Austerity is a deeply personal and often sensitive subject. The decision to embrace austerity can arise from many reasons – rooted in health, emotional healing and gone to mix the two. The reasons are unique for everyone and formed by their lived experiences. When Subeone chooses sobriety, this can produce emotions to others who may struggle with Esir relationship with alcohol.
Every story in austerity is valid. I share my thourhts from my own journey, I am completely aware that my path may not look like yours. My experience does not define austerity as a whole, nor does it decrease yours or invalid.
Data shows that alcohol consumption is changing in America. At the beginning of the year, a new health advice was given to link alcohol consumption to an increased risk of cancer. Our relationship with sobriety is broadened culturally. This is what my sobriety looks like today.
My relationship with alcohol
I am eighteen and at my first home party. It is my last year in high school. My friends and I turned it off with a group of boys who enter their junior year. I am at the end of a swampy beer pong table, ginger holds my red cup. I swallow and liberate to lukewarm barrel of beer, the first taste of the type of Freedom College. No, there was to check or assess except myself.
I was afraid to drink alcohol, my parents and a long -term boyfriend who demonized it. I rarely saw my parents drinking my father’s nightly beer, a grim departure from a drinking culture that I have observed in my Irish dance community. Drinking was synonymous with everything. While traveling to Ireland as a pread in the 90s, I looked at children with my age with a Guinness, sitting at the bar with their parents.
There are also memories of my grandparents: sipping Miller Light or a buttery Chardonnay, tortilla chips eating and playing cards. Their laughter is synonymous with my happy childhood, to the kind of solidarity that is rare and good and is worth wondering. Nowadays that scent of hops and salty chips brings it all at home.
Towards the end of my 18th summer, beer meant for different types of togetherness. Beer in my hand was connection, security and confidant. It was a key in places that I still had to open and a gateway to relaxed convenience that had referred me for a life.
Enter the maturity and I could not imagine the future without.
My relationship with alcohol was cloudy. At the age of 25 I often threw over the edge and black -out in the month prior to my first brown. Yet I always had a “off” switch. I was never worried that I would forget when enough was enough.
There were times in my thirty that the draw for drinking was irresistible. We bought wine in bulk during the pandemic and during our early parenting years. Wine was too daily ritual.
You have beaten much of my social life around angry. Wine as an activity. Wine for the unifier. Because Joe and I fell in love with drinks and not thinking twice about a weekday Martini, I had friends who decide to go Shree. With it came a sense of Wory that we would lose contact. Thank you, no friendships have been lost due to austerity.
I listened to stories from those who were outside of eleven friendships, otherwise and not offered to sit at the dining table, hurt by the frange of a friendship built around angry. While I asked questions about life without alcohol, they opened my eyes for a world that is just as rich in connection and taste as all the more aligned sensations I eat to associate with both alcohol and my relationships.
The beer in hand was no longer a ticket for arrival. Austerity offered to gain access to a deeper connection.
Why I decided to stop drinking
This is also cloudy. There were health reasons to stop. Then there were subconscious reasons. When I stopped drinking in November, it was not -exhausted, unannounced and powered by shelters that I really did not really understand at the time. I drank less than I ever had, so it felt like a not -fevent.
It was a few weeks later that I understood that the motivation came from a desire to bring life back to his necessities. I ran to report for things that I didn’t know where I was out. To put the external things that have made and read my life on the back burner to be with the parts of myself and did not like.
This was all about making room to experience the complete anger of human emotions, without damper or distraction. While I mark a year in my renewed therapy trip, I finally make big jumps ahead instead of wrapping the past. I can see my patterns and process them clearly.
I want to give change the best possible chance.
It was a few weeks later that I understood that the motivation came from a desire to bring life back to his necessities. . . . This was all about making room to experience the complete anger of human emotions, without damper or distraction.
How not to drink has felt
Many people have a complex relationship with drinks, and I have also had what no brigs drink in others. I try to be compassionate. In certain friendships, drinking has traditionally been a large part of how we socialize, and I have been worried that I have not been invited to things. But I like to be proud and still be near alcohol – it doesn’t have to be that black and white for me.
The ritual of a drink is the thing that I miss the most, one that is filled with an NVT beer or Orcotail. The best part that you have found so many great non -alcoholic options. I enjoyed athletic brewing, ghia, dry humor and heineken 0.0.
What the future looks like
I did not have an end date in basket when I stopped drinking, shoving from the holiday -carogant by wanting to get through the holiday.
After Christmas I shared a glass of wine with friends and a few drinks in Mexico. In this gray area, early steps. Only one drink that has staged a low turn of brain fog and irritability the next day, and it was more than I wanted to experience. In this test it was clear that drinking did not work better than just drink “a little kind”.
And that’s why I just can’t drink.
I realize that this period of cousin helps me to reconcile my relationship with distraction and avoidance. I have no invaluation, I will refrain from drinking alcohol indefinitely for an indefinite period of time, but if I choose not to drink, I strengthen the kind of self -respect I have missed for a while.
Eventually I decide to have a glass of wine again, and maybe they might not be drinking for a few weeks. I will probably identify with “subtimes”. But I don’t think about the future. What happens, I let my body and intuition take the lead. We will see what awaits us.
Kate is the founder of Wit & Delight. She is currently Larning how to play tennis and is forever Testing the limits of her creative muscle. Follow on Instagram on @witandDelight_.
