#11 Q: Do You Miss Drinking?
A: Yes and No
Dear Holly,
I listen to your book on the way home from work (veterinarian, fucking stressful) to arm me for the triggers I face when I get home (two kids, husband, etc.) I've tried stopping. I took 27 days off and felt amazing. I feel like shit now. I don't want to miss out on the celebrations—vacations, birthdays, etc. I just want to know: Do you get to a point where that doesn't even matter? As in…you don't even consider or think about taking a sip?
Yours, Can't Imagine
Dear Can't,
As you were writing me this message, I was sitting down to a late lunch in Italy. The weather was warm, it was a Sunday afternoon and there were hundreds of people sitting outside of ten different restaurants all lined up along an old Campanian road. Kids ran around and waiters doted and every single table was bursting with food and wine.
An extremely attractive waiter came up to me and asked if I spoke French or Italian or English and I presumed he spoke all three which made him even more attractive; I said parlo inglese. He pulled out my chair and came back with two sips worth of pale yellow wine in a large stemmed glass and he made the kind of eyes at me that definitely indicated he wanted to talk to me about wine and probably wanted to get me lit. If you would in your mind, please: freeze time here, because that's what I did.
He’s there, he’s making the eyes, he’s got the glass of white and he wants to tell you about it; you’re lonely; this is a trap. Next month it will be nine years since my last drink and yesterday was the 3,255th day in a row I've spent not drunk or even tipsy or even experiencing that warm tight feeling you get at the back of your neck when you've had one little sip. I had the passing thought that it didn't matter, that I could just take that wine and drink it and be in this moment and live a little. Like: I actually considered it, and in this extremely short period of time—barely seconds—I had the very real thought that I could get away with it, that I could probably just have those two sips and never have them again in my life that this would be it. Maybe I was being so ridiculous with this whole forever abstinence thing especially since WW3 is upon us and we're still in an endless pandemic and there are now such things as fire tornadoes. I could just so easily do it.
I don't know why I didn't yield in that moment, why I said no bevo alcol and ordered a soda instead. But I do know what it cost me; I drank my diet coke alone while he moved to another table where the women wanted to talk about wine and try the wine and have all the wine and probably him after. I inhaled my beef and truffles and I read my book in the sun and then I went back to my hotel, alone and completely sober, where I read my book s'more.
I've been mostly single these past 9 sober years, and every time I come to Italy I get horny and achingly, desperately lonely. Without fail I treat this feeling as total truth, and almost without fail I act on it. I could tell you all the small embarrassing ways I've scratched this specific itch with someone else's heart or corporeality, but I'll spare you. The absolute worst thing I've ever done was In 2019, when I broke up with someone because I didn't want him to come here with me and then got back together with him on the phone only five days into my trip. I assured him it was a genuine desire, not the careless impulse of a woman who gets sad and delusional when she travels. I didn't mean to lie, but I lied, and we broke up for good not long after.
The last few days I've missed that same ex again, acting in the strange ways we act when all the sudden a person we rationally understand we are over becomes appealing, or even the best thing we ever had. I skimmed through his Instagram, I looked at old pictures of us, I found his now deleted phone number buried in an email. I could just so easily do it.
Last night talking on the phone to one of my friends I tell her I miss him, am thinking about him, fantasizing about him. He’d probably come here. She reminds me that I called her and said (word-for-word!) the exact same thing last May when I was here. I don't remember that at all so I ask her if she's sure and she's sure. "You want him when you're in Italy. It's a thing." Indeed.
It's a thing. A thing I do because I'm alone in a beautiful location and there are families everywhere and it makes me ache for something; want for something. And instead of sitting with that longing—that terrible but totally wonderful ache that also happens to make me love being alive (to feel so much!!)—I reach for my phone and scroll through his socials and miss a relationship that never actually existed. (What did exist: we left each other totally empty; we hurt each other badly; we could not make it work for an entire week let alone a lifetime.)
I thought about this thing I've done for nearly a decade, this whole coming to Italy and getting all love-obsessed and thinking my life would be better if I had my person. How much time have I wasted here wanting what I don't have instead of being obsessed and delighted with what's in front of me? And how many seriously bad, rash decisions have I made that I later regret because of this totally false belief?
I suppose the point I'm making is this: let's pretend you're one of my closest friends. Let's pretend I call you and I say I want to have kids and I am thinking about Troy (let’s call him Troy) or whoever again who you know is like the worst thing for me. What do you say?
Do you tell me to just call him for the four-hundredth time because this time it might work out differently, or that my fantasy of him might solve all that inner bullshit I'm totally running from? That it's worth settling for something I have concluded time and time again I absolutely don't want because in this moment I’m sad or empty or nostalgic? Probably not. You probably say something like, Bitch you're being crazy. It will pass. Go look at the Tiber. Go eat a gelato. Not being with him is a good choice that will open other doors; don't run back to that bullshit. You made the right choice to put him down the first time. (And the second, third, fourth, fifth, and twentieth times.)
