Why I stopped drinking

Sobriety as paying attention

I’m driving alone across the country, somewhere in Oregon. I haven’t talked to another person in days. I think I may have irreparably severed whatever mental synapse allows me to converse with others like a normal human being. Concerning.

I’m leaving Crater Lake, a gigantic and impossibly blue hole in the earth that only adds to the surreality of my current circumstances. Nearby forest fires have turned the Willamette National Forest into a hazy dream-like wonderland. I’m eating palmfuls of trail mix like a feral animal. My phone has been on SOS for the past 4 hours. 

When I finally get a flicker of cell service, I’m near Eugene. Didn’t my ex’s best friend, the poet, live here? I think. I weigh my options: the possible weirdness of that encounter versus the guaranteed weirdness of the deranged version of me that will emerge after 72 hours without human contact.

I dial. 

That’s how I end up eating microwaved chicken tenders in the fluorescent lighting of a gay bar in downtown Eugene with a group of total strangers: the ex’s best friend, the best friend’s beautiful Latina single-mother girlfriend, her 20-something just-returned-from-Japan cousin (both in full club regalia), me (in Converse and a tote bag), and a gaggle of drag queens waiting for curtain call.

The four of us, sans drag queens, proceed to go out dancing until 2am at what is, in my estimation, the most depressing club in all of America. The DJ plays such 2010s hits as “Like A G6” and “Blurred Lines.” Every surface is inexplicably wet. 

If I can do this sober, I think, dancing with abandon, I can do anything.

For everyone's sake, I've opted not to include the few shaky videos I took of that club experience. Here’s Crater Lake instead.

January marks my seventh month without alcohol. Tenth if I’m allowed to tack on the first three months of last year and just ignore that hedonistic, European stretch from April through June. I’m not in recovery, though I’ve read several books from folks who are and benefitted greatly from their wisdom, most notably Holly Whitaker’s Quit Like a Woman and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. 

Still, when you stop drinking, people want to know why. Of all the radical changes I made in the last year, this one has gotten the most pushback. I’ve tested out several answers, from the misleading (“I’m not drinking tonight”) to the flippant (“Still atoning for my European bender”) to the mostly true (“For better or worse, I’m opting to experience life in all its brutal, screaming clarity!”).

My experimentation has revealed that short, breezy answers are significantly more well-received than the latter. This knowledge hasn’t stopped me in person, and it certainly won’t stop me here!

***

It was July when I officially quit drinking. 

I had just returned to Nashville from my spring in Europe and immediately realized I hadn’t stayed away long enough. Soon after, I would pack up my car and head west. In the meantime, I was attempting to make the most of it. Carly and I were in the backyard of an East Nashville bar on what must have been the hottest night of the year. I had on knee-high boots and my shins were sweating. Someone turned on a bubble machine next to us and suddenly we were surrounded on all sides by their iridescent, tremulous forms. 

I’d ordered a glass of wine, trying to get into the spirit of things. The plan was to go swingdancing after a quick galvanizing drink, but Carly wasn’t drinking. I asked why. 

She shrugged, sipping her sparkling water. Bubbles surrounded her like a heavenly mist. “I was just tired of trying to deaden my inner knowing,” she said.

God love Carly. She’s the type of friend who cuts straight to the heart of things every time. No not-drinking-tonights or I-have-an-early-mornings from her. Just a brutally precise, Jungian response that yanked my worldview off its hinges and re-hung it — making me realize it had been slightly crooked the entire time.

We did go dancing and I can confirm that the boots were the right choice.

Over the past couple of years, I’d begun to suspect that the cons of drinking were outweighing the pros.

• Pros: That loose-limbed feeling you get after a cocktail and a half. Loudly expressing opinions about the wine list. Accessing my dormant ability to flirt. The capacity to tolerate otherwise intolerable situations.

• Cons: Being in those intolerable situations in the first place. A humming sense of doom and dread that stalked me for days after drinking. That one Huberman episode. Plus, it made my face puffy.

It wasn’t the quantity or even frequency of my drinking that alarmed me. It was my dependence on it to access core parts of my identity. I saw alcohol as a prerequisite to unlock a certain version of myself—the carefree one, who sparkled and fizzed like a glass of champagne, who was warm and open and drew people in. The one who knew how to have fun. I’d relied on alcohol to access her for so long, and with such unwavering allegiance, that I was sure I couldn’t manage it on my own.

In The Recovering, Leslie Jamison captures this feeling perfectly, quoting theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick:

“Addiction isn’t about the substance so much as the ‘surplus of mystical properties’ the addict projects onto it. Granting the substance the ability to provide ‘consolation, repose, beauty, or energy,’ she writes, can ‘operate only corrosively on the self thus self-construed as lack.’

The more you start to need a thing, whether it's a man or a bottle of wine, the more you are unwittingly—reflexively, implicitly—convincing yourself you're not enough without it.”

I quite literally stopped in my tracks the first time I heard that (I was listening to the audiobook while hiking Multnomah Falls in Oregon).

How many substances had I granted the mystical ability to provide consolation, repose, beauty, and energy? More than just alcohol, certainly. Romantic interests. Professional accomplishments. Money. Affirmation bestowed on me through any means possible. And how often had those substances delivered on that promise? Most of the time, I just found myself anxiously dependent on them, unable to tap into an inner wellspring of whatever it was I was seeking.

Carly’s response that night in July was confirmation of what I’d known for a while. Drinking had begun to feel like abandoning myself, at odds with the return to myself that had marked the past couple of years. I finished my now-warm wine that night and haven’t had another drink since. I understand that this isn’t everyone’s experience with sobriety and I’m grateful for the ease with which I found an off-ramp.

***

Once I stopped drinking, my tolerance for doing unpleasant things went way down. Yet I also surprised myself with the things I was still able and willing to do sober: go to shows, meet new people, have hard conversations, attend my high school reunion (!!), eat soggy chicken tenders and dance with a group of strangers at the most depressing club in Eugene, Oregon, just for the hell of it.

Where before I would have relied on alcohol to blunt the discomfort, now I leaned into it. Choosing curiosity and attention over numbness and distraction, I found that the world around me suddenly became more vibrant, stranger, and more expansive.

In Quit Like a Woman, Holly Whitaker describes sobriety as paying attention:

“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.”

It’s no coincidence, I think, that my favorite authors describe writing the same way.

“Pay attention. / Be astonished.” — Mary Oliver

“Art is born in attention.”  — Julia Cameron

“If you want to be a writer, you can’t miss a thing.” — Elena Ferrante

“Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.” —  Mary Karr

I’ve written a lot about how changing my own life has restored my sense of personal agency. For me, not drinking has given me back qualities I had (reflexively, unwittingly) self-construed as lack. It solidified a sense of self that had been as fragile as a soap bubble. It proved that I have free access to the carefree, warm, fun version of myself whenever I want it.

Mostly, selfishly, it has made me a keener observer of the world, which is to say, a better writer. Of all the wells I’ve gone to for “consolation, repose, beauty, and energy”, writing is the only one that never comes up empty. Writing has given me myself. It has given me the world, and I mean that literally. If not drinking means more of that, then count me in.

Love,

Lane 💋