Instead of this week’s normal newsletter, I have an announcement: I’ve decided to stop writing Exploring Sobriety, at least for the time being. First I’d like to share a couple logistical issues, then an explanation, and finally a thank you.

Logistics:

If you have a paid subscription through Substack, I’ve just sent in a request to issue a prorated refund. In other words, you’ll get a refund for however much of your subscription is left. If you had paid for a year subscription this morning, you’ll receive a 100% refund. If you paid for a year subscription half a year ago, you’d receive a 50% refund. Etc.

The refunds are all handled through Substack and Stripe. I’m not sure how long the process will take, but if you haven’t received a refund within a couple of weeks, please feel free to reach out to me and I can take a look on my end. I don’t expect there to be any problems, though.

Paid and free subscribers alike will stop receiving any new Substack newsletters beginning today. Over on Medium, I repost the free newsletters with a one-year delay. I haven’t decided yet whether to keep posting the remaining year’s worth, but you might keep seeing additional posts there for a little while as I work through the backlog.

Explanation:

Why have I decided to stop writing Exploring Sobriety? The short answer is that I’ve run out of things to write about. I quit drinking in December of 2016 and started blogging about sobriety in October of 2018. That’s nearly eight years of writing about addiction and recovery.

For the past year, I’ve felt like I just don’t have much new to say. While there’s certainly some value to repeating myself, it’s been getting more and more boring for me. I feel like as a writer, I’m getting less out of it, and I suspect that as readers, you’re getting less out of it too.

In addition, I’ve been making a broader shift in my life to use the internet and electronics far less. The average American now uses the internet over ten hours a day! And that statistic isn’t an outlier on the world stage. Most of us have come to rely on the internet nearly every waking hour.

The internet can be a great thing. It helped me quit drinking. It also keeps me connected with friends and family. On a societal level, it’s broken down massive barriers to sharing knowledge across the world. However, I think that most of the time that we spend on the internet isn’t nearly so noble.

One of the reasons I quit drinking was because my addiction stole so much of my free time. I worry the internet is now doing the same thing. So, I’m stepping away from it as much as possible.

Thank you:

I want to end this final newsletter with a massive thank you to anyone who has ever read my blog or newsletter over the past eight years. Writing about my experiences was a huge help in keeping me sober, and I hope that it has helped you as well. I truly appreciate you reading my work! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Sincerely,

Benya

When I quit drinking, I had a crippling fear of how others would react to my sobriety. I was very slow to tell anyone that I had gotten sober because I assumed that they would be judgmental.

I was embarrassed by my addiction, and that embarrassment extended to my sobriety. I realized that by telling someone I was sober, I was also implicitly telling them that I had been drinking too much. I was worried about the follow up questions they might have, and I was also nervous about what type of assumptions they might make.

The good news is that I've now been sober for nine and a half years, and I can count on one hand the number of times someone has responded negatively to my sobriety. Generally, the news is met with indifference. Occasionally, it's met with support, or with the other person telling me that hey are actually sober too.

Now for the bad news: Although it's been extremely rare for someone to react negatively to the fact that I'm sober, I have had many reactions that are weird and uncomfortable, and those reactions seem to be getting more frequent lately.

The most common “weird” reaction that I get is that the person I'm talking to gets very reflective and/or defensive about their own drinking habits. When I mention my sobriety, I try carefully to avoid ever framing it in a way that could feel like an accusation against drinkers. Despite that, I think some people take it that way.

I also wonder if some of those reactions actually are because the person has mixed feelings about their own drinking habits. Are they trying to convince me that they don't drink too much, or are they trying to convince themselves?

I'm happy to support friends and acquaintances who are worried about their drinking habits, but only when they clearly want to talk about it. When I get these weird reactions to my own sobriety, I try to just change the subject and move on. I think that in most cases, digging into someone's drinking habits is just rude and off-putting, and it'll only cause them to resent the sober person, not to actually seek help for themselves.

The other strange response that I've been getting lately is on the other end of the spectrum: effusive praise for my decision to quit.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that many of my friends and family are proud of my progress. The people who knew me as a drinker can see how far I've come since getting sober, and I love that they've supported me.

However, over the top support from strangers or acquaintances who just learned about my sobriety always ends up rubbing me the wrong way. The praise feels condescending and patronizing. They know nothing about my addiction or recovery, so it's weird if they go on about how impressive it is.

I hope by saying this I don't cause anyone to walk on egg shells. I think most reactions to sobriety are fine, and even a quick congratulations or compliment is appreciated. However, some people just go on and on about it. When that happens, I end up regretting even mentioning it.

I feel the same way about addiction as I do about many other mental health problems. I believe in being open about it, and I think that by doing so, we can help reduce the stigma. However, there's got to be some kind of balance.

The reason I've been getting more weird responses to my sobriety lately is because it's been coming up in a new context: online dating.

I had never really used dating apps before this year, and it's weird to think about how I should approach sobriety on them. On one hand, I know that it is a deal breaker for some women, so I'd like to be open about it from the start and avoid wasting anyone's time. On the other hand, it feels like a weird thing to open with, which only ends up inviting weird responses.

I've settled on a compromise of putting “doesn't drink” in the little section that asks about it, but only explicitly mentioning being sober when it comes up. I don't know if this is the best solution, but it's what I'm doing for now.

