What I Learned After One Year Without Alcohol
On a Sunday morning in April 2025, I wake up in my dark bedroom with a
throbbing headache and a sense of impending doom: the one-two punch I’ve
grown accustomed to after a night of drinking.
Hurting and frustrated, I decide this is it. I’m throwing in the towel on
alcohol. I don’t want to experience another hangover ever again. It’s not
worth the misery.
For the first few months without drinking, I’m confident I’ve made the right
decision. I’m able to start taking care of my health without the punctuations
of bad sleep and subsequent poor eating that my hangovers always brought.
I begin to practice yoga daily, get a red light face mask, and start
prioritizing things like farm-grown vegetables. My stomach, which had always
given me trouble with mysterious aches and pains after a night at the bar,
miraculously absolves itself of the IBS I’d long suspected I was suffering
from.
Plus, an added benefit: I’m saving so much money.
But as time goes on, I start to notice a growing feeling of discontent. I go
to a party or work event and spend the night preoccupied with thoughts of
what everyone thinks of me. Whether or not I’m saying the right thing, if I’m
being fun enough.
I leave social situations feeling exhausted and miserable, unable to break
free from obsessive thoughts about my awkwardness. Eventually, I stop going
out on the weekends altogether to escape the discomfort of being in a room
full of people and unable to connect.
Alone and lonely one night in the red glow of my mask, it hits me: there was
a reason I’d been drinking.
Alcohol Had Served a Purpose in My Life
Alcohol had served a purpose in my life, starting from the time I had my very
first drink.
As a kid growing up in New England, I was different. And different, I
learned, was bad. Obviously. Otherwise the kids wouldn’t laugh at me for the
food I brought for lunch. The teachers wouldn’t get me in trouble with my
parents for speaking Croatian on the toy kitchen phone.
I wouldn’t be removed from the rest of my class and placed into a special
learning room for not being able to pronounce the “th” in three. To make
matters worse, I was about a foot shorter than everyone in my grade, too.
Maybe other kids can get through stuff like that without it affecting them.
In fact, I’m sure most immigrant kids do. Short kids, too.
But here’s the other thing about me as a kid: I was sensitive. Really
sensitive. So when kids laughed at me, and when teachers treated me
differently, it hurt. Bad.
So bad that I went from being a loud, expressive kid who put on plays and
impromptu performances for strangers to quiet and reserved, my nose always in
a book.
I learned that the less I spoke, the less people could see me, and the less
they could point out how different, how wrong I was. I withdrew from real
life into the fantasy worlds of my books, voraciously reading the Harry
Potter series in weeks.
But then emerged another problem, one that I couldn’t stamp out even with the
best of stories. A feeling. Namely, a want.
I could feel a longing in my bones when I saw the other kids in school,
laughing with their big groups of friends. Teasing each other in the hallways,
shouting in the gym.
Despite the pain it had caused me, I still, it turned out, had a deep desire
to be amongst them.
Thankfully, I found the solution to this problem in high school, the summer
before my sophomore year. The night I took my first drink, I knew I’d found
it: magic.
Like when Harry Potter gets his invisibility cloak and steps into it for the
first time, realizing he can go anywhere with it on, completely unseen. With
a few chugs from a water bottle at a party, I, too, was suddenly able to go
anywhere.
I could forget about what had made me so different, so wrong. I became
confident, funny, and comfortable in my own skin.
Finally able to be myself in front of others, my social life bloomed. I made
friends, started going out more, and even got a boyfriend.
But now, fourteen years later, the cloak was off.
And once Harry took the invisibility cloak off, the game was over. There he
was, exposed and in trouble.
Without alcohol, I was the same me I’d left behind all those years ago:
self-conscious, fearful, and yearning for connection in rooms of people, but
too scared to do anything about it.
Alcohol hadn’t solved my problem after all. I was still the same me.
It seemed like there was only one option: start drinking again. It’s not like
I ever had a real problem with it, I reasoned. Not like other people do. I
could get away with drinking for the rest of my life without any real
consequences.
What was an annoying hangover compared to a lifetime of alienation?
Finding Connection in Sobriety
That’s around the time that a friend from college reached out. She’d seen on
Substack that I’d stopped drinking. She had, too. She was in a sober
community. She invited me to meet them.
There, I heard from girls with similar stories to mine. They, too, had used
alcohol in social settings in order to feel more comfortable in their own
skin.
But now they were able to feel at ease all the time, without drinking. They
told me that I could do this, too. That I could learn how to be in the world
as I was, without any kind of cloak.
I was intrigued and decided I’d listen to what they had to say.
The connections I started to make were different from the ones I’d grown
accustomed to. When I was drinking, the relationships, whether platonic or
romantic, I made were explosive: they would start at 100 and eventually
degrade with time.
These new friendships I made with sober women were different. They progressed
slowly, growing closer with each passing day that we talked, met for coffee,
and showed up for one another.
Buoyed by my new network of support, I began to take risks at work and in my
creative endeavors. I began, for the first time, to allow myself to fail at
things.
I signed up for German lessons. A writing class. A public speaking course. I
allowed myself to be scared, and to do things anyway.
The Real Lesson From a Year Without Alcohol
It has now been more than one year since my last drink, and I confess that I
still haven’t been able to access the complete ease that alcohol provided for
me in social situations. I still haven’t found the silver bullet to
self-acceptance.
But here’s the thing about silver bullets and cloaks of invisibility: they
aren’t real. They’re just stories for kids. Illusions.
And I’m starting to suspect that the real magic might be in me. And that it’s
the kind that doesn’t go away after a night out.
In fact, every time I allow myself to be seen for who I really am, for all of
my differences, it only grows stronger.
And it’s the kind that finds me on a Sunday morning, surrounded by a group of
friends. Standing in the sunshine, smiling.
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