Sober

My name is James. I took my last drink on November 2, 2025, and have logged 222 days of sobriety as of this writing.

My decision to quit drinking was not brought about by an extreme rock bottom, for which I am very grateful. Basil, my beloved husband, talked to me one day about how my drinking was impacting my memory. He made no ultimatums, instead expressing concern and suggesting I consider drinking less. He had been worried about alcohol’s impact on my health for a while and had not been looking forward to having to talk to me about it, because of how I might react. The thought of making Basil feel like he couldn’t talk to me about something so important made me profoundly sad. I decided to quit drinking that day.

At the time, I did not think I had a problem with alcohol. I had known real problem drinkers. My mother drank in great excess for my entire life, doing things including driving drunk, showing up to work drunk, and sustaining injuries from being too drunk to walk upright. After losing her husband, one of my father’s close friends drank herself to death. I remember going to visit her in a home not long before she died, where she was in some advanced stage of jaundice/liver failure after only a year of extreme drinking: her eyes were alarmingly yellow and her skin a shade that reminded me of a jack-o-lantern. I could go on. I believed I knew what an alcoholic looked like, and I didn’t fit that mould. I had never gotten a DUI. My labs were good. I did not go to work drunk and had no problem maintaining a good job, a marriage, a household.

Things I have realised about my drinking in retrospect:

• I spent so much mental time and energy trying to manage my drinking. I was constantly curating a plan around the alcohol I was going to consume, how much, and on what days. For instance, if I could abstain from drinking Monday through Friday, that definitely demonstrated I did not have a problem with alcohol and would warrant me rewarding myself with drinks on the weekend. If I then encountered a situation where I wanted to drink on a weekday, I had to engage in a dizzying amount of mental gymnastics as to why drinking on this particular day was not problematic, e.g. this is a special occasion (anniversary, birthday, promotion) and it is totally normal for a person to have a drink, or many drinks, on a special occasion. This kind of rationalisation was also employed for the time of a day I had a drink. Only alcoholics drink first thing in the morning, unless it is a brunch, or New Year’s. Or if one happens to find themselves in a fancy airport lounge, where drinks are free, having a drink at any time of day is perfectly fine because that is life on the road.
• Once I started drinking, I always wanted more. If I was out at a meal, I would order as many drinks as I could work into the flow of the meal. I would justify this by thinking, “I like enjoying good beer/wine with food, which is totally normal.” This typically resulted in two to three drinks an outing, maybe four if there were a good number of courses. I would also opt to have another drink instead of dessert, because I thought of it as a good reallocation of calories. If a server failed to notice the opportunity to bring me another drink, I devoted an embarrassing amount of my attention to wondering when they would give me another drink and/or would flag them down for another round.

This desire wasn’t consciously driven by wanting to be drunk or some other outcome. I just wanted MORE. As I have heard some say in sobriety discussions, “One drink was too many, and a thousand was not enough.”

My drinking was impacting my physical and mental health, even though I would have swore it was not. Since I quit drinking, I have felt so much better in so many ways I will only provide a few brief examples for the sake of brevity. The not-so-great sleep quality I attributed to coffee was actually due to the booze. Dry eyes I was sure were due to working 7ish hours a day in front of a computer screen suddenly felt a lot less parched. My jaw clenching/teeth grinding, which I also attributed to caffiene and overall anxiety, all but vanished around the 180 day mark.

Before I quit, when Basil said drinking was impacting my memory, I didn’t think that was true, but I understood by the end of that conversation that it was impacting my marriage, my most important relationship with my most important person, and so I didn’t spend any time worrying about the memory stuff. I only learned he was right as I began to notice the gains in that faculty through the course of sobriety.

While I have struggled with anxiety for most of my life, I have never thought of myself as a depressive person. But in the months before I quit drinking, I started to feel a very pronounced heaviness and hopelessness weighing me down that I had never experienced before. I chalked it up to reaching middle age and dealing with a new life abroad. But once I logged some sober months, this darkness lifted. Now when I think about the fact that I might have had more of that blackness consume me if I had kept drinking, I shudder. My anxiety has also greatly reduced in the last 222 days, which has allowed me to enjoy activities that I had stopped persuing because of it (running, writing).

Plenty of people will tell you that when you quit drinking, you then must deal with whatever was leading you to drink in the first place. When I stopped using alcohol, I was shocked at the deep reserves of anger and grief that came bubbling up every day. I was not a pleasant person the first four to six weeks, often getting easily agitated at small things. But as I have continued to abstain from drinking, I feel like I have been able to make substantial progress in processing emotions that, apparently, have been hanging around for a long time. My moods have become more stable. I still have healing and processing to do, but I feel real hope about growing emotionally that I did not feel before.

One thing I didn’t know before I quit drinking was how many folks experience significant sugar cravings in their initial stages of sobriety. Boy did I destroy some sweet treats during those first few months!

Things that have helped me stay sober:

• An amazing, handsome, supportive husband
• A daily practice of journaling and meditating
• Having a physical fitness routine
• The r/stopdrinking reddit thread (I was not a reddit user before I quit drinking, so this one took me by surprise)
• The Recovery Elevator podcast
• The Huberman Lab podcast episode, “What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health” (I would not normally listen to any kind of science podcast because they bore me to tears, but this came highly recommended by a number of sober folks. Scared the bejesus out of me.)

While Alcoholics Anonymous has not been part of my sober path, I have come to appreciate and often repeat the AA slogan, “One day at a time.” I don’t have to worry about being sober the rest of my life or figuring out anything else about the rest of my life. This is not an admission of desperation (“just have to . . . get through . . . today” *gasp*). One day at a time is a reminder to be present, to appreciate the beauty presented by the right now. And that helps me look forward to tomorrow all the more.