Content warnings: depression, alcohol use

Friends, I am celebrating a really special anniversary this month. Two years ago, I was standing in my kitchen when a small voice arrived. It told me that there was nothing left for me down the road I was traveling with alcohol.

Actually, it said, “This will kill you. One way or another, this ends with you dead. That’s all there is down here.”

The voice was clear, gentle, and matter-of-fact. And I wasn’t scared. There is huge relief in being able to see things with absolute clarity. It’s leaning on a story that’s not true that will get you into the scary shit.

I don’t know why I chose to listen to the voice that night. I don’t know what factors conspired to help me hear it, but I did.

To be honest with you, the voice arrived while I was pouring a drink. To be even more honester with you, I was pouring scotch into a glass of high-ABV dark beer. I was alone on a weekday night. I needed to turn my brain off, and after months of drinking more and more, I knew using alcohol was a reliable way to turn my brain off, quickly.

A few weeks earlier, I’d made a New Year’s resolution to try life without alcohol, but I guess my brain could hardly stand the idea. Here I was, “enjoying” my final drinking days. January couldn’t come soon enough. The next day, December 2, 2021, was my first intentional day alcohol-free.

I took a few more weeks building up some resolve behind my resolution. Then I turned to my husband on the couch and said, “I think I might be done with alcohol, like maybe forever.”

He nodded. He said, “Okay,” and he listened to my evolving thinking on the matter.

I racked up a few sober holidays, then 30 days had passed, then 60, then 90. Soon it had been six months, then nine. I told my friends, I told my dad, I told my therapist, I found a group.

I was on my way.

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Year One was very easy in some ways and very hard in others. I never doubted that my decision was the right one for me. I made new sober girlfriends and talked to them in those early days about how I was longing for more space in my life. Things had taken on a stifled feeling, and I wondered whether alcohol was a big player.

Things did open up, and it was both freeing and challenging. In fall 2022, I faced my first major depressive episode in my adult life without alcohol, which had become a tool for numbing or otherwise deferring my feelings. I was used to being able to check out at key moments in my emotional life.

Without that release valve, I was facing things more directly than I ever had.

It was dark. Dark, dark, dark. I’ve written about that experience before, but I want to appreciate the role my sobriety played in it too. I had never had the capacity to navigate my depression with my whole self; I wasn’t bringing my whole self to anything when I was drinking.

It felt new. I felt raw and thin and so, so tired.

And after a few months, I climbed out. I leaned on therapy, meds, loved ones, loving connections, and I rebuilt a new toolbox of resources.

I didn’t drink. And I was glad I wasn’t drinking. Even as I was struggling, I could feel the shift as I strung together the choices a non-drinker would make.

The old ruts didn’t disappear. There was a moment in the late afternoons, especially, when I could still feel the turn, the moment I would’ve started drinking. Tough work days, frustrating days in the household, everything breaking, the coffee spilling everywhere—it could’ve been almost anything. But instead of thinking, “Oh my god, I want a drink,” new thoughts wore new grooves: “Oh my god, this is the moment when I would’ve gotten a drink.”

I didn’t live there anymore.

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Year Two, I had some work to do to put myself back together. After my mental health crisis, I could see more clearly what I had thought alcohol was doing for me.

I thought it was helping me survive. I’d spent a lot of adulthood thus far holding my breath. Part of the context: my family navigated some serious stuff as my mother was sick with progressive diseases for the better part of a decade. I was 22 when the signs really showed up; I was 30 when she died.

Every major milestone in my adult life was a gift that I got to enjoy with my mother, with my family, and yet, I was bracing and bracing and bracing as it became more likely that each would be the last. A lot of us lived that way on and off—for years.

Prolonged stress will kill you as surely as anything else. Alcohol was just one of the shapes it took.

Without it, I had room and distance to look at what I thought it was doing for me. I thought it was a weapon in my arsenal, a tool I could pull out in those “tough moments.”

I was actually using it as if it were a magic elixir: I would decide that things were about to become unbearable, but I had this potion here that would transport me to the other side.

Part of the damage of alcohol in my life was the way it created these self-fulfilling prophecies. Drinking let me decide what things meant ahead of time.

“This event will be too awkward.”
“This memory will be too painful.”
“This day will be too much.”

It’s like selling out low in the stock market: that’s a surefire way to lock in a loss. You decide that a drop is a loss, and then you make it true. Alcohol was no different. It was deciding that the night was a loss, and I was done, “Bye! See you later!” The drink made it so.

But the really pernicious thing is that it created some awful beliefs about myself. Over time, those judgments weren’t about the circumstances anymore; they were about me.

“This event will be too awkward for you to handle.”
“This memory will be too painful for you to handle.”
“This day will be too much for you to handle.”

I didn’t trust myself to live my life. I did not think I could survive this event, or this party, or these people, or this day. I didn’t believe that I could do anything for myself. I didn’t think I could take another second.

People drink because it works. I drank because it worked.

Until it didn’t. And then I couldn’t.

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I don’t want to decide ahead of time how things will be anymore. I want more space in my life, I want more space for my life.

The last night I drank, when my belly was full, I poured the end of my glass down the kitchen sink—something I hadn’t done in years, if ever. When I was young and cheap, I wouldn’t dream of wasting a drink. When I was older and using alcohol, I wouldn’t dream of giving up a crutch.

That night, it was finally okay to let go.

Tonight, it’s okay to let go. There’s room for a different future.

I am two years sober.

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Friends, if you or someone you love is experiencing not just alcohol abuse but alcohol dependency, please do not attempt to detox from alcohol alone. There are potentially fatal consequences to removing alcohol abruptly when the brain has become physically dependent on alcohol, especially after long-term or heavy use. Medical supervision may be necessary during the withdrawal process.

SAMHSA’s National Helpline is 1-800-662-HELP (4357). It’s a confidential, free, 24/7/365 treatment referral routing service in English and Spanish.
You can also visit the online treatment locator at findtreatment.gov or send your zip code via text message to 435748 (HELP4U).

This is not a process I have gone through personally, but I want to make sure that the people I love know that not only is it okay to ask for help—sometimes it’s absolutely critical.