Good At It
On being a good drinker.
I’ve been a drinker for 15 years. I began drinking relatively regularly when I was 14. It was the thing to do. Kids in small-town eastern Iowa were the poster children for Keystone Light, and as a relatively shy, insecure kid, drinking was the metaphorical closet to Narnia; I could be anything when I was drunk, but mostly, I could be anyone but myself.
At the time of this essay, I am 50 days sober. I opted to join the club of sobriety after a nearly five-year journey of being sober-curious. I have no timeline, expectations, program I’m working, or labels. All I know is that after a dodgy night out post-election in which I opted to drown my sorrows regarding my hypothetical impending pregnancy via espresso martinis, I needed a break. I needed more than a break. I needed a thorough, complete analysis of what the fuck I was doing and what purpose this (literal) poison was serving.
I have often said in my private sessions with my therapist that alcohol always seemed to be the thing I couldn’t ever quite “figure out,” and have frequently compared it to a shitty ex-boyfriend. It was the one area of my life I couldn’t quite seem to control, not in that I drank every day or hid bottles in my toilet, but in that I thought (think) about alcohol constantly. I usually did not drink during the week, and if I did, it was three glasses of wine at a girls’ night. The weekends would come, and depending on everyone else’s plans, I’d drink according to them. Someone’s having a party? I’ll pace myself to those around me. We’re going out for dinner? I’ll drink the amount that they’re all drinking. Someone’s having us over? I’ll bring enough to get drunk but not enough so that I look insane. It was a constant and relentless thinking of how much, when, why, and with whom. It was all-consuming for someone who didn’t identify as an alcoholic.
When I would take a couple of weeks off from drinking, which happened regularly, I was still thinking about drinking. When I went out to eat, I would think about my second drink before I even got my first drink. During my stints of abstaining from booze, all I would consider was when I’d drink again and what that first binge drinking session post-sober period would be like. The mental gymnastics I was doing trying to mitigate risk while still keeping alcohol in my weekly routine was exhausting. It wore me down, and all the additional Google searches of how to not think about alcohol so much or how to drink mindfully without giving up booze just made me feel worse.
Quitting drinking for the foreseeable future directly before the holidays is not necessarily something I’d recommend to the average Joe without a family history of alcoholism. It has not been a blast, it has not been easy, and I’m likely not an enjoyable person to be around at parties or family gatherings right now. I compulsively eat sugar when I’m socializing, and I miss champagne deeply. I cannot force connections with people right now, because booze made the process of connecting with people who I didn’t care for so much easier. My social battery runs out much faster, and my tolerance for people’s fuckery is very low. All that to say: I wouldn’t be offended if you left my presence as of late thinking “What crawled up her ass and died there?” The answer is, unfortunately, not a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
But, repairing my relationship with booze, or maybe deciding if I should even have a relationship with it at all became a top priority for me. Mostly, I knew I deserved better. I knew the people who loved me deserved better. And it’s not like being sober is the worst thing ever. I have been reaping the benefits of early sobriety, like great sleep, normal poops, hangover-free mornings, deeper connections with people I do like, and more time and money to do whatever the fuck I want, like buy pounds of Nerds gummy clusters. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it, though. I miss booze. I miss who I was when I got fun-drunk. I fear I’ll never be able to see her again, that she’s gone forever and so are those memories and TouchTunes credits. I wish I was able to binge drink like normal people, whoever they are, and whatever that means. I wish I didn’t put myself in danger when I binged, and I wish I could wake up, sweat out my sins in a sauna or a hot yoga class and follow it up with a boozy brunch like a fucking normal person. But I am finding more and more as time goes on that I can’t. And that maybe I don’t want to be that normal person, either.
