Is This Finally When I Stop Being A Drunk?
I'm on a seven-week-or-so sober stretch, and the plan is onward and upward.
I’ve had mid-size to long-ish runs of sobriety before, probably with the longest one being 10–11 months, but my ultimate goal is to keep it up. I guess there’s a part of me that wants, at 50 (I’m currently 43), to go to a bar and have one beer and watch college football. I am not there yet. Right now, zero is the best play.
I have a very long and ratchet history with drinking, including day drinking by myself, and while I’ll spare you all the things I’ve written about drinking over time, this one kinda gives you a summary.
I wrote that during a stretch of sobriety last year that I think I eventually got to 90 days. I fell off a little bit, and then started drinking semi-consistently by July or August of 2023. This one feels different, but I just need to push it day-to-day.
How I Got Here
I won’t go back all the way, but I’ll go back a few weeks. Sometime in maybe mid-July, I went to a third birthday party. Drank some boxed wine with the brother of the expectant mother. Came back to my area, went to a bar with him, and then went home. My wife was pissed at me, as she had been at a yoga seminar during that time. We got in a fight, and I took my e-bike and biked to a brewery, had two beers, and bought a four-pack. Not the best night. Also from that night: a neighbor of mine had recently announced she was pregnant (“the blessed event”). If you’ve read any of my shit, you know that my wife and I go through infertility, and I would bet $100 that spending most of my 30s drowning myself in IPAs didn’t help my swimmers, ya know? So I get triggered by the pregnancy announcements, and this night in question, I sent that girl two or three weird texts that, looking back, make no sense at all.
Alright, so I should have taken a pause then. Instead, the next Wednesday, I went to a bar near my house during the day. I had this newsletter-editing job and there was 2–3 hour period mid-day where you were basically just waiting for people to back-edit you, so I went and had some beers. I weirdly have a Portland Trail Blazers phone case right now (never lived there), and the guy next to me was from Portland, so we struck up a conversation and he actually paid my tab.
As I biked home, into my neighborhood, it was the day people put their cans out (recycling and trash). I swerved to avoid a divot in the street and crashed into someone’s recycling bin. I have a scrape on my ankle, and my bike was grinding to ride. I made it home, but again, not the best story.
Should have stopped again.
Instead, I took a week off, and the next Wednesday, I met my friend for some beers around 12pm. This time, as I was leaving the bar on my bike, I saw a mom on her phone, with her kid in a toy car on the Trinity Trails. I swerved to avoid that and bit it. My right leg was all messed up and bleeding. Had to call my wife to come pick up me and my bike.
So, that’s when I’ve stopped. Haven’t drank since then.
What else happened?
I got laid off from a job right before that second Wednesday story, but thankfully, I found another job within about 3–4 weeks. I’m there now. It seems to be going well. Being sober definitely helps with professional focus. That shouldn’t seem like a big revelation, but believe me, it is for some people.
How does this time feel?
Just a little bit more focused. Like I have more ability to achieve this. I have even gone to some AA meetings in this arc. I hadn’t really done that before.
I still have a lot of self-doubt and self-esteem issues, especially around the fertility stuff and “not giving my wife what she wants.” I look around and see a lot of derpy-type guys giving their wife 2–3 kids (“giving” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, I know), and it saddens me. I feel deficient. However, I also don’t think having 10 beers and crashing my $1800 e-bike into a recycling bin is the best way to escape that specific problem. So, I’m just going day-to-day.
Now, in college I had this group of friends who were pretty good to excellent guys. We graduated in 2003, and even in 2018 and 2019, we got to take some guy trips. So, I got 15–16 years out of that dynamic, which is a “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” situation. That group started to erode over Trump, politics, COVID, distance, and age of kids (some older, some infants, etc.) around 2020.
In 2020, I didn’t drink that much, in part because bars were closed for five months of that year, but in 2021 I did, and in pockets of 2022 I did. I am sure I alienated some of those friendships with weird texts or whatever during that time. I lost a bunch of friends in 2017 because I got divorced (ironically, you can argue the divorce was also deeply tied to drinking). So, all-in, I’ve probably lost 75% of my early adulthood friends due to drinking + a few other factors I couldn't control.
It makes me sad, but I also think parts of that are normative for many.
What I’d like to do better controlling is my side of it. That’s a goal for me right now.
I did send emails to some of those guys apologizing for anything I might have done, and I never heard back. I suppose that says something about both me and them, ya know? I try not to dwell on it.
This kid I’m about to mention was not in my college group, but I met him later in NYC because he was dating (and later married) the freshman year college roommate of my ex-wife. The kid is a big Bills fan. Even after the 2017 divorce, we would text or email sometimes about generalized bullshit, COVID, politics, and the Bills. I do remember one day in 2021, I was sitting at a bar in Fort Worth called Rogers Roundhouse (dropped a dime or two in there in my day) and me and this kid were texting about the Bills. I was on about beer number five. I think I said something untoward or off-task about how his wife had treated me post-divorce, which is a stupid-as-fuck comment from me, because why would a woman who is friends with another woman take the side of the man that the woman divorced? Anyway, this text conversation goes deeply sideways, and I go from beer 5 to beer 8 or whatever. Hurtfully, within the text, this kid tells me “We were never that close anyway; you imagined that." It’s like, bro, we talked for four years after I got divorced from the root of how we even know each other. I go from probably beer 8 to beer 10.
Beer is a depressant, and also can make ya angry as shit, so by now I’m firing off ridiculous shit that makes no sense and is probably designed just to get a reaction. Well, as you could predict, me and that kid have never spoken since that day. In weaker moments, I’ll check on their son on Facebook or something. He appears to like sledding.
But that's what I mean — I slugged 10 beers, and I basically put the hatchet into something that could have been a serviceable male text thread about sports periodically. Nothing major; I doubt I would have ever seen that kid in-person again (his wife would have blocked it), but it could have been a way to pass the time on a Monday when bored. I butchered it. Probably butchered some of those college dynamics too.
So that’s what I’m after right now — just relational stability and not having huge bloody gashes on my right leg.
Wish me luck.