Drinking can warp time.

Too much alcohol can make a night disappear. A hangover can make a morning feel like an eternity.

Sometimes I would see a friend on social media post about a sobriety milestone that would make my head spin. “They haven’t had a drink in four years? Jesus, really? Didn’t I get hammered with that person a few weeks ago?”

It would also make me wonder if I could do it.

Maybe.

Someday.

In early sobriety, a day without alcohol can feel like a week. Waking up the day after staying sober could feel like Christmas morning. A sober week felt like an accomplishment.

Ten days felt better, then twenty, then a month. Then you start thinking in months. Two months. Three months. My sober date was August 19th, 2024, so I would go to my calendar and draw a red rectangle around the 19th of the upcoming month to mark it.

On Tuesday August 19th, 2025. I hit one year of sobriety. But the day just came and went. I woke up around 6:00AM with my dog, got my coffee (a venti with two shots: my caffeine intake has been bonkers) and took her to Prospect Park for fetch. I treated myself to some pizza and Van Leeuwen ice cream. I got a message or two from some friends, which I appreciated.

But it still didn’t feel like a special occasion. Maybe it’s because for decades of my life, the only way I knew how to celebrate was to go out for drinks. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to celebrate the absence of something.

This might be the one time where it was about the journey and not the destination. (I am also developing a complicated relationship with the word “journey.” It annoys me but it’s also pretty useful.)

I already talked about what led me to quitting. Now I feel like talking about what it’s like being sober. Here’s a collection of takes on some of the most common thoughts and phrases associated with sobriety.

It hasn’t saved my life

I was worried I’d become Sober Guy^TM, that I’d make being sober my whole identity.

Sober Guy^TM starts rock climbing or founds a sanctuary for at risk dogs or starts a new company that donates a pair of jeans to third world kids when you buy a pair of jeans. Sober Guy^TM then tells you that he couldn’t have done any of this while drinking while sharing before and after pictures. In the before picture, Sober Guy^TM tends to be half-lidded and laughing way too hard while out at a crowded party with or without bruises on his face. In the after picture, Sober Guy^TM is wearing athleisure and has gleaming white teeth and a smile as bright as his alcohol-free future.

I’m a sober guy but I’m not Sober Guy^TM. I’m basically the same minus something that was dragging me down.

“Alcohol is Poison!”

This idea is pretty prominent in Alan Carr’s Easy Way book and Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind (how the Alan Carr estate has not sued Annie Grace for essentially stealing his book is beyond me). A lot of sober people use this refrain. I think it helps them in their sobriety. Or they start asking, “Why would anyone put poison in their body?”

I will admit that ethanol is literally poison but humans have been drinking fermented fruits and grains for thousands of years. Our bodies can metabolize it. And why would I put poison in my body? Because it’s a great buzz. I’m not trying to coax you back to drinking but let’s not kid ourselves, the buzz was great. It was so great that I spent years trying to figure out a way to keep it in my life. I eventually concluded that I can’t, but it was fun while it lasted.

“I wish I did it sooner!”

Nope.

This might be the first time I say this and mean it but I’m not going to dwell on the past. I had fun drinking and I think I would have felt like I was missing out if I had quit in my twenties or thirties or, let’s face it, the majority of my forties.

But I also value my decades of experience with drinking. I can truly say I got everything that I was going to get out of it. I remember the good times, and I remember the bad times, but the most important part is that I remember the middling times. I remember the realities of drinking.

I remember being in a bar with my friends, ostensibly having a good time, when really, I was just at a loss for anything else to do. There were times when I felt bloated, times I felt sick. On a few occasions I’ve been too drunk to talk (coherently anyway). I would often find myself standing in the middle of a bar, arms folded, balancing a pint on in the crook of my arm, watching some game (depending on the season), in the midst of people but not interacting with anyone. Alone in a crowd it still alone.

I don’t want to repeat those times, but I don’t regret them. I can remember all that crap and know that I left it behind for a reason.

“You’ll lose friends”

The thinking goes that, when you get sober, you will find out that many of your friendships were based on drinking and drinking alone and you no longer have anything to talk about.

Well, apparently, I’ve made friends with a lot of solid people because that hasn’t been the case. No one cares that I don’t drink anymore. Recently on a bike ride a friend told me that I’m the same guy, which was very cool. Hell, I’m still friends with one of my favorite bartenders.

If I quit liking soccer, ski trips, any and all forms of comedy, as well as having grown up in Rochester, NY, my friendships will certainly be in peril, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’ve also found that plenty of my friends really don’t drink that much.

“Everyone drinks like I do!”

Um, no. No, they do not.

This phrase is a talisman the heavy drinker will carry with them. Towards the end I remember a friend watching me order yet another double IPA and saying, “I don’t know how you do it, man!” Well, frankly, neither do I. Also, I am unlikely to remember exiting this bar when I wake up tomorrow morning.

I don’t know if I was lying to myself about how much I was drinking or seeking out heavy drinking situations but now I watch people behaving just like the tell you to in the commercials: responsibly. Out at a Friday happy hour or a wedding or a party – all places where I would get hammered – they just have one or two and that’s it.

Two beers. I mean, hey, you do you.

To NA or Not to NA and a Note on “I like the taste”

Non-alcoholic beers have 0.5% alcohol or less and the purest in me worries that that counts.

