A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits

The Weekend EssayA Diehard Drinker Accidentally QuitsIllustration by Derek AbellaSave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyA few years ago, I noticed that drinking alcohol had fallen out of favor with young people. I was annoyed. Yes, some people drank so much that they got fired and hit on random people and drove drunk—those people should obviously quit. But being able to drink reasonably and quitting anyway was, I believed, a rude refusal to have fun with others. We lived in a world where everything had become a kiosk or an effluent pond, or was owned by individuals so rich that the category “human being” ceased to apply. How could anyone not drink in a world where the most flourishing partnerships seemed to be the ones between climate collapse and state-sponsored violence? People who didn’t drink talked about having clarity. They talked about health. I did not believe in clarity. I did not believe in health. I believed in things like the fact that the oceans were getting hot, and that a lot of Palestinians were dead, and that I, an American, had been obligated to help finance both. So I drank, daily, sometimes with some moderation, but often enough with none. Not drinking seemed to me synonymous with a hatred of pleasure, a fascist quest for purity. Quitting alcohol was counter-revolutionary, enshittification posing as maturity, like downloading an app on attachment styles instead of just going out and getting laid. Those of us who could drink and maintain a decent life had a responsibility to keep it up.Almost everyone I knew drank, many of them a fair amount, and that was because, like me, they were correct in considering alcohol to be the only thing that gave the world any sparkle. People did fun, life-affirming, culturally interesting things with alcohol. They made wine or eau-de-vie from obscure grapes and herbs, and invented cocktails tasting of eight things at once. A bar that I went to in the suburbs of Madrid served white wine on a plane of ice, frozen on a slant in the glass. When I drank it, my eyes welled up at the generosity and brilliance of such an invention, and at the idea that anyone would turn down such a beautiful offering, and also, probably, because I was wasted.I started drinking when I was around seven. My father played basketball every Sunday night, and when he came home he’d have two bottles of Molson Export Ale. On those evenings, he’d allow me a sip. I’d often take a large gulp instead. This made him mad, but he wouldn’t stay mad for long. He could see that I liked drinking, and he couldn’t exactly tell me that I was wrong.Many years later, my family and I went to a dry family wedding, and as soon as we arrived my father drew a plastic water bottle full of vodka from the inside pocket of his coat and singsonged to my brother and me, “Looook what I have.” My brother and I had been clutching each other in fear at the very idea of not getting plastered at a wedding. Now we burst into applause. “Oh, my God, you’re a genius,” I cried. My father is a can-do, glass-half-full guy, a quality that has always felt like a rebuke of my own bleak world view, which makes the poor man literally wince. But alcohol darkens him. If 6 P.M. comes around and he can’t get a drink, he is not amused. When he drinks his cynicism becomes accessible. When I drink my mood improves, and this is where we meet. I am sure ours is not the only relationship in the world improved by alcohol.I would have drunk in high school if I could have. Certainly, anytime I could get my hands on alcohol in large amounts I drank it, but I can count those times on one hand. My parents were not the sort to tolerate teen-age drinking shenanigans. Getting B’s was barely on the menu, so you can imagine the household attitude toward breaking the law. In college I wasn’t a huge party person either. I’m not trying to tell you that I didn’t get so wasted that I blacked out a few times, or that at a 1990 event at Amherst College called the Madonna Party I did not take off most of my clothes. But my preferred form of drinking involved sitting around in dorm rooms. It was the talking—the laughing, the jokes, everything faster, ruder, less polite, more direct—that did it for me. I loved how alcohol made me feel as if the constant battle I was fighting against myself, the world, and other people had suddenly ended, and now we all were hugging and telling ourselves we were hot. In my junior year I started doing cocaine (while drinking, obviously!) with some women I met who were way smarter and more political than I was, and their frenzied expounding altered the trajectory of my mind and my life in a matter of weeks. Experiences like that made me wonder how anyone could get any movement out of life without partying. Still, at that point I didn’t drink daily. That was something that I was waiting to throw myself into as a full-fledged adult, as if drinking was such an exalted habit that its fullest expression deserved a more proper backdrop.Urban living in my twenties made me a champion drinker. I hesitate to even describe the pleasures of it, because I feel like everyone must on some level agree: Is there anything better than partying in a big, beautiful city? Whether