Member-only story
Dear Drinking Buddies
This is for the people that I told I was quitting drinking and for people who know of someone who is trying to quit. These weren’t random people I was telling which might excuse the response. They were people who knew me pretty well. They had even commented that drinking was a problem for me in the past.
Please, for the love of God, do not mention how many times I’ve quit before.
The amount of pressure that puts on someone who is making such a major life change like this is so high. You are dealing with new emotions and you’re taking this one day at a time. The last thing I need is a reminder about the previous times I attempted this and failed. While I can’t speak for everyone’s feelings on this, I heard this during the first week of sobriety and it felt like a slap in the face. I wasn’t being taken seriously and it was being treated like I was starting a new diet or workout plan, not an entirely different way of life that I wasn’t used to.
When you’re dealing with an addiction, you’re dealing with not just the physical cravings but the emotional escape that it gave you. I haven’t heard of many people who have been able to even quit smoking on their first attempt. It’s no different when dealing with alcohol. Alcohol these days is so normalized, it was easy to justify that I didn’t actually have a…
