Every day, hiking in the mountains with my husband and our two dogs, I experience a moment of grounded exhilaration. I think of it as my “How did I get here?” moment. And a big part of the answer is always: “Because now I’m sober.”
For decades, I was a hard drinker, a lush, a boozy romantic who could and did drink anyone under the table and prided myself on it. This lasted from the age of 27 until after 50, a golden time during which I felt very sorry for ex-drinkers and people who couldn’t or wouldn’t drink. How did they knuckle through social situations, especially parties? What did they do at the end of a workday to celebrate and relax? How did they get through life? Not drinking, ever, struck me as nothing but miserable asceticism.
When I got sober-ish myself in my early 50s, I wasn’t sure at first how it would work for me. But I did it anyway. My body demanded it. I was getting older. I had to concede that I wasn’t as tough as I used to be. Nights of drinking too much showed in my face, and I could feel it in my bones. I wanted to take care of myself and forestall or mitigate the ageing process as much as possible. So for the next few years, I ricocheted between not drinking at all for months at a time, then ramping up again until I had to quit again, and rinse and repeat.
During these years, I didn’t love not drinking. I missed the festive loose warm soak of alcohol and returned to it eagerly. But I had to admit that when I was off booze, I looked and felt better physically: I slept more deeply, had more energy, exercised more. My mind was clearer. My moods were brighter. Parties were hard, and so was cooking at the end of a day of writing without a glass of wine at my elbow. But the pluses seemed to outweigh the minuses.
I finally quit drinking for real almost four years ago, on 12 July 2019, the day after I watched a writer friend hit what should have been his bottom. He crashed with my husband and me in Maine after his wife found out about at least one of his many affairs and kicked him out. After my husband had gone upstairs to bed, my friend sat on our couch drinking an entire bottle of gin, lamenting his fate, until he passed out next to our dog, whose bed that couch was.
I didn’t judge him, but it was a wake-up call, and I was primed to hear it. I didn’t have a drink the next night, or ever again since.
A few months later, I dropped everything and flew to southern Arizona to nurse my elderly mother for a month through a nasty broken leg. Caring for a parent is very hard, as anyone who’s done it knows. And I was doing it sober. One evening at sunset, I found myself rocketing north alone in her car, well above the speed limit, on the verge of tears. When I realized I was trying to drive home to Maine, I forced myself to turn around and took myself to the local inn for dinner, where I sat in a booth by myself and ordered seltzer.
Let me repeat: seltzer.
Normally, in my old life, I would have downed six or seven shots of tequila to numb the trapped, anxious rage and unbearable sense of unfairness I was feeling at being taken for granted and resented by the person I was trying so hard to help.
Instead, I sat there stoically sober and thinking, This is so freaking hard. I’m homesick and I miss my husband. I need a break from my mother or I’m going to scream. But I didn’t scream, and I didn’t drink any tequila. Instead, I went back to her house and woke up the next morning with a clear head instead of a self-loathing hangover. And that was the moment I knew I was done with drinking for the long haul.
I remained committed to sobriety through the first year of Covid, entrenched in lockdown with my husband in a remote farmhouse, beating my head against a novel that wasn’t working, facing my demons in the fallout of the rift with my mother and a devastating slap in the face by a close friend. I used to react to pain with drunken blowups, but this time, I neither made drama nor drank myself into anesthetized denial. Instead, I let all the anger and heartache wash over me. In the quiet of isolation, I forced myself to live through professional self-doubt and the grief at the loss of two of the most important relationships of my life. I accepted these losses as necessary and let them both go and moved on, and to my surprised relief, other friendships and family bonds deepened in their absence.
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In the process, I learned something astonishing about drinking. It was the ritual itself that I most loved, not the altered state. I started mixing up a nightly pitcher of what’s essentially fake lambrusco: seltzer, peach fizzy water, a shot of apple cider vinegar and concord grape juice. Seduced by the adaptogen craze, I started taking a couple of ashwagandha capsules with my nightly “fauxtail” (pronounced “foxtail”). The relaxed, festive feeling came back – placebo or not, it does the trick.
When lockdown ended, my husband and I moved to Taos, found a community of people we love, and started going to parties again. A shy introvert, I generally get overwhelmed by so many people crammed together. I used to pound a couple of drinks within the first 20 minutes of any social occasion. But it turns out that being sober at parties is kind of nice. I bring my pitcher of fauxtails and swill non-booze with gusto and allow myself to just feel shy. And after a night of quiet conversations with people I genuinely like, I go home feeling calm and easy in my skin. No more panicky sweating 3am episodes of “What did I say?” No more apologetic next-morning texts. And that feels like a win, all around.
Being sober has also made possible a fulfilling, varied work life I couldn’t have handled when I was drinking. The novel that wasn’t working coalesced after two more drafts and found a wonderful editor. Then I was hired to co-write a YA trilogy. I hope to turn a detective novel I wrote for fun into a series. And I have more ideas for other books in my newly clear head than I can possibly write.
I’m not going to lie: being sober is not a hot-air balloon ride. It’s more like a hike in the mountains. Having to feel my damn feelings without filters compels me to face and change the things in my life that keep me stuck. Hard work all around, but as my reward, I connect more deeply with the people I care about, and I no longer tolerate toxic patterns I once accepted as my due. I think of not drinking as a kindness I’ve given myself, one I deeply needed but didn’t think I deserved. And to my surprise, it’s rewarded me with true, hard-won happiness.
Kate Christensen lives in Taos, New Mexico. Her new novel, Welcome Home, Stranger, will be published in December