I only went to three AA meetings but in one of the ones I attended, I heard a guy say, “non-alcoholic beers are for non-alcoholics.” The reason to not drink them is that it can trigger you to drink alcoholic drinks. It also keeps you in the same environment, so you never have to change. Those pitfalls don’t seem to affect me much.

NAs are weird. There’s a quality to an NA IPA that is unmistakable. I can always tell when I’m having one. Guinness 0 is as close to the real thing as I have experienced and is great to have while watching soccer in bar.

Another phrase that keeps the drinker going is, “I like the taste.” A lot of quit lit will tell you that’s bullshit and all you want is to get your poison.

Christ, quit lit, ease up on the “poison” thing.

I stand by the fact that I really liked the taste of an IPA or a good red wine, but NAs have shown me that I didn’t like it enough to have eight to ten, or to polish off a whole bottle. I like Coke but I never had eight of those in my life. In the first year of sobriety, I believe I had as many NA beers in a year as I did alcoholic beers in a week while I was drinking.

I liked the taste but clearly it wasn’t just that.

Leaving

Leaving is one of sobriety’s greatest joys.

When I was drinking, I stayed at parties until the very end. I always thought that if I left people would be disappointed (I’m not that arrogant, it’s more like when you take a sick day you think everyone’s going to notice and you’re going to get fired? Like that.) So, I stayed and kept drinking, because once you start, why stop?

Now when I go to parties I talk to people, then I leave. And it’s glorious. I go home and I’m okay. I can read or watch TV and just be. Going home drunk always sucked. There was only more drinking or sleep.

Also – and I’m seeing a pattern here – no one cares that I left. They’ll remember that I showed up.

“Have You Lost Weight?”

I have not. The following things don’t contain alcohol and are thusly part of my sober lifestyle: burritos, cookies, frozen yogurt, cookies, bagels, cookies, and cookies. Drinking is a dopamine hit. Know what else is a dopamine hit? Snacks.

It’s not at the level of a transfer addiction or anything but yeah, snacks.

If I’m a Dick Now, I’m Just a Dick

I have no excuses anymore. If I’m angry, I’m angry. If I’m whiny or bitchy, I can’t blame it on any substance. If I throw a temper tantrum over a NYT crossword puzzle (sorry, Dennis) it’s just me being a dick who can’t regulate his emotions.

Which brings me to emotional sobriety.

Emotional Sobriety

From all the reading, meeting, and podcast listening, I’ve gleaned that emotional sobriety is the goal. Unfortunately, I still don’t know what the hell it is. I know that there’s a thing called being a “dry drunk” where you quit drinking but do no other work on yourself. Well, I was always working on myself, even when drunk. I’m in therapy. I meditate. I’m reasonably self-aware. So, what else do I have to do to achieve emotional sobriety?

I know it has to do with not taking things personally and letting go of resentment but fuck me, man, that’s like my whole thing. You know how when you obsess over a small gaffe you’ve made and people say, “don’t worry, no one is thinking about you”? Well, I might be thinking of you. I have a mental list of people who have wronged me and, try as I might, it ain’t going anywhere.

I know that ultimately, emotional sobriety is about maturity, happiness, and creating the kind of life that I want. But for all my “work on myself,” which may just be navel gazing, I still don’t know what that is.

Mental Energy

The best part about sobriety is getting some space back in my brain.

I used to spend so much time thinking about my drinking and managing my spending on drinking and recovering from drinking. I spend time thinking about upcoming parties and events. How much will I drink? Or maybe I should not drink, what will I tell people? I used to drink just so people wouldn’t ask me why I wasn’t drinking. How many days are left in this month? Thirteen? Okay, well, I had two sober days already, so, if I abstain for all thirteen days, I’ll have half a month sober! Then I wouldn’t do it and feel ashamed. But then I’d say, okay, that was this month but next month will be different. And it wouldn’t be.

And I dealt with so much worry. Worry over my health, wondering who I was becoming, what do people think of me, and the ultimate worry: “Am I turning into my mother”?

You don’t have to hit rock bottom to quit

My mother never hit rock bottom. After she died, I found some notices, one of being written up at work for showing up drunk and one DUI. But those things just made her retreat into herself more. She never lost her husband or her son. She never lived under a bridge. She never went to prison.

But she got after it, day after day, methodically for decades. I tend not to be thankful for bad experiences in my life, but I am thankful to have had an alcoholic mother. She showed me how not to live.

They tell you that you need to know your “why.” There are a couple of whys that I think about to stay sober. One is a picture I have of myself – it’s my senior photo. I think, “who would this guy want me to grow up to be?” The other is my mom. I want to live free of the thing that killed her. For reasons I won’t ever fully know or understand, she wasn’t able to honestly account for this part of her life but, if she had been, I think she would have really liked sobriety.

I also never hit rock bottom. I did stupid shit, and I felt bad, but no one would ever describe me as destitute. Again, no prison, no tent villages. I would think to myself, “one day, I’ll be sober, just not yet.”

Well, it’s yet. As of this writing, I’m just over fourteen months sober.

In my sober curious phase I listened to a podcast called The Sober Stretch where the two profane British hosts posed the challenge, “don’t drink for a year then get back to us and tell us if you regret it.” It’s good advice and advice that I would give to anyone.

No, I don’t regret it. I’m glad I did it.