Last weekend marked six months since I decided to stop drinking, and since I decided to switch to a fully plant based diet. It feels like it’s been a lot longer. I think I have internalized not drinking in the same way I have internalized not eating any animal based foods. It’s just something I don’t do. For most of my adult life I have been a vegetarian, so having a self-imposed restriction is familiar. It’s one of several things that I see others doing and think, “I don’t do that.” There are a lot of things I don’t do, now that I think about it. I don’t stay up late. I don’t watch TV. I don’t look at Tik Tok. I don’t participate in most group activities. And I don’t drink. It’s funny because for my whole adult life I drank a lot, I thought about drinking frequently, I read about drinking for fun, and I often talked about alcohol and how much I enjoyed it. And now, just six months in, I find myself identifying as “someone who doesn’t drink.”
It feels like a permanent change to me, though I know that I often think of things as being permanent until they aren’t. When I do something, I tend to think about it as the only way to do things until suddenly one day I decide that I want to do something else. I used to go for long walks every day. I would see people running and think, running is so bad for you. It’s so hard on your body. I don’t know why people run. I wouldn’t never do that. I am a walker. Now I run every day and I can’t imagine walking. Walking is so slow, I think. Walking is so boring. How could I have ever thought walking was better than running? So, even though I imagine that I will never drink again, I know that someday I might change my mind.
I was thinking about this the other day as I watched my daughter playing with a friend of hers in the gym at daycare. The kids run around for an hour at the end of the day, and we pick up our daughter from the chaos of swirling, screaming children. The girl she was playing with was someone we used to do playdates with frequently before the pandemic. Her parents were exactly the type of people I loved to hang out with back when I was pretending to be a normal person, before the pandemic caused me to reflect, before I got my autism diagnosis, and before I started to realize all the ways I’ve masked, and contorted myself into what I thought a normal person should be like.
This other girl’s parents are fun. They are gracious hosts. They like to drink and eat fine cheeses and cured meats. When we did playdates we would have them at 4:00 PM, which is happy hour time here. While the kids played we would drink wine and eat cheese. We would have pleasant conversation, avoiding any difficult topics, and saying things that we thought would make us more likable to one another. At least, that’s what I was doing. That’s what I would always do. Try to act the way I thought the people I was with would find more appealing, and all the while assuming that everyone else was doing the same thing.
I listen closely, I try to pick up on subtle tones, find the nuance in passing comments, to understand someone’s position, their preferences. And then I empathize with that position, even if it’s different from my own (to the extent that I have a position on a given topic, or know what my position is). I agree with people. I reinforce what they say. I try to validate their perspective. I do this in an attempt to create the sense of a connection. To make the conversation easier. To be likable. Or, to be what I think is likable. I don’t do this all the time, or with people I am truly close to, or with family. I do this with people who are not familiar with me and with whom I am not familiar. People who I think I want to be friends with, or who I want to appear friendly to. People who I know I will interact with but never get to know too well. Neighbors, parents of our daughter’s classmates, co-workers, colleagues of my wife, friends of friends whom we’ll encounter at cocktail parties, now that those are happening again.
As I watched my daughter playing with her friend the other day, and I thought about those playdates with her parents (which we haven’t done for the past two years), it occurred to me that it was fun. It was fun having agreeable and surface level conversation about not-too-serious topics, while sipping good wine and getting slightly tipsy. I did a lot of fun things before the pandemic. Those things usually involved alcohol, and also involved going along with the expectations of others. I would work hard to give the impression I was a go-with-the-flow kind of person, but going with the flow has never been easy. And that’s where the alcohol came in. As long as I had a drink, I could flow in any direction. The more drinks I had, the easier it was, and often the more fun.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to the first cocktail party we’d been to in more than two years. It was a friend’s birthday. Friends with whom I have enjoyed many bottles of wine and many craft cocktails in the past. This is the kind of party I would be excited about going to two years ago - the kind of party I would look forward to. The kind of party I would be happy to be at and reluctant to leave. But this party was hard. Mostly unendurable. After a very nice first thirty minutes of catching up with our friends and hosts before the majority of guests arrived (they had invited us to show up a bit early), I was ready to go. And soon I was more than ready to go, I was anxious and eager to leave as quickly as possible.