sitting on the bougainvillea-shaded patios of Los Angeles or in the dark booths of New York, admiring the Rome sunset between sips of Peroni or rolling my eyes at the thimblefuls of Chasselas dispensed in Geneva, city of watches and light pours, I found that drinking in a city, with friends, or alone, always left me overwhelmed with happiness that I was no longer a kid living in a strict household in a small town. After the first sip of alcohol I would say to myself, “You’re an adult now,” and that feeling never really went away. One might think that saying to oneself “I’m an adult now” at the age of fifty might alert one to the possibility that something had gone awry in one’s development. But again, I was under the influence. After just a few sips of alcohol I felt prettier, smarter, older (and then, eventually, younger). I felt powerful. The fact that it happened so quickly, that intoxication came so easily, I took as proof that I wasn’t a true alcoholic. Wouldn’t I have built up a tolerance if I was?Even when I was drinking almost every day, the quantity was seldom extraordinary. Seven out of ten times, I had only two or three drinks. Two out of ten times I drank enough to give myself a significant but not debilitating hangover. Maybe I drove over the legal blood-alcohol limit. Maybe I was mildly rude, inappropriate, unkind, or all three. One out of ten times, I got wasted. I threw up. I had hangovers that lasted for two days. One night in L.A. (the place I probably drank the most, because drinking pairs so well with smoking outside, in permanently fine weather) I called one of my closest friends a fucking bitch. I didn’t remember this afterward, but at least ten other people did. I sent my friend an expensive bouquet of flowers and told myself that I’d never drink again if she forgave me. She did forgive me. To celebrate, I drank.In my mid-thirties, I tried Alcoholics Anonymous for the first time and stopped drinking for more than six months, but I spent much of that time asking myself if I was really an alcoholic. Most of what we see of addiction is spectacular: Richard Pryor lighting himself on fire, John Mulaney pawning his Rolex for half its worth to buy drugs, someone who can’t make it through a meal without nodding off. I just drank more than I wanted to. The only person who was critical of my drinking was me. The recovery community talks about “high-bottom drinkers”: alcoholics who don’t lose their jobs, marriages, or social standing, and so they can’t tap into the sense of urgency needed to quit. But I couldn’t yet see that this was me. In the end, that first stint in A.A. only offered me more proof that alcoholics were people who drank more than I did.So soon enough I resumed drinking, and not long afterward I met a man who drank more than anyone I’d ever met, and with all deliberate speed made him my boyfriend. Then, because I knew that I should leave him, and felt that I couldn’t without outside help, I joined Al-Anon, a program for friends and families of alcoholics. Al-Anon taught me to stop trying to solve my boyfriend’s problems. It also taught me that paying attention to another person more than you pay attention to yourself makes you just as sick and addicted as they are. Finally, it afforded me the opportunity to become an expert in alcoholism, a disease that I obviously didn’t have, because my boyfriend was the alcoholic, not me. I got healthy enough to leave him, but not so healthy as to understand that I was no better.Even if you’ve never been to A.A., you might have heard a famous line from the Big Book: “Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful!” I had bizarre notions about my drinking, but I want to make clear to anyone who isn’t a student of the A.A. literature that my rationalizations were were pretty textbook. I thought that my drunkenness was a rare, unpleasant variation on my generally controlled drinking, and that it was just a matter of time before I figured out how to cease doing the not-fun part of drinking so that I could continue doing the fun part. Giving it up altogether was not an option; the idea of going out to dinner and not drinking seemed like going to a pool that had no water in it and just walking back and forth along the bottom instead of swimming. So there was a lot at stake in figuring out how to do it right.Meanwhile, the cultural discourse around giving up alcohol rendered me less and less likely to consider doing so. It seemed that there was a veritable crusade to make drinking seem every bit as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. The Times regularly published headlines like “Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health.” A narrative about the dangers for women, in particular, had also emerged. I have no idea whether the best-selling book “Quit Like a Woman” is any good, because I was never going to read a book with that title, especially given that Miranda drunk-ordered it and got sober in the ludicrous “And Just Like That . . .” The idea that quitting drinking could happen in a gendered way made me determined that it would happen to me in no way. I wasn’t going to be one of those women who simply chose not to drink, like Blake Lively, or the women I met at parties who drank seltzer and bragged about