I’ve had a really great 2023 and I know it’s definitely been supported by being totally AF. I haven’t had any alcohol since early March 2022 and honestly I’ve achieved so much since then!
I’m sharing this in case someone is reading and is considering trying to give up alcohol…for so long I tried to “cut back”. I wish I had appreciated then how much better my life w/o alcohol would be, as I would have done it SO much sooner. The scary part is that I wasn’t a huge drinker. It was a wine with dinner type of thing and only more than 1 glass at specific social gatherings or special occasions. I rarely drank any hard liquor (a handful of times over a 10 year period). And yet, cutting it out has been SO beneficial!
My 2023 has been an onslaught of horror that I need a specialized therapist to help me process. I can't tell you how many times I've been grateful that I
don't drink this year.
I wasn't a heavy drinker, but I was someone who loved a glass of wine after work to de-stress. That's basic self-medication, and self-medication habits can turn into raging addiction so easily when life gets incredibly hard. We saw this during the pandemic when so many "moderate" drinkers had the wheels fall off their drinking and careen into full destructive addiction.
Not only that, but I've written about this many times in this thread, but being someone who drank in response to stress made my brain lower my capacity to tolerate stress. My stress response to anything really difficult would be amped up because that was the most reliable way to get me to pour a glass of wine.
Over years of being a regular wine "decompression" drinker, my system calibrated itself to produce maximal intolerance of certain forms of stress. It was like clockwork, I would be pretty much fine at work and then around 3pm my ability to cope with the stresses of my very stressful work would plummet, and my headache would amp up.
This just made sense to me, working a 10-11 hr day at an insane pace doing high-pressure work is bound to wear you down by the end of the day. Nothing seemed odd about that. But once I quit the pattern was so obvious. Two hours before I was scheduled to decide whether or not to pour a glass of wine, my brain would reduce my capacity to cope with stress.
Because yeah, I was always trying to "cut back" so it was always a question whether or not I would have wine when I got home. I would always have wine on days where I felt totally overwhelmed at the end of the day and too fried to forgo my "decompression" glass or two, which were like a magical tension release.
I now understand that it was a trick. The sense of overwhelm was fake, I can readily handle the kind of stress I was under at the time. I've handled much, much worse since with less effort. AND the tension release was a trick too, that wasn't the alcohol, that was the brain chemicals that my brain dumped to reward me for drinking. This is obvious because the tension release began with smelling the wine and the first sip, well before the active ingredients too effect.
So had I faced 2023 a stress-drinker??
Fuuuuck.
I would likely have become an excessive drinker because I had all the epic excuses in the world to justify soothing my stress. AND I would have systematically deconstructed my capacity to cope with the overwhelming stresses of this past year.
Lastly, when I was drinking the most was during the last time that my life was incredibly stressful, and distressing with a few glasses of wine every night allowed me to detach from my stresses and cope with them privately. I systematically withdrew from everyone I was close to because it was too difficult to discuss what I was going through. It made me very private and isolated in my coping.
Not having ANY means to detach from my experiences this year has forced me to lean heavily on my loved ones, be more vulnerable and open with them and ask for help over and over to get me through. The net result is that despite a horror show of a year, ALL of my closest relationships have thrived and grown substantially. I feel closer and more loving to every single person I care about and they literally ALL know every detail of what I've been through and how it has impacted me emotionally.
Lastly, not having self-medication as an option, I've been forced to find healthy alternatives that produce the same brain dump of soothing endogenous neurotransmitters and cascades of hormones that drinking used to trigger. Even severely disabled, I've spent an enormous amount of this year engaging in whatever exercise that I could, spending A LOT of time in overwhelmingly beautiful nature, and really investing in creating romantic moments with my spouse, even when I was in the hospital.
So as unbelievably challenging as my year has been, it's also been AWESOME.
And yeah, having previous extremely challenging years to compare it to, I can pretty much say that not drinking was a determining factor in the year being unfathomably hard, but overall pretty great compared to the pure torture-porn it could have been.
