Quit Like a Woman Quotes

“Real power doesn’t come from having a million followers, good hair, a Louis Vuitton purse, a new car, a new home, a title, a partner, or anything that can be weighed, measured, or acquired. Real power is the thing you’ve always had inside you. Real power doesn’t need to be demonstrated or boasted. Real power is the ability to be in your skin, to know who you are, to know you will always be okay. Real power comes from your gut and your heart and your courage and your bravery and your love. Real power can never be taken away from you and never lost once it’s found.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Disappoint other people with your no; don’t disappoint yourself with a yes you’ll later resent.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“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.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins.

Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants.

The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are.

We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from.

We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words.

We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor.

The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“The goal here is to create a situation you no longer have to escape, or a life you don’t have to numb. The achievement of sobriety is not the point; it’s a by-product of the work. The work is the point. Addiction is the hook that gets you in the door, and quitting is the catalyst to heal deeper wounds.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Sobriety, if it is anything, is paying attention, seeing the wonder and the beauty around us that we so easily sprint by on our way to the next thing. And this is more than fun; this is actually living.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“There is the life that most of us live, and then there is the life we have buried deep inside us, the life we know we’re supposed to be living.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Alcohol is the only drug in the world where, when you stop taking it, you are seen as having a disease.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“We’ve now established three things. First, we don’t need willpower when we don’t desire to do something, and it isn’t a thing some of us have in excess and some of us don’t have at all. It’s a cognitive function, like deciding what to eat or solving a math equation or remembering your dad’s birthday. Willpower is also a limited resource; we have more of it at the beginning of the day and lose it throughout the day as we use it to write emails or not eat cookies. When you automate some decisions or processes (through forming habits), you free up more brain power. Second, for us to make and change a habit, we need a cue, a routine, and a reward, and enough repetition must occur for the process to move from something we have to think about consciously (“I need to brush my teeth,” “I don’t want to drink wine”) to something we do naturally, automatically. Third, throughout the day, we must manage our energy so that we don’t blow out and end up in the place of no return—a hyperaroused state where the only thing that can bring us down is a glass (or a bottle) of wine. Maybe”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“As Mark Twain said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Saying no to people who want you to say yes, and upholding your boundaries with people who were used to having none, will at first feel terrible. Like a death. And it is a death of sorts. The death of the part of you that thinks you have to violate yourself to make it in life or be valued. You most likely will surrounded by people who are used to being accommodating or passive. At first, they feel threatened by you asserting your boundaries. This is ok. And in time they will get used to it. Just like in time you'll get used to understanding, that when people act like assholes when you say now, isn't about you. It's about them.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“To summarize, the morning ritual is as follows: (1) wake up at the same time, (2) don’t check your phone, (3) boil some water and squeeze a quarter of a lemon into it, (4) meditate for five minutes, (5) read a positive affirmation that you’ve written on a Post-it note and repeat a few times throughout the day. Spending ten to fifteen minutes in the morning sets you up for an entirely different way of being and prevents cravings later in the day. Do the same thing every day for thirty to forty days to make this process automatic.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“We are supposed to consume alcohol and enjoy it, but we're not supposed to become alcoholics. Imagine if this were the same with cocaine. Imagine we grew up watching our parents snort lines at dinner, celebrations, sporting events, brunches, and funerals. We'd sometimes (or often) see our parents coked out of our minds the way we sometimes (or often) see them drunk. We'd witness them coming down after a cocaine binge the way we see them recovering from a hangover. Kiosks at Disneyland would see it so our parents could make it through a day of fun, our mom's book club would be one big blow-fest and instead of "mommy juice" it would be called "mommy powder" There'd be coke-tasting parties in Napa and cocaine cellars in fancy people's homes, and everyone we know (including our pastors, nurses, teachers, coaches, bosses) would snort it. The message we'd pick up as kids could be Cocaine is great, and one day you'll get to try it, too! Just don't become addicted to it or take it too far. Try it; use it responsibly. Don't become a cocaine-oholic though. Now, I'm sure you're thinking. That's insane, everyone knows cocaine is far more addicting than alcohol and far more dangerous. Except, it's not...The point is not that alcohol is worse than cocaine. The point is that we have a really clear understanding that cocaine is toxic and addictive. We know there's no safe amount of it, no such thing as "moderate" cocaine use; we know it can hook us and rob us of everything we care about...We know we are better off not tangling with it at all.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Guilt is always preferable to the thing that might give you brownie points for being a good person but ruin your mental health. Choose guilt over resentment, because guilt is a natural part of life, a thing we can work with and absolve ourselves of, while resentment is something that we heap on other people who weren’t asking for it anyway.