My final thoughts on this are simply that part of life is sometimes having awkward conversations. There is probably no way to be open about sobriety without occasionally getting negative or weird responses.

However, those responses are not nearly as bad as I once worried they would be. Once you've been sober for a few years and feel secure about it, it becomes surprisingly easy to laugh off other people's reactions. The important thing is that sobriety is helping us, regardless of what other people think.

I’m writing this week’s newsletter at the end of a Sunday (a couple of days before it’ll actually get sent out). Today has been a weird day, because I’ve barely left my apartment. I made a quick run to the Target down the road to pick up a snack, but that only took about 15 minutes. Aside from that, I’ve literally been sitting inside all day.

I regret not going out for a run or a bike ride earlier, because I don’t think it’s healthy to spend an entire day inside like this. However, I’m also not going to beat myself up over this, because it’s just one day. Even if it’s not ideal for me, it’s also really not a big deal to spend a day lying on the couch and reading every once in a while.

When it becomes a problem is when you do it day after day after day. When staying inside becomes the norm, it starts to seriously screw with your mental health. I know this firsthand, because I stayed in almost every day back when I was a drinker.

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When I first quit drinking alcohol, I was bored out of my mind. In fact, the overwhelming boredom was quite possibly the single hardest part of sobriety for me.

I remember having no idea whatsoever how to keep myself entertained, especially during the first couple of weeks. All I could think about was how badly I wanted a drink, and whenever I tried a new activity to fill the time, I’d end up completely distracted by my cravings.

I couldn’t even sit still and watch TV. When I tried, my mind drifted away, I’d lose track of the plot, and my boredom would only increase. (Strangely, books held my attention way better, but still not well enough to fill all of my free time.)

So, what did I do to get over the boredom? I cleaned every inch of my apartment. I tried out new hobbies. I looked for opportunities to get outside.

Sadly, none of it worked very well. Despite all of my efforts, I was still bored the vast majority of the time.

The worst part about the boredom was that it felt like it would go on forever. When I thought about my sobriety, I was terrified of the idea that the rest of my life would be as boring as those first few weeks. If that were the case, would sobriety be possible for me? Would I even want to stay sober, if life without alcohol was truly so dull?

I’ve now been sober for nine and a half years. Fortunately, I’ve discovered that long-term sobriety isn’t nearly so boring as those early days. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s just the opposite: My sober life is vastly more exciting than my life was as a drinker.

Back when I was still drinking, I spent most of my nights alone, drunk, with a computer or TV in front of me. I rarely had an acute “bored out of my mind” feeling, but I wasn’t exactly living a thrilling life. I almost never did anything interesting or out of my routine. I didn’t grow or try new things.

Now that I’m sober, my life has become rich and interesting. I’ve learned new skills, met new people, and traveled to new places. Simply put, I do more.

An example that I use a lot on this blog is that I learned a new language and lived abroad for two years. I could never have accomplished that if I was still drinking every night.

However, there are plenty of less extreme examples as well. Two recent ones come to mind:

First, a few months ago I bought a bike and started bike commuting to work. I couldn’t have done this when I was a drinker for several reasons. I couldn’t have afforded it, because all of my disposable income was going to alcohol. I wouldn’t have been able to wake up the extra 20 minutes early that I need to make the commute, because I was always sleeping in as late as possible. And, I don’t think my body could have handled the exercise, because I was simply so out of shape.

Second, later this summer, I’m going on a week-long vacation abroad. While nowhere near as huge an experience as actually living abroad was, it’s still much more than I could have handled as a drunk. I almost never traveled as a drinker. Like with the bike, I couldn’t afford it. In addition, travel was too disruptive to my drinking routine.

Drinking kept me from waking up early to catch a flight. It kept me from sitting through a long flight without having to pee a million times. It kept me from even having the energy to plan a trip in the first place.

Travel felt so incredibly overwhelming when I was a drinker. It was hard for practical reasons, but it also was just more complicated than I had the mental bandwidth to handle. That’s how I felt about a lot of things back then. Everything just felt so hard, and so I spent night after night at home instead of ever trying anything new.

Since getting sober, life has become easier in nearly every way. This has allowed me to pursue all kinds of opportunities, which has made my life far richer and more exciting.

There isn’t a secret to getting past the boredom and into the exciting part. All that I had to do was stick with sobriety. As time goes on, I’ve naturally built a better and better life. With alcohol out of the way, it feels almost as if exciting opportunities just present themselves.

Boredom is a very serious problem in the early days of sobriety, but those early days aren’t representative of how life will feel years later. My sober life has been anything but boring, and I’ve heard the same from basically every long-term sober person that I’ve ever met.

If you’re still in the early days, try your best to remember that the first weeks of sobriety, or even the first couple of years, are not a good example of what long-term sobriety feels like. Once you get through the rough part, a truly wonderful life can await.

I used to love watching TV shows with sober characters. Even though the plots were fictional, I found that there was a lot I could relate to. Watching shows about recovering alcoholics was fun because I saw bits of myself in the characters.

I also loved these shows because they helped normalize sobriety. When I was a kid, addiction was so stigmatized that I never could have imagined an addict being portrayed in a positive light on TV, even if they were in recovery. These days, there are more shows with sober characters than I could count. There are even huge, big-budget sitcoms like Mom, which are centered entirely around the idea of being sober.

The showrunners really deserve to be applauded for featuring characters who struggle with addiction but remain human and relatable. I believe there’s a real-world impact to that kind of storytelling, which could truly help addicts feel more comfortable getting help.

Yet, despite all of these positive aspects of these shows, in recent years, I’ve stopped watching them entirely. I’ve also stopped watching movies about addicts, and I even avoid books about them. Why? Because there’s something nearly all of them have in common that I believe is doing a huge disservice to recovering addicts:

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For me, one of the most frustrating aspects of addiction is how hard it can be for other people to help. I’ve been on both sides of the equation, as the person trying to get sober and the person trying to help others get sober, and each side is tricky in its own way.

When I first quit drinking, nine and a half years ago, the hard part was asking other people to help. I felt as if by reaching out to other people, I’d end up being a burden on them. I also feared that I’d end up relapsing, which would let those people down and leave me embarrassed.

Another difficulty that I faced was taking help with humility and gratitude. To put it more plainly, I rolled my eyes at a lot of the advice I was given. I shrugged off a ton of great suggestions because I thought that they wouldn’t work for me, or because I couldn’t relate to the person giving advice.

Sometimes, when other people tried to help me, it even made me want to go back to drinking more. Normally, when someone shared stories about their addiction, I could relate, but occasionally, I’d hear from someone so different from me that it left me questioning whether I was even an alcoholic. Their well-meaning attempts to get me to see the severity of my addiction ended up having exactly the opposite effect.

As I spent more time sober, I found myself less often on the side of receiving help and more often on the side of giving it. It’s been an interesting shift, and it’s especially enlightening to see those same problems arise from the other side.

One of the first big difficulties is that most people who are struggling with addiction don’t want to ask for help. That leaves the rest of us in an awkward and tricky situation. There have been times over the past decade when I’ve suspected, or even been nearly sure, that friends of mine are having trouble with their drinking, but I’ve felt reluctant to be the one to broach the subject.

If they don’t ask me for help, is it appropriate for me to offer? It’s one thing when someone’s life is clearly falling apart, but what about when they just seem to drink every day? I can safely assume that the drinking is affecting other parts of their life, but it still would feel rude for me to just say something out of the blue.

My solution to this—and I’m honestly not sure whether it’s the best solution or not—has been to focus on being open about my own sobriety. Just about everyone in my life knows that I’m sober. It’s not always the first thing someone learns about me, but I never keep it a secret, and it tends to eventually come up.

During my first few years being sober, I was very embarrassed about it. I’d either keep it a secret entirely or downplay my reasons for quitting drinking. These days, when it comes up, I tell people I don’t drink, and when asked why, I feel comfortable explaining that I used to drink too much. The level of detail I go into is generally dependent on the curiosity of the person I’m talking to. If they ask a lot of questions, I’m happy to answer. Far more often, they don’t, and I don’t go into detail.

However, if I suspect a friend might have a drinking problem, I tend to talk about my sobriety a little bit more. I try hard not to come off as preachy, but I want to make it clear to them that I’m someone who has overcome addiction and is happy to talk about it. There have been a couple of times when this has led to them at least thinking about quitting drinking.

Something that I’ve never done, and I don’t think I ever will, is to directly tell someone that I think they are drinking too much. I know that some addiction professionals support that style of intervention, but I just can’t imagine it working in my friendships. If a friend of mine had ever said something like that to me when I was a drinker, I would have simply gotten defensive and resented them.

The other main way that I’ve tried to help people get sober over the years is by writing about recovery, both in a blog and a newsletter. When I first quit drinking (and even when I first started thinking about quitting), I spent a massive amount of time reading sobriety blogs, forum posts, and essays. I can’t say that the time was always well spent, but in general, it helped me a lot.

Reading about sobriety taught me a few tips and tricks, but even more importantly, it helped me feel less alone. It got me over the problem of feeling like there was nobody I could relate to, because there were simply so many people writing about sobriety that I found a few that I clicked with. (I had the most success on a subreddit called “/r/stopdrinking,” but I also found a lot to connect with in AA’s “Big Book.”)

A couple of years after I quit drinking, I decided to start writing about my experiences. I know, because people have told me, that my writing has helped quite a few people get sober. It’s not that I have anything revolutionary to say. It’s just that there are a lot of people out there with similar personalities who are going through the same addiction struggles that I went through. More than anything, I think it simply helps for me to be able to honestly say that I had a miserable time getting sober, but finally was able to stick with it.

Although it can often feel like there’s nothing we can do to help addicts recover, the reality is that a little help can go a long way. When someone has recently quit drinking and is struggling to get through the day, sometimes the key difference comes from giving a few kind words, sharing our stories, or lending a sympathetic ear.

It’s been about nine and a half years since I stopped drinking. These days, I’m confident in my sobriety. Not only do I know that I can resist a drink, but it’s been years since I’ve felt tempted to drink in the first place.

Long gone are the days of constantly craving alcohol. Sobriety is something that I still think about, but it no longer feels like a burden. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, and I simply have no desire to drink alcohol.

But what if I were to drink alcohol by mistake?

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I’m forever grateful that within my lifetime, we’ve seen a massive destigmatization of addiction. Thirty years ago, when I was a kid, addicts were still far too frequently dismissed as losers, moral failures, and lost causes. These days, most people, at least in the United States, recognize addiction as a curable problem that has nothing to do with morality or a person’s character.

There used to be only a handful of public figures who were open about their addiction or sobriety. These days, it seems like every week, another celebrity gives an interview about how they overcame their alcoholism or drug use.

What I love about this is that it allows addicts to realize they aren’t alone, which in turn, encourages them to seek help. In my twenties, I was a heavy, daily drinker. It was the most isolating and lonely experience of my life. Meeting other alcoholics and reading about other people’s recovery stories gave me the confidence and support that I needed to get sober.

I went from feeling like all of my drinking problems were weird and unique to realizing that I fit into a series of very common patterns. This encouraged me because when I learned that other people had felt exactly the same as I had, but had managed to quit drinking, I understood that getting sober was possible for me, too. (Even though it didn’t always feel like it at the time!)

While this is all great, I do worry, however, that some people take it too far in the other direction. We’ve gone from a world in which addiction is a deep, dark secret, in which people assumed almost nobody was an addict, to a world in which I often hear the idiotic phrase, “Everyone is addicted to something.”

The reality is somewhere in the middle. In my experience, many non-addicts underestimate the number of addicts, while many addicts overestimate it. So what are the actual numbers?

A survey in the US, the 2024 United States National Survey on Drug Use and Health, found that 16.8% of Americans had a substance use disorder. If we narrow our focus to just alcohol, the number was 9.7%. (Source.)

This is a huge percentage of Americans, but it’s not “everyone” or even “most.” It’s enough that we should take it seriously, and it’s enough that we should realize how stupid it is for there to be a stigma around addiction. But it’s not so much that we should treat addiction as the norm. The truth is that addiction is still uncommon, and most people will never be addicted to anything during their lives.

Along these same lines, I think it’s also worth pointing out that most people don’t have a serious mental illness. That same survey found that while 23.4% of Americans had a mental illness, only 5.6% had a “serious mental illness,” meaning one severe enough to significantly impair their lives.

I mention that because many addicts also tend to overestimate the rate of mental illness in the general population. There’s a lot of comorbidity between substance abuse and mental illness, so when someone spends a lot of time with other addicts, they tend to think mental illness is more common than it really is.

The reason that I consider it so important to know these numbers is that it helps shape our response to these problems, both on a personal level and through policy. Addiction and mental illness are serious public health problems that need funding and support. However, that support needs to be targeted at the populations who really need it.

Too often, people conflate substance abuse and serious mental illness with far more minor problems. Watching a little too much TV is not the same as doing cocaine every night. Feeling miserable after the death of a loved one is not the same as major depression. The strategies that help with run-of-the-mill self-improvement will not work for overcoming addiction and will not cure mental illness.

If someone is suffering from alcoholism, my advice is to seek out other people who are recovering from an addiction to alcohol. (Or professionals who specialize in substance abuse treatment.) They are the ones who will understand the problem and how to best treat it.

I’d recommend against following generic self-help guides. All of the popular internet advice about motivation and discipline is more or less worthless when it comes to addiction. Addiction is a unique problem that plays by its own rules. We can’t overcome our drinking habit using the same strategies we used to start working out more.

I hope that as we move into the future, the stigma around addiction disappears entirely. However, I want it to disappear because people recognize the problem for what it is, and not because they water down the meaning of the word “addiction” until it no longer means anything at all.

I was a heavy drinker throughout nearly all of my twenties. I had a brief stint of sobriety shortly after leaving college, but aside from that, I got drunk almost every single night for an entire decade. I didn’t sober up for good until just a few months before my thirtieth birthday.

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It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when my alcoholism began, but it was certainly in full swing throughout my twenties. The worst years were from age twenty-six to twenty-nine, which not-so-coincidentally overlapped my time in law school.

I drank almost every single night that I was in law school. The only (extremely rare) exceptions were when I tried to get sober and would go a day or two before relapsing.

Despite all of the drinking, I did great in school. However, my alcoholism was taking its toll on other parts of my life. By the time I graduated, my social life was dead, I had gained over fifty pounds, and my mental health was an absolute wreck.

I quit drinking shortly after taking the bar exam. I knew that I had reached my limit, and I think that part of my initial motivation for getting sober was to go into my new career without my addiction looming over me. I was moving to a new city and working a new job. Sobriety naturally fit into this fresh start.

Getting sober was hard, and so was being a lawyer. That year was, without a doubt, the most difficult of my life.

I hated getting through each night without drinking, and I hated working my high-stress public interest job even more. Although I had managed to land exactly the job I wanted, I quickly realized that I wasn’t cut out for the life of a lawyer. Within a month of starting the job, I felt sure that I had made a mistake, but I ended up sticking it out for a year, after hearing a lot of advice about how things would improve.

Nothing improved. I only hated the job more with every passing day. Right when I hit the year mark, I quit.

I felt like a total failure. It had been a rough year, and quitting my job seemed like the ultimate low point.

At the time, the narrative I had been telling myself was that going to law school, passing the bar, and getting the job I wanted were all steps in becoming more and more successful. Then, I saw hating my job and quitting as failure. I thought I had gone from being on track to a perfect life to being totally lost and aimless.

I saw it as if my graduation from law school was going to be the peak of my life, and that it was all downhill from there. Now I see that time in my life in exactly the opposite light.

