These days a Saturday night on the town in Boston ends by nine o’clock with a nightcap of a decaf lavender vanilla latte rather than beginning at this time with a dry martini. Today marks six years since I had my last drink of alcohol, and as each year passes it feels less and less remarkable, and more the way my life naturally needed to go.
The first year was probably the most transformative. It was a sea change, an entire shift in lifestyle that was oddly and fortuitously aided by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. It also came with a realization that unlocked years of tortured living, and finally rooted out the cause of such self-medicating motions.
By the second year, I was beginning to see how it all played out, and how I did it. In the third year, deeper philosophical concerns led me to the understanding that most of our journeys were not linear with an ending and a beginning, but rather a continuous, winding curve of learning and understanding.
A letter written to my former friend commemorated the fourth year, and by last year – the fifth – I realized I was writing these annual posts for those who might find inspiration or tools to use if they wanted to forge their own paths, as my own had moved beyond the need for such annual introspection.
It’s also helpful and necessary to remind myself how little I know, how I’m not in any way an expert on sobriety, and that I can only speak to what has worked best for my own journey. I understand that every day can be easy or precarious or worrisome or dangerous in ways that sometimes make sense, and sometimes make themselves known without rhyme or reason, and all there is to do is go a single day or hour or minute at a time.
Six years after my last drink, the once-impossible act of not drinking feels as unremarkable and natural as a martini once felt on a Saturday night. At the bottom of a lavender vanilla latte, and the start of a seventh year without alcohol, there is a moment of reflection in an empty cup, and room for further possibility.
