No Booze is Good Booze

IMHO

Hi.

Sitting in the airport, waiting for flight back to my kids who are in Montana.

There’s a lot of chatter floating around now about drinking/not drinking. I noticed an article or two about the Surgeon General warning that alcohol causes cancer. It’s natural, around the turn of the year, for people to decide to stop drinking, if only for a while.

My daughter, who turns 20 tomorrow, talked with me recently about her thoughts on drinking. She’s seriously thinking about being a sober person; she’s not crazy about boozy culture. I’m guessing my thirteen years of not consuming alcohol have rubbed off, but I’m proud of her, nonetheless, for at least thinking about the role of drinking in her life, especially as a college student. Drinking and getting drunk are so deeply woven into that culture that it’s impossible to think about college without thinking about all the drunken escapades. Woo! Freedom! Woo! Let’s get so drunk we black out or fall down and smash our face or do other incredibly stupid things! Right of passage!

I wish that choosing not to drink wasn’t a thing. I wish we were so far advanced as a society that we were already living in peace, making good choices and not having to endlessly debate to drink or not to drink.

But here we are. Sobriety has been a hot topic for a while now. Check out the selection of non-alcoholic spirits, wine and beer and you’ll know that there are big bucks in booze-free beverages. Which is cool, except that it’s also a kind of cosplay at actual drinking that we sober people do when we pour a glass of non-alcoholic red wine. We know perfectly well that grape juice tastes better and costs a lot less, but something in us still wants us to be part of the group thing, the cool thing.

There’s nothing that draws a crowd like a crowd. And as long as rich, famous and beautiful people are hawking booze, we will always be brainwashed into thinking we want to belong to that crowd. Remember the sexy cowboys in the old cigarette ads? Who didn’t want to be the Marlboro Man? Same same.

Everyone who chooses sobriety does so for personal reasons, but it never ceases to amaze me that people always want to know why someone has stopped drinking.

The two questions I’ve been asked most frequently in my life are why did you become a pastor and why did you stop drinking.

Because no one would choose to do those things, right? Something questionable must have happened to lead me down those strange and difficult roads, right?

For sure I was drinking too much when I chose to stop drinking. I was going through a divorce, which is an easy, stock reason to stop drinking. But looking back I see it more clearly: I hated myself. I hated the choices I had made and I was afraid of what my future held. I drank to forget all of it, to make myself invisible, which, of course, made everything worse.

I think most people in our culture do drink to forget what’s happening in their life, and that’s the part that makes me the most sad, in the whole sordid story of to drink or not to drink. I wish we were all living lives that we loved so much that to alter our sense of reality with alcohol would feel dumb. Why would I want to miss any of this?

How did I stop drinking? is also a question I get a lot. I tried AA but it wasn’t for me. I know it saves lives, but the culture of secrecy and the way of speaking about one’s self in the meetings … I am (name) and I am an alcoholic felt very ball and chain to me. If I haven’t had a drink in thirteen years then I’m not an alcoholic and maybe I wasn’t even one in the first place. Who’s to define? What difference does it make? I know that if I’m not drinking anymore, I’m free; I’m a butterfly and I’m not going to define myself in relation to the word alcohol.

How did I stop? I just stopped. With the support of a friend who had already been there, which is helpful no matter what you’re trying to achieve in life—having a mentor.

In much the same way that losing weight involves eating less, becoming sober means, simply, not buying, not pouring, not lifting the glass to your lips. And I have been around humans long enough now to know that every single one of us has the willpower to make those kinds of choices. To just stop doing the thing that isn’t a good idea.

I love being sober, have not missed one single thing about booze in my life. I think the hardest part has been watching drinkers around me, seeing how deeply steeped we all are in drinking culture and how often those with a drink in their hand don’t like my choice to not do what they’re doing.

I’ve said this a thousand times over the last decade; it has withstood the test of time: I have never, not once, seen drinking improve the conditions of anyone’s life. Drinking only causes problems: physical ones, emotional ones, financial ones, relationship ones. There is no Get Out of Jail Free card when it comes to drinking. And I know you don’t want to believe this, but you’re an idiot when you’ve had too much to drink.

And sure, maybe you think you don’t drink too much, but ‘too much” is the tipping point, where you get that nice, warm feeling of disconnect from your life. The vast majority of drinkers drink too much because most people are drinking to get into that space. There is something going on in their life and they want to be free from it for a while, and booze is the bridge to that feeling.

We are creatures of habit with a tendency toward deeply addictive behaviors. All of us are addicted to something; most of us are addicted to a bunch of things. I don’t know why we come hardwired this way, except to surmise that perhaps our addictions provide us with the opportunity to learn just how powerful we are when we choose to break the bonds or, at least, temper the behavior. I don’t know if moderate drinking is a good thing or not. I assume the Surgeon General knows more than I, but I also assume that the alcohol lobby is powerful. No doubt the story will waffle back and forth between a little is fine to even a little is harmful.

I circle back around to what I said earlier: what you do with your life is your business. You can choose to spend every single day marinated in a boozy haze. You can drink all you want, this is the beauty of life—we all have freewill.

Let me place the argument within a different perspective. As a medium who has been connecting with those who have died for over a decade now, I can report that almost everyone dies with some regret. Most people who come through from the spirit realm want to say I’m sorry for one thing or another. Almost everyone wishes they had paid more time and attention to the things that mattered most: their people and their creative calling.

It is very hard, near impossible, to be truly present in this life, for our people and for our work, with booze coursing through our bodies. It just is; no judgement, your life, your choice. In life you have time to look back and see that shit, I really screwed that up, make a course adjustment and proceed, improved. In death, the jig is up, the time is gone, the crap you gathered dispersed, the living ones left shaking their heads, wishing it had been different and getting on with their lives.

I would, in fact, give almost anything to have known my grandfather, the one who drank himself into an early grave, twenty years before I was born.

With love and a tender reminder that it all goes by so freaking fast,
Melissa

Favorite drink, to this day: chocolate milk. 🐄🤎