When I think back on my twenties, I recognize my academic success, but I also see how much I was destroying myself with addiction. Graduating from law school was a huge accomplishment, but that was also when I was at my lowest.

Quitting my job as a lawyer was actually a huge step toward a far better life. I left behind the stressful, high-anxiety field that had fueled my addiction, and went into the far less stressful world of tutoring and writing. Making that change was absolutely necessary to protect my sobriety, and protecting my sobriety was absolutely necessary to improve my life.

It’s been nearly a decade since then, and my life is better in every way—including my career. I initially changed jobs because I couldn’t balance the stress with my sobriety. Since then, however, I’ve realized that writing and tutoring are way better fits for me anyway. Becoming a lawyer fit the classic definition of success, but it wasn’t what success truly looks like for me.

I’ve found that staying sober requires a lot of hard decisions that can feel like sacrifices, but which, in the long run, turn out to be better for us anyway.

To protect myself from going back to drinking, I’ve changed habits, moved states, switched jobs, found different friends, and more. These are big changes, and they often seemed like too much at the time.

However, each one has been great, even aside from the benefits they’ve had on my sobriety.

I think that many of the lifestyle decisions that we make to stay sober tend to just be good lifestyle decisions in general. Happy and healthy habits tend to go well together.

Ever since I quit my legal job, I’ve kept an active bar license just in case I want to go back to it. It’s cost a few hundred dollars a year, and I’ve needed to do some continuing education, but none of that has felt like too big a sacrifice. This year, however, I’m finally thinking of just letting it go.

I don’t really have any doubts left about having left the profession. It’s been great for me, and I just can’t see any situation in which I’d realistically ever want to go back to it. It’s hard to walk away from a job that I worked so hard for, but the reality is, I’ve been out of school for about three times as long as I was in it. It’s time to happily move on.

When I quit drinking alcohol, I used to read every piece of sobriety advice I could find. Although most of it was helpful, there are also plenty of takes that I think miss the mark.

One common piece of advice was to be careful not to replace your drinking with another addiction. If you flip through sobriety forums or blogs, you’ll see a million variations of this warning, ranging from replacing alcohol with cigarettes to swapping out drinking for exercise.

Obviously, some of these swaps are more harmful than others, but my (perhaps controversial) opinion is that any of these changes would be better than continuing to drink.

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When I was a drinker, I was exhausted all of the time. In part, it was physical, but the mental and psychological exhaustion was even worse.

The physical side of my tiredness is easy enough to explain. Before getting sober in 2016, I had spent a decade drinking more or less every night. All of that alcohol interfered with my sleep in a big way.

The quality of my sleep was terrible. Instead of falling into a deep sleep, I’d wake up again and again throughout the night. Several times each night, I’d have to get out of bed to use the bathroom as the alcohol made its way through my system. Other times, I’d wake up from small noises, or for no apparent reason at all.

I also slept fewer hours than I should, because I often stayed up late drinking. On the rare occasion that I went a day without drinking, I’d typically be up even later, because I wasn’t used to going to bed without being drunk.

All of that sleepiness added up. During the day, I was normally in a slog, especially in the morning. I didn’t even realize how bad it was at the time, because it had been my normal state for years. I thought slowly, had poor proprioception, and zoned out all of the time. It wasn’t until I got sober and saw the contrast that I understood how much more I was capable of when I was properly rested.

However, as I said in the opening to today’s newsletter, physical tiredness wasn’t the worst type of exhaustion I experienced back then. The worst was the mental exhaustion of constantly feeling my addiction hanging over my head.

I realized that I had a drinking problem when I was in my early twenties, but it wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I finally quit. What was I thinking in all of those years in between? In short, I was a confused mess.

Every day, I struggled with questions about my addiction. I’d go from being sure that I was out of control to questioning whether I even had a drinking problem. I’d think about quitting, then come up with an excuse to put it off until the next day. I’d imagine my life sober, and flip back and forth between thinking it would be miserable or perfect.

Going through all of those confusing thoughts ended up completely wearing me down. I spent over half a decade debating the same thing day after day, instead of simply taking action. In retrospect, I can see how absurd that was, but at the time, I just felt stuck.

Meanwhile, as I questioned whether I had an addiction and what to do about it, deep down I knew that I had this enormous problem in my life that I eventually would have to address. No matter how little I wanted to think about my drinking problem, I knew that if I didn’t do something about it, I’d eventually destroy myself with alcohol.

What a miserable feeling it was to know that there was something massively wrong in my life for years on end. I can’t believe I allowed myself to sit with it for as long as I did.

Getting sober took many tries, a lot of misery, and probably even a little luck. And yet, going through all of that struggling was still far better than the alternative, which would be to keep letting that awful problem build and build.

These days, it has been practically a decade since my last drink, and it still feels strange when I stop and realize that there isn’t anything drastically wrong with my life. That’s not to say things are perfect. Regular readers of this newsletter know that I’ve moved cities a few times in the last few years and have been struggling to establish a social life. That’s a real problem in my life, but it’s something that I work on and regularly gets better. It’s not the same kind of feeling as having enormous impending doom lurking in the back of my mind.

In my day-to-day life, things are pretty good, and I don’t have the feeling that I’m procrastinating dealing with some major, life-threatening issue. Now that my drinking days are behind me, I feel more relaxed than ever.

