Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

by Holly Whitaker

What we are conditioned to believe is that there are two types of drinkers in this world, the normal ones (“normies” in AA-speak) who can tolerate alcohol, and the alcoholics who can’t.

We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

(3) it artificially stimulates the fight-or-flight response (release of cortisol and adrenaline, for instance), yet another cause of anxiety, depression, and insomnia.

Here is what we know about alcohol. First, it’s the number-one date rape drug.

Spending a night out drinking is akin to dismantling every piece of protection we have—our cognition, our decision making, our reaction time, our memory, our standards, our voice. If we thought about alcohol in this way—as something that undermines our collective momentum and personal agency and vitality and self-worth—what would that

mean for us? What if we all rejected the poison—then what? I’ll tell you what: world domination, bitches.

What I am saying is, alcohol is addictive to everyone. Yet we’ve created a separate disease called alcoholism and forced it upon the minority of the population who are willing to admit they can’t control their drinking, and because of that, we’ve focused on what’s wrong with those few humans rather than on what’s wrong with our alcohol-centric culture or the substance itself.

We should be able to ask ourselves these simple questions and answer honestly: Does alcohol negatively impact my life? And if so, should I take steps to address my relationship with it?

The truth is that anyone who consumes alcohol and can’t live without it is to some degree hooked on it, regardless of whether it’s a glass a week or a bottle a night.

In 2010 the former UK drug czar David Nutt and a team of researchers assessed twenty licit and illicit drugs on two criteria: harm to users and harm to others. Alcohol, with a score of 72, came in on top as the most dangerous drug (in the UK), followed by heroin and crack cocaine.

addiction is the opposite of awareness, and I’ve heard Johann Hari explain that addiction is the opposite of connection.

To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape.

I had a faulty brake system and had never quite developed any kind of willpower.

Kundalini meditations like the Meditation to Prevent Freaking Out (all available on YouTube),

Pema Chödrön explain that no emotion lasts longer than ninety seconds. You heard that right: no emotion we feel lasts longer than a minute and a half—if we let it run its course without interference.

RASINS, or Recognize, Allow, set aside the Story, Investigate what is happening in your body, Name the sensations, and Surf.

trauma isn’t the disturbing experience itself. It’s what occurs in our bodies when we aren’t able to process the experience fully.

For starters, there’s the process of just shopping for a therapist, an activity I can say with confidence is at least ten thousand times more depressing than shopping Tinder for a date.

down across from a stranger who is quite possibly more fucked up than you are;

“Why does alcohol excuse his actions but condemn mine?”

How you show up with other people is how you show up for yourself,

The only people who get upset when you set boundaries are the ones who benefited from you having none.

The shadow—a concept in Jungian psychology—represents the things present in ourselves that we disassociate from because we deem them bad, ugly, dark, or inadequate. The shadow is all the things we suppress, reject, or deny in ourselves—the things we would rather not be. And while it is not easy to see our own shadow clearly, we can see it very, very well in other people. In fact, the more we judge others, the more likely we are judging our own shadow (even though we usually don’t know it).

There is only us, making hell on earth through our beliefs about ourselves and especially about each other.

Removing alcohol does not remove options—it creates more of them.