I miss drinking all the time. Drinking was the most fun I’ve ever had, and, more than three months sober, I still wonder if I’ll ever have that much fun again.

One night this December, I went to a friend’s house. We had planned a casual night in because I was trying to “drink less.” But I was in the throes of a continuous fight with a non-boyfriend, so we ended up going out. I got hammered, drunk-texted two past flings for sex, and got shut down by both. But we kept drinking and I forgot about it. Later, I threw up at the bar, took an Uber home, fried bread in a skillet, ate it, threw up again, then woke up painfully hungover the next day. My friend and I went to JCPenney’s for a photo-shoot that morning. (you can do that — I didn’t know).

Then I got drunk again that next night, and probably ate some more fried bread. This weekend doesn’t stand out because it was bad. It stands out because it was good. I was with friends I loved, and I had a great time. Even though I was sick, hungover, broken, had eaten fried bread for three meals in a row, and was doubly-rejected, it was such a good time.

I quit drinking a few months ago, and I haven’t had as much fun in sobriety as I did those two days. This isn’t a story of someone who had a horrible drinking problem and then turned their life around. My life wasn’t visibly falling apart, and I don’t feel like I’ve really “turned things around” (I have a very nice life filled with many wonderful, supportive people, and I did before I stopped drinking, too). I also wouldn’t consider myself an alcoholic (and I have mixed feelings about the term — I’m pretty influenced by this line of thinking, but it’s just my opinion and does not have to be yours! I am still learning a lot about it, too).

I’ll start off by telling you a little bit about myself (I’ll also end with a little bit about myself, and it will be about me in the middle, too). I didn’t drink a lot in high school or college. Like many young women, I was terrified of gaining weight from drinking. I had recovered from the worst part of an eating disorder in high school, but I was still having a rough time. My freshman year of college I used to weigh myself 6 times/day (was I perhaps preparing for a later career as a data scientist?). My junior year of college, I threw my scale into a literal ravine at 2 am and didn’t weigh myself again for six years — I can’t recommend it enough.

I thought my plan to avoid weight gain would save me from ever having a drinking problem. Then, unfortunately, when I was about 23, I discovered that you actually can drink a lot without gaining weight if you replace food with alcohol. I don’t think anyone recommends alcohol as a weight-loss strategy. However, I found that once I’d eaten enough to satiate my hunger, food and alcohol served the same basic purpose: to anesthetize myself and to give me something to look forward to. In fact, alcohol did a much better job, and it became easy for me to eat a light dinner in favor of a few glasses of wine.

Everything was good in my life — I was living in San Francisco, I had a lot of friends, I had a cool tech job (how “cool” can tech jobs really be, but you get the idea). I was also going on a ton of dates (my dating app usage reached an all-time high, and I don’t just mean for me, I mean for anyone), which led to even more drinking. I was bored at work, but I felt sure I was putting in the hours to move onto a much better job. It didn’t seem like an issue that I was getting drunk all the time — once I had a boyfriend and the job of my dreams, I wouldn’t be out every night, and I’d be professionally and personally satisfied, so I wouldn’t need something to look forward to at the end of the day.

And then I acquired a boyfriend, after what felt like hundreds of first dates (and what was, in fact, hundreds of dates). He was really great, except for his personality. Unrelated, he kept telling me he wanted me to drink less (also, he was beyond annoying about me sleeping under his top sheet, although, in later years, as I visited the bedrooms of perhaps too many stand-up comedians, I would come to miss sleeping with a man who had a full set of sheets). In particular, he had a problem with my drunk-texting.

I’m a writer, okay? It’s who I am. It’s in my blood. So when I was a drinker, you better believe I was a drunk-texter. At one point, during the tail end of that relationship, he made a rule that I wasn’t allowed to text him when I was drunk. This was inconvenient for a number of reasons. Specifically, I drank every night, so this amounted to a texting curfew. I wanted to go over to his apartment, but I wasn’t allowed to text him. I suppose I could have called, but, ew, who does that? Instead, I just claimed I was sober. At the point in which I was actively lying to my boyfriend about my drinking, I maybe could have rethought my habits, but, luckily for me and my alcohol, he broke up with me.

In 2016, I started doing stand-up comedy. Now, not only was I in a bar every night, but also I found having a few drinks was a great way to get loose on stage. My alcohol use had gone from “not a problem” to “actively productive,” and I felt great. Starting stand-up was hands down the best decision I had ever made. For the first time, I felt fulfilled, which is what I supposedly needed to lose my interest in drinking. And yet, I was still getting a little bit drunk every night (and very drunk some nights).

The alcohol was affecting my sleep. I was working as a data scientist at a tech startup, and I typically got to work before 8. I’d wake up at 4 am and be unable to fall back asleep. I was prescribed Sonata (kinda like a short-acting Ambien) to help fall back asleep. Sonata is only meant to be taken for a few days in a row. To keep myself for becoming addicted to it, I’d actually leave it at my office. If I had a sleepless night, and I’d bring the Sonata home the next day to keep it from becoming two.

