Celebrating Three Years of Sobriety

Thursday, June 6, 2024 • 7 min read

I passed my third anniversary of giving up alcohol today. I thought I would share some background on this milestone and why I decided to stop drinking.

I have a long history with alcohol.  Maybe it’s the genetics mapped deep in my Irish blood or an inheritance from longstanding tradition, but alcoholism runs in the family, near and far. I can’t think of a time in my life that wasn’t steeped in the rituals of drinking. 

I met the love of my life in a dive bar. Most of my proudest accomplishments and favorite moments were punctuated with a celebration beer or glass of wine. An early love of Hemingway surely contributed to an interweaving of my very identity with alcohol. If I closed my eyes and pictured my true self in my natural element, it was cozied up to a dimly lit bar with a whiskey on the rocks in a brown, brown study.

I was never what you’d call a problem drinker. I never hit that proverbial rock bottom. But I saw in myself the potential to become one. Retiring early brings many joys, but it also provides the means and opportunity to easily tip over into alcoholism. I left my profession for a pirate’s life of boats and docks and drinking buddies, which, in hindsight, feels like a trifecta of trouble for the would-be alcoholic. I think many people enjoy time on the water as an excuse to drink with friends. I know I surely did.

Over a stretch of twenty-five years, I gave up drinking an astonishing twenty-two times. I know this because of an obsessive need to keep track of my life through a daily journal.

When I gave up alcohol on this day three years ago, I looked through these old journals for clues. I analyzed the data and found troubling patterns — empirical evidence my logical, fact-based mind could not refute.

I discovered that most attempts lasted a week or less. On four occasions, I managed more than a month without drinking—the longest, six months. I often complained of headaches and insomnia in the first few days. After two weeks, I slept better and had more energy. On longer stretches of sobriety, I lost weight, my blood pressure improved, and I felt more optimistic.

I asked myself, as I flipped through those scribbled snapshots of my past, why in the world did I ever start drinking again?

Here’s what happened, time after time after time: I enjoyed such a rebound in health and outlook that I considered myself “cured.” There’s a name for this in sobriety literature: the Pink Cloud. Feeling so good, I couldn’t possibly be addicted to alcohol any longer, so I concluded it was perfectly fine to drink again, just in moderation like everyone else. After all, who would want to quit the stuff forever?

As you might have guessed, the dabbling soon turned to the occasional few too many until I eventually returned to my old ways. I gained weight, slept poorly, and fibbed about my alcohol consumption on medical questionnaires.

It took reading this boom-and-bust history in my own words, repeated and repeated and repeated, to fully comprehend the situation. Self-knowledge is a real-life superpower. My journals delivered a message that I could not have accepted so completely any other way.

For most people, controlling alcohol consumption is natural and easy. For others, it’s more complicated. My journals taught me the hard truth that I’m one of those rare cases where moderation simply doesn’t work.

I was still hoping for a third door: another option besides door number one (drinking) and door number two (sobriety). I simply could not fathom that there wasn’t a fucking third door.

— We Are the Luckiest by Laura Mckowen

The thing is, I now know remaining a non-drinker is essential to my health and happiness. At 59, I’m back to my college weight and waist size. I have more energy than I had at 49 and sometimes even 39. I feel very comfortable in my own skin.

Yet my journals have ground into me an inescapable truth: I am not cured. I cannot dabble. I cannot drink even one single beer. I must remain vigilant, which, even after three years, isn’t always easy.

After all, there is a lot of encouragement in our society to drink alcohol. Drinking, plans for drinking, casual references to drinking, jokes about drinking, memes about drinking, and advertisements for drinking are everywhere. Being a non-drinker, at least in my experience, runs against the very grain of societal norms. Alcohol, which is responsible for more deaths each year than cocaine, heroin, and meth combined, is the only drug you have to explain not using.

We sold the boat last year and now live in a 55+ retirement community in Arizona. We’ve made dear, dear friends, all of whom drink. Like boaters, young retirees do like to tip back a pint or two. Sometimes, it feels like we’re all back at college, only this time with nice houses and money. I pack along a little cooler of non-alcoholic beer to parties, though you’ll see me slip away early. A room is never drunker than when you're the only sober person.

I’ve never gone to an AA meeting, though sometimes I think it would be nice to have even one sober friend who understands my reluctance to hang out when alcohol is flowing so freely. I’m not the most social person, so introducing one more mental barrier to attending these get-togethers isn’t helpful.

A few months back, I smoked some pot at one of these parties to try to enjoy myself more. The last time must have been thirty years ago. As it hit me, I felt that familiar glossy curtain sway between me and my surroundings, that muting of the sharp and bright realities of life. With alcohol, I enjoyed that pleasant release. But, as I sat there with my lungs burning and my mind not entirely my own, I felt uneasy and, well, drugged.

With addiction, there’s always something deeper that keeps you drinking from the poisoned well. The legendary Joe Louis once said of a wily opponent, “he can run, but he can’t hide.” It can be difficult to look too closely at the harder parts of life, the miseries so interlinked with the joys, the seeming pointlessness and terrors of existence. Alcohol hides all that away for a time, but it’s a cop-out. These are the things we all need to face. We can’t run. We can’t hide.

No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me.

— Your Bright Baby Blues by Jackson Browne

When my son was killed in a motorcycle accident almost two years ago, I was desperate for anything that could soften the pain I felt. If I were still drinking, it would have been an easy thing to drown myself in alcohol. Maybe it’s a small blessing that I had a year of sobriety to weather that awful storm. But, if anything, my resolve now is stronger. Connor told me in the last year of his life that he was proud of me for not drinking. My eyes well up with tears as I remember this. How could I even think of tarnishing that memory?

Lisa, the same love of my life this young accountant met playing pool in a bar so long ago, who’s stuck with me for twenty-eight years and drinks so sporadically that I hardly even notice, has been a huge supporter of my sobriety. The following morning, she asked me what I thought of smoking pot. She was a little worried it might have triggered something and cause me to fall off the wagon.

“I didn’t like it. It felt a little too much like being buzzed from alcohol,” I said over coffee. “It feels weird to say it, but I just like being me.”

She smiled and said, “Darlin’, me too.”