I’ve been gone for a while. I’ve no idea what to say about this return. I’ve tried nine times to write my first blog back—I even posted one of them a few months ago without telling anyone. (It’s gone now.)

I thought about changing the template and branding of my website (which I did), then changing platforms altogether. I thought about consistent themes I should write about—making it more political, philosophical, or solely about me. I talked to my therapist about why I should write; I filled another three notebooks with chicken scratches; I added six new folders to my drive to capture half-baked rants.

But I haven’t really written something—with the intention of it being read—since the summer of 2022.

I have plenty of excuses: I moved to Vancouver; picked up new hobbies; worked more; met new people whose eyebrows I wasn’t ready to raise; prioritized the book I’m trying to finish; and I started drinking again.

All those things kept me from posting, and there may be time for posts about each. For now, we have to start with the one that underscores everything else. Drinking, from my experience, is not the lone wrench that derails a life. But: quitting is the one thing I changed recently, and here I am writing again, so it’s clearly a big wrench.

I wrote about alcohol years ago. Then, as now, I’ll preface everything I have to say on the subject: this is about me and my experience. If you like drinking: great, I get it, I did too. And while I think alcohol is fundamentally negative, I also think we’re allowed to enjoy bad things, and it’s not my place to tell anyone else what enriches or erodes their lives.

For me: booze inarguably hurt more than helped. While drinking over the past two years, I:

Underperformed at work (by my standards).
Accrued tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
Failed to post a single blog or finish a creative project.
Didn’t maintain any lasting relationships.
Went to four weddings and remember none of them.
Developed tendonitis, tore my calf muscle, and never fully recovered.
Made “guy who drinks” my defining character trait

That’s a lot already, but I feel like I lost something more than that collection of consequences. It feels like I lost years of my life. This is not where I pictured myself at 33. I feel the same as I did at 27 and was at the lowest point in my life. I was just…stuck. Except now it’s starting to feel like time’s running out and I drank myself past a point of return. It feels like I’ll be priced out of the housing market forever; the gap in my dating resume will turn people off; and I won’t set up the cabin retreat where I’ll write all my books.

It feels like I drank myself into a hole I won’t get out of, and the craziest part is: I have no clue how it happened. I could swear I just moved to Vancouver; I’d been pretty tight with my budgets; I never abandoned work unannounced. I lived my life with a general sense that I was doing the right things. It just turns out that sense was way off.

Again: this is not all alcohol’s fault; but again: since I quit drinking, I made a two-year plan to clear up my debt; things at work finally paying off; and I’m here, at a coffee shop instead of a bar, writing. I might still be in the rut, but for the first time in ages, I’m climbing out of it.

Sobriety is the catalyst, so I have to talk about it.

First, to clarify what I mean by sobriety: I don’t drink at all anymore, and I don’t ever plan to. I’m four months sober now, and I look forward to forty more years of this. (We’ll see what happens when I’m seventy-three. If I’m in a bunker because the world’s gone to hell, I reserve the right to change my mind.)

For contrast: last time I “quit,” I never made a long-term plan. I had a panic attack while hungover in Ireland and had to stop immediately—though not necessarily permanently. Given the right circumstances, I considered adding the odd drink back into my life. If I was financially secure, for example, had a stable relationship, and gained more self-confidence, then I could share a bottle of wine over dinner.

That time, I took eighteen months off; but that time, I never said I was quitting. If anything, I told people I was giving up hangovers. That worked great for a year and a half, then one day—Christmas Eve, 2020, in Revelstoke—I decided to have a few beers. From there, I drank every day for a week. I was on a ski vacation, why wouldn’t I? After that, I spent $1,000 on booze every month for three years straight. It wasn’t until I tried and failed to go a week without drinking that I decided, once again, that something had to change.

Except this time, I did a bit more reading and self-reflection, and decided to be a bit more deliberate.

I go back and forth on the term, alcoholic. By definition: I am an alcoholic. I don’t have control over when or how much I drink, and my drinking negatively affects my work and relationships.

It wasn’t just that I liked or needed booze—those don’t feel like the right words. To me, alcohol was medicine, curing physical and psychological symptoms and enhancing my mood and performance. It was my favourite treat and biggest crutch rolled into one.