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“short term always leaves us in a place worse off than when we started. — To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape. We need to address the root causes that made us turn outside ourselves in the first place. This means getting our physical health back, finding a good therapist, ending or leaving abusive relationships, learning to reinhabit our bodies, changing our negative thought patterns, building support networks, finding meaning and connecting to something greater than ourselves, and so on. To break the cycle of addiction, we need to learn to deal with cravings, break old habits, and create new ones. To address all of this is an overwhelming task, but there is a sane, empowering, and balanced approach. But before we discuss how to implement solutions to the Two-Part Problem, we need to address one of the bigger issues that women and other historically oppressed folks need to consider, which is how patriarchal structures affect the root causes of addiction, how they dominate the recovery landscape, and what that means for how we experience recovery. If we are sick from sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, microaggressions, misogyny, ableism, American capitalism, and so on—and we are—then we need to understand how recovery frameworks that were never built with us in mind can actually work against us, further pathologizing characteristics, attributes, and behaviors that have been used to keep us out of our power for millennia. We need to examine what it means for us individually and collectively when a structure built by and for upper-class white men in the early twentieth century dominates the treatment landscape.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Because alcohol is primarily a depressant, we reach for it to take the edge off. Which it does, initially. However, the counteractive process (or the B process) to the depressant nature of alcohol is a release of cortisol and adrenaline into the body. If you drink one glass of wine, you might have about twenty minutes of the desired “relaxed” effect before the drug (A process) wears off, and you’re left with increased amounts of cortisol and adrenaline, which fuel anxiety. This means alcohol causes anxiety; it doesn’t manage it.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Today I don’t think of myself as being in recovery from illness. I think of myself as being on a mission to recover the truest version of myself, and as being in recovery from long exposure to a sick society that actively wants to destroy all that is good about me. Consequently, I get to do a bunch of rad things to manage life better, so I don’t need to escape.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“And the shocker? I actually like what I found buried down there. I like myself. I like my tastes, style, preferences, opinions, movements, and peculiarities. I like the books I read, the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, my dry wit, my big hearty man-laugh, my maniacal drive, my deformed big toe, my big messy heart, my big messy life. All of it. And because I’m the person I spend the most time with, this means I get to spend a lot of time with a person I dig. As you can imagine, this is fun.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“As a white woman, part of my awakening has included a growing awareness of my privilege and an active education in dismantling the ways I contribute to the oppression of black, brown, and indigenous people. It’s the job of white women (and white men) to undo this discrimination, the same way it’s the job of men to undo toxic masculinity”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Today my toolbox consists of breathing techniques, hot lemon water, herbal tea, hot baths, cold showers (this is called “hydrotherapy” and it’s so, so good), coffee, essential oils, yoga, meditation, kirtan, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), massage, French pastries, emotional freedom technique (EFT), and many other things.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Finally, my hope, because here is the part of your dating life where you no longer date to find someone to fill the emptiness. You look for someone to share the fullness that you both already are.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“finally, someone had put into words the thing that had been screaming in me since I was first told that my failure to submit to AA was really my ego run amok. Finally, what I read was: It makes sense that a woman might entirely refuse a program that asked her to give up something she’s not only never had, but was finally just grasping: a sense of self, a voice, a sense of her own desires, freedom in a world not made for her.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“To properly heal from addiction, we need a holistic approach. We need to create a life we don’t need to escape.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“We go from being able to naturally act like kids to thinking the only time we get to access this state is when we’re a few drinks in.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Is alcohol getting in the way of my happiness, my life, my self-esteem? Is it getting in the way of my dreams, or maybe just not working for me? Does it cost more than it gives, does it shrink more than it expands, does it cut pieces out of me I can’t reclaim? Does it make me hate myself, even just a little bit?”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“According to Flinders, all religious and spiritual traditions and specifically meditative practices—because they were built by men and for men—promote the following: self-silencing; self-naughting (destruction of the ego); resisting desire; and enclosure (turning inward, sealing off from the world). As a feminist, naming these four requirements of transcendence troubled her. “I realized that however ancient and universal these disciplines may be, they are not gender neutral at all. Formulated for the most part within monastic contexts, they cancel the basic freedoms—to say what one wants, go where one likes, enjoy whatever pleasures one can afford, and most of all, to be somebody—that have normally defined male privilege” (emphasis mine).”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Ultimately, what helped me understand addiction and how I came to be ensnared was first realizing that we all suffer some degree of addiction. While not all of us give our lives over to it as much as I did, or get tangled up in chemical addictions, the fact remains that all humans suffer, all look outside themselves to manage that suffering, and all get stuck in feedback loops that run through the same wiring in our brain that alcohol addiction runs through. The second thing that helped me pull apart my own addiction, and thus understand how to approach it and overcome it, was breaking it up into two distinct parts: the root causes, or the things that drive us out of ourselves to cope, and the cycle of addiction, or what happens to us biologically, spiritually, socially, and psychologically over time when we use an effective but addictive substance or behavior in an attempt to regulate ourselves. I call it the Two-Part Problem, and in order to heal, we need to address both parts.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“Women don’t need to be groomed to apologize further. They need to be groomed to be worthy of their own apologies to themselves.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“We are supposed to be able to tolerate it, and when we can’t, when it doesn’t feel good or things start going to hell for us, it’s not the substance that’s the problem—it’s us. We are damaged, weak-willed, defective, and totally fucked.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol