Five years ago this week, I stopped drinking.
I didn’t know it would be five years.
I don’t think I even knew exactly what I was doing.
I just knew I was tired.
Tired of thinking about drinking.
Tired of deciding whether I was going to drink.
Tired of deciding how much I was going to drink.
Tired of wondering whether I drank too much.
Tired of waking up and taking inventory of the night before.
Tired of trying to figure out whether alcohol was actually a problem when, technically, my life looked pretty damn functional.
I wasn’t standing in the smoking crater of a life alcohol had destroyed.
Five years alcohol-free doesn’t mean I haven’t had hard days or wanted to escape my life sometimes. It means alcohol is no longer one of the ways I do it. What started as an experiment in not drinking eventually became something much bigger: a lesson in attention, identity, self-trust and choosing what gets to stay in my life.
I was running businesses.
Raising kids.
Showing up.
Getting shit done.
Being responsible.
And drinking was woven right through the middle of all of it.
A glass of wine because it had been a long day.
Drinks because we were celebrating.
Drinks because we were on vacation.
Drinks because it was Friday.
Drinks because it was Tuesday and apparently Tuesday had also been a lot.
Alcohol didn’t have to destroy my life to take up too much space in it.
That was the part it took me a long time to understand.
I didn’t quit because I hit rock bottom
There was no dramatic final night.
No intervention.
No DUI.
No doctor sitting across from me telling me I needed to stop.
There wasn’t one moment when the universe parted the clouds and announced:
Katy, you have a drinking problem.
Which, frankly, would have made the decision a lot easier.
Instead, there was just this increasingly uncomfortable knowing.
I didn’t like my relationship with alcohol anymore.
That was it.
And eventually, I decided that was enough.
I didn’t need a diagnosis.
I didn’t need to prove I had a problem.
I didn’t need to wait until things got worse.
I was allowed to stop doing something simply because I didn’t like what it was doing in my life.
So on August 30, 2021, I stopped.
At first, alcohol-free life was about alcohol
In the beginning, not drinking required attention.
What would I order?
What would people think?
Would I still be fun?
What would I do at parties?
What about vacation?
What about weddings?
What about dinner?
What about sitting on the patio on a beautiful summer night?
Apparently I had assigned alcohol approximately 742 jobs.
Celebration.
Relaxation.
Connection.
Reward.
Stress relief.
Fun.
Vacation.
Romance.
Boredom relief.
Social lubricant.
End-of-day punctuation.
No wonder removing it felt so strange.
I wasn’t just removing a beverage.
I was learning how to experience my own life without constantly changing how I felt about it.
And that turned out to be much bigger than drinking.
Those early months were their own strange little chapter. If you’re curious about that part of the story, I broke down what my first 30, 60 and 90 days without alcohol actually looked like, including what helped, what surprised me and what happened after Day 90.
→ Read: What Happens in the First 90 Days Without Alcohol
Then something interesting happened
Eventually, I stopped thinking about alcohol very much.
It went from being something I actively wasn’t doing to something that simply wasn’t part of my life.
And all the attention I had been spending on it became available for other things.
That’s the part of alcohol-free life I don’t think we talk about enough.
Not just the mornings without hangovers.
Not just the better sleep.
Not just remembering everything you said the night before.
The space.
Mental space.
Emotional space.
What I got back were some of the currencies I now think about most: my time, energy and attention.
Five years later, I can see how much of my life was quietly being spent managing my relationship with alcohol.
When should I drink?
Should I drink?
How much?
Do I need more?
Did I have too much?
Should I stop for wine?
Who’s driving?
Why do I feel like shit?
Am I going to drink tonight?
Should I take a break?
Maybe only weekends.
Maybe only wine.
Maybe only socially.
Maybe I should stop again.
That is a lot of brainpower for a beverage.
When I stopped negotiating with alcohol, I got all of that back.
One thing I didn’t give up was the ritual itself. I’ve written more about whether drinking non-alcoholic beer and wine counts as “cheating” and why I’ve decided it doesn’t for me
My life did not magically become perfect
This is important.
I did not stop drinking and ascend into some glowing state of permanently hydrated enlightenment.
I’ve still made bad decisions.
I’ve still been anxious.
I’ve still spent money I probably shouldn’t have.
I’ve still overworked.
I’ve still questioned myself.
I’ve still wanted to escape uncomfortable feelings.
I’ve still had seasons where I had absolutely no fucking idea what I was doing.
Because alcohol wasn’t the source of every problem in my life.
It was just one of the ways I avoided being fully present for them.
Without it, I had to get much more acquainted with myself.
Sometimes that has been wonderful.
Sometimes it has been wildly inconvenient.
But it has always been real.
Five years later
I don’t feel like someone who is constantly resisting alcohol.
I feel like someone who doesn’t drink.
There’s a difference.
Alcohol-free isn’t something I white-knuckle my way through anymore.
It’s just part of who I am.
And when I look back over these five years, I’m less interested in everything I gave up than everything I gained.
I gained mornings.
I gained clarity.
I gained trust in myself.
I gained the ability to sit inside an uncomfortable feeling long enough to figure out what it was trying to tell me.
I gained curiosity about my own life.
I gained a version of fun that doesn’t require me to borrow happiness from tomorrow.
Most importantly, I think I gained evidence that I can change my life without first needing to prove that it’s bad enough to change.
That lesson has followed me everywhere.
Businesses.
Relationships.
Money.
Work.
Midlife.
Identity.
You don’t have to wait until something is completely broken before you’re allowed to want something different.
Maybe that’s what these five years have actually been about.
Not alcohol.
Permission.
Permission to question something everyone else considers normal.
Permission to change your mind.
Permission to leave before everything falls apart.
Permission to choose what feels better, even when you can’t fully explain why.
Permission to build a life you don’t regularly need to escape from.
Five years ago, I thought I was giving something up.
I had no idea how much I was about to get back.
