We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life

by Laura McKowen

One woman wrote me a letter describing how her mood and outlook improved after a month without wine, and — because feeling so much better surprised her — she was concerned she might be an alcoholic. As if only alcoholics feel better when they don’t drink. Being an alcoholic or not had no bearing on the anxiety and cravings she felt around dinnertime the first week she didn’t drink. No, those cravings surfaced because alcohol is an addictive substance and a social buffer and she wasn’t using it anymore. She’d become used to life with alcohol and had maybe even become addicted to it. Because it’s addictive.

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Most people have no idea what their bodies feel like without it for an extended period of time. Alcohol is so normalized, so everywhere, so much a part of the fabric of mainstream society that most people will never experience life without it unless they’re forced to. Weird, right? Isn’t it completely fucking bizarre that we don’t question (and, in fact, highly encourage) regular consumption of a drug that’s more harmful and causes more deaths than cocaine, heroin, and meth combined? If someone stopped doing coke for a month and felt better, we wouldn’t sit there and wonder whether they were an addict or could go back to recreational line snorting. Or let’s look at smoking, which we were duped for decades into thinking was actually fine, and even healthy! Now that we know better, nobody questions the decision to stop smoking. Smoking is just so obviously stupid and dangerous. And yet, alcohol is still cool. Unless you’re an alcoholic. In which case you’d better deal with it . . . . . . quietly. . . ...over there . . .

This

“gray-area drinker,” enjoying a few glasses of wine here and there but rarely drinking too much by any standard. Her drinking certainly never appeared to be an issue to anyone else, yet drinking nagged at her for years. She would quit for periods of time and went so far as to document those occasions on her blog. Ultimately, she decided to give it up for good. Not because she labeled herself an alcoholic but because she realized her life is simply far better without it. Life without alcohol grants her greater peace of mind, less anxiety, and a generally more solid, calmer existence.

Yes

It was often an overwhelming and scary feeling, like drinking too much coffee or falling in love, and it was this upper register of things that felt so hard to explain. I think one of the things I was doing with drinking was trying to bring down this energy so I could survive it. Alcohol was a very effective way to slow down that frequency, and the raucousness of partying was a way to stop it completely.