56: The significance of 24 hours
Not drinking has shifted my view of time
I read something recently that intrigued me. In her book, The Believer, Sarah Krasnostein interviews a woman who spent 35 years in prison for murdering her husband after he abused her and her child for years. The woman, Lynn, describes how she would approach the concept of time while enduring those 35 years behind bars: “When women learned she was doing twenty-five to life, they would say to her that they didn’t know how she could do it, that they were struggling with lesser sentences. And she would reply, simply, ‘We have the same time.’
“What do you mean? We don’t have the same time, they would say. I’ve got a two to six. You have today, Lynn would say. Why are you worrying about two or six? You have today.”1 How is two to six years the same as 25 to life? Because everyone has right now, today, the next 24 hours, and Lynn was approaching each individual day as the scope of time she was concerned with.
This passage got me thinking about how I conceive of time, divide it up, structure it. I’ve often felt, like with having happy hour at 4:00 PM, that if I didn’t do a certain thing at a certain time I was missing out, or running late, or upsetting the balance of things. I’m a routine oriented person. The predictable structure of my day gives me a sense of calm, and I get agitated when it’s messed up. That’s an autistic thing, and it’s not necessarily bad. When one of my daily rituals, though, involves consuming an addictive substance, it increases the intensity.
This week marks one year since I stopped drinking alcohol. It’s only been in the past few weeks, I feel, that I’ve really started to appreciate life without drinking. Over the past twelve months there have been some hard moments - times when I really felt like I wanted a drink, but didn’t have that option to turn to. Mostly, though, that hasn’t been the case. If there is any adjective that comes to mind the most when I think about life without alcohol, it has been a bit boring. At least, until very recently. Drinking was an important part of my routine, a sort of daily entertainment that I looked forward to. It wasn’t just the sensation of drinking, the way it provides the illusion of relief, the sense of relaxation, of slight, brief, escape even if you are only having a glass or two of wine. It’s also something to do, a way to occupy time, a method of distraction, like TV. Life without alcohol, I used to think, would be like working for hours on end, day after day, in the kind of tedious banality that Dilbert makes fun of. Or, even more dramatically, like the 25 to life prison sentence that Lynn describes. Life would be, in other words, something to endure.
Not drinking, just like not watching TV, creates more time. It forces me to fully recognize more of those 24 hours that exist in each day. This could be wonderful - especially if I’m feeling productive, useful, or energetic and able to do things. It could also be terrifying - more hours of consciousness in which to exist, to contemplate the challenges of life, to endure the anxiety and fear of our endless world crises. I used to think, “I just need to make it to 4:00 and I can have a drink!” Now, when we get to 4:00 PM, there is no drink. What do I do? And what do I anticipate doing? What will I look forward to the way I used to look forward to that glass of wine?
For the first several months of not drinking, I focused mostly on trying to find alternatives to my evening glass or two of wine, beer, or the occasional cocktail. I bought bottles of non-alcoholic wine and wine substitutes that were more expensive than I’d normally spend on a bottle of real wine. I sought out something that I could put in a wine glass, swirl, smell, and taste slowly, feeling its strange sensations coat the inside of my mouth and make their way down my throat. Nothing could provide the unique, warm, shuddering twinge of alcohol. But, I did find a few things that simulated the novelty of having a flavor in your mouth that is not quite pleasant, but not unpleasant, not sweet, but not sour, not bitter, but not too sugary. Complex mixtures of exotic vinegars, herbs, and fermented things that come in beautiful wine-shaped bottles and look enticing and curious in a proper piece of glassware.
I made do with these substitutes, trying to retrain my mind to look forward to the ritual of opening a beautiful bottle, and pouring a unique, fragrant liquid into a special glass that I only used for that one drink each day. It’s not about what the alcohol does to you, I told myself, it’s about the ceremony surrounding it. I could plausibly argue that this is true in a cocktail (or I guess mocktail) party conversation for a good while. But, at some point, I had to also admit to myself that it was bullshit. I didn’t drink alcohol every day just for the ritual of it. I drank alcohol every day because it’s an intoxicating drug. I drank alcohol because I was stressed and wanted an escape. I drank alcohol to distract myself from the fact that I was unfulfilled at work. I looked forward to alcohol because it was a break from my life. This realization was triggered in part by this great post from Chesley Flood where she describes her therapist explaining back to her, “You’re drinking to be able to tolerate your life.”
