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October 26, 2019 marked the very last day I had a drink of alcohol. 

This morning marks three years of sober living. 

And when I look back and consider all the crazy shit that’s gone down in the world during that time, not drinking was a pretty big fucking deal. 

Luckily, I didn’t see it as such in the very beginning, or I might not have stopped. During those first few days of not drinking, it was all I could manage to locate myself in a day. Who was I without a martini glass in my hand and a bolt of harsh truth on my tongue? Who was I without simultaneously charming and offending dinner guests from soup to nuts, or in my case from pre-dinner cocktail to greeting cocktail, to dinner wine, to after-dinner cocktail? Who was I without a pre-gaming drink to quell the nerves and calm the social jitters? 

When that kind of existential crisis hits, not drinking happily felt like something of a cake walk. When I thought of the reasons I drank, it was mostly to calm and quiet my social anxiety, something I had only recently discovered around that time. Such a discovery was at the heart of how I could simply stop drinking one day, and be entirely ok with it. The second I was aware of why it was happening was the second I didn’t feel the need to do it anymore. It didn’t take away the social anxiety, but it stopped drinking from being the crutch I used to deal with it. Then the real work began – the therapy, the reading, the meditation, the examination – and the redrawing and re-envisioning of my life. Not drinking was a part of that, but it was secondary to the main part of learning to be a better, healthier person. 

I thought those early days would be fraught with the panic of not having a drink on hand for when I felt nervous or anxious or simply frazzled by life, and I wondered at how I might function without having my usual friend out there. The world is tough enough – it’s not getting any easier – and even on the best days only an idiot would think things are all ok. And while not drinking itself proved to be rather simple, it was everything else that left me challenged and terrified. For so many years, the support of a drink had been what got me through every difficult situation. It was a universal band-aid that covered and protected my heart and head from a multitude of injuries and pain and, above all, worry.

Without alcohol, I would have to deal with all of those things head-on for the first time – and with a clear mind and no excuses. That was the scary part. That was the part everyone wanted to hear about because it can be torturous to turn your regular life upside down. People love that kind of drama, and for a while I kept that part quiet, tamping it down when I explained how and why I stopped drinking, but after three years I feel even less afraid, and maybe it will help someone else to hear that it was frightening at first, but ultimately rewarding. 

Once I learned to give in to the honesty and the fear, to let it out in therapy and to close friends and family whom I knew wouldn’t judge me, I could begin to tackle the origins of a lifetime of feeling like I needed a cocktail in my hand. For someone whose image has a life of its own – an image that has protected and ruined me in equal parts – drinking was inexorably bound to my perception of myself, even as I knew it shouldn’t have been. Even if I knew it wasn’t totally true. I played it up so much that it started to take hold, and maybe I caught it just before it was about to come into existence. The question of whether I was a full-fledged alcoholic is a tricky one – and I have genuinely been on both sides of it through the years. 

Today, that question is moot. 

I’m comfortable with saying I was an alcoholic.

I’m comfortable with saying I wasn’t an alcoholic.

I’m comfortable with saying I genuinely don’t know if I was or am an alcoholic, because the bottom line is that you don’t have to be an alcoholic to be sober. You don’t have to be addicted to alcohol to live a life of sobriety. You don’t have to explain why you don’t drink any more than you have to explain why you don’t like Brussel sprouts or the color magenta. Once I took out that socially-induced need to label and act accordingly, it became a question of choice – and the over-riding theme of my life, of the person I most want to be, has been making choices that are not always socially-sanctioned or common, but have always turned out right for me. This was just another of those decisions, made in defiance of what anyone else thought or assumed. 

And so I begin another day of not drinking. It may lead to another week of not drinking, then another month of not drinking, and then a whole season, and then another whole year.