a small victory.

This was something I wrote on Instagram that I will put here also in an attempt to remind me that I can also just write without a 2,200 character limit.

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Loath to do this here (also loath to begin any sentence with “loath”) but there is supposed to be a public component so here it is. It’s hardly controversial to declare that the last 365 days have been generally unprecedented in our lifetimes. It might be slightly more controversial to declare (possibly hyperbolically) that the value of modern hyperbolic language has kind of been exhausted, that we’re so far off the scale of normality in 2021 that there’s barely any point in exaggerating for effect anymore, because hey, whatever it is, THIS COULD BE THE YEAR, you never know. So i am not exaggerating when i say that I never ever fucking imagined that one day I’d be declaring, in “public”, with a nebulous mix of pride and embarrassment, that I haven’t had any alcohol in 370 days. And that it would be 100% true. And that it would be accompanied by such a pure, non-rationalized feeling of liberation and relief. I never believed that “sober people” were ACTUALLY happy about not drinking, I thought for sure it was something they had to desperately brainwash themselves into believing. It feels wrong to say I hope I never become the non-drinker that always turned me off of non-drinkers, but it’s true, I do hope that. And I know I’m also fucking that up with this post. But I will squirt out one more cliche and cheesy thing before mercifully stopping and never posting about this shit ever again: if you are tired of your relationship with alcohol and want to change it; if it is making you more miserable than carefree: once you stop for a while, at least months, for me it was certainly more than 3 months but who really knows, there is a switch that will eventually flip where the genuine relief of not being dominated by alcohol and the genuine dread of falling back into that increasingly relentless and horrifying cycle are more powerful than any anxiety you might have or imagine having over the grim-sounding “life without alcohol”. And when it happens, this switch will feel natural and normal and unforced, unexaggerated for effect. Do it now while there are no social events to struggle through.

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