Trading Booze for Badassery

It's time to change the narrative around alcohol free living

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The optics of giving up alcohol are antiquated. Raise your hand if when you think of help with addiction, you envison going to meetings with bedraggled, whisker-laden men with gaunt cheeks. The well-seasoned women in the room have deep smoker voices and rose tattoos peeking out from the top of their leathery cleavage. They all sit in metal folding chairs in a cold room with bad lighting, each taking turns to go up front and talk about their shame. Now raise your hand if you want to be one of them.

Those images probably aren’t accurate. Maybe it’s just in my head because of how group meetings for people who are dealing with addiction are sometimes depicted on TV and in films. It’s all white knuckling life and making awkward connections over bad coffee and shared cigarettes. Or more likely today—vapes—way less cool optics-wise, but allegedly not as deadly.

I used to think that if I couldn’t moderate my drinking, I’d end up at one of those places, and that sounded just awful to me. First, the humiliation of admitting I had no control; second, the part about having to be somewhere among people who held me accountable. Also, traditionally, I’m not a joiner or sharer of my struggles. However, in 1935, when Alcoholics Anonymous was formed two years after prohibition in the U.S. was repealed, the format made sense, and for many, it is still a beacon, so that’s fantastic for all whom it’s helped.

Today, 12 steps and Christian leanings aren’t for everyone, yet a lot of people are still stuck in the cycle of drinking and regret, drinking and shame, drinking and health issues, drinking and strained or broken relationships, drinking and law infractions, drinking and fucking up. We keep doing it, though, because we don’t see ourselves as that person with a bottle in a brown paper bag chillin' on the sidewalk with nowhere else to go; we are just drinking like everyone else and being cultural normies. Even if we recognize that we aren’t handling it as well as others seem to be, we may not realize that there are multiple roads out.

In actuality, the majority of people with alcohol abuse issues are functional, doing some version of holding down jobs, paying bills, maintaining homes, raising kids, and checking the boxes of upstanding citizens. Gettin’ boozy is just a normal part of life. In fact, it’s a treat. It’s fun, and we earned it! We think we need it to help us relax, escape, and not care, and of course, not caring is lovely. We want that so much that we put not giving a single fuck on a pedastal. It’s easier not to care, but it’s not easy not to care, if you know what I mean. Alcohol helps with that on the surface, but in reality, she’s a sorceress who seems to give while she’s secretly taking, and she’s so good at it that we may not even realize how enchanted we are. Under her spell, we do things we normally wouldn’t. Anyone who’s ever been drunk can attest to that. And some of us get in so deep that we fully give ourselves over to her, people who love us be damned.

For a lot of drinkers, alcohol gets so ingrained that it becomes part of our identities and informs how we navigate the world. If we stop drinking, who does that make us? The problem is that there is a misguided, unspoken social agreement that says drinking culture is cool and that people who don’t drink are uptight, lame, and boring. I’m the first to admit that used to be my thinking, largely because that’s what I grew up with. I had young parents who partied, and I grew up watching plenty of coming-of-age movies with epic party scenes like “Sixteen Candles” and “Weird Science.” Rock ‘n’ roll was always my jam, and we all know how those cats get down.

The message was that fun is had by being wild, and being wild is facilitated by getting drunk. It’s the fuel for making out with strangers and jumping in the pool fully clothed. With our usual inhibitions or hang-ups ups muted for the duration of our drunkenness, we make confessions, start fights, show our tits, dance like no one is watching, and forget to pay our bar tabs. We give zero fucks. We’re a real delight.

Know what, though? The behavior is fake, the consequences—not so much. The sorceress is in control, not us. We are her puppets, and sometimes we even like being her puppets, free from giving a shit about what people think and taking a license to be obnoxious. No one thinks of it like that, but that’s part of her illusion. That’s why conquering the sorceress is the real badassery, and we’d do better to think of it like that than as if we’re giving up some necessary potion that makes life easier. To walk away from the hype, the intense marketing, and the cultural brainwashing that booze will improve life experiences is rebellious, and rebelliousness has always been cool.

Turns out, once you get to a certain point in the abstaining journey, life is much easier without alcohol. Every day we get to strengthen our powers by keeping the sorceress at bay, because, oh, she lurks. She’s always waiting for another in, but those of us who are honing our superpowers only get stronger with each moment that we keep her out. The more we suppress her, the weaker she gets, so, eventually, it’s not even that hard, and you realize you prefer not having her around. She was only getting in the way of your potential and purpose.

Recently, I posted a Note on Substack about reaching a one-year milestone of abstaining from alcohol. I typically only get a few likes for any Note I post, just another voice in the Substack void, but this one took off and is currently at more than 8,000 likes. It was empowering, touching, and eye-opening because it spoke to how many people get it. You get how damaging alcohol can be for those who abuse it, but more than that, many commented about how painful it has been for them as the family members and friends of people who are fully in the throes of the sorceress. And of course, some aren’t in the throes anymore because she went ahead and took their lives—or did they willingly give them over because they couldn’t do life without her? It feels like that, and that’s never not going to be heartbreaking.

The best comment, though, was from one of my favorite Substack writers, Valkyrie, who writes HopeSprings Journal: “Hell yeah!” she wrote. “Raw doggin' life is the real thug life. Us sobers are badass. Way to go.”

That’s the kind of attitude and outlook for anyone who is cutting out alcohol to adopt, and it’s also a good direction for the movement to go in—not all this, “I lost control and I suck for all the mistakes I made” attitude. Accept that part and move forward—what’s done is done.

Every minute of every day, you get to write your story, and you can change course anytime. You are in charge of your decisions, and it’s entirely in your grasp to have a full, fun, and happy life without being a slave to substances. Dealing with life as it comes without hiding behind a bottle is some thug ass shit, and it turns out, raw doggin’ life—being metaphorically bare and naked as you ride out the storms and sail into the sunshine—makes it so much richer and more interesting. We can all build the muscles to deal with whatever life throws at us.

It turns out, there are lots of ways to overcome alcohol dependency, and if you are like me and don’t love sharing feelings or if you live somewhere that doesn’t have much support in the way of meetings, there’s a whole sober community out there that only requires access to the internet and your willingness to commit and do the work. There are abundant apps (I used Reframe), quit lit books (I only read “This Naked Mind”), and podcasts (“Sober Motivation” was a favorite, but there are many good ones). I never went to any meetings or shared with groups. I listened and consumed, I thought a lot, journaled, and I let myself feel things. I tried new activities, learned to meditate, and drank non-alcoholic beers and mocktails when necessary, and I still do. I set manageable goals and leaned heavily on the cyber sober community for several months. Point being, you can find support in many places if you look.

Giving up drinking doesn’t mean you still can’t do stupid shit for fun, you will just likely be less inclined to do so. You’ll have better ideas, better experiences, and you’ll feel better overall about the things you do. I’m not saying it’s easy or that you get to a point where you are done. It’s a daily decision to maintain clarity, especially because it’s easy to romanticize our drinking days. However, not drinking, shockingly, can become a new normal.

As a society, it’s long past time to shift the narrative from the idea of sad little broken person in recovery to badass slayer of sorceresses and demons who live enriching lives and who will work to help lift others out of the grips of those tricky bitches.

Who’s with me?