My Messy Road to Not Drinking

I had stints where I didn’t drink, but that dry January felt different. I tucked myself away in our basement office, balancing my laptop on a stack of laundry, my coffee mug nestled into the pile of socks. The welcome graphic for the Zoom class lit up the dark room: “Tapping for Sobriety.”

Almost everything I’d heard about sobriety landed in two buckets: my friends who stopped drinking because they could “take it or leave it,” and alcoholics. I was firmly in the “I’ll take it, please, especially if it’s red wine” camp, but didn’t feel like a person with a problem. I had no DUIs or alcohol-fueled fights with my husband, but I did notice within myself a resistance to any thoughts of slowing down. It concerned me enough that I signed up for a sober curious women’s group to take me through dry January (100% guarantee I’d had a few glasses of wine before clicking purchase) and found myself in my basement, my laptop cattywampus on the deflating laundry pile.

On the slowly-sliding-sideways screen, the instructor explained that EFT, or “Emotional Freedom Technique,” could anchor and calm our nervous systems with gentle pats and taps by our index and middle fingers. I laughed at the phrase “pats and taps,” but closed my eyes as instructed. I exhaled, thinking of my poor nervous system. I tapped my forehead, trying to ignore the sound of my children upstairs, arguing over Bluey. I tapped my upper lip; trying to ignore the fact that my fingers smelled like old kitchen sponge. I tapped my underarms (not my favorite), and I tapped my collarbone (my absolute favorite). I closed my eyes, trying to tap in the right order, tap tap tapping, trying not to think about what I was actually thinking about: how many days were left in January, how many drinks everyone else might have had that month, how many reasons I could find to keep drinking or stop. I felt, simply, over it.

And so, I reached for my mug. There in the socks, my mug of red wine — the one I’d poured despite (or because of?) this being a sobriety workshop. I’d poured it for one of the many reasons I’d poured it most nights of the year: because I was anxious about what event I was headed to (tonight: tapping), because I was bored by elements of parenting (Bluey), and/or because I felt like I was doing my best and might need a little help (always). I took a long sip, sloshing red wine onto my laptop. I quickly wiped the keyboard off with a sock. I felt relieved, if I’m honest. But I also felt like I’d failed.

The buzz around sobriety keeps growing louder, but it feels disconnected from my reality. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote recently about the growing tide of “performative abstinence” and sobriety as shorthand for a clean, perfect lifestyle (NYTimes gift link). Reading her op-ed, I couldn’t stop thinking how my experience of stopping drinking was pretty much the opposite of the perfect white backgrounds and “clean living” language Cottom so astutely critiques. For me, the process of stopping drinking can only be described as messy mess mess (understatement).

I’m now nearly two and a half years without alcohol, and nothing about it has felt performative; it’s felt private and prosaic. There were no pristine IG posts or clean-living manifestos — instead, it was tapping my collarbones between sips of wine, then doing the class the next time without wine. It was a many-years mishmash of sober lit (Quit Like a Woman) and audiobooks (This Naked Mind) and wine-soaked girls’ trips and therapy, both with a therapist and girlfriends.

When I tell people I don’t drink, I get the feeling they assume either I was a secret alcoholic or I just randomly stopped. Back when I, too, only saw those two buckets of sobriety, I couldn’t see where I fit into them.

And so, I’d like to introduce another bucket — a messy middle. I occasionally recognize it in the wild, but it can be hard to spot. Lately, though, it’s been coming up with my girlfriends. Late at night, they’ll (sometimes tipsily) ask, “Why did you really stop drinking?”

Here is what I say to them: The evidence about the risks of alcohol is compelling (NYTimes gift link), and, like most of my friends, I was drinking more than the recommended maximum of seven drinks a week. But that’s not why I stopped. And it wasn’t the hangovers, or the fact that my kids had given me wine-related presents for my birthday, or the small change in my liver numbers. It wasn’t even how I answered the question of whether or not I had a drinking problem. It was the presence of the question itself, and the space it took up in my brain. I hated how much I thought about it. I stopped drinking because I didn’t want to waste any more of my inner life.

And when those girlfriends ask how I finally moved from the murky middle to not drinking, I tell them it was that women’s group I tapped away with when I was just curious, and a few sessions with a sober coach that got me to the place where I was ready to fully try not drinking. It wasn’t fast; it took 10 months from the tapping class, nearly a year of reading and thinking and drinking and not drinking. I really wanted casual drinking to work, but I wanted the space in my brain back more.

In terrible news (that was a joke, fellow sobers!), stopping, rather than moderating, my drinking worked. My brain feels more quiet, more mine. It’s not always easy, but, for me, not drinking means less effort.

My reclaimed mental space feels like the opposite of a shadowy basement, but I can trace its origins back downstairs to that failed attempt: me, skeptically tapping my collarbone, fingers smelling like an old kitchen sponge and spilled wine. What felt so dark and humbling then makes me feel tender now. I felt like the worst version of myself in that pile of laundry, but looking back I wasn’t at all. It was messy, but it’s how I got here — to the quiet in my brain, and the tapping of my keyboard. And I wonder what changes you’re making, and if they feel messy? If so, I’m cheering you on.

Kathleen Donahoe is a writer and poet living in Seattle. She has written about how her MS diagnosis informs her parenting and the worst gift she ever received. She is currently writing her first novel, and warmly invites you to follow her free Substack newsletter, A Little Laugh.

P.S. More drinking posts, including “my mom was an alcoholic” and “how I changed my relationship with alcohol.”

(Photo by Sasha Dove/Stocksy.)