Part of the problem was the crowd - it was as if the pandemic had never happened. Rooms filled with unmasked people, talking and hugging and standing elbow to elbow as if there was no potentially deadly airborne virus drifting between us. But even if I wasn’t worried about COVID (and I’m actually not all that worried about it compared to how I felt a year ago), part of the problem was not drinking. The hosts were wonderful - they had coolers of nonalcoholic beer, and they even had a nice nonalcoholic gin to make fake gin and tonics. Those things are great for a quiet evening at home, when I want to sit and relax with a beverage that feels special to mark the end of the day. But at a party, meeting new people, facing a continual whirlwind of introductions, small talk, clinking glasses, and many delicious looking wines to choose from, they don’t really help. I gulped down a nonalcoholic gin and tonic hoping for it to have the same kind of soothing effect as the real thing. It tasted real, but it left me wanting. Having another wasn’t going to help. Yes, it gives me something to hold in my hand, something to fill the physical space, to clink, to swirl, to sip from. But the difficulty of facing the crowd without the warm, soothing, ease of a nice glass of wine, or the sharp, tingling warmth of a Manhattan flowing down my throat and into my limbs, started to become very apparent.
As each new guest came through the door, most unknown to me, and most in the form of families of four or five, I felt myself shrinking more and more into myself. I walked through the house to the back deck, where our host was cooking burgers on the grill. At first it seemed to be a refuge. I could chat with the host, who is extremely gifted at making people feel welcome and starting conversations, and I could feel the reassurance of being outside, and the comfort of not having too many strangers around. But soon the deck started to swell. Wanting something to do that didn’t involve talking to the people in the growing crowd, I decided I needed to visually locate my daughter, who had been playing in the yard with the other children. I couldn’t see her from the deck, so I made a task of walking into the yard and around the house to locate her. I imagined it would just take a moment before I spotted her, but I didn’t. The kids had vanished without a trace. Nothing to be worried about, of course, they were probably just running around in the house. But worrying felt like something to do, something to focus on that didn’t involve contemplating how to talk to people while my mind filled with anxious thoughts about viruses and the relative virtues of wine.
I walked around to the front of the house and went inside. In the short time I’d been on the deck, the number of guests seemed to triple. I felt a tinge of panic as I quickly headed toward the staircase, telling myself I needed to find our daughter. I walked up to the playroom, in the attic, where I found our daughter and the other kids entranced in front of the big screen TV, sucking the straws of juice boxes, trying to extract the last drops from the disposable containers. I felt a wave of relief, partly because I found my daughter (I always get worried when I don’t know where she is), but mostly because the attic was quiet, padded, and safe from the crowds of grownups downstairs.
I went over to my daughter and whispered in her ear, “Sweetie, are you ready to go?” I was hoping that she’d say yes, that she’d be tired, that she’d be cranky, that she’d provide the perfect excuse to leave quickly without need of explanation. Everybody understands the urgency of a cranky toddler.
She shook her head, “I don’t want to go,” she said. I could see from the glazed look in her eyes that prying her away from the television would be a monumental task. I checked the time on my phone. Barely 6:00 PM. No imaginable reason to leave. I contemplated the situation. Can I go back to the party and just deal with it? Can I stay up here with the kids, pretending that they need a chaperon? Nevermind that other parents, whose kids were a year or two younger than ours, had no hesitation whatsoever of letting their kids roam free through the house, the yard, or even across the alley into the neighbor’s yard. I sighed.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go?” I asked my daughter, perhaps hoping that she would recognize the precarious mental state of her father, sensing my unspoken needs through the unexplainable bonds that children and parents share with one another. She looked at me skeptically before returning her eyes to the television.
“No.” she said. “Get me another juice box.”
“Please?” I asked, naively hopeful that she would at least pretend to ask for something rather than demand it. She ignored my plea, and although I felt defeated as a parent, I also felt at least some reassurance that I had another task - to walk down the stairs, through the house to the back deck, retrieve a juice box from the cooler, and retrace my steps to deliver it.
