Madeline’s Reviews > Drinking: A Love Story > Status Update

“You’re still entrenched in all the same problems you had before you quit drinking, but you react differently, because reacting in the same old ways becomes intolerable; it just hurts too much without anesthesia.”

“My terror that I'd be bored and lonely in sobriety abated almost immediately. In fact, as time goes on, I become more aware of how bored and lonely I was while I was drinking, and how much more textured and varied life seems without it.”

If you like your daily six-pack or your gin-and-tonic at the end of the day, if you see drinking as part of your right as an adult member of society, you're not apt to look kindly on those of us who can't tolerate it. Something must be wrong with her, you may think. Or I'm glad it's her and not me.
The stigma surrounding alcoholism has abated a great deal in the past few decades, but it's still present

“You drank to drown out fear, to dilute anxiety and doubt and self-loathing and painful memories, and when you stop drinking, all those emotions come to the fore, sometimes in a torrent that feels overwhelming. Putting down the drink may give you an opportunity to solve problems, but abstinence won't solve them on its own.”

“Anxiety looms and you think: This is why I drank.
Sadness and shame wash up. This is why I drank. Feelings of rage surface. This is why I drank. The drink may have become the main obstacle between you and any hope of change, but a hundred other obstacles lie behind it and most of those have to do with emotions, the very beasts you never learned to contend with in any other way.”

“I drove home thinking about the trade-offs you make when you drink: about how many times I'd chosen drunken company over sustaining company in the past; about how hollow that is, opting for the trappings of intimacy - the restaurant, the candles, the wine - shielding yourself from its warmth.”

“I saw growing up as something that happened to you. In some ways giving up an addiction involves reversing that equation, understanding finally that growth comes from the inside out, from trying and failing and trying again. When you quit drinking you stop waiting. You begin to let go of the wish, age old and profound and essentially human, that someone will swoop down and save you.”

I'd never really grasped the idea that growth was something you could choose, that adulthood might be less a chronological state than an emotional one which you decide, through painful acts, to both enter and maintain. Like a lot of people I know (alcoholics and not), I'd spent most of my life waiting for maturity to hit me from the outside, as though I'd just wake up 1 morning and be done, like a roast in the oven.

“Alcohol is what shielded me all those years from the messy business of standing in that room with my own emotions, coming to terms with my own quiet, restrained, complicated heritage, finding ways to tend to my own needs, instead of waiting for others to jump in and tend to them for me. In a word, alcohol is what protected me rom growing up.”

Not drinking is a choice one makes every day, sometimes many times a day. The immediate decision is clear: either you pick up the glass or you don't. Hard days - a larger set of choices can be at work too. Not drinking that day meant acknowledging certain truths: that self-destruction would have served no one, least of all me; that medicating those emotions wouldn't resolve or alter them; self defeating solution