I’ve crossed an interesting line in my life this month: I’ve been sober for five years. I hadn’t planned on making it a permanent choice at the time…but it still felt different from all the other anguished attempts at pouring alcohol into my sink or promising myself (or my deity) that I’d get better. Boring as it sounds, in the end, I quit drinking for my health.
Physically, alcohol was giving me acid reflux–not fun–and the harder the drink (say, Knob Creek Single Barrel), the worse the upset. Ever feel like Darth Vader was gripping your throat from a distance? That was sort of how it felt in my esophagus at that time. My weight and blood pressure were also up, which also were not good things.
On a functional basis, alcohol reduced my effectiveness as a writer, editor, employee, and person. I forgot or overlooked things I shouldn’t have, from paragraphs to appointments. Plus, no one edits well on a hangover, not even Hemingway. And I was at an age where I realized driving under the influence when you’re only a C- driver to begin with was a time bomb waiting to explode.
Finally, on an emotional level, alcohol was killing me. I went to Australia and New Zealand as my present to myself for lasting 50 years. I was in one of the most beautiful places on Earth–even the friggin’ farms are beautiful in New Zealand!–and my moods were a dark shade of blue. I was seeing a therapist going into 2020, and she asked me a question I’d forgotten I knew the answer to: “You know alcohol is a depressant, right?” Indeed, I had forgotten. So while I was drinking to pound flat any bad feelings about my self-esteem, my sporadic dating life, or my general worth as a human being, I also was making the feelings worse by trying to “forget them” by blanking the memory with booze.
Alcohol also tended to make me more emotionally unstable. I thought for years that I might be manic depressive (what’s now called bipolar disorder). It took a while to get used to not having the crutch there, and it also took my body a while to get used to having a restful sleep, but my moods smoothed out, bit by bit.
More importantly, quitting drinking as a lifestyle forced me to face all my ugly little thoughts and feelings straight, no chaser. I had to read a lot more philosophy, have a lot more honest conversations with myself in my journal, and generally try to think like an adult who suddenly has more money and time on his hands than he knows what to do with–and drinking can take up a lot of both.
In the years since I made that random, fateful decision, I’ve found alcohol substitutes: low- or no-alcohol beers and mocktails, for example. I can tell if something has more than 0.5% now because my stomach and brain remind me, so I’m stuck with low-octane beverages. More importantly, I don’t use drinking the beverages as an event unto themselves (as my father once put it to me and my sister when we were young’uns, “We’re going out to do some serious drinking”). Curiously enough, I’m better about setting limits for myself with nonalcoholic drinks than I ever was with the real stuff. I suppose that’s because my body and mind remember what being drunk feels like, and they don’t like that anymore. I’ve had dreams about relapsing occasionally, and they frighten me.
So there it is: Sober Bart has a different life now, one with a wife who has never seen me drunk–something I’d never considered, honestly–house, dogs, and a responsible life outside of work. “But you were never that much of a drinker!” I’ve heard friends say. Maybe as far as they know. A guy I know third-hand died recently from his well-hidden alcoholism, and he was a week older than me, so I got a reminder that a well-hidden drunk is still a drunk. The point is that I knew I had a problem even if others didn’t. I finally stopped myself one random day in January, before COVID, Trump 2.0, and all the rest of the 2020s excitement, but it was worth it.
The Real Bart Leahy 