It has been 1000 days since I quit drinking.
It feels like a significant milestone so I wanted to share some things I have learned. It has definitely impacted my life as an artist—to become sober. It is one of the best choices I have ever made. So…here you go…
I should have made the choice to quit drinking 30+ years ago.
Definitely a lot of fun, definitely a lot of mistakes and toxic damage. So many bad choices, risky behavior. Some of it is just being a crazy, wild young person, but it’s a slippery slope that sucks some of us in for decades. Obviously I stopped while pregnant and nursing-but once the kids were a little bigger, the mommy wine years weren't good and I know contributed to depression, anxiety, being tired and moody and not feeling good–just being lame overall. The culture around mommy happy hour definitely perpetuates this destructive habit. My drinking tapered off substantially over the years, but even when I was down to ¼ glass of wine it would still give me a headache the next day and this weird, dark, metallic anxiety. An unmistakable cause and effect.
You’re not broken.
I thought it was something wrong in me, the feeling of constant searching, the longing for something unknown, a map I couldn’t quite follow. I thought it must be my basic brokenness, but nope, this is part of how it feels to be alive. It took me until very recently to realize that the tricky thing with addiction is that it manufactures a drive to attain the unattainable, tells you that you’ll actually get to see the thing just around the bend. And it strings you along with empty promises. It’s the hamster on the wheel, the carrot dangled before the donkey–it serves itself to no end–to infinity–to the deep black void…
IT is never going to be found through drinking.
It is to be found by sitting still with yourself. By feeling what you are really feeling. By being agitated and annoyed and still having to stay with it. Because the temporary relief is just digging you a hole. I kept telling myself day after day, “It’s not doing anything for you.” But that wasn’t true. I realized, yes, it was doing something for me: It was helping me relax, unwind, be social, stop over-thinking, be ok just sitting–all these tricky things that drink/drugs do for us. But with real and negative consequences.
Life is so much better without drinking.
More moments of clarity, energy, inner peace, stamina, ability to plan, joy, health. No more waking up to working hard just to swim to the surface for at least half of the day. No more headaches every morning (I would take ibuprofen with my coffee pretty much every day), waking up out of it–I called it “coral brain” because it felt like my brain was dehydrated and full of holes. No more regret for passing out too early, things I did or said. Less anxiety, stress, worry, regret. More presence, more patience, better eating, better skin, more exercise, better relationships, able to show up and not be hung over or stuck in a brain fog.
BETTER SLEEP.
The foundation for a good life is good sleep. And alcohol wrecks your sleep. I used to wake up every morning around 4:00 am with heart palpitations and quietly knowing I was hurting myself. That can’t be good long-term. It’s better to wake up after a good night’s rest and start the day above water and go from there.
Going each and every day without drinking is a practice in itself.
It looks like a gradual coming home to yourself, to sitting comfortably with yourself, to sitting uncomfortably with yourself, to being in the uncomfortable reality of your life, to having downtime with a cup of tea and sitting next to your spouse and having a real conversation or having nothing to say at all–and being ok with that. Or not being ok with that. It looks like breathing through nervous energy. It looks like breathwork. It looks like getting used to yourself. And it looks like moments of yourself being so goddamn happy to see you.
There is a price to pay for always wanting escape.
We are not miraculously created from nothing in order to deny the gift of having a life to live. We are not meant to disown our own souls, to abandon the quiet voice, the rambling, the uncomfortable self, the nervous, the uncertain. This is all we have. This is all we are. I would never ever want to go back to being hooked on that false promise of nothing at the end of the rainbow, blindly following a clueless, manipulative fuckface (aka addiction). The end of the rainbow is right here, right now–in all its shitty, magical, crazy and mind-blowingly divine colors.
Day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment is how we build our lives.
The repetition of actions–whatever they are–build a thing. What do you want to build? What are you meant to build? Chances are you are very consistent at certain things. And consistency creates a momentum, and momentum gets harder and harder to stop. So it is with addiction and making bad choices for yourself; so it is with sobriety and making wise choices for yourself. When you choose wisely, moment by moment, you build something more beautiful and life affirming. You become a node of concentrated radiance.
Don’t be mistaken. To quit drinking isn’t the answer to your problems.
Getting off the well ridden rail of addiction won't necessarily make your life easier. Yeah, you will feel better, and have more energy and clarity and all the things. But life's still life. It’s fucking difficult sometimes. But drinking makes it even harder to deal with.
Drinking is an insidious drain on your potential.
Like an app left open in the background, using up your battery, slowing the actions and efficiency of the important tasks. It’s convenient in a way. Since you don’t have the bandwidth to face the uncertainty of creative work, you can be certain that you are going to spend most of the day recovering and thus not risking rising above baseline into some place entirely new and enlivening.
Drinking is a disservice to the work.
…The work of being an artist, a parent, a surgeon, a salesman, a server–of being a human of any kind. Drinking is a convenient way to poison yourself out of accountability to your work, your relationships, your life.
If you are toxic and out of tune, you are wasting precious time, you are missing out on being a conduit for life.
If you are toxic and can’t show up for doing your best work–whatever it is–the rest of the world is missing out as well. Better to take responsibility for the moments and days you are lucky to have. Better still to have a clear mind, to feel the natural rhythms of a healthy body and brain, to have the discipline and freedom of choice to direct your energy into attunement with your work–which isn’t really your work to begin with. It’s life’s work, working through you. Could be terrifying, could be electrifying. This is the real and true work of living. To be open and attuned and clear for channeling, for streaming, for letting life reveal itself through you–for as long as possible–until you are no longer.
Something super cool is that life builds along with you.
It magically supports you. Your soul supports you. There is a real momentum in making choices moment by moment that support sobriety. You begin to build a foundation for yourself that gets stronger and stronger each day. Truly. You will find that your good choices support more good choices, which in turn make a better life and it builds and builds and builds. The consistent and “easy” choice is to choose sobriety. It is empowering in every way. You have nothing to lose with this choice. You will change. You will become a better person. You will feel better. You will inspire others.
Drinking is a convenient way to avoid owning the full force of your life.
You could spend your days cleaning up after yourself and have little left for your real work. And your “potential” may seem overwhelming and wholly unachievable. But the thing is, nothing is achieved with one grand attempt. You get to choose each and every moment and make small moves that add up to bigger moves. It isn’t one big test that you pass or fail. It is literally moment by moment, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. If you are starting with a big blank canvas, it is shape by shape. And it adds up to something, it builds, it begins to take on its own power and force–just like drinking can–but choosing sobriety and being in alignment with your higher self, you actually serve life, serve others. You just have to show up and make one move. Start there. You’ll be reacquainted with your purpose and find that yourself has been waiting for you all this time—with total forgiveness.