Finding the perfect time to stop drinking

I'm away this weekend visiting my daughter so sharing a post from early sobriety that seems pretty relevant right now. ALL NEW Sunday Shares

The unbearable lightness of a sober beach getaway (Aruba 2023).

Happy Sunday, Midlifers,

I flew to Raleigh, NC for my third annual holiday house tour weekend with my oldest daughter. She moved to this very charming Southern city during the pandemic and I’ve made the trip three years in a row. We check out some of the historic homes dressed up for the holidays as part of the city’s Annual Candlelight Tour and eat and shop as much as we can in about 48+ hours. With all that eating and shopping, there’s been zero time for writing.

So today, I am re-sharing a post from the 2020 holiday season when I was about two months into sobriety and wrestling with the notion of finding the perfect time to stop drinking (*spoiler alert* there is no such thing). It also seemed kind of relevant as my oldest son just got engaged and is currently in Paris with his fiancee, who also doesn’t drink. Life is weird!

The Sunday Shares are all fresh though, so please enjoy, and I’ll be back again IRL next Sunday. xoAmy

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My 28yo son called me a few days before Thanksgiving to check in about holiday plans and coordinate his arrival by train from NYC for the long weekend.
 
“You still doing the no-drinking thing?” he asked as we were winding up, knowing that I hadn’t had any alcohol since his birthday in October.
 
“Yup,” I said.
 
He laughed a little and then asked, “So, like, what’s your end game?”
 
I thought about all the many and varied answers to that very big question, and finally said, “Sobriety, I guess.”
 
“Really?” he responded, sounding a little annoyed. “So, you mean to tell me that you won’t even have a drink on my wedding day?”
 
And funny enough, that’s just the kind of thing I worry about when I think about not drinking. Kids’ wedding and even my own someday. The trip to Paris I’m dying to take once we are out from under the thumb of COVID or biking through California wine country with girlfriends. Maybe I should just wait for all of those things to happen and then give up booze for good.

I relayed this to my therapist who laughed and said, "Imagine if someone was shocked you weren't going to eat asparagus at their wedding?"
 
But at the time it really pushed one of my buttons, but then I remembered what a newly made sober friend had reminded me of not long before, “It’s just today.”
 
So I said to my son, “I don’t know honey. That’s not happening any time soon. All I know is that today, I am not going to have a drink and it’s gonna make me feel really good.”
 
And that’s the truth. Since I had my last drink (a glass of some random red wine my son’s dad brought to the birthday dinner at my house that night in mid-October), I have felt pretty great. My skin looks so much better, I’ve lost a few pounds and my sleep has been off-the-charts good.  
 
But the best part has been waking up clear for the last 58 mornings, without wine cobwebs that took hours to clear and that general sense of self-loathing I’d begin most days drenched in.
 
And my productivity level has risen dramatically. By Dec. 1, I had not only the outside of house’s holiday situation set but not one, not two, but three trees decorated within. My gutters have been cleaned, the leaves and brush all raked to the street and the vegetable bed has been cleared out and a fresh blanket of mulch is keeping it warm until spring. I even got my car serviced and oil changed the other day.

I think the best way to quantify how wine was affecting my daily productivity is by measuring my book consumption in 2020. I did some deep dives on Goodreads over the last week and it turns out that of the 23 books I read or listened to this year (12 less than I’d hoped to read at the start of the year), I think about 6 were read in just the last two months. That means that a quarter of my entire reading year occurred when I stopped drinking wine every night. Had I still been sitting on the couch after dinner watching TV with a glass in my hand, I would never have finished listening to Maybe You Should Talk to Someone or Such a Fun Age – both highly recommended – or plowed through The Testaments or Leave the World Behind in the last week. (Okay, I’ve also finished a lot of shows I’d started, including The Good Place, which is so lovely, profound and goofy and I urge all of you to watch it.)

The 2020 sober reading list.

So, here’s the big question: Do I miss wine (or, tbh, vodka, bourbon, seltzers in the summer, and on and on)? Of course I do. I am a dedicated and committed girlfriend to all the things I love. There was a time that I never thought you’d have been able to pry a cigarette out of my hands, so much did I love the act of smoking (especially with a drink) and yet, I have not taken a drag in – oh, gosh, I don’t even know when. Twenty-five years ago? I’ve long since counted those days. But after about 20+ years of committed smoking, starting at 12, I finally stopped for good somewhere in my 30s.
 
I’ve probably been in love with booze since the early 1980s as well and it’s been a long ride with that selfish lover. But I don’t think it’s been doing me any favors and I’d rather see what life is like without it riding shotgun.
 
Much like stopping smoking all those years ago, there was no big event that preceded my decision to quit. Well, I threw out my cigarettes for the first time when I learned I was pregnant with my eldest, which I deduced during a work trip to our nation’s capital. I can only imagine what housekeeping thought emptying out a trash can filled with pregnancy tests and a full pack of Merits. But I'd keep going back to smoking socially until one day, I just stopped. It no longer served me.
 
One of the bigger tipping points towards sobriety was reading Laura McKeown’s We Are the Luckiest, which came out at the beginning of this year. I bought it as soon as it was released and read it immediately, downloaded the audio version and listened to that, and then promptly pushed it all away. It was just too much.
 
But I kept thinking about the author and her path to sobriety. How parts of her story resonated so much, too much, with me and I thought about her promise of just how good life could be without alcohol. And while it’s hard to tell anything during a pandemic — like even, what day is it? — I can say that I’m feeling pretty darn good and happy and overly hydrated by all the seltzer and teas I’ve been guzzling in the absence of alcohol.
 
I’ll be honest, I was a little worried about Thanksgiving, but it ended up being fine. In the past I would have been all over coming up with a signature cocktail (an apple butter old fashioned, perhaps?) and buying lots of wine. Instead, I drank my new favorite fizzy water from Costco (Kirkland Italian Sparkling Water) and my sister joined us for a lovely dinner. The kids’ dad came over for a drink and appetizers earlier in the afternoon, and they sat outside and had cocktails while I made dinner and popped outside every once in a while for some cheese and conversation.
 
“You’re still not drinking?” asked my ex, who has known me since we were teenagers. “That’s not the Byrnesy I know. Did you lose a bet?”
 
And interestingly, I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving 2023. Guys, I’m winning.

sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy

Chemistry lessons. I detest coming to things late. I’m always disappointed. It’s why I initially hated the movie Titanic and do not understand the hubub around Middlemarch. I’ve started it four times and can never get into it. So, after listening to everyone’s gushing, things always seem overrated and never live up to the hype. So I began listening to Lessons in Chemistry — the much-loved recent(ish) novel and now AppleTV series — with a certain level of skepticism and was surprised by how much I loved it. Really delightful with memorable characters. Even better, in the Audible version there’s an enlightening interview with the 65yo debut novelist. #inspiration

Visiting Raleigh? Here are my recommendations for places to eat and things to do: Barcelona, Flying Biscuit, Mandolin, Whiskey Kitchen, Wye Hill Brewing, O-ku Sushi, Pooles Diner, Layered Croissantery, Yellow Dog Bread Co., NC Museum of Art, Raleigh Trolley, Mordecai House, Quail Ridge Books, The NOW Massage.

How to keep time. Um, if you want to really freak out, listen to the How to Keep Time podcast’s “Waste time” episode in which you will be reminded that in an average life, you have just about 4,000 weeks to do all the things. It’s a slap in the face and also, a good slap in the face and reminder that this is not an endless party we’ve been invited to. There is an end.

The truth about getting older. I sent this TikTok to my Ladycationers this week and we all agreed, this gal was right on.

See you next Sunday! xoAmy