A decade without alcohol

January 4, 2010 is the day I mark has having had my last drink of alcohol. It might have been a day or two earlier than but four is a lucky number for me and I decided to set that as the date. This past Jan. 4 marks a decade since I’ve had a drink.

The time went by quickly. Since 2010 a lot has happened. I got married and had children. I left journalism and “went over to the dark side” of public relations. Could I have done those things if I had still been drinking? I don’t know.

I am confident that stopping drinking was the right thing for me, but quitting drinking was not some massive and sudden wonderful change. There’s no magic transformation that turns someone instantaneously from a pathetic drunk to a charming success. All of life’s frustrations are still there, and the warm confidence that comes with drinking is now gone.

And while it’s worked for me, the non-drinking life is not for everyone. I think even people who have problems with drugs or alcohol don’t necessarily have to quit completely. There’s a middle ground that most of the world can navigate. One of the signs that I needed to stop drinking was when I was bowled over at my ability to have only one single beer at a punk rock show I went to. I caught myself as I was glowing in a self-congratulatory mood on the walk to the subway from Trash Bar—uh, actually, this is what most of the world is able to pull off every day!

Quitting drinking wasn’t something I did on a whim or at the spur of the moment. I had been thinking about it for a long time. I had taken long breaks from drinking, sometimes as long as three months at a time, to show myself that I could do it. When I first quit, I only gave myself the goal of stopping drinking for one year. Only after one year without alcohol did I decide to officiallybid goodbye to the drinking life.

The drinking life had been a fun one. I’d be the worst kind of hypocrite to rage against drinking since I was an absolute maniac with booze for the better part of two decades. I have good memories from those times and made many great friends over rounds of drinks, I can’t just throw all of that away. I can still be around people who drink; I just don’t. I won’t create a new identity or try to reconfigure my entire life because I don’t drink any more – that would truly be giving alcohol power that it doesn’t deserve.

But it got to the point of not being fun anymore. I would ponder and plan out how I was going to approach a night of drinking and then all my well-intentioned plans of moderation would go right out the window. I was tired of waking up with long gaps in my memory, incredibly hung over, and realizing I had spent twice the amount of money I wanted to. I had no one to be angry at but myself, and my weekend mornings regularly began with waking up to this miserable, impotent rage. 

There were some moments that stand out in my decision but thankfully no major disasters. I miraculously never got arrested for drunk driving while in college, no major bar fights or major accidents litter my beer-fueled past. But slowly the magic of the alcohol began to wear thin and not work as well anymore. And all the things I felt I need to drink to enjoy—dating women, going to concerts, playing music, reveling in the creative act that drives us to joyful madness—these were all things I was supposed to be enjoying anyway, and if I needed to be drunk to enjoy them, maybe I was on the wrong path.

So I went ahead and quit drinking on my own, though I did read a book that was helpful in my first year of not drinking. Drinking,A Love Story by CarolineKnapp is an impressive memoir and I highly recommend it if you are questioning your drinking. A lot of what she described as signs of having real drinking problems was very recognizable, and it provided the well-researched bulwark that helped me decide that I was on the right path in putting booze aside.

In her book, Knapp quits drinking after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Alcoholics Anonymous route is one I decided to avoid at all costs. Alcoholics Anonymous wallows in pathetic victimology and peddles its soft-core religion incessantly. Furthermore, many people I know who joined AA have come back to drinking. If AA is the only alternative to drinking yourself to death, have at it, but the success rate is low and its philosophy teaches weakness.

The past 10 years have been filled with a lot of ups and downs, and I’m glad that I experienced them without the hazy filter of alcohol, which for me had become a sad crutch. If the magic dies, don’t be afraid to move on. If I can do it, so can you. 

Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

I told people I was taking a year off from drinking. That year is now over but I’m not going back.

Quitting drinking was something in the back of my mind for a long time. I even took extended breaks from drinking for months at a time here and there, though sometimes book-ending these periods with serious benders. I pulled off these periods of not drinking just fine. It was the drinking life that gave me trouble.

I found a book I had read about when it was published called "Drinking, A Love Story," by Caroline Knapp. It’s a very good book despite some of its mushy emotional female content. Knapp points out that if you are someone who thinks and worries about drinking a lot, that’s a sure-fire sign that you should quit. That idea really stuck with me, because so many times I found myself doing my own form of alcohol calculus (if I have only four beers and then maybe have a soda so I’m not too drunk; if I start with a mixed drink and then switch to beer I’ll be OK) that continually left me short-changed. In Knapp’s book she recommends Pete Hamill’s "A Drinking Life," which is a brilliant memoir about growing up in New York. Drinking features prominently in Hamill’s book, but it’s a great New York memoir first, and not really a book about drinking at all. He does detail his decision to quit drinking, though, and mentions that he saw himself as acting out his life instead of living it.

Knapp’s and Hamill’s books were filled with a lot of things I recognized and encouraged me to give up the ghost on the drinking life.

I’d like to say that there was a big clarifying event that forced my hand and made me swear off booze, but the truth is I got tired of it. I got tired of waking up with a big headache, a lot less money and the painful fear that I had done or said something stupid enough to lose friends in the process. I got tired of waking up angry over the crappy state I was in and having no one to be angry at but myself. There were plenty of times when I drank a lot and didn’t overdo it and had a great time and patted myself on the back for that, but those times were being outnumbered by the times when I set out to pace myself and ended up in the zone where you’re on a great drunken roll and you just have to have that next sweet drink, and eventually you’re too drunk and you hate yourself for it.

I would be the worst kind of hypocrite to denounce drinking altogether. I dedicated too many hours to the fine art of consuming alcohol to stab that old friend in the back like that. There have been too many good times spent with the stuff, too many good memories forged with beer and whiskey to look upon them as anything but old friends. But sometimes friends outlive their usefulness.

Drinking is only as good as the help it gives you to do the other things you want to do, to have the real adventures and the real good times. It’s not the drinking that really makes for the good time; it’s the courage to meet women, the fun of joking and speaking very frankly with your friends, to blast through the social awkwardness that might cripple us. If drinking is still a help and a healthy supplement to life itself, then great. But for me it turned from a stepping stone to a stumbling block. I spent too much time worrying about drinking to make it fun anymore.

I have generally kept quiet about quitting drinking, because in my opinion it shouldn’t matter. Being defined by your drinking is a dead end, but so is being defined by your not drinking. It’s true I don’t go to bars much anymore on my own, but I won’t refuse to go to if I’m invited to hang out with friends there. I understand that my friends aren’t trying to force me to drink, they simply want to hang out and bars are the usual way to do that. It would be the most arrogant, self-centered crap to ask all of my friends to rearrange their lives on my account.

One thing I will absolutely not do is join Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program. I know many good people who are involved with these groups and joining them is certainly preferable to drinking yourself to death, but the 12-step program is back-door religion. It tells its followers that they are powerless and can find salvation only in the inane catch phrases and prayers of its program. By some measures it is a cult. Your own free will is your highest power; anyone who tells you otherwise is only feeding you another form of poison.

So far I’ve made out fine without any prayers, group hugs or other nonsense. For me, quitting drinking was pretty easy. Instead of drinking something with alcohol in it I drink something without alcohol in it. I always was a big soda drinker, and I’ve resigned myself to enjoying that vice if nothing else. I’m the only person I know who sneaks non-alcoholic beverages into concerts.

I could tell you that drinking soda is just as much fun as drinking beer or bourbon, and that if you quit drinking you’ll be high on life, but that would be bullshit. But a lot of people have the attitude that I once had that life would be impossible without drinking, and that’s bullshit too.