On Staying Sober This Holiday Season

Navigating the booziest time of the year.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

For all the talk about ghosts in October, I have always felt December to be the most haunted month of the year. There is something inside of the traditions of the holidays, the cold in the stark winter air, the smell of fires burning not just for light or warmth or cheer, but for survival. For real. We enter into the collective darkness of the season, and come to know a more quietly sincere type of reverence for nature. There is a sacredness to the stripping away of color, vibrancy, and life all around. To smell the coming of the first snow, the wetness of the waiting sky, is a heightening of the sixth sense somehow. The way something animal in us knows something is coming and we best be prepared.

One year ago today, I was 25 days away from taking my last drink but I didn’t know it. I had no plans a year ago today to stop drinking. I was just about to celebrate my 43rd birthday on December 8th and there was no doubt in my mind I’d be celebrating with drinks. It wasn’t even a question. I was not considering not drinking. If you had told me that was even an option for me I would have said you were crazy and also stop ruining my birthday cocktails with your ridiculous suggestion that anything at all could be enjoyed in the least, let alone celebrated, dry.

But there was a nag in my brain all the while. For over a decade I had been bothered by the fact that I could not control my drinking. That once I started it was really hard to stop and alot of times I just wouldn’t. I’d just go on until I passed out. A lot of shit went down because of that, none of it worth recounting here in this little post. Only to say that shame, guilt, fear, and confusion were in constant swirl in my mind around my drinking. Not just the actual act of the drinking itself, but the thinking about the drinking before, during, and after.

I knew something was wrong. I knew I was concerned (scared). But I felt trapped between trying to just ignore it and tell myself I was ‘just like everybody else’ or saying I was an alcoholic and having to get sober god knows how. All I knew was that alcoholism was deadly but it would ruin my whole life to give up drinking, of that I was certain. Even the thought of never drinking again was so terrifying I would drink it off my mind.

Somewhere around the last week of December 2021, my aunt told me about a book she was reading by Annie Grace called The Alcohol Experiment. We had lost a dear family member earlier that year who struggled with alcohol, and it gave us all a deeply heartfelt reason to examine our own precious, fragile, fleeting lives and our own choices around how to live them. I remember my aunt saying she found the book very useful because the premise is not that you stop drinking entirely, only that you stop drinking for 30 days to ‘see how it feels.’ As you purge the poison from your system (alcohol can take up to nine or so days to completely exit your system) and observe what happens to your mood, anxiety, digestion, sleep, and life overall, the book teaches you the science of what is happening in your body and brain now that you are essentially in the first days of recovery. The science of healing.

New Years Eve 2021 was a shit show for reasons also not worth mentioning, but come January 1st 2022, waking up with an epically gross hangover, I promised myself I would not drink that day or that evening or that night. I would do The Alcohol Experiment and blend in with the Dry January crowd which, up until I joined in, I judged harshly and with wildly arrogant gusto.

I remember eating pizza for dinner that night and not drinking wine with it. I remember being very surprised at myself. I remember reaching into the fridge and picking up a La Croix and thinking, If I can’t be sure when I start drinking how much I will end up drinking, what the fuck am I even doing drinking at all?

By the end of Dry January 2021, I had made the final call. My days of drinking were over. Full stop. I was already 30 days in, the longest by far I had ever gone without alcohol, why turn back when I’d made such progress? The changes I had experienced in those 30 days in my body, mind, heart and soul were profound (and quite honestly astonishing) enough to show me unequivocally that this was the better way, and for me the only way to live free of the fear of what I was doing to myself day after day, year after year, when I was drinking.

I wish I could say what exactly it was that flipped the switch for me. How exactly I started my sobriety and how I have maintained it all year. But I think it comes down to something so simple it almost seems like it’s not worth mentioning. It was a choice. That’s it, plain and simple. Inside of myself deep down I knew the choice to get sober was always available to me. I did not want it. For a long time, with every fiber of my being I did not want to choose to stop drinking. Drinking had become the thing I did with everything I did. It felt like if I stopped drinking, all my joy would disappear. All of everything would disappear. I would not exist.

As I was decorating my Christmas tree this past weekend, I had old Sinatra holiday classics playing, and a large goblet full of sparkling water on the coffee table. The candles were flickering and the sun was setting slowly in rich velvety purples behind the tall dark pines in the yard. I could swear a part of me in that moment was right back in my childhood, decorating the tree at my parents house, and at my grandparents house, listening to the bells ringing out Christmas carols from the church across the street. The memories of all those magical years washed over me like a heavy sigh, slung around my shoulders and pressing on my chest. They were long over, but they were not entirely gone. Somewhere inside my newly pristine sober mind, they fell steadily down into my awareness, like the weight of fresh snowfall across my inner trembling landscape.

December is a haunted month. The ghosts of holidays past are there, whispering, jingling, inside all the ways you celebrate, decorate, and move through the closing of yet another year. A season of light in the dark. I found my mind screaming at me as I sat untangling my tree lights: YOU SHOULD HAVE WINE RIGHT NOW WHY DO YOU NOT HAVE WINE GET WINE GET WINE GET WINE. And I was rattled by the urgency of this suggestion, coming from inside of me, that I get booze into my system immediately. Hadn’t I gotten past this part? After 11 months sober, why is this voice still here and why is it suddenly so LOUD?

Because this is my first sober holiday season. Because I am moving through all the things I always do in December but this time I’m not picking up a drink. And the ghosts of my past self cannot understand this. There is panic in their phantom voices. They could not have seen this coming. They still cannot believe that I no longer allow them to have their way.

It has been one hell of a year, burning through all the ‘firsts.’ First sober funeral, wedding, beach vacation, weekend getaway, summer parties, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and this Thursday, my first sober birthday in 23 years. And with holiday cheer spinning all around us like a frenzied, wobbly top, I find myself a little bit exhausted of crashing through firsts. Of anticipating them, putting up with them, getting through them. At the same time, I cannot believe how fast this year has gone by, even as I can say that 100% I didn’t check out of a single day of it.

When you make the choice to stop drinking, there is no way to know how that’s going to play out as the seasons cycle past, as the pages of the calendar turn, one by one, every month all year long. What your mind - or your life - will throw at you as you make your way through your first year of sobriety. The only thing you can know is that you made the choice. And you will not go back to the way it was. You will be met with the ghosts of your past, calling you back to your old life, in ways you will not expect or be prepared for. And when they moan and rattle their sad metal chains in the halls of your mind, you will choose your new life again and again. You will know in your heart of hearts that morning is always coming. And that even though your new way of life is not always quiet, at its center there is always peace.