Making change: Booze 

Let's talk about alcohol, creator of (sometimes toxic) relationships, (occasional over-) sharer of secrets, balm to some (destroyer of many). Welcome to the final installment of Making Change, a six-week series on the hows and whys of personal, social and political change.

I type this from Ottawa, where I'm with people from frontline communities and Indigenous rights groups fighting to end toxic plastic production. I type this between reading updates on the student protests happening across the nation, including at Cal Poly Humboldt, and news stories that invoke despair. How to wrap this series of essays in a way that means something? I could write a guide on influencing people using Cialdini's Six Principles of Persuasion (reciprocity, scarcity, authority, commitment and consistency, liking and consensus — worth a Google). And yet, I land in the same place I started: Strengthening yourself from within improves your chances of making change in the world around you.

So, booze. You may be someone like my husband. He'll spend a couple hours at the Shanty nursing a drink or two or drinking club soda because to him the point is the socializing, not getting smashed. What a superpower. Maybe you buy nice bottles of whiskey and those bottles last you months, and are something you savor instead of inhale. Amazing. What a thing, to be one of the lucky humans whose DNA does not predisposition to dependence. For you, a fun read would be Edward Slingerland's Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, a science-based, rollicking ode to how alcohol has factored into human evolution. (I do not know why, in our booze-heavy culture that already promotes drinking at every turn, such a book was needed, but there it is.) Even Slingerland, in his worship of the drink, takes pains to note that how we drink now — hard liquor, high ABV beers and wines, constantly — differs from the historical ways in which humans consumed alcohol and thus can often be an agent of harm. But that acknowledgement arrives late. If the reader is someone for whom pain and drinking already intertwine, I would fling this book out the window.

Because even as I roll up on three years of sobriety this June, Drunk teases me into thinking maybe a full life requires drinking. It stokes my fear of being boring, reminds me that I'm never invited out to drinks anymore and how I miss the happy hour camaraderie, of the loneliness of being left out of the toast — of being left out. This is dangerous because my brain will not shut up, ever, and so I'm required to find constructive ways to quiet it, none of which work as quickly and effectively as a bucket of whiskey or bottle of wine. (It's really fucking challenging to have a brain like this sometimes.) But talking about sobriety is to accept a certain risk of being thought a vibe-killer. Nonetheless, I make this offering.

Book rec: The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Grey

Anyone who has partied with me over the years knows I was very fun to drink with. Until I wasn't. Read Blackout by Sarah Hepola, Quitter by Erica Barnett, Lit by Mary Karr or The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, and you will find echoes of me in them all. I wasn't blind to the benefits quitting drinking would bring, I just couldn't quite break the habit of incorporating alcohol into everything I did. Until I could. Catherine Grey's The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober helped, was the right book at the right time.

Most drinking memoirs follow a pattern of rollicking drunken tales, self-effacing and sharply told, followed by, "and then I went to AA," at which point the story's shine often fades. But Unexpected Joy is the first one I read that focused on exactly what the title promised, that sobriety would bring more happiness into one's life rather than "merely" purge the pain-guilt-regret cycle excessive drinking brings.

Before quitting, I would never have believed that life without booze could feel this right. I didn't use the word "quitting" at first. I just focused on surviving the first week, then the first month, then 100 days, then six months. At some point, I stopped eating so many donuts and forgot to think about how I wasn't drinking. Turns out this effort is as much about what I've gained as about what I've given up.

Here is the happymaking: The not being hungover. The not struggling to remember what happened, what I said. Better management of my feelings. The inability of those I may be mad at to no longer invalidate my anger with, "You were drunk." Never worrying about driving. The reward that comes with deliberate intimacy instead of drunken. The joy of having done the hard thing, the hope that comes from that. Being a better mom. What a sensation, these moments of being pleased with myself.

Here is what I do instead of day fade on the weekends: surf, hike, walk on the beach, crosswords, long-postponed projects around the house with groove-inducing pop songs blasting. Sometimes I write a card to a friend or craft a blog post in hopes of connecting. I go to bed feeling good and wake up imbued with hope. Maybe I write a series of columns that I hope might serve as small beacons to those in need of light.

Here is what I do to maintain friendships: Invite friends for walks or hikes or lunch, and give them my full attention, ask thoughtful questions, open my heart and life to them, none of the pleasure lessened for a lack of booze.

Here is how I maintain a social life: I still meet people for drinks, sometimes, but I suggest places that have fancy NA options, or I make sure to have an exit plan in case I find myself itchy. I host dinner parties and tell people to bring their own booze, which I'm happy to supply glasses for. I show up for outdoor interpretive walks or volunteer events or stand on the dunes and talk story with the surfers. I wander the farmers market and Arts Alive and run into people I know and chat for a bit and it's lovely, and then I move on. I find pleasure in crafting a more deliberate, more rewarding way of being in the world.

When I go out now, I still dance and laugh and get real with people. I listen instead of eyeing the bar thinking about getting my next drink. When I feel depleted, I leave rather than use drink after drink to drive my exhausted self through the motions. When I'm overwhelmed by a workday, I go outside or to the gym, or meet a friend. I know my friendships are real now — I know my feelings are real now — because they have survived honestly in the outside world, the one we're all striving to make better.

Jennifer Savage (she/her) is a freelance writer and full-time environmental activist. Find more of her personal writing at outonthepeninsula.com and more of her professional work at surfrider.org.