Why I Quit Drinking

I awoke in a sweat. The space beyond the window blinds appears to be as dark as my bedroom. As I roll onto my right side toward my nightstand I sense the heaviness of my left arm. I’ve fallen asleep with it draped over my pillow, around my head yet again and it’s gone terrifyingly numb. Shooting, tingling pain sprints from my fingertips to my shoulder as I force the arm off the pillow and down to my left side.

Awkwardly, I manage to roll so that I am slightly on my back again and use my right hand to grab my phone so I can check the time.

3:12 am. Great.

This is the fifth night in a row that I’ve woken up around 3 in the morning. As my body continues to become alert, and my head begins to throb, I quickly open my phone and navigate to the clock app. As I suspected, I hadn’t set my alarm for work so I toggle the switch next to 8:15 am to ‘on.’

A dizzying wave of heat surges through me. Forcing my body out of bed, I take five hurried steps to the bathroom, shut the door, and before I can finish kneeling I am vomiting into the toilet.

A muffled “you okay?” comes from the bed on the other side of the door. Why must he always wake up when this happens?

“Yeah, fine.” I reply weakly.

Wiping my mouth with some toilet paper, I sit beside the toilet, back against the wall, and await the next wave. With every second that passes my head throbs more forcefully. It seems, for now, that there is no more puke on its way so I stand up at the counter, rinse out my mouth and flush the toilet.

As I return to bed I grab the Tylenol PM bottle from my nightstand and remove two pills. Did I already take these? I can’t remember if I took any already because I can’t remember actually coming to bed. I decided to put one pill back just in case. With a small swig of water, I take the pill and crawl back into bed.

Upon learning of my sobriety, many people ask how I knew that I had a problem or what was the thing that made me decide to quit drinking. The truth is, of course, that there were a number of reasons I decided to quit.

Like everything else in life, my decision to be sober is multi-faceted and complex.

Sure, there was plenty of evidence that my drinking was, and had been, out of control. Weeknight happy hours nearly always turned into 4–5 glasses of wine, midnight vomiting, and the kind of hangover that can’t be remedied by any amount of coffee, greasy food, or meds. Bottles of wine bought with the intention of lasting a couple of nights were finished in a couple of hours. Casual dinners with friends or movie dates with my husband ended prematurely by the abrupt curtain drop of a blackout.

What I always come back to, though, are the 3 am wake-ups. Whether or not it had been a big drinking night, I found myself abruptly awake every night around 3 am for months leading up to my decision to quit drinking. Sweaty and panicked, I’d lie there for an hour or two, sometimes more, incapable of slowing down my racing brain.

Even when my thoughts weren’t occupied with alcohol-laced regret, all of my anxieties keeping me from falling back asleep could be traced back to the time, passions, hobbies, and peace that alcohol was taking from me.

So, truly, there wasn’t one defining moment, a singular “rock bottom”, that pushed me to quit. It was the amalgamation of numerous indicators.

It was…

- Fighting with my husband and not remembering anything I said the next day

- Vowing to cut back or refrain from drinking entirely a couple of nights a week and never following through

- Spending every sunny day, every holiday, every weekend night, every date night, every rainy day, every single day and night, period, drinking

- Years of worsening anxiety and depression

- Hundreds, maybe thousands, of regret-laden conversations that I half remember

- Sobbing every time I blacked out because it was the only time I would allow myself to feel deeply

- Nearly cheating on my husband on numerous occasions

- Failing at friendships with people who didn’t drink much or at all

- Spending too much time and energy on friendships based solely on drinking

It was many little things and just as many big things. It was the constant fear that the next time I drank I’d ruin my life — blow things up with a single act that I wouldn’t recall the next day. It was the conversations loved ones had with me the next morning explaining how I’d hurt their feelings. It was the conversations loved ones had with me the next morning inquiring about why I seem so hurt.

One of the most important things I’ve learned through reading and listening to others’ stories about what motivated them to quit is that no person’s reason is exactly the same but nearly everyone’s process of fretting and wondering is.

So many of the stories I have engaged with include weeks, months, or years of debating whether they have a proper problem or if they just need to ‘cut back a little.’ So many share in my 3 am wake-ups, the mornings spent hunched over a toilet reasoning that this is what ‘young and fun’ looks like, the evenings spent crying over or yelling at or fucking people who don’t deserve an iota of your energy.

What this tells me is that, like me, so many of us who have quit or are thinking about quitting know in our souls that we are no longer in control long before we decide to take the leap.

The morning after I decided to quit I woke up hungover. Not the kind of hangover that has me leaning against the bathroom wall willing the world to stop spinning — more like the kind that demands an egg and bagel sandwich delivered straight to my nightstand. I laid in bed and knew deep within me that this was the last time I’d ever experience this feeling.

Then, I downloaded the “I am sober” app and made my first sober pledge. When filling out my profile, I was prompted to write why I was quitting and so I wrote three truths that had been trying to breakthrough for years:

“I don’t like who I am when I drink. I don’t feel like I have control over how much I drink. I’m no longer having fun.”