Third update on no booze 2026
It really hasn't been that long since my last update on not drinking alcohol this year, but this week I hit the six-month milestone and I wanted to reflect a bit on this achievement as I felt a lot more strongly than I had expected to, and these days, after blogging for a fair amount of time, it seems the only way I have left to do that is to put pen-to-paper/hand-to-keyboard.
On Tuesday, after I had gotten home from work, I opened the I Am Sober app that is tracking the exact amount of time since I last drank, and watched as it counted down the last 20 minutes before hitting the six-month mark. About 30 seconds after opening the app, I burst into tears; like big, gulping, raw, scrunch-faced tears that I just couldn't stop. I stood in the kitchen, trying to eat my dinner of cold beetroot soup (it's meant to be that way, good for a warm day) and bread, and as it all mixed with the crying, horrendous sight that it was, I realised how much I've changed in the past six months.
Trying to parse what happened during those minutes has been a lot this week. I am not a very emotional person, or so I thought, but that seems to have changed since beginning this journey, so I tried to dig into this line of thought: am I transforming who I am? I have almost settled on the answer, but what is clear to me is that there's no hiding from what I'm feeling now.
You may know the feeling of subduing the person you are, tears and all, with a drink, and with that came a crutch you could fall back on: "Ah, yes, I was indeed crying, but that was just the alcohol coursing through my veins. It won't happen again." That no longer exists. When you cry, you are crying. When you feel a certain way, you yourself are having that experience, nothing else. There is no shield anymore and you need to deal with that. And... It's scary.
After so many years of passing the emotional buck, it now seems that there's things I need to come to terms with. I'm not sure what that is; but it's here, it's now, and it's time to dig deep to discover this person I am. That in itself is hugely liberating. Yes, it's scary, but it's freeing in a way that I didn't expect.
In the drinking app, I can write myself reasons for why I'm doing this. The latest one I wrote, just before the six month mark, was the following:
"It's been 180 days and I've never been healthier. I'm relaxed, I can hang out with drunk people and don't want anything, I can think clearly: I'm free."
Writing that on day 180, as you may have guessed, made me burst into tears as well. Alcohol has been a prison I always had deference for. Something that somehow protected me (from myself), and gave me what I thought was a sense of self that I wanted to hold on to. A self that people were drawn to. That is not the case. The reason I think I've been so emotional is that I never gave myself, the real self, a chance. Now that I've given myself that chance, the chance to be who I truly am, I realised that this is the most generous thing I've ever done to myself, and that's at such conflict with what I thought I knew about my being.
I'm ready for the next six months and so far, I am indeed the healthiest I've ever been, physically. Emotionally; I'm still figuring that out, rewiring the paths that delivered the dopamine hits before to be more reactive to the new methods I have today for finding that pleasure, that happiness.
Would I recommend this path? Yes. The new generation of youngsters living amongst us have already figured this out and I can't help but tip the metaphorical hat to them, in that they realised the damage being done by something that is so easy to place to the side for good. I look forward to continuing to learn from them, and from my father who started this entire journey and who I drew inspiration from for this, and to another friend of mine who advocated for this path after discovering for themselves that they had a very special person of their own hiding within, once the façade of alcohol and cigarettes had been stripped away. Thank you to you both.
The moment I hit six months without alcohol