Breaking a cycle I didn't think I could break
I had my first whole alcoholic drink at 14.
It wasn’t at a party.
It wasn’t something I snuck out of my parents’ liquor cabinet.
It was a Tequila Sunrise my mother made for me because she wanted me to know how alcohol affected me. Prior to that, going back as young as five, I’d had sips of beer, wine, gin and tonics (“it tastes like a Christmas tree!”), and whatever else the adults were drinking.
From there I had what I suspect is the typical experience of a typical teen/young adult in the late 70s and early 80s: partying with whatever alcohol I could get my hands on (except beer, I couldn’t stand it), and sometimes drinking so much I got sick.
After I graduated from college, I lived with my mother (who was newly single at the time) and many weekend nights we’d go out to nightclubs, drink, dance, and meet men.
Over the course of our lives, drinking together became a thing, and in later years it often ended with her getting sloppy drunk and either picking a fight with me or wanting to have a deep conversation rehashing the past. If I didn’t want to drink with her, she’d get angry and mean.
~~~
My mother would often criticize and make fun of her mother to me, because my grandmother often traveled with her liquor in the trunk of the car, “just in case” whomever she was going to see didn’t have any.
I’ll never forget the time we went to some family event where one of my mother’s aunts (on her father’s side) was going to be, and how there wasn’t going to be any liquor because said aunt had quit drinking.
“She’s the one with the ‘problem’,” my mother said in a harsh, mocking tone, rolling her eyes. “That doesn’t mean I can’t drink because I don’t have a problem,” she added, putting her liquor in the trunk of the car.
It was my stepfather, she said, whom she divorced when I was in college, who had the real problem with alcohol.
~~~
It wasn’t until I got married in 1997 that I became a daily drinker, specifically wine with dinner. My husband had his one beer (which he still does) and I would have my one, two, three, or maybe four glasses of wine. Besides…it was wine, not “hard liquor,” and those French people are so healthy and they drink wine every day! It’s good for you!
I don’t remember the first time I thought I might have a “problem” with it because the idea of having a problem with alcohol (or anything, really) was such a shameful thing. Needing help with a problem means you’re weak. Going to AA is stupid. It’s for “those” people.
As I got older, there was a part of me that didn’t like how much space wine rented in my head – not to mention how it impacted my sleep (snoring, waking in the middle of the night sweaty, with my head feeling parched, unpleasant, and fuzzy-achy) – so I cut back.
But I loved those first few, crisp, cold sips and the zoned out feeling I got and how any stress from the day would just melt away. For the most part I didn’t drink “too much” but there were times when I thought I should just give it up already (“Only people with ‘problems’ have to give it up,” I’d hear my-mother-in-my-head saying).
In the beginning of the pandemic, I joked that it was like stocking up for a blizzard…getting all the things you’d need to hunker down for a few days: snacks and drinks! Except the “blizzard” raged on for several years.
Then a funny thing happened: I started to pay more attention to women who were getting sober (and it how it was cool to do so) and writing books about it, and how wine had basically replaced Valium as “mommy’s little helper” (and why do women need that kind of “help”?) and that ANY amount of alcohol was poison (debunking all those prior studies).
I would have conversations in my head about how I was just going to stop, but then there’d only be one glass left in the bottle and I’d go and get another bottle or three.
I hired a life coach who specialized in stopping over drinking. I tried hypnosis.
What I really wanted was to not want wine. But I did want it. Very much. Unshaming that want created an opening.
And then along came Zepbound. I knew that GLP-1 medications were helping some people quit drinking so I decided to stop the day I took my first injection, and hoped the “wine noise” would disappear just like the “food noise” did.
But it didn’t.
What kept me from drinking in the beginning were two things:
#1 I didn’t want to get sick (the Zepbound subreddit is full of stories of people becoming extremely ill from drinking) and
#2 I didn’t want to find out that I wouldn’t get sick (because the Zepbound subreddit is also full of stories of people who can drink just fine on the medication)
There were evenings when I REALLY wanted a glass of wine, and I’d say so out loud, and then the urge would pass.
Over time the “wine noise” has quieted, although last weekend my husband commented that he was off to the local liquor store to get some beer and my knee-jerk reaction was to say, “get me a bottle of wine!”
But I didn’t.
The thing that surprises me the most is that I think I am way more fun without wine than I used to be with it.
Do I worry what would happen if I were to stop taking Zepbound? For sure. But I now feel free to talk about alcohol use, sobriety, getting help with it, and that the help doesn’t have to involve shame or white-knuckling it.
"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me." ~ Audre Lorde
P.S. I no longer snore and I sleep GREAT!