I was exhausted from worrying about my addiction, and just like the physical tiredness, I didn’t realize just how bad it had been until after I was already a few years sober.

Many people who are heavy drinkers hem and haw about whether to quit. We ask ourselves if life would be better or worse without alcohol in it. We weigh the pros and cons, we go back and forth, we decide to quit one day and reverse our decision the next.

The reality is that none of us can truly understand the profound effect sobriety will have on our lives until we actually get sober. We learn to live with all of the harmful effects of our addiction. We don’t even realize how many of the bad things in our lives are caused by drinking.

I think that by the time most people even start questioning whether they might be addicted to drinking, their addiction is typically already fairly advanced. Normal, moderate drinkers rarely have these thoughts.

I’m glad I quit drinking, despite the difficulties, and I hope that any current heavy drinkers reading this have success in leaving their exhausting addictions behind too.

If I could go back in time nine years and tell my newly-sober self one thing, it would be this: Sobriety isn’t going to feel so hard forever.

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This year, I’ve been trying very hard to run a faster 5k than ever before. My current best time is 20:45, and my goal is to run one in under 20 minutes by the end of December.

One of the strategies that I’ve been using to achieve that goal is to stick to a specific, gradually increasing weekly mileage. For the past few months, I’ve been hitting these weekly mileage targets perfectly. Until last week.

Last week, I was completely on track (even ahead of schedule) and only had three miles left to run on Sunday. However, Sunday turned out to be a completely packed day. I met with one group of friends, then another, and went out hiking twice. When I finally got home, it was almost sundown.

The perfectionist in me wanted to go out and hit those remaining three miles, but I was completely exhausted. Reluctantly, I skipped the run. Life went on.

The truth is that those three missed miles don’t matter at all. It probably even helped me more to take a rest day.

However, I’ll admit that it’s tough for me to get in that mindset. After so many perfect weeks in a row, I feel like I’ve failed by not going out for that run yesterday. I worry that if I start to relax too much, I’ll never hit my 5k goal.

I’ve noticed this type of perfectionism among many other sober people, too. My theory is that many of us see the world in black-and-white extremes, perhaps because that’s how we are as addicts.

As a drinker, I really am all or nothing. I’m either completely sober, never having a drink, or I end up getting drunk every single day. As much as I used to wish there was an in-between option, there wasn’t.

When it comes to my sobriety, I need to be a perfectionist. If I let myself slip up for even a day, the odds are incredibly strong that I will have a relapse lasting months or years.

However, I don’t need to carry that type of perfectionism into all aspects of my life. A missed run doesn’t cascade into failure the same way that a single drink does. Even if it did, the consequences wouldn’t be nearly as dire.

Even though it’s important for me to be a perfectionist in my sobriety, it’s also important for me to have a break from that mindset when it comes to things that don’t matter so much.

The reality is that none of us can be perfect in everything we do. Humans just aren’t built that way. So, we have to prioritize. We have to carefully think about all of our goals in life and figure out for ourselves which demand perfection and which don’t.

The alternative is counterproductive, and I know that because I’ve tried it many times.

Before I got sober, I had many failed attempts. One of the common causes of failure was that I would try to change too many things at once. Instead of just quitting drinking, I’d also try to start new hobbies, build healthy habits, eat better, make more friends, etc. It was too much to take on at once, and as soon as I failed at a single aspect, I’d give up on everything else.

I found success in my sobriety by prioritizing it. I told myself that the only major life goal I needed to stay perfect about was not drinking. It was OK if I didn’t exercise regularly or ate a terrible diet. Those were things I could work on later and without so much pressure. Above all else, however, I really did need to make sure that I was absolutely perfect about not having any alcohol.

That type of focused perfectionism is so effective that it feels like a superpower. When you’re able to narrow down to a single goal that you want to achieve, it is suddenly far easier than ever before. This is true even when it’s a goal as difficult as overcoming addiction.

In my opinion, too much self-help advice emphasizes building discipline in all aspects of our lives. It treats us as if we can achieve perfection if we only try hard enough.

I think that it’s far healthier to recognize that humans will never be perfect. There will always be areas of our lives in which we don’t act exactly as we’d like.

However, if we can identify the areas that matter most, and put our focus there, we can find a more limited (but also more lasting) success.

Whether I go for a run today doesn’t make a big difference in the grand scheme of my life. It doesn’t even really matter whether I reach my goal of breaking 20 minutes in the 5k. My life will go on, and I will be happy, either way.

However, it matters more than nearly anything else to me whether I have a drink today. If I do, I will derail my life for months or years. If I don’t, I will continue to have a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life.

Between running and sobriety, I know what’s most important to me, and that is where I’ll remain a perfectionist.

I can’t count how many times I told myself, “Today isn’t the right day to quit drinking.”

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Do we live in an age of overpathologization? Where every quirk or bad habit is treated like a mental disorder? It can certainly feel like that sometimes.

I was talking to someone recently about the unfortunate phrase, “everyone’s on the spectrum.” When people say this, they mean that everyone in the world has some characteristics of autism (or even that everyone is autistic, but to different degrees). It’s an absurd sentence that’s typically repeated by people with very little understanding of autism.

While it’s true that autism is a spectrum, and some autistic people have more severe symptoms than others, that doesn’t mean that everyone has symptoms. The vast majority of the planet is not autistic. Saying that “everyone is on the spectrum” minimizes the difficulties faced by the people who actually do have autism.

