I stopped drinking a year ago this week. In some ways, it doesn’t feel believable.
I will celebrate it the same way we acknowledge most annual milestones. But as I’ve gotten older, years have started to feel fast, though not quite as fast as my father observed them to be when he neared death in his late 70s. I really don’t know what happened, he said. All those years now feel like days.
As my father did before I came around, I drank sloppily and for many reasons. I genuinely loved a lot of beers, wines and spirits — I loved the craft. But in truth, I never really learned how to deal with being around people or reconciling stress. If drinking didn’t help reconcile this, it helped me keep my mind off it. I’d also found that I constantly was chasing after or trying to re-create a handful of good times. The combined effect was a sort of suspended animation, in which I grew and evolved much less dynamically through my 20s than I hoped I would going in. The common denominator always was drink.
I came to the decision to stop for a number of reasons.
I was bored with routines. I met a number of people for whom sobriety really worked. A number of my own personal and professional heroes — Stephen King, Marc Maron, Chris Hardwick and John Hodgman — had proven that sobriety does not necessarily destroy what makes one interesting. I had a family to take care of and a business to tend to. And drinking is expensive.
The past year hasn’t been particularly harrowing, but it hasn’t been especially easy, either.
I never really hit a bottom of any sort, so the drama is minimal, which itself makes for interesting motivational challenges for me. Sometimes, because things never really got dire, it’s easy to wonder why I’m doing this again — especially because sobriety can be weird. You have to re-learn a lot of things you initially learned buzzed. You have to relearn how to engage with some super friends and, in Portland in particular, you need to relearn how to exist in a city built on drink. It makes being in groups difficult, and you realize small talk really is an art. These weird parts of adulthood you never really learned how to do with a clear head would be a lot easier with a beer or 10, right?
It had never really gotten that bad, but I’d made bad decisions, acted poorly and treated people I loved — and some I didn’t — even more poorly. And so it hadn’t gotten too bad — yet.
And while it hasn’t been easy, it has been rewarding. Replacing drinking in part with running and shedding the additional calories helped me shed about 50 pounds and feel exponentially healthier. And, my God, I’ve saved thousands of dollars — without exaggeration — and I’ve focused much of my newly acquired bandwidth on my business and my family.
The former is growing, thankfully, but the benefits to the latter are the most rewarding. My wife told me on a recent morning, “in the past year we have had so many great memories that weren’t impaired by booze. I am so grateful.”
That’s hugely rewarding, considering if there is anyone who has proven himself a master at taking an otherwise nice event and dampening it with booze-soaked depression or undertow, it’s this guy right here.
Beyond all that, though, I just feel better. Awkward or not, this sobriety thing appears, in my case, very much worth the journey.
I appreciate the support from friends, family and readers. If you’re thinking you need to pump the brakes a bit or give it a try, I encourage you to do so.
By no means do I purport to be a model for how to approach the process. Recovery comes in many different shapes, sizes, philosophies and tactics. But as someone who used to fear that going without, so to speak, was something that might leave me as less of a person or with a dampened personality, I have learned the opposite to be true.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.