Two thousand days ago, five and half years, I decided to stop drinking alcohol. I haven't had more than a taste or a 'no alcohol' beer since. I wish I had made this decision 9,000 days earlier.
My parents didn't drink too often. I grew up in a mixed white/blue-collar New Jersey town, though, where people often would have a beer or a cocktail or three when getting together. In the summers, down the shore, heading to a bar with friends was a fun thing to do. My friends in high school found ways around age limits and would carry cases of beer for long evenings around the fire in the woods, or have a few on someone's patio deck when the parents were away, or be out with a bottle of whiskey on a park bench. Drinking to me became part of hanging out and I never really stopped.
I could claim that I was not a problematic drinker when I was younger, and that wouldn't be true. I liked to binge, not to the point of blacking out, but more into the range of wild and inappropriate behavior far better left unrepeated. I learned my limits, though, and by my mid-twenties only rarely was anyone getting sick. We were too smart to drive after drinking, too.
The years passed and the social binge sessions more or less stopped, but I did start to enjoy a beer or two after work some evenings especially in my thirties once I became a parent. I had a stressful tech job, and I loved to unwind after dinner with a pint, or to have a beer with dinner at the airport before flying down to California for work.
At the time I liked to set strange goals for myself, and one year I foolishly decided to try 300 different beers in 300 days. The craft beer revolution had happened in America and the endless sea of lagers was now all types of new and tasty beers. I tried them all. Sours, stouts, ambers, pale ales, gose, belgians, lambics, pilsners, domestic and imported.
This was fun for awhile, but it had the side effect of taking a habit of drinking from a couple nights a week to every day. The cycle of waking up, drinking coffee, working, and having a beer or two was unhealthy. I was athletically active with ice hockey and running, but that only seemed to mask the problem. I started to look tired all of the time and developed dark bags under my eyes.
I made the break during our year sabbatical in Asia. I had already reduced alcohol consumption a lot. At around forty years old, I committed to sitting for meditation every day and as this practice deepened I started to notice in the morning even after a single beer I had unpleasant sensations in the morning sit. I could feel stinging in my eyes and throat that wouldn't be there if I didn't have a beer. One day shortly after the New Year I just decided I wouldn't drink anymore and that was that. I had my last beer at a riverside restaurant in Chiang Mai.
When you are on sabbatical in a foreign country it isn't too hard actually to stop because you aren't surrounded by your usual social group. I'd meet people and simply politely refuse when offered a drink and tell them that I stopped drinking. It was a bit more difficult after we returned to our home in the US, mostly because of the social implications. Sometimes accepting a drink is a social obligation. Or at other times explaining that you quit makes people feel uneasy, overly aware of their own relationship with alcohol.
The effects of sobriety were brilliant, too. Inward observation from the meditation practice had taught me how to see closely what was happening in my internal sensory field. Alcohol as a depressant felt like a type of sink to me. That is, I could feel my clear consciousness flowing down into a duller, more sleep like state with alcohol. I learned that I disliked that feeling. I wanted to stop feeling it.
I also noticed that the effects from quitting took months, not weeks, to arrive but did more than just remove the hangover feeling. My thinking mind also became clearer and unimpeded in a way that was noticeable. My general health improved. The bags under my eyes and other just noticeable parts of my face cleared up. My circulation improved, too, and some skin issues at my extremities that I had had for years of a sudden healed themselves.
I had had cravings for a month or so, but these didn't take too long to go away. I stopped wanting alcohol pretty quickly. I started to have a repetitive dream, though, where I would accidentally forget my commitment, have a few drinks, and feel simultaneously both buzzed and in a sense of deep regret or disappointment. I think these also served as a feedback loop to keep me away.
I wish I had made this choice much earlier in my life. I can see that my drinking habit, as moderate as one may say it was, impacted my health and professional career. I feel like that I could have done much more with a clearer head. In a weird way though, I am okay with the youthful misadventures, although my friends and I are lucky to not have gotten hurt or thrown in jail along the way.
I tell my friends that I plan to start drinking again at 60, on a boat in sunny Croatia, enjoying a bottle of humanity's finest red wines. At that point, I figure, the tradeoff for health may not be worth versus the capacity to enjoy life. On the other hand, I just might not like the buzz at all anymore.