'It was two weeks into social distancing that I started craving alcohol again. It wasn’t a nice glass of Sauvignon Blanc that I wanted, it was two bottles. Of anything.' mmaggeler writes
Photo-Illustration: by Stevie Remsberg; Photos: Getty Images By the time I was eight months sober, the version of myself who drank felt like a distant memory. I’d think back on her with pity, and a little condescension. Why did I think I needed alcohol to have fun? I’d wonder, knowing full well that fun had nothing to do with it. In sobriety, I’d become a new person, I thought — someone braver and calmer who had more hobbies and did more laundry.
Weekends, which once sped by before I could even get a good look at them, felt eternal. Saturday mornings I would wake up full of energy and wonder what it was that people did when they weren’t hungover. I started running laps around Prospect Park, organizing hikes, kickboxing. Physical exhaustion, it seemed, could quiet the anxious thoughts in my head almost as effectively as alcohol had.
The physical activity helped, and so did time. By month eight, I had new routines, deeper relationships, clearer skin. I’d occasionally find myself musing about how nice it would be to have a crisp, cold glass of white wine that tasted bright and green, like limestone and freshly cut grass, but I’d quickly dismiss the thought. My dry life was going so well, why would I bother drinking? I began to wonder if I had exaggerated my own alcohol use. Maybe I was making a fuss out of nothing.
The term alcoholic is one I avoided when I first quit drinking. It seemed too big for me, too weighed down already by baggage that wasn’t my own. As Caroline Knapp wrote in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story: “Alcoholic is a nasty word, several decades of education notwithstanding. Say it out loud and chances are you still get the classic image of the falling-down booze-hound: an older person, usually male, staggering down the street and clutching a brown paper bag.
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