one with the red digital numbers and the AM radio. The one that sounds like that fire alarm in an office building that makes you put your fingers in your ears.

Hearing something that powerful was more than just words.

“Oh,” I thought to myself when I read that. “Oh, shit,” is what I thought second. (Go read the post.)

It was a crystalline moment of facing my own baloney: I know I have a drinking problem. I’m the only one who has to know I have a drinking problem for me to do something about it. And all of the rest of it is an elaborate scaffolding I’ve been building for well more than 25 years to avoid really accepting that I have a drinking problem. There is no day/reason/event where I should drink, or plan for drinking, or look forward to drinking, because I am an alcoholic. And there is no life event so terrible that I should drink in response to it, because I am an alcoholic.

I can’t drink reasonably. Therefore, I cannot drink. Period.

It’s really that simple.

And knowing that if I stopped drinking, I could hold onto it as the one act that I was doing to take care of myself and show up for myself in a really bad year — the most unpredictable of life preservers — that was what pushed me across the “I’m finished” line. And it did help. And it did begin to pull me out of the dungeon, just that single ray of light: “I didn’t drink today.”

Today I am 100 days finished with drinking. And I made it through the holidays, and Theresa and Frank’s visit, and a friend putting a hot toddy in my hand right as I walked into a party. And I’m going to keep going.

And I’m writing this post both to congratulate myself — yay, me! — and also to publicly say what I spent 25 years trying to ignore: I am an alcoholic. (I still feel a slight internal wince when I type that!! The lie still lives within!!)

But today, I am an alcoholic who doesn’t drink. And the simple straightforwardness of that feels very, very good

And I’m happy I lived long enough to stop believing my own bullshit. The simple act of receiving information into my brain (“I have a drinking problem”) and responding to it simply (“That means I need to stop drinking”) has been a huge revelation, with implications far beyond quitting drinking.

So quitting drinking has cleared my vision in more ways than one — so it’s a double celebration today for me.

xo!