After a year of no alcohol, I have put together my thoughts on how I became sober, what it was like to quit, what I did to stop, as well as what I see in the future for anyone who wants to stop.
My At-Risk Social Groups
It was no mystery to me that I am in two groups where drinking is deeply integrated into life: the tech world, and the art world.
Every artist and art enthusiast loves going to art openings and drinking wine. Artists are also often seen as, well, a bit colorful, and with that comes the stereotype that we all love drugs and alcohol. There are only 1 million depictions in movies, books, and magazines of artists being drunks, smoking, or artists using drugs somehow. Drugs and alcohol are posited as a way that we artists get our ideas, or as an escape hatch from the trauma of our exciting lives (haha). I used to love drinking with my friends in school, Drink and Draw was sort of our thing.
Add to this the other biggest facet of my working life, the tech world, where drinking is so normalized that most software companies pretty much have beer on tap. I’m not so special that I avoided all this, in fact I indulged in this for years. On several work trips, I would drink every single night with my coworkers. Monday, Tuesday, every single night - and it wasn’t because there was a holiday or anything to celebrate, it was just how life was lived. After a full day of working through intense story problems and software issues that would make any grown man cry, nothing sounded better to me than crashing through some margaritas. I crashed through a lot of margaritas in my time in software.
In addition to the art world (wine and cheese) and the tech world (beer at the office), I’m a part of a third group that is extremely at risk for abuse due to alcohol: women. My take is that women are marketed alcohol left and right. There’s also overlap with women in art and women in the business world - Too many go-getter women-power self improvement business books geared towards women talk about wine culture and enduring negative experiences by getting drunk. If I open a book that is supposed to be empowering to women and it starts talking about wine, I usually stop reading it immediately. I know this sounds harsh, but I’m just not that into it.
Around when I was 19, one of the most liberating moments of realizing adulthood was that I didn’t HAVE to finish reading some books. Unlike in school, in life, if you’re reading for fun, you don’t have to finish anything for the assignment or book report. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. If you don’t like it, nobody will be mad at you for turning it down.
That said, I didn’t learn how to turn things down with alcohol until much later.
I Break Down My Own Argument: Why Would My Social Groups Even Matter?
Am I thinking too hard?
Sure, students, passionate artists, and high-octane, high-stakes techlife people are going to be vulnerable to drinking, but, in parallel to all of this, I can’t help but think that alcohol has simply done a very good job of infusing itself into many different kinds of social groups. I could have probably written all of the above if I were a member of a bowling group, or if I were a pro basketball player, a cook, a racecar driver, or bridge enthusiast.
No matter what I chose as a profession or identity or social group, chances were good all along that alcohol was going to be somewhere near it. It’s simply everywhere.
Professional Noticer
In my professional life I am a pattern-weaver and noticer. It is my job. I am rewarded over and over again for identifying and improving patterns and behaviors, and also noticing problems, making small adjustments for user experiences. One second saved by one user is days and weeks of time saved for hundreds of thousands of users. One process tweaked for a team means the whole team is improved. One experience made happier for one user is thousands of satisfying, happy experiences for thousands of users. What is simple? What makes people happy? What is least risky? What makes life easy? To lean on a well-used analogy, I’m often in the weeds on issues with technology, but I’m also at 30,000 feet, looking at the geography of the weeds.
The same is true in painting. You’re working with detail, and with scale. The smallest detail matters, and so does the whole thing. The details are the whole thing.
Same thing with comics - each panel matters, and so does the whole book. Being a software executive who paints and makes comics doesn’t make a lot of sense at first, then it makes more sense than anything at all. Once you run into one of us, you’ll start to see more of us at various companies.
To me, taking a sky-bound professional noticer view of alcohol, what it looks like is dozens of well-loved people of any gender, in any walk of life, rich or poor, racecar driver or painter, getting taken out left and right by accidents or problems directly caused by alcohol.
In the weeds, it doesn’t look so bad. It looks quite nice, actually. One beer isn’t a big deal, neither are a couple margaritas.
Living in The Weeds
I think this is part of why quitting is so hard. At first, when I quit, I started to see the weeds around me in perfect detail. It’s terrible, I’d rather have them be fuzzy, but that’s the problem… whether I drank or not, I’d still be in the weeds.
Even when I was drinking, I would tend to surprise my friends by how much I can remember events, people, or things. Having a fearsomely accurate memory might be one reason why drinking was so attractive to me. Who the heck wants to remember all of life’s most terrible moments, all of our personal failures, rejections, and losses, when all one has to do is drink a couple beers or some wine?
The good thing about an accurate memory is it can be used to summon up positive memories as well as bad memories. If the brain is so powerful that it can bring up trauma or remind us of how terrible some parts of life are, it can be powerful enough to bring up whatever redeeming moments are out there.
Sometimes, there may need to be a jumpstart in this process, like therapy or medication or rehab, if anyone is caught in bad thought cycle or depression. We all get stuck. It happens.
For me, the jumpstarter was exercise and running.
What I Did To Stop
As far as what I actually did to quit, I did very little on the psychological side, I mostly got into exercise in a big way, and this distracted me from drinking. I didn’t think very hard. I took a lot of action.
My official quit date is June 1 of 2020. Here are the events leading up to that date.
In January of 2020 I was getting into running again after taking a multi-year hiatus. I would knock out 8 mile runs after work from time to time. I hit a goal of running 6 miles in 60 mins near the end of January 2020, and was super happy about it. I hadn’t run very seriously since high school, and I am in my mid thirties, so the idea that I could have some kind of speed was very exciting! At this point in time, however, I still was drinking from time to time.