However, about once a week, I’d wake up at 4 am, hungover, unable to get back to sleep, head-aching, exhausted, and I’d panic. I’d literally take an Uber three miles to my office at around 5:30 am (the security guy got there at 5 — I did wonder what he thought of me, but not that much, since I was mostly unable to think), take a Sonata, go back to sleep until about 7:30, and find a way to stumble through another day. I did this for almost a year. The sad part is — it wasn’t hell. It was the most fun I’d had in a long time. Mostly because I was so in love with doing comedy that if I could power through brutal work days and be a little bit (or a lot) drunk all evening, it was totally worth it.

Stand-up changed everything — I finally felt like I was doing the exact right thing, and I was so obsessed with getting more stage time I abandoned my lifelong pursuit of the validation of men (for like 10 months — I found a way back). Still, staying out all night performing/drinking and then waking up for work was taking its toll. Instead of reeling in my drinking at all, I decided I’d battle the problem at its source. I quit my job, packed up my life in San Francisco, and moved back to my parents’ house in NYC. This would have seemed a lot like a woman having a nervous breakdown, except New York has the best stand-up scene in the world, and — ok, maybe it was kinda a nervous breakdown, but no worse than Rory Gilmore’s.

I guess it might be helpful, at this point, to know a few of my particular “habits” around alcohol. I drank in at home alone and socially, but my favorite way to drink was while walking. I’d either pack my own wine (this would have been a good place for me to take a step back — when I was pouring my mother’s expensive white wine into a Kombucha bottle (sorry, Mom, for everything), but no, I plowed ahead), or I’d buy the single-serving Sutter homes and drink them on the street. In fact, I can tell you basically every bodega and liquor store near every open mic in San Francisco and NYC that sells them. So I’d drink and walk and listen to music and pretend I was someone else. That’s it. That was my favorite thing to do for years. Getting drunk and walking around and pretending to have a different life. And, if we’re being honest, it would probably still be my favorite thing to do, if I still let myself do it. Most nights it was fine, but many it was not. I’d been bulimic as a teen, which wore down my gag reflex (don’t try to make a dirty joke — I’ve made them all already), and I was pretty sensitive to throwing up from drinking, so after more than 4 drinks I typically couldn’t keep it down.

Despite all this, my drinking still didn’t feel like a problem. Over the next two years, I worked here and there — I picked up some part-time coding projects, I tutored for the SAT (I once spent an hour-long session convincing a 17-year-old boy that not all the girls who’d gone to my college were ugly), I wrote some freelance (which is like any other writing but there’s only a 60% chance you’ll get paid). Now, without set hours, I didn’t have the 4 am panic of wondering what I’d do if I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t on sleeping pills, I didn’t have to sit in front of an Excel spreadsheet, and I could nap. I was probably drinking 20–25 drinks/week, which is about what I’d been drinking in San Francisco. That might sound like a lot, or it might not, but I’ve since stopped thinking that the amount is important — for me (and this doesn’t have to be true for you), what seemed more important was the reason why, and what, if anything, I was trying to avoid. For this reason, I’d really urge anyone who has friends who say they have a problem with alcohol to believe them — it’s really hard for someone on the outside to know exactly what’s motivating another person. Just because your friend isn’t the drunkest person at the bar doesn’t mean they’re not struggling.

I wanted to drink all the time. Whatever desire I’d had in San Francisco to get on stage as much as possible was starting to subside. Maybe doing stand-up 8 hours/night had “killed the vibe,” but if I was going to sit through hours of open mics and then an hour on the subway in the middle of the night, I had to be drunk. I’d force myself to take nights off drinking and white-knuckle it through, but these nights got less and less frequent. I didn’t have a drinking problem, I’d say. I had a stand-up problem. I felt socially awkward all the time, and I needed some lubricant between me and the people around me. I assumed at some point I’d just grow into being comfortable without alcohol, but that would require learning to like myself. And of course, it was tough for me to quit stand-up when I was making so much money doing it (in three years, if you adjust for inflation, I’ve made a total of 75 cents performing stand-up comedy, mostly in the form of fries I requested from audience members).

Finally, about ten months ago, my body spoke back. Well, my body had been speaking back for a while — when I wasn’t sleeping, when I was hungover all morning, when I was depressed for what felt like no reason, when my skin looked a constant state of bad. But now my stomach hurt literally constantly, and it was hard to get through the day. I went to a GI doctor to see if I could get some tips.

“What about cutting out alcohol and caffeine?” she asked.

“Um, do you have literally any other tips?” I replied (coffee is also a close friend).

