5

It's The Worst Breakup You've Ever Had

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For people with a drinking problem, alcohol can be like a loving, supportive partner with a major dealbreaker. It's there with you every step of the way. It goes with you to parties, celebrates your victories, comforts you during heartaches, and also sometimes poops in the shower.

Having a problem with alcohol doesn't have to mean you're throwing plates at your cowering wife; it can manifest as just really, really, really loving alcohol, to the point where you're not quite sure how you'd get on without it. That's how it was for me. I didn't want to be one of those weird sober people. I was so afraid of being "single" that I stayed in a shitty "relationship." And honestly, it could have gotten much worse for me. And who knows, it could still get worse. We could get back together. But I didn't want to get married.

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Mazel tov, you two!

I found ways to incorporate it into the parts on my life I already liked: hanging out with friends, doing shows, going to the movies, having writer's meetings, writing at home by myself, peeing at work, walking somewhere, sitting, breathing, living. There really needs to be an out-of-office canned response that says, "I'm currently away from my desk until whenever I figure out how to be a person without four Narragansetts each night at minimum."

4

Your Skin Transforms

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Here's a pretty good rule of thumb: If someone looks like they're at least 10 years younger than they are, chances are good that they're a teetotaler.

I met a woman after a show who looked to be about my age (a hard 28). She mentioned that she was still dealing with weird dating apps at 42. I immediately knew she was sober. She later mentioned that she hadn't had a drink in almost a decade. Am I a mentalist? Yes, but also, it's usually the case that fresh faces are sober faces.

There's no mystery about whether or not drinking is good for your skin. It dilates your blood vessels, making you look like a red-faced cartoon drunk. It saps moisture, causing wrinkles and loss of elasticity. It bloats you (seriously, all those Mad Men guys were way too fresh-faced for how much brown liquor they drank before noon). It's a carcinogen and can make you more sensitive to sunlight, so you'd better get those moles checked. Plus, if you're flopping into bed trashed most nights, chances are you're not washing your face.

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Vomit isn't a great moisturizer.

After just two weeks off the sauce (the alcohol sauce!), I noticed that my skin looked way brighter. Even the whites of my eyes were whiter. Part of this was because three weeks back, I had thrown up so badly that I burst blood vessels all over my face and in both eyes, making me look like a jaundiced, bloody-eyed hellbeast for my cousin's wedding, and it was starting to finally clear up. This was a part of my not-Hollywood rock bottom: having to explain why my eyeballs were bloody to every member of my family in a house of worship. And goddammit, Uber charges you an $80 cleaning fee even if you throw up out of the car.

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"M'lady, you need to get the fuck out of m'car."

3

People Get Weirded Out

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I was out to dinner recently with people I didn't know that well, and I ordered the nonalcoholic version of a drink. I considered mentioning I was sober so that no one assumed I was pregnant (you'll have to catch me with my back turned, fetuses!), but I realized in that moment how ridiculously personal an admission that would be. It would have been like saying, "Hey y'all, I'm broken on the inside. I come from bad stock and my genes are trash. I'm gonna get my sticky fingers on your wallet! I sleep in the sewer! I'm a lil' raccoon! Hissss!"

Y'know, or something.

The point is, literally nobody besides sober people are happy to hear someone say they're sober. It's like outing yourself as mentally ill, or kinky, or some other hella personal thing that isn't polite to talk about at social gatherings. You don't poop with the door open at book club, so why explain why you're skipping a glass of wine?

Here's why: Everyone has a fucking opinion.

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"Hey good for you! HAVE YOU CONSIDERED ADDING A NIACIN SUPPLEMENT? I HEARD ABOUT IT ON NPR!" -- Your friend Dan who drinks two Michelob Ultras a week.

Either they worry you won't be fun anymore, or they have a factoid about why AA is the ONLY way to get sober, or they start to think you're some sort of seer who can divine whether or not they have a drinking problem and they shrink away from your touch. No matter what, most people respond to "I actually don't drink" the same way they would to "Have you heard the good news?" If they're also in that crowd, they're down to talk. If not, then move along, Jesus freak! People are trying to have fun over here!

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Speaking of a Higher Power ...

2

There Are Secret Rules For Women

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People who've never dipped their toes into non-alcoholic waters probably have no clue how different the rules are for sobriety depending on your gender. Lots of women get sober for reasons that aren't really talked about in the general conversation about sobriety.

First off, I had no idea how many sober women had antidepressants contribute to their worst and final drinking days. Lots of medications interact with booze, but SSRIs can actually lower your tolerance to alcohol and get you drunker faster. They also open you up to blacking out, which women are already at a higher risk for. Plus, your antidepressants can't make you any less depressed if you're ingesting large amounts of depressants every day. That's just science.

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No, your doctor didn't give you placebos. Quit drinking.

A huge open secret is that longtime sober dudes love newly sober women. This behavior is so prevalent that its practitioners even have a fun name: "13th steppers." They range from straight-up predators who specifically target women who don't know up from down to run-of-the-mill gray-area creeps who try to hook up with, influence, silence, shame, and intimidate other women in their groups. And a lot of the women are in a vulnerable state and attach heightened significance to the men they meet in the program, making the resulting relationships pretty rocky and ill-fated. It's a big mess, and as with lots of heterosexual big-mess relationships, the women are the ones who get shunted aside when it's all over.

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And guess what society tells you to turn to when that happens?

1

There Is No "Rock Bottom"

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Good news: Your life doesn't have to be a total nightmare for you to quit drinking.

Whether it's the residual cultural effects of the Temperance Movement's fearmongering or the stuff you sort of remember from that episode of Intervention, lots of people have this idea that you cannot stop drinking or using unless you're in a heap in the gutter. If you're not clutching a jug with three X's on it, you're simply not eligible. It's like a screwed-up deductible you have to meet, but instead of money it's blackouts, and instead of co-pays it's meetings in church basements. If you're not the bath salts homeless dude eating someone's face (or at least the other homeless dude getting his face eaten off), you're not there yet.

Thankfully, this is bullshit.

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Well, that deescalated quickly.

There's no scientific evidence that addicts must hit a Hollywood rock bottom in order to start the recovery process. In fact, most people do better when they start a little earlier than total failure, since they still have some sort of network to support them through the process.

Like any other significant life change that affects your daily routine, it does take some solid stakes in order to make it stick. There has to be an un-fun reason to not do the fun thing. In that way, yeah, you have to hit a point where the pros no longer outweigh the cons.

You can make up your own mind about what you think about all this. It's not a very objective field. But what I've heard, and what makes sense to me, is that everyone has their own bottom based on who they are. For some people, it's contracting that heart infection heroin addicts get from using dirty needles, or getting arrested for trying to fight a bouncer twice their size, or driving drunk with their kids in the car. For me, it was throwing up out of a black Toyota Camry on the BQE and missing my best friend's birthday. Much less marketable, but it was the moment I realized that alcohol was making my life harder. One person's bottom could be another person's top. You know, like a Human Centipede.

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"Somebody get me a fucking Uber! I gotta get to an improv show!"

It's easy to believe that there's a born-and-bred difference between "afflicted booze hounds who need serious help" and "people who love the stuffin' out of drinking," but it turns out that line is much fuzzier than you think. The only difference between people who stop drinking and people who drink is that the people who stopped drinking stopped drinking.

The biggest sign that you should stop? If stopping makes everything feel different. If not, cheers! Keep walking!