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Don’t You Need a Month Without Drinking?
The idea behind dry January and the unchecked alcoholism to check
According to AA, the first step is to admit and accept that you are an alcoholic. I have never been to an AA meeting and I don’t identify as an alcoholic, but I imagine that this first step might be the hardest of all — in their 12-step program to fight alcohol addiction.
But alcohol and alcoholism worry me. It doesn’t give me the creeps or it doesn’t make me lose sleep, but somehow, like a tiny voice in my head, it’s there. There have been alcoholics in my family and there have been other — equally worrying addictions too. I have been struggling with quitting smoking for some time, and I am not proud to admit that I lack the willpower to do it.
Thus, alcoholism is a worrying concept for me.
This past year — the gruesome, unforgettable 2020 — the whole world turned upside down and it changed some of the habits I built up during the years. I, for one, rarely drank alone at home. I restricted my alcohol consumption to partying every once in a while and family celebrations. Of course, as alcohol is a social lubricant, it was always with booze, sometimes a lot of it, but I never thought it would qualify as alcoholism. For one, it didn’t happen frequently enough, and there was no pattern to it…
