I was recently interviewed for a “Bustle” article on sobriety.
As I’ve shared on the Healing Laughter podcast, in 2019 I made the decision to become sober.
For me, that means no longer consuming alcohol. And as I share in this Bustle article – I realized that my new sobriety wasn’t just an adjustment that I had to get used to, but my friends, family, and colleagues also had to adjust to the new sober version of me.
Here’s a snippet from the article:
In July 2019, a drunken phone call made me realize I had an issue with alcohol. I let my feelings and pain do the talking, thinking that when you’re drunk, you can say whatever you want and it will be excused because you weren’t thinking clearly. But you don’t get a free pass for being mean just because you had a mimosa with breakfast. I felt not just embarrassed, but disappointed that drinking seemed to hold a higher power over me. After hanging up, I pledged to try to make it 30 days without any sort of booze, and I kept extending the timeline.
At first, I wanted to make sure my friends felt comfortable drinking around me. I didn’t want to be the fun police. I didn’t want to lose my invitation. So I tried to act cool. But it’s really hard to be the sober person in a room full of intoxicated people.
What really started to irk me was when I would go out with friends, and they’d say, “Let’s split the bill.” Why do you need $50 from me when I had water and a couple bites of an appetizer? Why are you trying to get me to help pay for the bottles of wine or the pitchers of beer when you know I’m on this sober journey? I had a really hard time even being around people who were drinking, because I felt like there were so many people using alcohol to escape their problems. I didn’t want to be a part of enabling them in the way I felt others had enabled me.
I lost touch with a lot of friends who were constantly drinking. Some of them don’t really know what to think of me now. Some of them are probably annoyed by the person who I’ve become. It’s a shift in what I value and what they value.
It’s like I’m in middle school again. I have to get comfortable socializing without that crutch of alcohol. It’s been an exercise in learning to get comfortable in my own skin.