There was a stint I didn’t drink, but I felt that dry January was different. I dressed in my basement office and balanced my laptop into a pile of laundry. The coffee mug is surrounded by a pile of socks. Zoom-class welcome graphic illuminated a dark room: “Tapping for drinking.”
Almost every bucket we heard about drinking landed in two buckets. I’m an alcoholic with my friend who stopped drinking because I can “take or leave it on.” I was firmly in the camp “I take it, especially if it’s red wine, take it” but didn’t feel like a problematic person. I had no deuis or alcohol fuel fights with my husband, but I found myself resisting the idea of ​​slowing down. Through a dry January (100% guaranteed I had a few glass of wine before the click of purchase), I signed up for a group of cool, curious women and found myself in my basement.
On a sideway screen with a slow slide, the instructor explained that EFT, or “techniques of emotional freedom,” can help us to secure and calm our nervous system with gentle pads and taps with our indexes and middle fingers. I laughed at the phrase “pat and tap,” but then I followed the instructions and closed my eyes. I let out a breath thinking about my poor nervous system. I smacked my forehead and tried to ignore the sounds of the kids upstairs, arguing blue. I tapped my upper lip. I’m trying to ignore the fact that my fingers smelled like an old kitchen sponge. I tapped my armpits (not my favorite) and my collarbone (the absolute favorite). I close my eyes, try to tap in the appropriate order, tap tap, try not to think about what I was actually thinking. It was the number of days left in January, what everyone else drank that month, and the number of reasons why they could continue drinking and stopping. It simply felt more than that.
And I reached for my mug. The socks come with a mug of red wine. I poured it for one of the many reasons I poured it on most nights this year: I was worried about which event I headed to (tonight: tapping), so I was bored with the parenting element (tapping)blue), and/or I might need a little help as I felt like I was doing my best (always). I took a long sip and stomped a red wine on my laptop. I wiped the keyboard off with my socks immediately. To be honest, I was relieved. But I felt like I had failed.
The topic of drinking continues to grow, but I feel that it is detached from my reality. Tressy Macmillan Cottum recently wrote about the growth of the tide. “Performance abstinence” Drinking as a shorthand for a clean and perfect lifestyle (NYTIMES gift link). Reading her operation, I couldn’t stop thinking about my experience of stopping drinking astonishingly critiques the opposite of the perfect white background and the language of “clean life” cotton. For me, the process of stopping drinking can only be described as a messy mess (understatement).
I’ve been in nearly two and a half years now without alcohol and feel no performance about it. It feels private and mediocre. There were no untouched IG posts or clean live manifestos. Instead, they slammed the collarbone between a bite of wine and then the next class was without wine. It was years of calm lighting mishmash (I’ll quit like a woman) and audiobooks (This naked heart) And a girl’s travel and therapy, with a therapist and girlfriend, dipped in wine.
When I tell people who don’t drink, I think they either I’m a secret alcoholic or I’ve stopped randomly. I too couldn’t see where it would suit them when I saw these two bucket drinking.
So I would like to introduce another bucket, the messy middle. I sometimes recognize it in the wild, but it can be difficult to find. But recently it’s been coming up with my girlfriend. Late at night, they ask (sometimes grossly), “Why did you really stop drinking?”
This is what I say to them: Evidence regarding the risk of alcohol It’s convincing (nytimes gift link), and like most of my friends, I was drinking more Recommended up to 7 drinks. But that’s not the reason why I stopped. It wasn’t a hangover, but the fact that my kids gave me wine-related gifts for my birthday, or a small change in the number of livers. I didn’t even answer the question of whether I had a drinking problem. It was the existence of the question itself, and that was the space that lay in my brain. I hated how much I thought about it. I stopped drinking because I didn’t want to waste my inner life any more.
And when those girlfriends asked how I finally moved to not drink from the dark middle, I tell them that it’s a few sessions with a group of women I tapped when I was just curious A plain coach It took me to a place where I was ready to stop drinking completely. It wasn’t fast. It took me 10 months from my tapping class and I hadn’t read, thought, drank and hadn’t drank it for nearly a year. I really wanted to have casual drinking work, but I wanted more brain space to come back.
With the terrible news (it was a joke, my fellow Sauber!) my drinking didn’t go well, it stopped. My brain is quieter and I feel more mine. That’s not always easy, but for me, drinking means less effort.
My reclaimed mental space feels like the opposite of a shadowy basement, but I can revert its origins downstairs and trace its failed attempts. What I felt so dark and humble now makes me feel kind. I felt like the worst version of myself in that laundry pile, but looking back, I wasn’t at all. It was messy, but that’s how I got here – the quiet guy in my brain, and my keyboard tapping. And I wonder what kind of change you are making and do they feel messy? If so, I’m rooting for you.
Kathleen Donahoe He is a writer and poet living in Seattle. She wrote How her MS diagnosis will inform her upbringing and The worst gift she’s ever received. She is currently writing her first novel and is warmly inviting you to follow her free Substack newsletter, I’ll laugh a little.
PS More drinking posts, including “My mother was an alcoholic” and “How did she change my relationship with alcohol?”
(Photo: Sasha Dove/Stocksy.)
Source: Cup of Jo – cupofjo.com