On the deck I found that the crowd had grown considerably, with so many people crammed into the shrinking space between the railings, the tables, the chairs, and the coolers, that it would be impossibly awkward to remain there without engaging in conversation with someone. Luckily, my wife was among the group. I walked up to her, “She’s upstairs,” I said, “watching TV.”
“Great,” said my wife. I shrugged.
“I’m feeling quite anxious,” I said, grateful that I could tell her the truth and not have to make up a reason for wanting to leave. “I think I need to go,”
“OK,” she said, “No problem.” I love my wife. Seeing the empathy in her eyes as she recognized my needs and made no hesitation to accommodate them, even though I knew she was having a good time, seeing people she hadn’t seen in two years, catching up and talking about whatever people talk about when they reunite old acquaintanceships. She immediately looked for a place to put her drink and started to think about how to gracefully make an exit.
I went back to the attic with a juice box, contemplating how to coax my daughter away from the party, while my wife said goodbyes. I hoped that she would tell people the truth for me, that she would explain to them that I was worried, that not drinking combined with my diagnosis, combined with the lingering pandemic anxieties, made these situations hard. For some reason I thought it would be easier for her to explain in the third person, than it would be for me to explain in the first person.
As we drove home I felt the anxiety dispersing from my body, I felt the relief of being done with a big test, or unwinding after a big presentation at work. Even if it hadn’t gone well, at least now it was over. And I wondered, will these things ever be fun again? What does it mean if I can’t have fun at a party? Is drinking the cost of having fun? If it is, then is it worth it? Is it better to not drink, and avoid parties, than it is to drink and spend more time with other people? Would it be physically possible for me to drink only in situations like that, and abstain the rest of the time? Or would I wake the next morning and spend the rest of the day focused on waiting for the clock to roll around to an hour that felt reasonable to have a glass of wine? Would I be back to daily drinking before I knew it, capping this not-drinking phase at six months and calling it a successful experiment in proving I could do it?
So far, the answer to all these questions is to ignore them, to keep not drinking, and to keep not socializing, taking momentary refuge in the rising virus levels that once again provide a plausible excuse to be cautious and avoid crowds.
34: Six months of no drinking
Thanks for writing this, I related so much. I remember my first party sober. It was a fairly tame affair but I felt on the verge of a panic attack after an hour or so and left v early. I remember his wonderful it felt to leave, and to be sober. Though I didn't exactly write it off as a success at the time.
It has gotten easier, and I hope that will be the case for you. But I still prefer to stay home and read or write or to go for a walk. I think.
The transitions between conversations are tough and parties involve so many! Lately I am finding myself wanting to leave even friends houses v quickly. The more I pay attention to my needs, the more I recognise how much effort 'normal' things are. Like popping in for a cup of tea, without a clear end time. Nowadays I realise that isn't entirely enjoyable for me because I am wondering when we can leave after ten minutes or so. I am always ready to leave and suggesting leaving before anyone else. It's quite comical really.
I'm glad you have your wife who understands. And the bit about your daughter made me laugh.
I think you can count the party as a success because you took your own needs seriously and you tried your best. You showed up early, too, which is an important contribution! And you were honest.
I have the same q's about drinking. I imagine I would return to a similar state fairly quickly, where I was drinking a little every day and worrying about whether it was healthy or not, with occasional blackouts. But who knows?
I love the way you describe yourself arguing for why your current way is best. We humans are so funny, aren't we? Our brains endlessly persuading us and making cases for our choices...
No wonder a lil drinky seems appealing.
I'm still committed to the cause of unmasking. It's exciting to find who I really am, by which I mean, how I feel most comfort and ease and joy and pleasure and positivity.
I tune into people in the same way you describe and I can often build a good rapport with people very quickly, and I enjoy it, but it's very tiring. And so I'd rather be gardening or napping. Gardening energises me and so it will always be more appealing though it is not as amusing as conversations with people, which I love. Gardening feels good because I am not over adrenalised the whole time.
As we keep telling the truth more people seem to admit they feel the same. I wonder what would happen to the social life of England if we ran out of alcohol...
Anyhow, thank as ever for an excellent read.
Ps I can't believe you don't want TV!