Why I'm Not Drinking in 2024
TLDR: I'm competitive and Dry January just wasn't intense enough
19-year-old me with a Keystone Light in the frat house basement.
No, that’s not a Clue answer.
It was my first drink.
From that point onward, alcohol essentially becomes a series regular - if not the main character - in the sitcom of my life. It was the foundation of numerous friendships, the star of most weekends, the thief of the following morning, the hijacker of every wellness/fitness goal, and ultimately the source of my livelihood for nearly a decade.
And the entire time, I was happy to take a backseat to this magical substance. Because I’d bought into its promise: that drinking it made me interesting & funny and gave me connections & camaraderie I wouldn’t have otherwise.
And that’s how our society has positioned alcohol, isn’t it? We’ve glamorized its consumption in such a way that a glass of a certain kind of alcohol is synonymous with celebration, connection, and confidence. Whereas, on the other hand, a paper bag of a different kind has become a stand-in for dysfunction, deprivation, and deadbeat.
It’s the “cocaine vs. crack” fallacy at a much broader, more sinister level.
The fallacy here is, of course, that chemically speaking, the two are exactly the same. And yet, we’ve attached a social hierarchy to one over the other that enables and promotes the consumption under one context, and demonizes it in another.
P.S. If you like this sort of social commentary, here’s where I’ll plug my very much under-construction Medium page that I’m repurposing for exactly that.
Between the twilight of my 20s and the early morning of my 30s, I’ve been reevaluating my relationship with alcohol and rearranging my consumption habits — up to and including an exploratory stint in AA. (I guess this is really putting the personal in “personal blog,” huh?). And while I’ve landed on embodying a more mindful approach to drinking in the past, I can’t help but take note of the myriad ways my life is better without it.
To be clear, this is not me telling the world that I’m an alcoholic. Rather, this is me taking action around the very real fact that our society has a troubled relationship with alcohol. This is me stripping alcohol of its ability to define me at all.
“Sobriety, if it is anything, is paying attention, seeing the wonder and the beauty around us that we so easily sprint by on our way to the next thing. And this is more than fun; this is actually living.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol
In her book Quit Like a Woman, Holly Whitaker poses a question that’s continued to haunt me when she asks “Does [alcohol] cost more than it gives, does it shrink more than it expands, does it cut pieces out of me I can’t reclaim?”
And so, 2024 is the year of answering that question for myself once and for all.
I have a few working hypotheses that I’m eager to test out during this experiment:
A life without alcohol is a life of heightened clarity and consciousness
I am more magnetic to the right attention and connection when I’m not drinking
My physical being will glow in ways no amount of Botox could buy
Days will, in fact, become longer when chunks of time are no longer muted
If you’ve read this, thank you for being here. Goals are more real when we say them out loud. Or, er, type them on a screen and memorialize them on the internet.
Yeah, that’s the saying (:
I see you asking questions with both boldness and careful consideration, which is one of the reasons I follow you. Thanks for sharing your thought process here!