26 Reasons I Used to Drink
26 Reasons I Used to Drink
And what I finally realized now that I don't.
The daily journals I kept from the end of last year and beginning of this one are stacked next to my bed. I’ve been re-reading them lately, curious to piece together the very beginning of my sobriety. But the truth is my sober journey did not begin on my first day sober (1.1.22). It began when I realized I was treating alcohol like some kind of god that would magically fix my life while I was- I don’t know- passed out? The mind of someone addicted to booze is a strange and often illogical place.
If you follow me on Instagram you know I have been sharing some excerpts from my private journals with commentary on how it feels to look back on my early days of sobriety as someone now almost one year sober. What strikes me most overall is how desperately I just wanted to know how to be kind to myself. To not hate myself for creating a life I felt trapped inside of but couldn’t figure my way out of to freedom. I can see now that I did not understand what I needed freedom from. I thought my marriage was rocky. I thought my job was crushing my soul. I thought I was a terrible, weak, incapable person who could not create a life I felt alive in.
What I really needed to free myself from was alcohol. I just couldn’t make all the connections. Addiction is a broken belief system. As long as you remain inside of its clutches, you will trust the thing that is destroying you to save you from destruction. I can see that so clearly now. But I honestly couldn’t then.
On December 29, 2021, I wrote a list of reasons why I was drinking. The list is forty-eight reasons long. I’m going to go ahead and guess that a person who does not have a drinking problem would also not have a list of forty-eight reasons to pick up a glass of wine everyday. Wine was my problem solver and absolver. With that first glass at the end of the day, all that generalized worldly tension melted away. I finally felt at peace, safe, held, warm, fuzzy. For maybe twenty minutes, I was okay and my racing mind was quieted. And if one glass could make me feel blissed out, why stop there? Easy: I didn’t. I just never did. The starting was a given. The stopping was not.
Some reasons I listed for drinking:
To escape my hateful self talk.
To relieve stress at the end of a long day.
To forget life felt too small/sad/caged/pathetic.
To help soothe my growing sadness.
To numb out. I spend so much energy trying to be good, be the best, be perfect, be happy, be whatever a happy person is supposed to be. I just want to STOP TRYING.
It’s part of my personality. It’s who I am. I am a wine drinker and everyone knows that. It’s endearing/sophisticated/lovely/grown up.
To relieve boredom.
To have fun.
To laugh.
To escape what hurts.
To numb the fear that my marriage lacks deep connection.
To numb the fear that I will never have the courage to live my own life.
Life is fucking hard to face straight on and I need R E L I E F.
I don’t give a fuck.
The world is a shitty place and we are all gonna die anyway.
To escape my insecurities. To stop feeling sad/angry/scared/resentful.
To drown my inexplicable rage.
Alcohol sets me free from feeling trapped all day.
Free me from the pain of non-stop restlessness.
Because I don’t want to have to follow my dreams.
Because I cannot trust myself.
Because I am not strong and I need a crutch.
Actual life is hell.
I am lonely.
To relieve my anxiety.
For a moment’s relief from the non-stop mental torment.
After writing that list in my journal, I then wrote this note and underlined it in red: Fuck. This list is a LOT of TRUST I put in alcohol alone to fix my life.
There are twenty-two other reasons on that list from one year ago. But the only thing that really matters in the end is that the list is very sad and reflects the mindset of someone trapped in addiction. And that none of the reasons I listed were really that hard to believe when you think about the way alcohol is sold to us as a cure for, well, everything. A magic elixir that will make you happy and set you free.
We can get hung up on the substance in stories of addiction. We sort of rank the level of ‘seriousness’ by what the person is addicted to. Alcohol is legal. Alcohol is harmless as long as we moderate. As long as we “drink responsibly.” These messages are false and ranking addictions on a scale of danger can distract us from the underlying truth. Addiction of every kind is a trap. Because when you are desperate to know how to be kind to yourself, to stop the hellish self-talk in your mind, the minute you trust a substance to do that for you, you have a serious problem.
I won’t get into all the science around alcohol and its nasty effects on the human brain, body, mind, and functioning. Annie Grace’s book The Alcohol Experiment does a beautiful job explaining it all in great detail, day by day, over the course of a month. What it all comes down to is that the alcohol we believe is the cure is actually the disease. What we trust it to treat, it is actually exacerbating. And every time I lifted a glass I was reinforcing the false belief that I was not enough to handle my own life. That I could not take care of my emotional or mental health so I had to obliterate any thoughts about all of it. That being numb was being cozy. That self-care was a blackout.
It is tremendously painful to read through my old journals. It is also deeply healing. When I read in my own words what I was struggling through, I have nothing but respect and compassion. And gratitude that I have made it to the other side. If you are reading this and see yourself in my list of reasons, none of it is your fault. You are not wrong. This life is tough to face everyday. The problem is not that you are inept or inadequate. It’s that we have been sold the (insanely profitable) lie that alcohol is some sort of god we can worship to fix us. That if we drown our problems in it they will somehow miraculously disappear.
Looking back on all of this now, twelve days before my first sober anniversary, I can tell you with 100% confidence, sincerity, humility, and gratitude, that every single thing on that list is better now that I do not drink. My mind is healing. My thought patterns and habits are forever changed. I trust nothing outside of myself to mend or manage or soothe what is going on inside of myself. And while a year ago I did not know how to recover from addiction, something inside of me knew. And I followed it all the way back to myself. I clung to one single belief, shaky as it may have been: that I had it in me to care for myself. Without numbing or cheating or flinching.
If you see yourself in my pain, I promise it is safe for you to also see yourself in my freedom from it. If you are up for a bit of self-discovery, maybe make your own list. Why do you drink? What are your reasons telling you about your expectations of alcohol? Has drinking delivered on its promises? If not, what might freedom from that merry-go-round of disappointment mean for you?
I drank for two decades before I made my own list of reasons for doing it. Until I wrote them down and looked at them all in one place, I had no idea the depths of what I was expecting a toxic poison to do for me. And when you finally look at what is really going on, honestly and without shame, something in you changes. That whisper-quiet part of you that knows how to get you out of the addiction becomes a much louder, clearer, stronger voice. And the part of you that feels hopelessly lost begins to learn how to hear it.