Our conversation reminded me of a similar phrase that I’ve heard all too often: “Everyone’s addicted to something.” This one is equally absurd.

Sure, it’s probably true that most people have something in their lives that they do a little too often. For some, it’s watching TV for hours every day. For others, it’s eating too much candy. For many, it’s too much of a good thing—like exercising too often.

However, most of these people aren’t truly addicted. There’s a huge difference between doing something too often and being addicted to it.

I say this as someone who has suffered from two addictions in my life: to alcohol and nicotine. I was a daily drinker for a decade and a pack-a-day smoker for even longer.

Addiction can be a tricky word, and I’ve seen multiple definitions of it. To me, a key component in both of my addictions was the feeling of compulsion. Drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes never just felt like things I wanted to do. They felt like things I needed to do.

The best description I’ve ever heard to describe addiction to a non-addict is that resisting these substances felt similar to trying to hold my breath until I passed out. Even though I logically understood that I didn’t need alcohol or nicotine to survive, my body reacted as if I did. When I tried to resist the urge to smoke a cigarette, my mind and body reacted as if I were depriving myself of a vital substance.

I have had other bad habits in my life, but none where I felt that compulsion. Staying up too late playing video games isn’t the same as feeling like I’ll die if I don’t keep playing.

I’m not arguing that nobody is addicted to TV, video games, or exercise. However, it’s not a majority of people, let alone all. Most people will never personally experience an addiction to anything.

Why does this matter? Because there’s a huge difference in how we overcome addiction compared to how we overcome other bad habits.

I’m gratefully over nine years sober and six years cigarette-free. To get to this point, I had to get help from others, I learned all kinds of tools and techniques (check out the archive for details), and—perhaps most importantly—I had to cut the substances out of my life entirely. Not only did I stop drinking alcohol and smoking, but I also avoided even looking at them for years.

In contrast, when I catch myself spending too much time with video games, all I have to do is remind myself to cut back. I can give myself a time limit, or wait until all my chores for the day are done, or limit myself to weekends.

That cutting back strategy would never work for a true addiction.

I think that one of the worst results of the “everyone is addicted to something” mentality is that it ends up causing addicts and non-addicts alike to underestimate just how hard it is to overcome an addiction. Addicts end up beating ourselves up over our failures, and non-addicts end up looking down on us for a perceived lack of self-control.

It’s better for everyone if we just accept the obvious truth that most people are not addicts. Addiction isn’t a rare disorder, but it’s not something that the majority of people struggle with either.

I think it’s great that we’re living in an age in which mental illnesses and disorders are more readily identified. The stigma surrounding addiction and other disorders has rapidly faded within my lifetime. Even now, just nine years after I quit drinking, I can tell that sobriety and addiction are far less taboo than when I first got sober.

However, let’s not overcorrect by starting to pathologize things that are simply normal human behavior. You can be sad without being depressed. You can have trouble with eye contact without being autistic. And, you can indulge in something a little too often without being addicted to it.

I learned a new word yesterday: Catastrophizing.

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I’ve had two serious addictions in my life: Smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. They both developed in my late teens and early twenties. I managed to quit drinking just before turning thirty, and then quit smoking a few years later.

It’s now been over nine years since my last drink of alcohol, and over six years since my last cigarette. With so much time having passed, I’m feeling more secure than ever in my sobriety. Even when things go totally wrong in my life, I still don’t feel tempted to have a drink. The same is true for cigarettes. It’s been ages since I last had a craving.

To add to all of this, my life is going very well right now. As long-time readers of this newsletter know, I’ve had a bit of feeling up and down over the past year, but in general, things have been solid. I haven’t had any of the catastrophic, unexpected life events that might typically drive someone to relapse.

Despite all of this positive news, there’s one factor in my life that I worry is posing a serious threat to my sobriety: For the first time ever, I’m living in a state with legalized pot.

Let me back up and say that pot has never been a serious issue for me in the past. I smoked it occasionally when I was younger, but had grown out of it by the time my drinking habit was in full swing. It wasn’t hard for me to stop smoking pot, and I never felt cravings for it. It was something that I experimented with, not something that I was addicted to.

When I first quit drinking, I even briefly considered going back to smoking pot, thinking it would be a healthier alternative. However, I quickly realized that I wanted to be completely sober, not just free from alcohol.

I knew that if I quit alcohol but replaced it with other mind-altering substances, I’d never have a chance to address the root issues that made my addiction so strong in the first place. I also felt that pot would be a slippery slope and lead me back to drinking.

I really hadn’t thought about pot at all in the past decade, until recently moving to this new state, where it is legal and popular. All of a sudden, I’m smelling it when I’m out for runs, passing stores that sell it, and hearing a voice in the back of my head asking, “Why not?”

The fact that I was never addicted to pot is exactly what now makes it so tempting. It’s easy for me to imagine myself trying it out again and not forming a habit. I truly believe there’s a good chance that I could get high every couple of weeks or so without it turning into a daily habit. I think that I’d be able to use pot “moderately” in a way that I could never use alcohol.

I’m also tempted by the idea of taking a pot edible. It’s something I never tried when I was younger, and I’m curious how it feels. It even annoys me a bit to think that I’ll never know.

Despite all of this, I’m committed to not going back to pot. Why? Mostly because the risk is just too great.