The other night at a Christmas gathering, I pulled out a non-alcoholic canned Aperol Spritz. When I opened the can, someone asked me what I was drinking. I said, “Oh, it’s a non-alcoholic Aperol Spritz. I’m not drinking right now.” My lovely sister-in-law interjected and had my back by saying, “It isn’t pregnancy related,” because she knew that’d likely be the first question raised. The person who asked me what I was drinking then replied, “Aw, but you were so good at it!” And then laughed. I laughed, too. Not because I found it funny, but because my recovering-people-pleaser tendencies took over in autopilot, and I wanted them to feel comfortable. Announcing you aren’t drinking is usually awkward, regardless of who you are or how you drank. It’s even more awkward if you are the aforementioned “very good drinker” who consistently donned a glass of wine at every family gathering in the past five years. The more time I spend as a sober person around people who are drinking, the more I realize I think a lot of people are deeply uncomfortable with broaching the topic of sobriety because it forces them — for even just a moment — to consider if their relationship to booze is a healthy one. And no one wants that. No one wants to consider if the thing that makes us feel sexy, empowered, confident, and charming is maybe the problem. No one wants to think they have a problem. Because that thinking will lead to questioning. And those questions will almost always lead to answers. And once you know it, you can’t un-know it.
Ultimately, this person was right in their assessment. I was good at drinking. I was so good at it that I have considered early retirement many a time. I was a really, really good time when I drank… usually. I could keep pace with basically anyone in the room, and still keep my wits about me… usually. But, I was also an asshole. I got really, really mean when I drank. No one ever knew — myself included — what version of Maggie was going to come out when I got shitfaced. I got defensive. I made jokes that weren’t actually jokes, just sentences hidden ever so slightly under a veil of pure, unadulterated anger. The kinds of statements that usher in uncomfortable chuckles and glances. I used drinking to quell my anxiety, which just returned tenfold the next morning. I used drinking to quell my grief, which ended up catching up to me, too. But the anger worried me the most. The booze calmed it down but then brought it out again in a vile, ugly way. In a way I wasn’t proud of, and in a way I often needed to apologize for. There were many times when I felt my anger deserved more of me. That maybe that little voice telling me it wanted to fucking scream could’ve used a little more tenderness, a little more visibility. It deserved to be seen, and not intercepted by a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. It deserved not to have to pay for existing.
When my therapist and I talk about my drinking (which is regularly), I’m careful to stress to her that 90% of the time when I’d drink, everything was fine. I could drink like a normal person. I could binge drink how other people binge drink and wake up with the worst of it being the hangover I was nursing. 90% of the time. The remaining 10% was not often, but when it did happen — when those nights out reared their heads — it was the most shame I’d ever felt in my life. That shame was all-encompassing, all-consuming. That shame led me to many short stints of sobriety, lots of glasses of water between drinks, lots of quit lit, lots of experimenting (begrudgingly) with mocktails, lots of Dry Januarys, and lots of Google searches of Am I an alcoholic? How do you know if you’re an alcoholic? That 10% of shame far outweighed the 90% of normality.
A friend of mine passed away a couple of weeks ago, and it was New Year’s Eve when I got the news. I knew this moment would come — the moment where something awful would happen and I’d maybe wish for a drink. Except the awful thing happened and I didn’t. I didn’t wish for a drink. I thought about it, of course. I thought about all the other times I had loved ones die and how I handled those deaths, and it was almost always with booze in hand. I thought about those funerals, and how we’d get shitfaced after them to avoid the grief, or at least make it easier to stomach. I thought about my friend who died a few years ago and right before I gave the eulogy, I took a sip of the bottle of wine hidden in my partner’s backpack. I won’t do any of that this time.
And what’s more, I don’t desire to. Shockingly, the grief did not swallow me whole, and it didn’t come in like some bully to destroy my world. In fact, it felt a little tender, much kinder than I remember. It wanted my attention, and because I was sober and able to give it that, it seemed less like a 7-year-old throwing a tantrum and more like an old friend.
So, here I am. Sober on another weekend, relishing in the fact that for about three whole hours today, I didn’t think about booze. I woke up hangover-free, ran an errand I have been putting off for three months, socialized, and now I am getting ready to tear into a new book while simultaneously devouring Christmas truffles. I hope that maybe, someday, I’ll be as good at this whole thing as I was at drinking. I hope that I’ll stop taking that anger and trying to put it away. I hope that maybe on my 30th birthday or in Tuscany someday, I’ll be able to have a glass of rosé without any worries. But for now, I’ll tell myself what a fellow sober friend of mine says, which is that I’m not yet 30, I am not yet in Tuscany, and I seem to be doing pretty okay so far at this whole thing. And ‘pretty okay’ seems like maybe it’s enough for now.
Me, being a very, very good drinker.