Well. If you call me in ten years and you’re waxing poetic about a thing you literally just told me makes you hate yourself because you’re at a celebration or on a vacation and you miss it, I’m gonna tell you you’re being delusional. I’m gonna tell you it will pass, that this was a good choice that will open other doors; to not run back to that bullshit, to not question the damn decision. Go eat a gelato. Life is good.
Regarding the alcohol thing and your question at hand. Yes, of course I miss it sometimes, yesterday being one of them. I ache for the ease of a lubricated first date, long for the ability to stumble into a bar and melt away whatever pain I might have that day or amplify whatever joy was felt. Yes, I wish for a night with a few bottles of wine and a few good friends and the magic that some of those times really were. Yes, I want the attractive waiter to share his favorite pale yellow local varietal, to come back a few minutes later with a fuller bodied choice, to keep coming back and pouring me drinks until it's five pm and the sun is setting and we're moving to a second location where my dress will come off easier. Yes, sometimes it just fucking sucks. Yes, sometimes it feels like I'm being an extremist and committing to a life of sobriety is prohibitive and extra. Yes, ten years in it can still be hard.
But also, not really.
Yesterday I missed an ex. I thought about calling him and watched vidoes of him and his kids sledding and texted one friend I AM SAD AND LONELY AND I WANT BABIES and then called another friend to talk about it. Today, I know it was a delusion and that I'd be paying had I acted on that impulse. He'd be texting me and I'd be back in that same place I've been so many times before and realizing this is not what I want at all or he'd be texting me like he did last time the much despised refrain: leave me alone you psycho. (To be fair to him, he did not say those exact words.)
So it burned a little yesterday; so I had to show restraint; so it sucked and I didn't get this immediate gratification of his acceptance or his rejection, neither of which I wanted. So what? Is my life less big, less interesting, less anything because I didn't do the impulsive, fleetingly gratifying easy thing? No. In fact, it's richer because I didn't. I sat with the feelings I had, I moved the thoughts around in my head until they arranged themselves into sense, I chose the harder more rewarding path that left me in tact instead of destroyed. New habits were formed. I stood taller. I made a different choice than the ones I've made in the past and that different choice will support other harder different choices I'll have to make in the future. I didn't take the cheap option. I was clear with the Universe: I am not fucking around; I am ready for what's next. And the Universe listens to that kind of shit.
All that applies to drinking too. You miss exes. They are not good for you. You miss alcohol. That isn't good for you either. When you first break up with someone, you're worried that you're going to miss them this much always and you won't be able to stand it; maybe you’re worried you can’t trust yourself to stay away or not respond to their advances or not call them a thousand times or text them about a sweater you can’t find. But if you've lived through a break up, you know none of this is true. You know that you begin to center your life on different experiences, different people; you create new worlds and you forget old ones. You feel differently in time; you don’t miss them the same way and some times you don’t miss them at all. That's what drinking is like to me now. It is an old ex who is absolutely terrible for me that I fleetingly miss under rare conditions.
I said above that yesterday I don't know why I chose not to drink in that moment, but the truth is I do. I chose not to because for one, it's my default—now, nearly a decade on, not drinking is more normal than drinking. Mostly though, I chose not to because everything I ever wanted in my entire life and searched for everywhere else has come to me through the choice to not drink. I said no because no means yes to everything that actually matters to me, now that I know what matters. You said you don't want to miss out on celebrations, on life; I am telling you I don't either, and that is how I consistently do not drink. There is absolutely nothing more depriving of life than the need to use drugs to experience it.
I also get that you're worried that the cravings won't go away, that it will be this terrible thing you have to constantly resist for the rest of your life and it will burn like it does now. First of all, you will not feel like this forever, just like you probably don’t feel immense longing for all your past lovers; things fade. But also there’s an additional point to be made here, because I think we’re under the general impression that to crave even so many years later is some kind of faulty wiring, some weakness, a bug to be fixed. I don’t think about cravings that way. I think to crave is a feature of our humanity; a sign that we are alive and paying attention; an opportunity to build a pause between the moment we want to totally escape and the consumption of the thing we use to escape it. Remember when I said "freeze time right there." That's what a craving does; it teaches you to freeze time right there, to consider, to make different choices, to not drink the wine, to not text Troy lol.
The short answer is alcohol will become less important, your life will become centered on different things, and there will come a point when it won't really matter, as it doesn't to me anymore. But yes, honey, yes; you will have those moments when you lose your fucking mind and you think "maybe just this once!" And in those moments perhaps like me you will find they hurt and pinch and suck, but they are also tiny little portals to the freedom you have always been seeking. Opportunities for expansion; not demons to outrun.
I felt every word of this piece. The desire to feel normal, loved, accepted. It makes me feel less alone and more lonely at the same time. I wonder why our brains betray us to want more, what we don’t have, and to fool us into romanticizing things we don’t want, need or truly love. You hit me in the gut with this!
This: "Mostly though, I chose not to because everything I ever wanted in my entire life and searched for everywhere else has come to me through the choice to not drink. I said no because no means yes to everything that actually matters to me, now that I know what matters. You said you don't want to miss out on celebrations, on life; I am telling you I don't either, and that is how I consistently do not drink. There is absolutely nothing more depriving of life than the need to use drugs to experience it." Thanks Holly, you are everything.