Even if the odds of me developing an addiction to pot are slim, I think the odds of it leading me back to drinking are much higher. And, if I did go back to drinking, the results would be simply devastating.

When it comes to issues of addiction, the wise and obvious answer is always to err on the side of caution. Whatever tiny bit of fun I might get out of smoking pot again isn’t worth even a 1% chance that the habit spirals and I end up drinking alcohol again.

Avoiding pot is a very small sacrifice to protect me from my alcohol addiction.

Aside from this main point, I also feel like overall, I’m just happier being completely sober, rather than merely alcohol-free. It feels good to be more in control of my mind. I love waking up each day and not having to worry about whether I said or did something stupid the night before while under the influence of a mind-altering substance.

I’ll admit, there were times when drug and alcohol use were fun. But what a joke it would be to suggest those slivers of fun outweigh all the damage that addiction has caused in my life. The balance isn’t even close.

I like the version of myself that is sober far better than the version that came before. Why on earth would I ever intentionally take a step backward?

So, although I occasionally feel tempted by the legal pot that fills my new state, I’m going to continue to resist it. The potential harms are far too great, and the potential benefits far too small.

One final thought: I think that when temptations like this arise, the best thing we can do is talk or write about them. When I began this week’s newsletter, I worried that the legal pot here might threaten my sobriety. Now that I’ve gotten my thoughts on paper, I realize just how absurd it was to feel tempted by pot in the first place.

Despite having quit drinking over nine years ago, I have very little experience dating while sober. Back in December, I wrote a newsletter about why I’ve dated so little over this past decade. (You can read the whole thing here: Is It Hard to Date While Sober?)

I wrote that back when I was first getting back into the dating scene, and now that it’s been a few months, I thought it was time to provide an answer.

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It’s been over nine years since my last drink. Sometimes I can barely remember what my life was like before I got sober.

I started blogging about sobriety about two years after I quit drinking. In the beginning, I could remember my life as a daily drinker all too well. It was easy for me to slip back into my old mindset and bring back the old feelings of struggling with addiction.

Sometimes, in those early years of sobriety, I’d even remember new details about my drinking years. Random people, parties, and conversations that I hadn’t thought of in ages would suddenly pop back into my head.

However, lately, I just seem to remember less and less. And to be clear, it’s not that I have some cognitive problem. It’s simply that most of our memories get weaker with time, and it’s totally natural to have a hard time recalling things after nearly a decade has passed.

I have very mixed feelings about these fading memories. In part, I’m happy to let them go. My addiction defined me for a decade, and there’s something nice about the fact that it no longer plays a big role in my life. In many ways, I’d be happy to just forget about it entirely and move on.

However, another part of me worries that if I don’t have the memories of how bad my addiction was, I’ll eventually end up falling back into it. I don’t ever want to have another drink for the rest of my life, and I think that one of the best ways to avoid a relapse is to regularly remind myself of just how bad my life as a drinker had been.

It truly was awful. I was miserable, lonely, broke, out of shape, and hopeless. I still remember those years well enough to know that. And, as much as those memories still sting, I’d like to hold on to them so that I can continue to appreciate how much better my life is now.

All this naval gazing brings me to a more practical question: How do I actually maintain a good balance of remembering how bad my addiction had been, while also moving on with my life?

For years now, my answer to that question has been to write about my addiction. First in a blog, later in a newsletter. In the earlier years, I used to write almost every day. More recently, I’ve cut down to just writing once a week. In either case, it forces me to take a little time out of my schedule to purposefully look back at my life as an addict.

Lately, I’ve been questioning whether that’s the best strategy. The main problem is that it no longer works nearly as well as it used to. As hard as I try, when I sit down to write, I simply can’t remember my drinking years as well as I used to be able to.

A few months ago, I started thinking about closing down my newsletter. I decided against it for the time being, but I’m not sure that I’ll keep it running for too much longer. 10 years sober might be a good, natural stopping point. Perhaps even sooner.

I’ve always advocated maintaining sobriety strategies that work, but being willing to pivot when those strategies stop feeling helpful. However, as of right now, I have nothing to pivot to.

If I were to stop the newsletter, I don’t think I’d have anything better to take its place. I want something to help me remember my life as an addict, but I’m not sure what.

Perhaps, there simply isn’t a good solution to this. As I mentioned earlier, memories fade with time, and that’s completely natural.

I wonder too if, after nine years sober, I no longer need as much motivation to keep going. The truth is that at this point, avoiding alcohol just feels easy and natural. I’m not convinced that it will always feel this way, but I’m at least hopeful that it might.

No matter what I decide to do with my newsletter, I can tell you one thing with certainty: I’m glad that I started writing it in the first place. When I have days like today, when it’s hard for me to remember what my addiction used to be like, I can go back through seven years of blog posts and newsletters to remind myself.

That’s an incredibly powerful tool at my disposal. No matter how much my memories fade, I will always have them in writing.

When I started blogging about sobriety, I had no idea what a powerful tool writing could be. Now, I’ve come to realize it was one of the strongest ways that I supported my earlier sobriety.

I don’t know if it makes sense to keep writing about sobriety forever, but I think that it’s a great tool for anyone who has recently quit. If you’re reading this and have ever thought about starting your own sobriety blog, I’d just say that it was one of my best decisions.