My drinking sort of petered out.
During hot COVID, I stopped drinking. The world was lurching out of orbit and I took the reins on anything and everything I could. So while lots of my friends and colleagues were enjoying a glass of wine, or leaning on it to dull the edges of all the chaos, during my lockdown, I socially distanced from alcohol.
It was the right move, at the time, because I was very depressed and anxious, and alcohol amplifies those feelings for me. Then restrictions eased up, and I eased up, and the occasional glass of wine or whatever came back into casual circulation.
But over the last eighteen months or so, I’ve pulled almost all the way back from drinking alcohol again, going from 15-ish drinks per year down to like four. (Filling out the questionnaires during doctor visits is always awkward, because I don’t drink daily, or weekly. It’s a very sporadic decision, sometimes drinking twice in one week and then going months without any alcohol. “Drinks per year” wasn’t a menu drop down option anywhere.) The decision to cull out alcohol wasn’t a conscious one and I’ve been lucky to never have an addiction to alcohol, or a social dependency on it, or anything like that. I didn’t drink much before, but now I don’t drink much at all.
When it comes up in conversation, the responses vary.
“Oh, did you have a bad experience?” Didn’t have a bad experience.
“Are you in recovery?” I’m not in recovery.
“Was it hard to stop?” It wasn’t hard, and I didn’t aim to stop. Just ended up petering1 out.
”Is it because you have diabetes?” No, but that’s always been a factor in my lifelong decision to not drink much on the whole.
“What do you do when you go out?” I drink a lot of coffee, or tea, or diet soda.
“If I drink in front of you, will it make you feel bad?” Nope – will it make you feel bad when I’m hopped up on diet soda?
Sometimes I feel like the odd man out. Have a glass of wine with dinner. Going to a friend’s house? Let’s make cocktails! PTO meetings take place at vineyards and breweries. It’s part of the culture that surrounds me. I even find myself writing a glass of wine or a cocktail into the stories I’m drafting.
I don’t care/mind/notice when other people drink. Over the last year, I think I’ve had two or three drinks myself. The tapering was accidental.
I even felt weird about saying I’d drifted away from a desire for alcohol, mostly because it sounds really high-horsish and judgey and pinkie-stuck-out-for-effect-whilst-drinking-tea-damn-it, but it’s just what’s going on here, for better or for worse. I still scroll on my phone too much. I still leave laundry in giant piles on my bed that I mean to fold and put away but usually end up scooping it back into the laundry basket and trying to do it the next day … or the next one … and on and frigging on. I still have 30 open tabs on this browser (and probably another dozen on a shrunken browser). I still wait three weeks to make a three minute phone call. Very much still WTF’ing over here.
But as the world becomes more perplexing and uncontrolled, those feelings of wanting to control what I can become more prominent. I need to stay as stable as possible, as focused as possible, in order to be as effective as I can in all ways: as a creative, as a parent, as a partner, as a person with a chronic illness, all the et ceteras. If this is one more place where control freak monsters rear their heads, that’s okay. I have plenty of other type A tendencies we can talk about, but before we get into it, would you please take your shoes off when you come in my house, avoid making eye contact with the hamster, and would you mind only using words that start with vowels when standing on the kitchen tiles? Thank you very much.