Like for so many, it was March of 2020 and Coronavirus that simply cut me off from my social groups. No more fancy openings, no more meetups, no more after-work brews. March pushed me further into running, life at home, and life away from social events. Yet, for a couple months, I still drank. I would mow my lawn and then have a beer or two while reading books. It was a fraught time, a time to read the news and try to ignore it. It seemed like every hour in April, ambulance sirens would be wailing down the street outside my house. There was always something. I started to feel like I lived in a cursed disaster place, like Gotham or Thebes. Then I realized this was probably pretty selfish - this virus was a disaster everywhere. We were all in one big disaster boat together.
Near the middle of May 2020, I’d had enough, I just didn’t buy liquor or beer anymore. Drinking in my yard wasn’t fun, there was nobody around, and it seemed like everyone was getting sick. I just stopped, I didn’t even think about it. I wish I could say there was some sort of striking, dramatic event that happened, an event which finally pushed me over the edge and made me quit. That would be logical, right?
Running big miles in the DMV
But no, nothing about when I quit was very dramatic on the personal level. I think, in retrospect, it was the world that caused me to stop. I’d finally been so overwhelmed by the news that I realized no amount of drinking would fix anything, it wouldn’t fix me, it wouldn’t fix the pandemic, it wouldn’t soften the blows of division being struck everywhere. If I was going to get wiped out by a virus, I wanted every second before that to count, even if it hurt.
My running took off in the summer of 2020, where I would do 10 and 13 mile runs across Washington DC and Maryland. Wearing an Osprey water backpack, even in the soggy heat of a DC summer, I could just run forever. I’d never run this far in my life. Even in high school and running cross country, a training run would be, at max, seven miles. Deciding to come crawling back to running was pretty funny to me. And also, it made a lot of sense. I had to deal with my problems somehow, why not figure it all out on a run?
My History as an Athlete
I always saw myself as an average runner. I would usually finish third in my group in school. I liked running because I never felt too nervous about it, I never thought I would be the best at it or that I had to beat anyone else at it. It was entirely something that I could do against myself - if I could beat a goal or a time I had set for myself, I was very happy.
I am an average runner but I am even worse at team sports. I have absolutely no aggression or a will to win against others in team sports. In school, I could get behind kicking a ball, but not stealing it from someone else. I could block an inbound volleyball but if I spiked it on someone, I would feel guilty somehow.
Running was perfect for me, because that’s all it is. I can make little games in my head while doing a race and see how many people I pass, but that’s about it. If I don’t pass them, I don’t pass them. I’m still doing something that is fully for me. Have you ever been in a win-win situation?
Running Doesn’t Fix Everything, Either
My burgeoning running obsession didn’t take me completely out of harm’s way - on one of my runs in June, a man ran after me up a hill and touched me near my hip. I was pretty surprised and stopped.
I am not sure, but I think he may have been on drugs. I ended up calmly talking to him and he went off in some other direction. Since he’d chased me within the first half mile of my run, I ended up finishing seven more miles after this, which sounds absolutely bizarre to me now.
Even though this event was traumatic, I didn’t think about drinking then or diving into alcohol to get the trauma out. I doubled-down on exercise. I would run very repetitive loops in areas that I knew were safe. I would check the public sex offender list and avoid areas dense with offenders. I had a couple canisters of pepper spray.
Seeing the weeds in perfect detail is so hard, but it’s also liberating because they’re easier to understand. My negative experiences with street harassment and street assault kind of pile up in my head as a sober person, but as a drunk person, it was all a trainwreck. Each moment is at risk of bleeding into another one, as if my brain files all of the events into the same cabinet. As a person who is sober, I can compartmentalize and figure out issues faster with less bullshit cutting in. Namely, with street harassment, that none of it is my fault at all, and I’m going to keep running no matter what.
How I Feel About Social Life Right Now
I have no issue and harbor no ill-will towards my friends and connections who still drink. I also have 0 regrets about all the time I spent at clubs or bars with friends or people I dated, or drinking in the art major. It was great to drink sake in Tokyo, wine in Paris, and whatever that crazy thing was that we all drank in the Bahamas. Ultimately I love my friends and all of my romantic partners very, very much, and any time I get to spend with them is treasured by me to no end. Possibly the funniest thing about being dead sober is that my art is exactly the same if not better, and the person I am is exactly the same person.
If someone wants to open some brews on a zoom call, I have no negative thoughts about it. In fact, I have almost no thoughts about it at all. Since life is, er, coming back to life, and we’re all going out again, if someone offers me a drink or a drink menu I politely decline and pass. It does take energy to decline, but that’s okay. I’m sure a lot of people might be tired of me repeating my sobriety milestones online, yet they are very important to me, because the more people who know that it’s a part of my life, the more I am living authentically.
I sort of have to make a big deal of this for myself, first of all, because during 2020 there just weren’t too many people around. I can’t even remember what I did for my own birthday in June of 2020. I think I must have gone on a run.
What’s in the Future?
More sobriety for me in the future!
For all of us, who knows? I hope if you read this entire blog it was meaningful to you in some way. I don’t like to give a lot of advice out or tell people what they should do, first of all because I am not a doctor, and also because everyone is always at a difference place in life. The person reading this in Kansas is going to be different than the person reading it in California. Instead of issuing judgement or advice to people I’ve never even met, I find it much better to discuss experiences and events as they come, and go from there. If you do ever want to talk about sobriety, or, you know, art stuff, haha, you know where to find me. xo 😴