And she did. I cut out dairy and gluten and carbonation and spicy foods and fried foods and soy and eating past 7 pm and eating quickly and eating too much at once and mint and gum and eating. All of that seemed like a better compromise — I wasn’t going to, what, like, not drink wine? It comes from grapes, it’s a vegetable, it’s basically a salad, and even healthier since it has no dressing. I said I’d drink less (and I did, for a while), but the idea of giving it up entirely, very sadly, felt like losing a close friend. I truthfully did think of alcohol as a friend, which honestly makes me grimace just to write. If I had a long night ahead of me, racing around the city to different shows and making small talk at dank bars, I needed a buddy with me. It gave me comfort to know I’d have alcohol at my side.

My stomach hurt less, it’s true, and I had magically kept alcohol in my life. I was sleeping ok, but I felt tired all the time (potentially due to lack of food? Apparently food is a thing we need to have energy), so I was sleeping a ton despite never being rested. In retrospect, I realize how much I gave up to keep alcohol in my life — my job (my justification was that I also didn’t like it), my sleep (my justification is that it would have been bad anyway), several guys (they are objectively useless though, I’ll stand by that one). But when I started to give up food, I knew I had to turn back.

By the time I stopped drinking, I was barely eating and sleeping about 11 hours/night but never feeling awake. I didn’t have a full-time job, and I was living in my parents’ house in NYC. All of this sounds bad, but it actually looked totally fine on the outside, which is sort of shocking in retrospect.

I knew it was unsustainable though, and I wanted alcohol out of my life so badly. I’d tried and failed to moderate so many times. I’d convince myself if I drank less than 1 whole drink, it didn’t count, and so I’d pour out the tiniest amount off a glass of wine (then decide it was really most important to not have more than two, so I’d pour myself another).

This all happened last fall, and I decided I’d just go through one more holiday season with drinking and then quit completely. I think I took New Year’s Day off but was back at it Jan 2nd. I had plans to move to LA in February, so I decided to just push off my “sobriety” until then. Most of what I remember from my last few weeks in NYC is just wanting it to be done. I remember buying a sober memoir and reading it drunk while waiting for a show to start at 11 pm. I wanted to be the woman in the memoir. I wanted to get started with this part of my life.

I love this quote from Laura McKowen’s Instagram (follow her and buy her book):

photo here

I saw this quote and thought about it constantly my last few weeks of drinking. I could just be done. I didn’t have to go through it anymore. It wasn’t easy to stop, obviously. In fact, it was the opposite of easy (do they have a word for that? I’m a writer). Still, short of someone force-feeding me alcohol, I could just choose to have it out of my life, and that’s what I wanted, so badly. I drank a few times in LA, but I did find that moving made it easier to quit. My last time drinking was March 9th, 2019.

I miss it all the time. I went through the typical “pink cloud” that people talk about where I’d find myself smiling for no reason at a pretty flower or during yoga. But then it passed, and I was back to my life. I was back to being the socially-uncomfortable person I’d never liked, and now I had to do it all sober. I sleep better, but as I write this, I’m coming off a two-week long period of waking up at 5 am every morning and being unable to get back to sleep. I want to drink all the time. I want to drink right now. In fact, I left a comedy show early to come home and write this so I wouldn’t drink.

The first few months have been really hard. I’d go whole days without laughing, which is particularly sad, because I spend about two hours/day at comedy shows (so, in that sense, it’s sadder for the comics performing than it is for me). What I miss more is crying, though. When I drank, the tears flowed freely. I’d listen to sad music and drink single-serving Sutter Homes and think about how, you know, sad it all was. Now, I still think about how sad it all is, but the feelings get stuck inside my sober brain. I’m 3 months sober, which means I’m 3 months constipated for tears. I’ve gone through a lot since I quit drinking, but the tears haven’t come to join me. On the bright side, my shits are great.

But things are better. I eat relatively normally now (it’s not perfect, but it’s a vast improvement) — in fact, without alcohol, I pretty much have to, or I’d be so bored. That sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Even in my up-at-5am place, I still have more energy than I’ve had in years. I haven’t ruined a romantic relationship with a drunk text in a while. And even if right now is rough (today, in particular, has been very rough), I feel optimistic about the future, which I didn’t before. I used to live in constant fear that I was putting too many substances into my brain, and, as a result, it would stop working very young. I don’t feel that way anymore.

For a long time, I thought my drinking was bad, but I wasn’t sure I had to quit. I don’t know what it means to “have to” quit — it’s such a spectrum, and there are so many ways to exist as a person. But I told myself I would, and that’s really what mattered to me. After years of telling myself I’d do one thing or another, I finally kept a promise to myself. And maybe if I can keep promises to myself, I can trust myself, and maybe even like myself. A lot of people told me I didn’t have to quit drinking, and a few even actively discouraged it. If I could give you any advice, I’d encourage you to listen to the people in your life when they tell you they want to change — it’s impossible for someone to know the full story of someone else’s life. Maybe. I’m not really in a position to give advice. I don’t know much (but I am available for hire as an SAT tutor). Anyway, I’m 108 days sober, and I’m very grateful.