Today’s the last day of Dry January, a month where folks who usually drink don’t drink, but also talk about not drinking a lot. As someone who’s been sober nearly five years, I’m definitely ready to stop hearing people moan about how much they miss drinking. (I feel you, buddy!) But if you’re not counting the hours until midnight, if you’re not sure what to do next, here’s an option: you don’t have to start drinking again.
This isn’t some call for everyone to stop drinking forever, or to point the finger at alcohol for my own problems. If, for you, Dry January is a chance to reset your drinking for the year ahead, or a way to practice healthy habits, or just something to do with your friends, then by all means go back to drinking tomorrow and enjoy it. One of the weird things about drinking culture is that people only seem to think you have a drinking problem when you stop; by being a group-sanctioned activity with a time limit, Dry January removes some of that stigma and lets people explore sobriety without all the baggage that comes with it.
As a sober person, I’m a bit defensive about that baggage. For all the good “sober curiosity” has done for me by making non-alcoholic booze better-tasting and easier to find, I don’t think it’s done much to actually change the way we think about struggling with substances. There’s something to be said for taking sobriety out of dark church basements and spiffing it up for Instagram, but it also turns it into, as my friend Niko Stratis writes, “another cog of a content machine… a branding exercise to sell flavored water.” (This has proven especially true for me during this year’s Dry January, as YouTube has taken to insistently showing me a campy ad about taking edibles instead of drinking. Dealing with one problem by developing another problem is how I got a drinking problem in the first place; parlaying all that into another substance is very bad advice for me.)
Dry January, and sober curiosity more broadly, can feel like they presuppose health: you are bettering yourself, like a morning workout or skin care routine. Mocktails are for the sober curious; O’Doul’s is for alcoholics. Counting Dry January’s days on social media is fun engagement; AA chips are a guilty secret. As someone who once angrily wrote “I’M AN ALCOHOLIC” on an NA beer marketing survey whose options included “I’m an athlete” and “I care about my health,” I’ll admit I can get a bit butt-hurt to feel like I’m the dirty little secret of my own lifestyle choices. Some unhealthy drinking habits might drive you to Dry January, but sober curiosity lets you steer clear of any sign of a problem, a thing it is bad to have and which, despite all sober curiosity’s gains, our culture still sees you as bad for having.
But admitting you have a problem is that first daunting step that lots of people never take, and I spent years drinking over it before deciding to quit. Anything that lets you skip that torment is a positive, whatever my personal feelings are. All of wellness culture’s grossest parts aside, more good than harm comes from it making sobriety less scary and more accessible.
Here’s where I stop grinding my axe and instead give you something useful. You, a person doing Dry January, don’t have to have my problems. But if you’re not sure what to do with your drinking now that Dry January is ending, here is a fact that helped me: you can just start drinking again later.
Quitting drinking can be terrifying because, for a long time, it seemed like the only choices were Drinking and Never Drinking Again. Never having another drink again forever sounds like a terrible idea! Before I quit, as miserable and trapped as booze was making me, I literally couldn’t imagine my life without it. What eventually got me over the line was telling myself that I wouldn’t have to live without it: I knew first-hand how easy drinking was, and if not drinking sucked, I had a lot of confidence in my ability to get drunk again.
Booze is always going to be there. If you’re doing Dry January, you already know what drinking is like, and now you know what a month of not drinking is like too. You probably know what two months of drinking is like, but maybe not what two months of sobriety is. You can see what three or six or eight months brings you, and if at any time you decide you hate it, drinking will be right where you left it.
For the first six months of my sobriety, I was utterly convinced that I was just taking a break. One of the only reasons I didn’t give up was one night, complaining about how much I missed drinking while bitterly slurping a seltzer at my favorite bar, the bar owner (who arguably would have benefited from my return to booze) gently said, “Well, why don’t you see how you feel tomorrow?” That permission to keep going, and the visible horizon it set–just check it out, for one more day–made a difference I couldn’t see at the time, but one I’m so grateful for today. Even now, when I hope I never drink again and put a lot of work into that hope, I don’t think too hard about forever. Today, I know what 1,714 sober days are like; if I want to, I can dip my toes into day 1,715. I hope I’ll find that day good enough to decide to check out day 1,716, but you never know.
Personally, I wouldn’t have been able to get sober if I hadn’t seen other people do it first, wrestling through the hard parts and coming out better on the other side. These days, I tell people that sobriety is the second-best choice I’ve ever made after transition, which sounds like so much bullshit but is true. So if you need that example, or would be helped by that permission, here you go. If you’re at all curious about how 32 days of Dry January might feel, you can go find out. It doesn’t have to be any bigger than that.
