I stopped drinking in late 2018, the part of the year that leans toward Thanksgiving and the downhill cascade of holidays that follow it. I wasn’t dealing with an addiction, exactly, and therefore my experience of quitting alcohol was much easier than it is for many people: I didn’t like how alcohol made me feel anymore, and I was no longer getting any enjoyment from it to counterbalance its negative effects in my life. In short, I didn’t like drinking, so I stopped doing it. For this reason, I try to say that I stopped or quit drinking rather than that I got sober, to make a clear differentiation between the relatively straightforward process of letting go of a bad habit, and the far thornier and often lifelong struggle of a recovering alcoholic.
The truth is that I rarely miss drinking, and when I do, it’s occasion-based and never actually about the booze itself. There are certain events—almost always a celebration of some kind, whether an official holiday or just the festive exhale on a Friday afternoon at the end of a long week—that make me wish for the gesture of a drink, without the actual drink itself. Thanksgiving has been one of the times when I have had to work the hardest to re-create that gesture, underlining the holiday aspect of a holiday through other means.
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