0 Days Off the Sauce

On sobriety, power, and perception

The Drinkers - Honoré Daumier, 186

Previous installments in this series: 90 Days Off the Sauce, 365 Days Off the Sauce, 730 Days Off the Sauce

---

I celebrated three years of sobriety with a beer. It was a citrusy wheat ale, a local brewer’s take on a Blue Moon. Aside from a barely perceptible spike in heart rate as I carried it to the table and a brief pause before picking up the glass, there was no climax or ceremony involved, no gravity to it. Nobody cheered me on as I took my first sip; no music played to mark my crossing of the threshold. The mostly empty brewery remained mostly empty.

This did not seem appropriate.

It did not seem appropriate because alcohol had always, in one way or another, been a main character in my story, a primary plot device. It held great power. For many years it ran my calendar, regulated my emotions, and gave me a place to go. Sometimes I felt compelled to immerse myself in that place, as I did during my penultimate pre-sobriety bender at a high school friend’s wedding. I downed shot after shot, pursuing not a buzz but total oblivion, the dissolution of the self. The last memory I have before blacking out is of a hotel room littered with liquor bottles and the rotten fruity smell of sweat and acetaldehyde. I did, in fact, succeed in reaching another place: that hotel room turned out to be across town from the one at which I was staying.

From there, alcohol’s character took on a different role. I cut it out of my life like a toxic ex, and its absence became a pillar of my identity. Elegant bars and gas station beer fridges alike were cordoned off with yellow caution tape—elements of the human experience to which I denied myself access. I was Someone Who Didn’t Drink.

It turned out that, for a time, that was precisely the Someone I needed to be. I’d long since severed access to raw emotional reality; I feared its venom. Sobriety was largely about restoring that access. I remember watching a documentary about six months into my sobriety—some feel-good sports story, I think. There was a garden-variety bit about the parents supporting their kid growing up. Out of nowhere my chest and head were consumed with that pre-lacrimal feeling that is somehow both heavy and buoyant at the same time, a feeling that had become almost entirely foreign. It consumed the rest of my body like a forest fire. For the first time in many, many years, I bawled my eyes out.

The act of reclaiming hundreds of hours of lucidity in a year is a certain exposure therapy to oneself, a reacquaintance. There are rewards for the discomfort. Throughout that first year, I became more relaxed in my own presence, softening into myself. I fell asleep more easily, smiled more often, started to emit something of a glow. I did two interviews on the same podcast about a year apart—one before I stopped drinking, and one not long after. The difference in my energy is stunning. By the second interview, I seem to have shed a hundred pounds of psychic weight.

An interesting thing about growth is that it right-sizes your perception. As you begin to see things more clearly, they cease to appear as more or less than they are. This is what happened with alcohol. I stopped viewing it out of proportion; it was no longer magic charm juice or a panacean escape valve or the liquid ticket to my downfall and destruction. It no longer held an outsized power over me, positive or negative. It was simply a substance with a specific set of effects that could be good or bad depending on context and magnitude. No more, no less.

I suppose that’s what growth is, really: the discovery of power. Not power in a Machiavellian or even Tony Robbinsian sense, but a more humble and grounded power. A power that equips one to handle the vicissitudes of life by virtue of seeing them as the impersonal, contextual forces that they are, without endowing them with undue power of their own.

As I began to see alcohol for what it was, I found myself entertaining the idea of a reunion. The first of these instances was a balmy autumn afternoon at a brewery on the edge of the woods. I was enjoying the company of good friends and thought it might be nice to soften the edges of my consciousness a bit. I walked up to the bar, combed through the menu for a beer I wanted, stared at the guy behind the counter for a few seconds…and ordered a water.

There were a few such false starts. A concert, an evening out at a jazz club, a game night with friends. I’d stare at a bar menu or a friend’s fridge in the way that one guiltily eyes a pastry in a cafe, lingering for a while before settling on the sensible decision. The stakes felt high, like I might lose something that I’d never be able to get back.

One day, I decided I’d had enough of that—that I was going to have a damn drink and move on with my life. I chose a day shortly after three years of sobriety so that I could have a nice round number for narrative closure.

The night came. I felt mostly nothing. The quiet of the winter gloom and emptiness of the brewery added to the feeling of insignificance. I sat around making small talk with my friends for a few minutes, perhaps waiting for someone to stand up on a table and announce my return to drinking to the other five people in the place. Nobody did, so I walked over to the counter and ordered the beer.

The buzz came on more slowly and subtly than I thought it would. Every so often, I’d go to the bathroom and check in with myself. I’d close my eyes and observe the spread of the warm glow, the pleasant sluggishness of sensation. I’d look in the mirror to see if I was still there. I’d ask myself if I was enjoying the experience. I was.

I ordered a second beer. We talked and laughed and had a perfectly pleasant, perfectly normal Friday evening. I felt content, and a notable lack of desire for anything more than that.