how great not drinking was for their skin. Instagram had invented a non-alcoholic spirit called Seedlip. No one would ever be able to force me to drink a non-alcoholic spirit called Seedlip, but if I quit alcohol someone might offer it to me, and that would be bad enough.I did read and enjoy Leslie Jamison’s excellent drinking memoir, “The Recovering,” thinking the whole time, Wow, this person drinks a lot. I could never be like this! Only later did I understand that Jamison had simply crammed into ten years all the alcohol that I had painstakingly, and with no less sickness, titrated out over thirty. The Big Book says, in its “Doctor’s Opinion,” that it is not the amount we drink but the phenomenon of our craving that makes us alcoholics. (I would bet my life that there’s a passage about this in “Quit Like a Woman”; fortunately, I will never know, and I can’t be accused of having plagiarized it.) My friend Brandon quit drinking two years ago. She had drunk the same way as me, with bouts of moderation and occasional excess, and she helped me understand the thinking behind this pattern. She described, for instance, how she would allot herself no more than half a bottle of wine at a time. Sometimes she’d just give up and drink the whole thing—an obvious sign that she had a problem—but later, in her sobriety, she understood that obsessively attempting to restrict herself was equal evidence of her addiction. “Sometimes it seemed like a better idea to drink it than to fixate on not drinking it,” she said. Either way, alcohol was the focus of all her thoughts.A half bottle of wine was my limit, too, for what I thought a sane person drank. Here is the behavior that I classified as sane: I would open a bottle. I would pour myself some wine. Then I would worry about how little liquid there appeared to be in my glass versus how much appeared to be missing from the bottle. I was shocked and enraged each time that an equal volume of wine appeared different in different containers. Sometimes I would add more to my glass, because I figured that it would make me relax and feel like I had plenty. But other times I would put less in my glass, because it seemed more reassuring to have more wine left in the bottle. When I poured subsequent glasses, I’d apply creative geometry to convince myself that I had only drunk half the bottle, because drinking more than that would mean that I was indeed an alcoholic, and that would mean that I had to quit drinking.Every week I told myself that I would have four drinks only. Every week I had fifteen or twenty or twenty-five. Sometimes I had forty. I tried, to no avail, to drink on certain days of the week and not on others. I tried to magician myself into better behavior with Reiki, acupuncture, self-hypnosis, microdosing mushrooms, macrodosing mushrooms, ditto for acid, all of which I imagined were working for a week or two, but then it was always back to hangovers. By my mid-fifties I had decided that the most mature path was to accept that I wasn’t going to quit while hoping for a miracle that would make me drink less. Sometimes, while nursing two-day hangovers, I’d write in the margins of my notebooks, “please god let something happen to make me stop.” And since I had successfully asked God—whom I probably don’t believe in, but am happy to use as a figure of speech—for certain things in the past (boyfriends, money, new Frye boots), I was quick to add, with witchy paranoia, “but don’t let it be a D.U.I.”In therapy, along with incessant, completely insincere talk of drinking less, one of my main subjects was how to be less angry, less judgmental, less paranoid, less likely to lash out when threatened. I had made poor progress in all of these areas. So in July of 2025 I did a psychedelic journey, alone with my therapist, in an Airbnb in Berkeley. I arrived at 10 A.M. and ingested large doses of MDMA and psilocybin. The hope was that when I left, sometime before dusk, I would reënter life with profound insights into my many problems, and perhaps into the human condition itself.For six or seven hours I was tripping my face off. At the lowest moments, I felt old. I looked at my wrists and they seemed frail and thin. My arms had less hair on them than they used to. What the hell? My skin looked dry and wrinkled. The fact that I was lying down made me feel like a patient instead of a cool person paying a cool therapist to watch her do drugs. I remembered when my grandmother had lived with us for a while when I was a kid. At an age when women today would still be running three miles a day and having sex, she spent hours in bed wrapped in a quilted bathrobe reading Ellery Queen and eating Pepperidge Farm toast with margarine. She started drinking at five o’clock, straight gin or rye. Lying in the Airbnb, I felt that my body was hers. I had to stand up to shake her off of me. When my grandmother got drunk she got meaner than usual, though she was mean all the time. I felt her presence running through me, the way a vein runs through a shrimp. “I don’t want her in me anymore!” I sobbed to my therapist. “Get her out of me.”Soon after, when my dead friend Joshua appeared and told me to tell our friend Juliana to finish her book, I sensed that distress was giving way to euphoria. Through the Airbnb’s