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 either. My alcohol consumption was purely situational and the situations were happening too rarely to matter.
But last year changed this. I had to let go of the socialising part and the relief that alcohol consumption can offer — at least it was impossible to keep it up in the changed situation. The online wine-dates slowly crept into my every day, and drinking alone started to become an acceptable solution — to release tension, to forget about uncertainty, to finally get a few minutes for myself after homeschooling three kids.
It wasn’t accompanying a great meal anymore and it didn’t require anyone else — I was getting used to drinking alone. At first, not every day. And never during the day.
But by the time we were reaching the Holidays, and additional stress crept in, the pandemic news were still awful, and still nothing changed for the better, I noticed that I have been slowly getting used to drink every…
