TW: Alcohol, suicide

On February 28th, 2022, at the ripe age of 23, I made the decision to put the bottle down for good. Today marks 500 days without a sip of alcohol. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but it’s also been one of the most isolating.

To be abundantly clear, I have had almost nothing but words of love and support from my friends, family, Kentucky State Senator Whitney Westerfield in one tweet five months ago, and online randos (how often do online randos actually support others? What luck!). I’m truly blessed to not have anyone who’s pushed me, prodded me, or taunted me over my sobriety. I’ve never been bullied into playing defense on my choice, which I know many other sober people have to deal with on the daily.

(An aside: want to know if a bar is a good bar or not? Play this hyptothetical scenario out in your mind: if you go in and tell the average patron you’re sober, how do you think they’ll react? If supportive, it’s a good bar. If you think they’ll call you a pussy? Not worth your time. That’s reason #340,686 of #4,210,426 why you should never, ever, ever, go to Two Keys in Lexington. Truly a stain on our fine city.)

But I often feel like few in my life really understand my decision. Largely due to my age, people often react with confusion when they learn I’m on the wagon – especially because I still spend a lot of my free time in bars and breweries, made easier by the growth-spurt of non-alcoholic beers that don’t taste like bathroom mop water. But after silently saying “Huh?” through a quick glance, people quickly flip the switch into Flailing Support Mode. I imagine what follows is familiar to other sober people.

“That’s awesome!”

“I’ve thought about cutting back myself.”

“Wow..”

Looking at the drink in their hand: “Umm.. is this okay?”

I grade on effort rather than product, you might say, and the last thing I want to do is make anyone overly self-conscious as to how they react to my sobriety. But it’s always heavy when to see people weighing, in real time, how far down the topic’s rabbit hole they’re willing to travel. Usually, it isn’t far. But once it’s out, it’s permanent subtext to the rest of the conversation. Or to be less pretentious, it’s the gorilla inserting himself into the action of this driver’s-ed video.

The one response I’ve never heard in any tone is “Why?” That’s probably good manners; the origins of this post is me not feeling a part of a sober community and wanting to air things off my chest, and a symptom of not being a part of a community is that I have no idea what Good Sober Manners are. Maybe asking why is seen as a Pandora’s Box full of triggers, all ready to launch out and tempt my tongue with a wine-bottled relapse refreshment.

Intentions may be pure, but I honestly want people to ask me sometimes. Perhaps it’s perverse vanity and a lust for the sound of my own drawl, but I’ve rarely talked about my sobriety at-length with anyone – and I’ve never talked about it to someone with an experience that felt very similar to mine. But it’s always right there on the tip of others’ tongues as well as mine. What happened?

Despite that longing for discussion, I’m not sure this post is the place to air out what happened in great detail. But I do want to talk a little bit about it, because leaving it as this undiscussed rain cloud over my head is getting quite tiresome (and wet!) over 500 days.

A lot of my sobriety has played out solely in my heart and mind. There aren’t many people my age who are sober, and while things felt pretty grim for me, my story is not one that would bring people to tears. I didn’t sever every connection in my life through alcoholism. I didn’t lose my job, home, or any material sense of stability. My story would sell zero memoirs. Which is absolutely fine; I’m not looking to monetize anything.

But when the majority of sober people I know have a larger existential backstory, it honestly leads me to a frankly ridiculous sense of imposter syndrome. Was I not alcoholic enough to be allowed to call myself sober? It honestly was pretty easy, physiologically and mentally, to quit drinking; since I didn’t face withdrawals and have had very few temptations since quitting, does my quitting even count?

To state the obvious, this is completely silly. But I’m on what feels like a one-man journey. The people in my life support me, but we don’t actually talk about it. 12-step programs aren’t for me. I’m very proud of my friends of faith who have had powerful journeys to sobriety with the help of their Lord and their church, but I’m not a religious man and can’t relate in that way with them. Where do I go when I feel lonely, and often fraudulent, about my sobriety?

Frankly, as grim as it may be, the place I go are the memories of the hurt I caused myself and others.

I go back to 2020, when the world collapsed and I watched Governor Beshear’s updates every day violently hungover.

I go back to starting my days at 7pm with a Leinenkugel Berry Weis, and slurrily ending it at 10am with a Zofran, several glasses of water, and blackout curtains drawn in my bedroom.

I go back to staring red-eyed and light-headed at emails from concerned professors who hadn’t heard from me in weeks. Opened books surrounded my laptop, with pen underlines chaotically scrawled through sentences during the few times I actually tried to make sense of the jumbled words on the page.

I go back to my near-daily debauched Instagram stories featuring me and a bottle of Purple Toad Winery’s Black and Blue wine, which I jokingly called “Toad Wine.” (This is one of the more harmless memories, but anytime that a person in my life saw a bottle of Toad Wine at the store or in their home, they would text me. Getting to the point where someone’s top five associations with you is wine, is, well, not the best place to be in.)

I go back to building fires in the backyard, staring at the light through the tear-soaked eyes, tossing bottles and cigarette butts one after the other like offerings to the flames.

I go back to the time I drove to Lake Herrington at 3am without telling anyone, parking my truck by the water, sipping Angry Orchard Rosé and wondering just how easy it would be to chug, chug, chug, and charge my Nissan clear into the depths of the Commonwealth’s deepest lake.

I go back to asking my mom for money to tide me over to my next paycheck, but planning all along to spend it all at my nearest Liquor World.

I go back to drunken arguments I started with my then-girlfriend that she in no way deserved nor earned. I go back to the time she left for two days after I shattered a remote control against the wall and kicked our floor fan over, which landed on our small dog Rosie who I never noticed was even in the room.

And I go back to the time I drunkenly cheated on my partner, losing a dear group of friends and almost losing the most important person in my life.

Reliving those memories are hard every time. But as cliche as it is to say those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it, I know it’s true in my life. And I know that pain justifies this long, long journey I’m still only just beginning. In a weird way, those memories are like friendly ghosts always populating my periphery, guiding me onward every day toward being my best self. My best self may be weak, because if he has a single beer then his whole character could crumble. And while I wish I could go back and redo it all, the reality is that he’s his best self because he was his worst self for a really, really long time. I’m so sad to say that too many people primarily knew my worst self. But I sincerely hope no one ever has to meet him again.

This is all a little too self-congrulatory. But it’s a lot to carry, and 500 days in I’m giving myself a little space to let it out.

I don’t know that there are any grand lessons to take from anything I’ve written thus far. As I’ve said, my story is certainly less cinematic than others. Honestly, that’s by design: things were bad, but I knew so many people whose life got a lot worse than mine was and I knew I was very very close to tracking their footsteps too tightly. I try to be a strong practicer of learning from others’ mistakes.

But in the few talks I’ve had with people who do consider themselves a part of the sober community that there are a lot more people like me than we realize. A lot of people who see a problem, but don’t think it’s bad enough to fully stop. And a lot of people who don’t pull the switch on sobriety until months, or even years, after the first thought of quitting enters their mind. It took nearly a year between me first thinking seriously about quitting and actually quitting. If you’re having even quick thoughts about it, talk to someone. Talk to a friend, talk to a therapist, talk to me. Odds are that if you’re thinking about it, you need to do it.