enormous picture windows, I watched tufts from a disintegrating fog bank gradually morph into the exact shape of the cypress branches they floated toward. “Oh, my God, did you see that?” I asked my therapist, who just smiled and nodded, exactly as she did when I informed her that, in the grand tradition of Moses, I had been entrusted as a divine emissary, singularly capable of communicating what was wrong with the world and how it could be fixed.As I was putting on my shoes and coat, my therapist told me that I should take it easy that night. I said that I was going to a party. She broke her posture of pleasant neutrality and winced. “Try not to drink,” she said. I said that I would try, but in truth I was already picturing the cold glass of white wine that I would drink on my friend’s patio as I watched the sun sink behind the Salesforce Tower. Juliana picked me up to take me to the party.“Joshua told me to tell you to finish your book,” I said. She asked what else had happened. I told her I’d had a visitation from my grandmother’s devil spirit.“It’s inside of me,” I said, trying out the shrimp line on her, because she’s a poet.“Can you get rid of it?” she said.I might have remained a high-bottom drinker forever. But then, a few weeks after taking all those drugs, the man I’d been dating for about six months, my first serious boyfriend since the end of a twelve-year relationship, abruptly stopped speaking to me. (There’s more to it that I won’t get into, but I will say: if you’re going through a separation, and you’re dating someone who is also going through a separation, best of luck to you.) I am easily upset and often anxious, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so upset or so anxious in my life. A friend from Al-Anon, whose meetings I still attended, suggested that I stop drinking for a time, because alcohol worsens anxiety. “I’m not saying you’re an alcoholic,” she said. “But it does seem like every time I ask you to hang out, you can’t, because you’re going to a bar.”“But I’m going to the beach with a bunch of friends in, like, two weeks,” I said sniffling. “I have to drink then. I can’t go to the beach with my friends and not drink.” She assured me that I could drink at the beach as much as I wanted, and just try giving up drinking in the meantime.I was unusually susceptible to advice. A regular breakup I could have dealt with. I wouldn’t have liked it, but it’s something I could have kept drinking through. But being ghosted by my boyfriend was bad. Apparently he was crazy, which meant that I must be crazy too. I had to take action, to feel less helpless, and not drinking was something to do, so I did it for two days.On day three, a friend poured me some wine. I was glad that I hadn’t mentioned to her that I wasn’t drinking, because I wanted to drink. But the first sip felt wrong in my mouth. I was so sad that there was nothing alcohol could do for my mood. I was beyond all that. Also, I really wanted the woman who’d suggested I stop drinking to like me. I may have put the glass down in part because I am a people pleaser. I’m O.K. with that.I went to an online A.A. meeting that my friend Dylan went to, just to check it out. “But I’m not definitely saying I’m an alcoholic,” I told him.“No problem,” Dylan said.As the days passed, I started noticing a few small things. Going to bed with no alcohol in my system, no matter how heartbroken and betrayed I felt, was good. The turning off of lights, the closing of curtains, the pulling up of blankets, the loss of consciousness—each piece of the routine felt distinct, and sweet. The mornings, likewise, offered new things to look forward to: waking up with no hint of a hangover, in the early-morning darkness; my one-eyed red heeler, Ruthie, pawing me and whining for her food; the way black coffee felt when it could work on a clean body, instead of having to fight its way through the remnants of alcohol.This is harder to explain, but after maybe six or seven days of not drinking, I felt a softening in me. I was walking through the woods with Ruthie and I suddenly stopped, because I was aware of the absence of a feeling I’d had my whole life. It had something to do with acknowledging that it was a hot August day, uncomfortably hot, without moving into a state of feeling personally victimized by the heat. I had always felt that I was carrying the anger of my grandmother, which she had passed along to my mother. I had felt some force tying me to them, old and even antiquated frustrations and resentments that did not seem to be mine but felt impossible to get rid of. They were not in me anymore. That thick, ugly vein, the shrimp feeling, was gone. It was abrupt and unmistakable, like when you’re in a terrible mood and you don’t know why, until a neighbor who has been using a leaf blower turns it off, and suddenly you feel fine. It was like I had a dormant tablet of rage and fear inside of me, and alcohol made it dissolve and seep into the tissues of my body. Now, finally, I saw that the tablet could stay dormant. I never had to stare at a wine bottle, wondering how full it was, again. I never had to wake up hungover again, or hear the sound of my dumb drunk voice.