Three years ago tonight I had my last cocktail (sober anniversary post to come tomorrow). That last cocktail had been several months, perhaps years, in the making, and while I knew it would eventually arrive, I just wasn’t exactly sure when. My mind and my body had been whispering for some time that it was enough, that they weren’t getting the protection and joy they once did from alcohol, that they couldn’t properly defeat the demons with liquor getting in the way. In my head, I understood all of that. It made sense and sounded like reason, but fear has a way of overriding sense and reason, and back then I was simply too afraid to go out there alone, without a cocktail.
It wasn’t that last night of drinking that did it. It wasn’t that last hangover. It was the culmination of all the hangovers that had come before, in the stark light of the next day. At those times I would be filled with the dread and depression of having flushed my body with alcohol, of altering my brain and bending my perception to the point where I didn’t remember things or know what I was saying. The cumulative effect of those mornings eventually clicked over to being something I didn’t want to do anymore. I’d had enough.
Those hangover mornings felt haunted. The quiet felt more quiet, the gray light felt more gray. The world took on a somber aspect, and I always felt more alone than ever. It makes sense when one considers the basic fact that alcohol is a depressant. I remember on one such day sitting at a cafe and watching people walk by, wishing I could have been more like them, wishing I didn’t have to get drunk the night before to handle whatever social situation was worrying me. Everyone else seemed to go through the day so much easier than me. I didn’t realize how much drinking played a part in those thoughts, how it all fed into a slow, downward slope whose ending I dreaded as much as I wanted to watch it play out.
Was I having fun on the night of October 26, 2019? A little. Not very much though, if I’m being completely honest. Drinking had ceased being fun for a while, and it was verging on simply being a habit. It was time…