In case that’s too vague:

I drank when doing creative work because booze shushed my internal critic that over-analyzes things.
I drank when feeling awkward because I was always felt one drink away from fitting in.
I drank when having deep chats, because it was easier to be honest and empathetic when you’re both unfiltered.
I drank when tired at a bar because a shot of liquor was a great pick-me-up.
I drank the day after drinking because I couldn’t be both drunk and hungover at the same time.

I drank because I thought it improved my life. I talked openly about it: booze had benefits. So, even though I was aware of its downsides, like any drinker is, I believed the good outweighed the bad. If it ever tipped the wrong way, it was simply a matter of re-balancing.

There are a two big lies in there though:

Balance wasn’t an option for me.
And booze could never be a net positive.

I know I am past the point of “drinking responsibly.” I am irrevocably too enamoured with booze to flirt safely with it. I will never not see it as a wonder-drug. I can tell myself, while sober, that it doesn’t make everything better—but if I took one drink tomorrow, I’d throw out this whole four-thousand word post—even though I know how dark my drinking almost got.

How dark, you ask?

When I failed my one-week sobriety test, and I knew I’d never moderate my drinking, I didn’t default to, I’ll never drink again. I thought about it. I thought about it a lot. I thought: there is a fork in the road in front of me. One way, I drink; the other, I never drink again. On the first path, I embrace alcoholism with open arms and structure my life around getting drunk. I could work a job that enabled me to drink every evening, live frugally then spend half my paycheque on booze, and hang out with whomever was most likely to say yes to another final round of drinks. I could sneak whiskey into alcohol-free zones and maintain a steady flow of drinks whenever possible. I would drive unsafe cars, ride decade-old bikes, wear holes in my clothes, and pass on once-in-a-lifetime trips—preferring to spend my money at the local bar.

Even as I just wrote that and thought, this sounds like hyperbole, I’m still tempted. Part of me wants that path. Life is hard; alcohol is easy; and I might be decently happy with a bottle glued to my hand.

So…yeah, there’s a giant, flashing, impossible-to-ignore fork in the road.

The good news—and the reason I feel different about this decision to quit compared to the last—is the second path isn’t just away from alcohol; it leads somewhere better.

The common story about quitting alcohol (the one I had last time) is about giving things up—sacrificing good times to avoid health effects, social gaffs, and financial costs. It’s all subtraction—a lop off the arm to save the body story; like retiring from a sport you love to prevent recurring injuries; like leaving a part of you behind and moving on with a giant hole to fill. Again: seemingly hyperbolic yet damn close to the truth.

That story sucks, though. From my experience: it’s hard to follow through on, and it leaves you perpetually hoping for a third path to open up. You always wonder: if the math were different, would you have to give alcohol up completely? If you just cut out the blowouts, maybe you could still enjoy the benefits of drinking.

With my new story, the third path is irrelevant. The math will never balance out because this isn’t about trade-offs. In this story, sobriety isn’t a net positive, it’s all positive. I’m not sacrificing anything; I’m losing the negatives of alcohol, improving on the perceived benefits, and gaining more in the process. It feels like I left a weight vest behind at the crossroads and am genuinely excited to move forward.

If I start to lose you after this point, no problem. If you read this, mull it over, then disagree, A-okay with me. This is not based on peer-reviewed science; this is what I think. You can think differently.

But this is my blog, so what I think is: we lie to ourselves and each other about what drinking actually does and why we like it. I’m going to describe what I used to like about it, but I’ll ask you now before I put words in your head:

What do you like about drinking? Be as specific as you can and put it into words; what physical feelings do you enjoy most about alcohol?

For my part, I was recently hiking with the Arche today and thought, if I summitted this mountain, sitting down with a glass of whiskey as the sun sets would be the best possible reward to give myself. Maybe for you, it’s a beer after a bike ride, or a glass of wine after putting the kids to bed—whatever the activity or drink of choice, there’s just something about that full-body relaxation that comes with the first sip of booze after a hard activity. To me, it was the epitome of a long, refreshing sigh.