“Jesus Christ,” I said out loud. I put my hands over my face. What a long nightmare I’d put myself through. That night, when I went to the online A.A. meeting, I said, “My name is Sarah and I’m an alcoholic.” In one of the little Zoom squares, I saw Dylan close his eyes, smile, and nod. Just as I’d prayed, my non-D.U.I. miracle had come.When I think of myself making the half-bottle calculations now I get physically repulsed, like I’m watching body horror. The way my thoughts exerted themselves with maximum force and insistence, but no logic, makes me picture a sharp knife carving deep paths into my brain matter. The disgusting images help me to see that both my drinking and my efforts to drink less were forms of self-abuse.The other night I walked by a restaurant patio as a waitress passed by, carrying a tray filled with maybe ten beers, in varying hues of orange and yellow, in different glasses appropriate for their respective styles. I admired their silhouette, which brought to mind a city skyline, but I was not tempted. The same collection of beer glasses revisited me in a dream that night, a dream in which I got drunk again. “Oh, no,” I said to some sober friends who were drinking with me in this dream. “What are we going to do?” Then they all shrugged, and one of them said, “We can just go back to A.A.” When I woke up, I felt so flooded with relief, and then bliss, that as I fell back asleep each breath seemed drawn from a sweet-scented vapor.I would be foolish if I didn’t think I was capable of drinking again. I have been back in A.A. long enough now to see people I couldn’t have imagined relapsing doing so. Outside of my front door, in three directions, I can find a drink within three blocks. I don’t drink mostly because I don’t want to, but who knows what event in the future might make me feel like I do. I know enough to know that should that moment ever come, I need to ask for help, because if I’m delusional enough to have drunk for so many years without accepting that I was an alcoholic then I’m delusional enough to think that I can start drinking again without inviting the same problems I had before.The last time I got really drunk was with an editor at a magazine, to celebrate the publication of a piece I had just written. We talked about so many things that night—love, sex, people we liked, people we didn’t like, one in particular whose terrible personality we dissected for two thrilling hours. We smoked a pack of cigarettes. I think I had maybe nine drinks. I don’t think I threw up, but I wish I could have. In the morning I took some Adderall, which was helpful. (I discovered Adderall in my last year of drinking: what an incredible hangover cure.) We talked on the phone afterward and agreed that our shared dog-shit state was worth it, because we’d had so much fun. I had experiences like this all the time with alcohol, and in the cost-benefit analysis that kept me drinking, one of the pros was nights like this.My drunken bonding with the editor didn’t feel fake, as some alcohol-induced connection does, but it would have been very difficult to arrange without the excuse of drinking. Imagine asking a person you barely know to have a long, intimate conversation with you. In the Big Book, there’s a phrase that begins, “with all the earnestness at our command.” Before giving up drinking, I had very little earnestness at my command. I drank in order to give myself permission to talk openly, or at great length, or to heighten the sensation of listening or being listened to. Drinking is way easier than saying that you want to talk to someone, or don’t. I learned this in my childhood home, where my parents would be downstairs at the same time for hours, absolutely silent. At six o’clock, I would hear the ice cubes, and at 6:02, the talking.Make no mistake: I often still feel very bad, because the world is terrible much of the time, even if you become sober. I live in a famously beautiful place, but the daylight hours are filled with the sounds of chainsaws and chippers, as both private citizens and government agencies fulfill mandates to clear the area of excess foliage so that when the next wildfire inevitably starts it will have less fuel. I doubt that the chainsawing will help. People are always performing tasks that allow them to pretend things are getting better, and it still hurts to watch, but I’m glad to be freed from the belief that getting drunk will make things seem less bad.I’m not against other people drinking, in my presence or otherwise. I still spend time with friends who drink. My boyfriend and I eventually got back together (long story, and, as it says in the Big Book, “God alone can judge our sex situation”), and whenever he has a few drinks I praise him for engaging in self-care. I have a divorced friend who works in tech to whom I would love to prescribe good old-fashioned bender. But if you are someone who needs alcohol then drinking is just a way of saying, to yourself and to everyone else, “I can’t deal with you.” To no one’s greater surprise than my own, I’m now earnest enough to say: I can. I do. I will. Plus, even without the psychoactive drugs, I maintain a sneaking suspicion that I’ve been anointed by God to tell everyone what is wrong with the world and how it might be fixed. If I’m drunk, my words won’t make any sense, and my voice will sound really dumb. ?