🎩 Cheers to nine years of sobriety

April 2017 wasn’t the first time I vowed to stop drinking.

It was, however, the most recent.

April 23 marked nine years of sobriety for me. I wasn’t sure of the exact date until I looked up the apology that I wrote to my wife. She had come home one Saturday night and found me pickled to the point of being unintelligible.

I only remember bits and pieces of our interaction that night, a phenomenon that is referred to as a brownout. This would be in contrast to the total void of a blackout.

I was 17 years old the first time that happened. It was after the winter formal. I went over to Paul’s house after the dance. We drank vodka and (for some ungodly reason) crème de menthe. The latter of those intoxicants resulted in a neon green, silver-dollar-sized stain on my flannel pillowcase the next morning. I had spit up like a baby in my sleep.

For a while, I wondered if the weekend binge drinking of adolescence had paved the way for my tendency to drink too much as an adult. I didn’t drink all that often. When I did drink, though, it could be a challenge to stop.

Or perhaps it was simply a matter of logistics. I just needed to eat a bigger meal before I started drinking or be sure to drink glasses of water along the way.

I tried several life hacks as well. There was one year I stuck to a two-drink maximum on any given night. During another stretch, I refrained from any hard alcohol after 9 p.m.

And then, as I entered the back half of my 30s and my job became more intense, alcohol came to be a reward I gave myself when I had finished my to-do list. Something I could plunge into and relax. I would start out planning to have two drinks on a given evening and wind up having eight.

But looking back, I don’t think the explanations or reasons matter all that much.

The simple fact is that I can not be trusted to consistently regulate my alcohol intake. I may do it for a night, a week, or even a couple of months, but I have 25 years of first-hand research proving that I will eventually barrel through any limits I try to impose.

This tendency could stem from the anger I carried from my adolescence. Perhaps it was compounded by the stress of a deadline-driven job. There’s probably a genetic component, too. My mom’s parents each had issues with alcohol, her mother ultimately requiring inpatient treatment.

Here’s what I am certain about, however: I’ve never, ever finished a drink without thinking about how nice it would be to have another. Sometimes, I can talk myself out of it. Eventually, I won’t, though.

As I entered my 40s, I realized I had nursed a bad habit into a full-fledged problem. I cut back on the number of nights I actually drank. When I did drink, though, all bets were off, which is how my wife came home on a Saturday night in April and found me unable to complete a sentence.

The one surefire way to avoid this was to refrain from drinking.

This idea scared me, though. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do it, afraid that it was too late. I was afraid of who I would be if I gave up the ability to have a drink with friends.

I was also ashamed that I would have to quit. I felt that admitting I couldn’t control my alcohol use was a sign of weakness.

Ultimately, I became more afraid of what would happen if I kept drinking. Afraid of what would happen to my marriage. My job. My life.

I went to 30 recovery meetings in 30 days after my wife found me drunk that last time. Some of those were run by Alcoholics Anonymous. Others were through SMART recovery, which is less spiritual and more aligned with cognitive behavior therapy. I started seeing a substance-abuse counselor.

I identified the trigger points, which for me were the times my wife was away or I was out of town traveling. I created a structure around those events, making sure to attend a recovery meeting or book a gym class.

I’ll never say that I’m confident in my sobriety. I am, however, comfortable with it.

It doesn’t bother me to be around others who are drinking. I can go to a bar and sip on soda water.

I always stop short of saying I’m proud of being sober, though. It took me an awful long time to reach what is—in retrospect—a fairly obvious conclusion. It created many problems along the way. I also hear Chris Rock’s voice in my head, stating that you don’t get credit for doing things that you’re supposed to do.

I am happy to be sober, though. Overjoyed. I feel the world is open to me in a way that it wasn’t 10 years ago, and that’s largely because I’m not carrying around the shame I used to shoulder over my drunken tendencies.

I never knew how much that was weighing on me until it was gone.

Also, you could not pay me to endure another hangover.