Sober Curious

Story by Jennifer Vaughan/Staff Writer

If you’ve ever second-guessed accepting the alcohol offered to you at seemingly every function and occasion, or if you’ve ever entertained the possibility that your life might be better without alcohol in it, you might be sober curious.

According to Ruby Warrington, author of Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol, “[Being sober curious] means, literally, to choose to question, or get curious about, every impulse, invitation, and expectation to drink, versus mindlessly going along with the dominant drinking culture.”

April 1, 2022 marks 328 days since I made the decision to stop drinking alcohol. I don’t actually keep track of the days; I just search my iPhone calendar for “Last Hangover” and then I Google how long it’s been since that calendar entry on May 8, 2021. For me, it wasn’t a decision that I had to make every single day, one day at a time. I took the same approach as Holly Whitaker, author of Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol.

“I am an extremist, a ‘let’s get to the point’ kind of woman. I don’t dabble in gray areas for long or suffer through things pixel by pixel. I drink the ocean. What worked for me at the beginning was not deciding day by day that I wouldn’t drink that day. What worked for me was obliterating the idea that I would ever drink again, striking the possibility completely, making a decision and never questioning it.”

Not even a year later and my entire life has changed to the point that I’m filled with joy and brought to tears as I look back. I didn’t once question my decision to stop drinking, but it was certainly uncomfortable at times. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In the Healing of Trauma was invaluable to me in my journey and offers this quote, “‘The night sea journey’ is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness ... The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.” – Stephen Cope, Author

If you’re human, you’ve lived a complex accumulation of experiences and deciding to explore a sober lifestyle is a big change. I encourage anyone who is sober curious to go to therapy, reference the books mentioned above, download a meditation app, find Jesus and do yoga.