For months, I would finish the workday (which is pretty anticlimactic when you work at home on a computer all day), go into the kitchen, pour a glass of non-wine, and then sit in the living room to… look at my phone. Looking at my phone was so much more interesting when I was having a drink. Now I had to acknowledge the banality of the updates, the repetitiveness of the headlines, the annoyance of the crosswords, and the disappointment of checking my inbox to verify that there was nothing new there, just the unread messages that I was already aware of and intentionally avoiding. That daily ritual, it turns out, made time drag on, extending an evening into something that felt much longer than an evening, and a month into a period of time at the end of which I would look back and say, “Oh my god, it’s only been a month?” Rather than, “Wow, I can’t believe that it’s already May!” In other words, I had stopped the activity that helped me “tolerate” my life, but I didn’t address the real problem of why I felt like I needed something to make my life “tolerable”. I had to acknowledge this and face it head on before I could make real progress.
It sounds odd to say that my life is not “tolerable” (I don’t want to write that down without air quotes to lessen the blow). I never would have said that my life is not tolerable. I have a great life. I am married to an incredible person, we have an amazing daughter, we live in a beautiful place, and I’ve been extremely fortunate in my career (though it is ultimately not as fulfilling as I want). It wasn’t that the elements of my life were not satisfactory, or that there was anything wrong with the things that comprise my life. I think the challenge was more around the simple question of how I was looking at my life on a daily basis. I might explain it by saying that I enjoyed the drinking so much, it overshadowed other things. I was excited for 4:00 PM, so that I could have a drink. Without that, whatever else happened at 4:00 PM would feel boring. Or, I’d look forward to a certain restaurant because of the cocktails they had. Or, I’d be excited about going to a work event because I knew they’d have great wine. I wouldn’t have admitted this at the time. I probably told myself the alcohol was just an ancillary benefit. But the truth is, dinner out is less exciting without anticipating the cocktail list. The work event is less appealing if I know I will have to just ignore that amazing bottle of wine that others are enjoying. Even sitting in the living room to browse my phone at the end of the day became less enjoyable without wine.
This realization forced a bunch of questions - why was alcohol so central to how I conceived of fun? Why did I think I needed it to make an activity more enjoyable? And how can I continue to enjoy things when alcohol is no longer part of the experience?
These are challenging questions. My sense from observing, listening to, and speaking with people in different kinds of recovery programs is that these questions get at the heart of why it’s hard to stop. Some people turn to a “higher power” and develop a faith practice. Some build community through acts of service. Some turn inward with mindfulness practices, or creative expression. Some simply talk to other people going through similar experiences and build community that way. Some do all of these things and more. It’s tempting to offer a simple explanation - when you stop drinking, it creates a void, and you need something else to fill that void (faith, mindfulness, community, etc). But I don’t think that captures it. I don’t want to replace alcohol with anything, I want to understand why alcohol has been such a powerful force in my life and how I can reconcile the way I approach and think about my life without it.
Autism plays a role, but it isn’t the only factor. In many cases, I used alcohol to be able to tolerate the social interactions that others might look forward to. I could meet a good friend for tea and talk for hours without the need for alcohol, but when it comes to someone I don’t have a strong connection with, or meeting a group of people, or going to an event, alcohol has always been essential. I either do those things with alcohol, or I don’t do them. Before COVID, before I stopped drinking, I experimented with doing some work trips with no alcohol. Work trips were always the times I felt the greatest need for alcohol and consumed the most. What I found is that the only way I could do a work trip without drinking was to avoid people as much as possible. I’d go to the meetings, or the presentations, but I’d skip the social and networking events (which, for most people, are the highlight of the trip). I’d pick up some takeout and go back to my hotel room at 6:00 PM, where I sat alone until bedtime, waking up early the next morning to exercise.
It makes sense to me that alcohol was a big part of how I was able to approach a variety of social situations. What’s less clear is why alcohol was such a necessary ingredient in any given evening when I had no plans, but just wanted to have a drink or two while I cooked dinner, or chatted with my wife, or browsed random things on my phone. I didn’t just want to drink to alleviate social anxiety. I also saw alcohol as a part of how I experience the world and daily life. I don’t think I could have imagined, much less acknowledged, how big a role alcohol played in my life even if I didn’t get “drunk” very often. It’s only now, a year later, that I’m starting to really appreciate it.
I’m still learning how to understand and describe this feeling, but knowing that alcohol is not part of my life is somehow freeing. It removes the sense of urgency and frustration that I used to carry. I feel less like I might be missing out on something, or that I have something better to do. I find I am more accepting of stillness. I am having a longer, deeper, more fulfilling mediation practice. I am less worried about work (and less inclined to keep working in the corporate context). I feel less pressure, which is interesting. Somehow stopping the substance I took to relieve stress has actually reduced my overall feeling of stress, rather than increasing it as I imagined it would. Though I was always afraid not drinking would make life intolerable, it’s actually had the opposite effect. I am slowly realizing that daily life is more enjoyable without the interruption of a drink. And, somehow, not drinking has changed my perspective on time, enabling me to embrace more unstructured stillness. In the words of Lynn from The Believer, We have the same time. We have today.
Krasnostein, Sarah. The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and our Place in the Middle (p. 264). Tin House Books. Kindle Edition