That feeling was my favourite thing about alcohol. More than the taste, the liquid courage, and the relaxing (numbing) effects; I loved the first pull of a fresh drink that sent a signal to my brain saying: everything’s all right, we’re drinking now. It was like stepping through a veil to another dimension (the drinking dimension) where things were just…better. Things on the drinking side of the curtain were lighter, warmer, funnier; the worries I once had were like raindrops bouncing off a tin roof—outside noise while I was dry and cozy. Whenever I used to drink, a voice in my head would say, aaand we’re back the moment a drink touched my lips. It was like taking off or putting on VR goggles; there was a night & day difference in the world after a single sip.

That feeling—the crazy teleportation to another dimension—is a placebo, though. It happens too fast to be an actual effect of the drug. I would feel my shoulders roll back & down long before the booze could reach my brain. Really, that feeling I love so much is more like a Pavlovian response I drilled over fifteen years. I might’ve cultivated the same effect had I played a chime on my phone every time I sat down to relax.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. A switch flips in my brain the moment I drink, and it’ll turn on the same joyful & relaxing sensation the rest of my life. It’s like a shortcut to a garden oasis in the middle of a chaotic, dog-eat-dog world.

That’s a nice thing to have.

That being said: it’s also a lie—a trick of mental associations and dopamine drips that portrays booze as the hero of a scene it only has a bit part in. For me: that changes things. It paints alcohol as an insidious voice that tricks me into partnering with it. I literally see it as this phantom-snake thing—straight out of an old Disney movie. Right now, I’m telling myself I don’t need a drink because it won’t actually make me feel good, and I can still hear a half-formed response saying, ahhh but that’s not truuuuee, a drink would wash over you and welcome you back to the good place.

Fuuuck that voice.

No one likes getting conned, and I feel like alcohol’s been conning me for years. At this point, I’m pissed about it, and the more lies and half-truths I learn about why I liked booze in the first place, the less I was to associate with it.

Which brings me to my next favourite thing about alcohol: drinking to connect with people.

I understand: when meeting new people and going on dates, booze can be a superpowered supplement. My last relationship really kicked off when we bar-hopped from the Stanley Park Brewpub to another West-End bar and the awkward feeling-out phase of early dating unfolded into genuinely liking each other. That wasn’t an isolated occurrence for me; it’s how all my relationships started.

Booze makes that that part of social life easier. No caveats: it smooths awkward or boring conversations and I absolutely loved that about it. What I loved even more were the chats it enabled with loved ones. Hanging in the halls of my most-cherished memories are some near-blackout conversations with best-friends. They became an unspoken tradition on cottage weekends or big nights out: at some point, late in the night when everyone else had passed out, we’d head to the patio, roof, or dock with a bottle of whiskey, and talk for another two hours. I used to point to those memories as particular reasons to never give up drinking; they felt like irreplaceable benefits of booze and were worth almost any price.

If you know me, you know I have solid walls up most of the time. I’m not quick to say I love you, and I don’t easily share moments when you feel distinctly present with someone else. Alcohol was the perfect solvent to erode the bricks in those walls. Whatever brain activity it impaired relaxed the hyperactivity that made it hard for me to relax around others. It created opportunities to connect deeply with people I did love.

I never wanted to quit drinking because I thought alcohol was the key that opened the door to those perfect moments—and all the smaller ones of a similar type.

I wasn’t wrong. Alcohol was the only way I could access those moments. I was too in my own head when sober—trying not to put my foot in my mouth while appearing smart or funny. That was just the way my brain worked, and alcohol worked like a designer drug to cure social anxieties.

In that sense, alcohol provided a clear and tangible benefit for me—but only temporarily and while seriously drunk. In using it this way, I became wholly dependent on it. You shouldn’t need alcohol to have a good conversation with someone. I honestly did. I relied on it as a crutch for so long that my social muscles atrophied and I couldn’t function in public without a drink. That meant: by drinking, I could only be the best, most-social version of myself a fraction of the time. If I kept at it, I was guaranteed to spend the majority of my life (the sober parts) socially crippled. It was that, or commit to being drunk more and more often.

That’s where the excitement really comes in. It feels like I’m finally dropping a set of social training wheels. Just like biking: it’ll be a little harder for a while, but once you can pedal on your own the world will open up. With practice, I think I can get everywhere alcohol used to take me. That 4am conversation shared over the sounds of ice clinking in a whiskey glass—I could have that at noon with a coffee and a donut. I could have drunken-karaoke confidence in a sales meeting. I could late-night-wedding-dance on a first date.

