Today I am celebrating 3 months sober. I’m 3 months alcohol-free and that freedom is something well worth celebrating but I am MAD! I am so mad at the big lie that is alcohol. I am so mad that alcohol gets its hooks into people and won’t let go, and that turning your back on it and walking in a different direction seems so hard. I am mad that people get free and then go back to drinking.  I am mad to read about anguish and sadness, all caused by a poison that seeps into our minds, our pores, and like petrified wood, forms itself around us like it’s part of who we are.  It is a big flipping lie.  Alcohol doesn’t bring fun, or relaxation, or happiness to our lives.  Alcohol LIES.  

I drank every day for 35 years. Well, I was in the hospital once for 4 days for a health thing, and sat with my husband while he was hospitalized for 9 days from a motorcycle accident, and probably didn’t drink one day here and one day there, but for 35 years, I poured alcohol into my system. I have hundreds of Facebook posts of me in some paradise or another, holding up my drink because yeah, the drink is the important thing, not the spectacular beauty just behind it.  I was a high-functioning, ridiculously over-achieving, depressed, miserable, closet drinker. For 35 years. Alcohol – drinking alcohol – was part of me. My life revolved around it.  I never in a million years thought I could ever stop drinking. If only you knew.  

Four days before I stopped drinking, in abject fear that the pandemic would shut down liquor stores, I went to Total Wine and bought $400 worth of wine and booze, and was afraid it wouldn’t be enough (it wouldn’t have been).  4 days later, because of a moment of lightning-bolt clarity, I stopped drinking, and that was 107 days ago.  I’ve never tried to quit drinking before, I’ve never gone without alcohol other than for some medical reason, and now I have over 3 months sober.  3 months alcohol-free !

I don’t have willpower, or strength, or wisdom.  What happened to me was a miracle, and two more miracles happened in quick succession.

Miracle #1:  I found the Boom Rethink the Drink community.  I didn’t recognize it as a miracle, but it was–and is.  Miracle #2: Because I’m lazy and a big scaredy-cat, I found and read Allen Carr’s Stop Drinking the Easy Way.  Because easy, right?  From that book, I found William Porter’s Alcohol Explained.  I read a bazillion other books but didn’t realize at the time that Carr and Porter had just served up Miracle #2 for me.

In those books, I read the TRUTH about alcohol.  That is is literal poison to our systems.  It changes our thinking processes, it poisons our cells, it changes the way our brain works.  It ruins our skin, our livers, our internal processing systems, how our brain responds to stimuli.  I was slathering Estee’ Lauder and Lancome on the outside, taking vitamins like crazy, working out at the gym, then pouring poison over the entire garden when the little plants were desperately trying to come up.  These books WOKE ME UP.  

I don’t have willpower worth a damn.  I’m not stronger than anyone.  I am just awake to the LIE that is alcohol.  It is poison, nothing more, nothing less.  When I poured my $400 worth of booze down the drain 2 months later, it smelled like lighter fluid and made me literally gag.  I’m sure it cleaned the pipes out good because that’s what it’s made to do.  Kill and scour everything in its path.  It only took me so long to pour out because I had spent so much on it.  Crazy, right?  Alcohol lies.

Today, I feel FREE.  It hasn’t always been easy, but every time it’s hard, I think of poison.  And I am MAD.  I am mad that alcohol is such a liar.  I’m mad that a poison that kills us is allowed to lie and lie and lie.  I am sad to my bones that it keeps beckoning people to the dark side.

Grab ahold. STOP.  I drank for 35 years.  I have stopped.  It’s possible.  

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related reading: William Porter’s Alcohol Explained 1st 5 chapters free in that link

more on Allen Carr’s Stop Drinking the Easy Way – How to get from here to There

and more from the author of this post on her first 3 months sober Tales of a High-Functioning Drinker Told to My Newly Sober Self

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