Why I Decided to Stop Drinking and What Sobriety Actually Gave Me

This post was originally published in 2021 and updated with additional reflections on sobriety.

I did it. I posted the S word on social media.

I will be honest, I waffled on that post for days. Completely riddled with anxiety, I kept drafting and saving and redrafting and re-saving versions of what I wanted to say from Thanksgiving morning on. It was giving unhinged PR team of one. Every time I thought I had landed on the right version, I panicked and closed the app again.

Finally, on Sunday, I thought, oh my God, enough. This is ridiculous. Beth Dutton your ass.

Share.

So I did.

I posted a before and after photo and a string of sobriety hashtags that even made me cringe a little. Honestly, even writing this now makes me cringe a little, which feels on brand.

My anxiety about sharing it publicly was not totally unfounded. Deciding to quit drinking is scary. Sharing that decision with a world full of drinkers can feel even scarier, especially when drinking has been part of your identity for so long. For me, it had been woven into so many versions of myself that I barely knew where I ended and the wine began. Ironically, the idea for our wine bar was dreamed up during my first ninety days of sobriety a few years earlier, which is either very poetic or very on the nose, depending on how generous we are feeling.

Deciding to Quit Drinking Is Scary

I waffled because I was scared.

But in the end, it became more important to me to be honest than it was to keep this neat little secret tucked away where no one could see it. Which, of course, is funny because there is absolutely nothing neat about a secret you are obsessing over in the Notes app.

A lot of my fear centered around what sobriety would mean, not just privately, but publicly. Not just quitting, but staying quit. Not doing a cute little time-sensitive challenge and then hopping back in with a triumphant boomerang of a mocktail. I mean really changing something. Really letting it count.

I worried about what people would think.

What if I failed?

What would I do when I was stressed, sad, depressed, frustrated, happy, celebrating, bored, or just existing on a random Thursday?

What would I drink at my kids’ weddings if I could not have the champagne toast everyone imagines in those future movie scenes in their heads?

What about my friends? What about Dale? What about my job? What would people say to my face? What would they say behind my back? Who would support me? Who would get weird? Who would quietly disappear? Who would still want to hang out with me?

When I really looked at those fears, most of them were rooted in other people. Other people’s comfort. Other people’s expectations. Other people’s opinions of me.

And at some point I had to admit that none of that was actually my business.

This was not about my family or my friends or my customers or the people casually observing from the edges of the internet. It was about me. My health. My peace. The way I wanted to live my life.

Why I Finally Decided to Stop Drinking

I shared it publicly for a couple of reasons. First, let’s not pretend otherwise, I am an oversharer. This is not new information. But I also shared it because I know how lonely this can feel.

And it can feel very lonely.

There is a weird isolation that comes with questioning something that everyone around you seems to treat as normal, fun, harmless, expected, deserved, and basically the reward for surviving adulthood. When you start wondering whether alcohol is making your life worse instead of better, it can feel like you are the only one pulling at a thread nobody else even notices is loose.

I also wanted to say something because I know how easy it is for sober people talking about sobriety to accidentally sound preachy. The minute you start naming the benefits, some people hear judgment, even when none is intended. So let me say this as clearly as I can.

I really, truly do not care what anyone else drinks.

I am not counting your glasses of wine. I am not judging your margarita order. I am not taking inventory of what time you started or what rules you have made for yourself. If drinking works for you, have at it. God bless and carry on.

But a few of you had reached out and asked me how. And if six people message you, there are always more who are thinking about it quietly and not saying it out loud. That is just how this works. The public comments are never the full story. The real story is usually sitting in the inbox.

If you are starting to question your own relationship with alcohol, I know how vulnerable and disorienting that can feel. I wrote before about my first ninety days alcohol free, and that season was an important beginning for me. But this time felt different.

This time I was not trying to prove I could take a break. I was trying to tell the truth.

And the truth was that my life was better without alcohol in it.

For years, I thought quitting drinking would require some dramatic rock bottom moment, a perfect plan, or a heroic amount of willpower. I assumed there would be some cinematic turning point where everything became obvious and I emerged transformed, glowing, and somehow suddenly into herbal tea.

It was quieter than that.

One day I realized I did not want to keep living the way I had been living.

Not the hangovers. Not the anxiety.

Not the mental negotiations about whether I would drink, how much I would drink, whether it counted if it was just wine, whether I had earned it, whether I had overdone it, and how bad I was going to feel the next day.

At some point the math became obvious. My life was better without alcohol in it. Once that became clear, the decision followed.

Not perfectly. Not dramatically. Just honestly.

I stopped depending on willpower and white knuckling my way through dinners, events, and random Tuesday nights. I stopped acting like I was depriving myself of something wonderful and started admitting that I was releasing something that had become a burden.

Eventually I realized quitting drinking was not some punishment I had to endure. It was the decision that made the rest of my life make more sense.

How Much was i drinking?

This is one of the questions people ask most, and I understand why. Everybody wants a number. A benchmark. A way to measure whether their drinking is worse, better, safer, or more justified than someone else’s.

My answer is simple.

Too much for me.

Which for those that get annoyed by cryptic answers like me, in the end about one and a half to 2 bottles of wine every night.

I have never been especially interested in one drink. I honestly do not see the point in one. One always felt like the opening act, not the whole show. But comparing numbers misses the bigger point anyway.

Sobriety is not really about how much someone drinks. It is about whether alcohol is making your life better or worse.

For me, the answer eventually became obvious.