I’m not there yet, but it’s coming. I recently went sober at a friend’s wedding, for example, and felt roughly as at-ease as I used to. Conversations felt a little more deliberate—I had to try to find people to talk to and things to talk about—but even that felt good when the alternative was half-consciously stumbling around. Then, at the after-party when I still had control of my brain, it felt like I got bonus time with the friends I was visiting. The real me—the one writing this—was present the whole time; I never sat passenger to drunk me’s whims or entered that drunk dimension.

That weekend was the first confirmation that this new story’s legit. I think I’m going to be a better person, living a better life, without alcohol. It’s not just because I’ll be happier without hangovers; I’ll genuinely enjoy everything more.

That’s me. Now I’m going to talk about everyone else, so if you were already on the fence about this whole post, this might be your cue to cut & run.

I think everyone should stop drinking. I will never tell anyone what to do, and I don’t think anyone is wrong for enjoying alcohol. I just think, should you stop, you’d be happier, and should everyone stop, the world would be a better place.

I believe this is the same way I believe people should avoid sleeping pills, though. It’s purely theoretical. I understand why someone takes sleeping pills: they want to sleep and need a bit of help. I can say, address underlying issues that necessitate those pills, and that may sound like a nice idea, but it isn’t global advice for the masses. Life isn’t that simple. Not everyone wants to suffer days or weeks of insomnia, has the resources for counselling, or even feels compelled to change—and no one has to. No one has to check any of a thousand hypothetical boxes to optimize their life. We can all choose whatever shortcuts and escape hatches work for us. I, for one, take vitamins instead of eating vegetables. It’s not a great choice, and maybe I’ll change eventually, but it’s working well enough and I’m content for now.

Maybe I’ll saddle-up my high-horse when I start eating salads.

For now, whether on-the-sauce or not, I’d just love to shift our societal view of alcohol—even just an inch or two—because right now it’s completely broken.

We’ve collectively agreed it’s perfectly normal to have our guard up and pretend to be other people most of the time. As an extension: we’ve agreed it’s perfectly normal to use alcohol to break free of that paradigm.

Life is hard; it’s nice to cut loose with some drinks on occasion.
That sounds fair.

But…why is life so hard? Why do we force smiles and small talk at work? Why is hanging out with new people emotionally exhausting? Why do we let out such a massive sigh when we walk through our own front door? Why do we only joke with our close friends? Why can’t we dance in public?

What are we afraid of? What do we have to prove? What are we trying to hide?

Why can’t we just…let go every day? Why is it so hard to just be ourselves?

Alcohol is not the reason; social-anxiety pre-dates our drinking culture. However: alcohol maintains systems that oppress us:

It creates pressure-release valves of communal drinking where, by jointly numbing our over-thinking brains, we create temporary havens to drop our masks.
And it adds to our stress and anxiety—and therefore the pressure to put up walls—by messing with our brain chemistry.

Alcohol fits so perfectly into this role it almost feels engineered. It’s the perfect medicine for, this kind of sucks but we’ll just deal with it. I once said, I could happily sit through a two-hour sermon in a Catholic church—as long as I had a cooler full of beer. That’s still a perfect metaphor here: alcohol is this strange and powerful coping device that overrides boredom, stress, discomfort, pain, grief—and anything we want to put in the background. My building debt, for example, only mattered while I was sober; and the book I couldn’t finish could stay in the drawer. If I could hit that easy-eject button whenever life was getting too real, I’d never have to change.

Similarly, we tolerate the isolation we feel in our daily lives because we have booze as our not-so-secret outlet. We don’t overflow with resentment while engaging our work identity because we get to be free for a few hours on the weekend.

Without alcohol, we couldn’t take it—and things would change. With alcohol, we’ll stay stuck.

I think change is long overdue.

In my own way, I feel lucky for my fork in the road. I had to change my perception of alcohol and its role in my life. If things weren’t so off the rails, I wouldn’t believe this new story or maintain my convictions with half the confidence I have today.

So, if things are going right in your life, I completely understand if you don’t jump on board my booze-is-bad train.

I just wanted to write this because it’s an important story for me. If it does nothing more than provide a curious glimpse into my bizarre brain: awesome. Honestly, I’m just glad to be back.