I was trying to run a big, full life while constantly recovering from the night before. I had businesses to run, kids to raise, ideas I wanted to pursue, and a body that was already waving a large red flag in the form of an ulcer. My life was asking more of me than I was able to give while dragging alcohol through it.

At some point I realized I could not keep doing both.

What Sobriety Actually Gave Me

This is the part that can be a little tricky to talk about.

When sober people start listing the benefits of quitting drinking, it can sometimes come across as a little… righteous. Like we’ve joined some secret club where we all wake up at 5AM to journal and drink celery juice while judging everyone’s wine glass.

I promise that is not what’s happening here.

I genuinely do not care what anyone else drinks. Truly. I’m not quietly counting cocktails across the table or judging your second glass of wine. If alcohol works in your life, fantastic. Carry on. Godspeed.

But for me, something shifted when I stopped.

At first it was subtle. The mornings were easier. My brain didn’t feel like it had been wrapped in cotton. I stopped waking up at 3AM replaying conversations I barely remembered having. My body started to feel like something I lived in again instead of something I was constantly apologizing to.

And then something else happened that I didn’t expect.

Clarity.

Not the kind that makes you suddenly become a productivity robot who alphabetizes their spice rack and runs marathons before breakfast. (Although if that’s your vibe, you do you.)

I mean the kind of clarity where you suddenly notice how much energy alcohol was quietly siphoning away from your life.

Energy to think.
Energy to build things.
Energy to actually be present for your own life.

For years I had this vague feeling that something bigger was waiting for me out there. A life that felt more expansive. More creative. More aligned with the person I suspected I might actually be.

But I was trying to reach it while shackled to a hangover and a glass of wine.

Turns out those two things don’t pair well.

Sobriety didn’t magically solve all my problems. I still have anxiety sometimes. I still procrastinate. I still occasionally eat a sleeve of cookies while pretending I’m “just having one.”

But it did remove one major obstacle that was quietly making everything harder than it needed to be.

It gave me my mornings back.
It gave me my energy back.
And maybe most importantly, it gave me the ability to actually trust myself.

When you stop numbing every uncomfortable feeling with a drink, you suddenly have to learn how to sit with your life as it actually is. The good parts, the messy parts, the boring Tuesday afternoon parts where nothing dramatic is happening but you’re still responsible for being a functioning adult.

It’s uncomfortable at first.
But it’s also incredibly freeing.

Because once you realize you can handle your own life without a buffer, a lot of the things that used to scare you start to lose their power.

And for me, that was the real shift.

Not just quitting drinking buut realizing I was capable of living my life fully awake.

The Part No One Talks About

One of the fears I had when I stopped drinking was losing people.

Not in some dramatic movie scene where somebody throws a martini glass and storms out of my life forever. More quietly than that.

I worried about who would be weird about it. Who would feel uncomfortable. Who would stop inviting me places because suddenly I was the sober girl with sparkling water and what probably looked like an alarming amount of emotional awareness.

Alcohol quietly organizes so much of adult social life. Happy hour. Girls’ night. Patio wine. Champagne at celebrations. Margaritas because it is Tuesday and apparently that is reason enough. Once I saw that, I started to wonder what would happen if I stepped out of that rhythm.

And yes, some relationships shifted.

Some people pulled back a little. Some did not really know what to do with the change. A few interactions became awkward in that extremely Midwestern way where everyone is polite but nobody knows where to put their hands.

But something else happened too. A surprising number of people leaned in.

Quietly.

People who had been thinking about their own drinking but had not said it out loud yet. People who were curious. People who just wanted to know they were not the only ones asking these questions in the privacy of their own mind.

That is the thing no one really tells you. When you share something vulnerable like this publicly, the truest responses rarely show up in the comments. They show up in private. In messages. In little confessions sent after dark. In careful sentences from people who are not ready to say it publicly yet but feel relieved that somebody else did.

If six people message you, there are probably sixty more thinking about it.

Maybe six hundred.

A lot of us are walking around with the same questions, just waiting for someone else to say them first.

What I Know Now

What I know now is that sobriety did not make my life smaller.

That was one of the fears, of course. That I would become boring, rigid, less fun, less spontaneous, less me. That I would be the woman clutching a lime LaCroix while everyone else laughed freely and lived colorfully around me.

That has not been my experience. If anything, sobriety made my life bigger.

It gave me access to myself again. To my own instincts. My own clarity. My own energy. It gave me the ability to actually build the life I kept saying I wanted instead of constantly being delayed by something that was quietly draining me.

For years I had this feeling that something more honest and expansive was waiting for me. I could not fully see it yet, but I could feel it there, just outside my line of sight.

And it turns out the first step toward that life was not becoming someone new.

It was getting out of my own way.

If You’re Questioning Your Drinking

If you are reading this and quietly wondering about your own relationship with alcohol, here is what I want you to know.

You do not have to label yourself anything. You do not have to decide the rest of your life today. You do not have to hit some dramatic rock bottom in order to earn the right to change.

Sometimes the first step is just asking a very honest question.

Is this actually making my life better?

Not socially. Not temporarily. Not for the two hours between the first sip and the second glass.

Overall.

If the honest answer is no, even a little bit, that curiosity might be worth listening to.

You do not need to solve the whole thing today. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is simply start paying attention.

katy ripp

sobriety +
Alcohol-free living

Scanners &
Multi-passionate minds

midlife & reinvention

entrepreneurship & business

guides & resources

Sober Living