I love alcohol! I love the beautiful, fuzzy, warm glow where all the aches, pains, and worries of the day dissipate after the first fat whiskey of the day. It’s beautiful, really. 

As a shy teenager, I found acceptance and recognition among my friends for my Friday night antics, recklessly slugging down one beer after another regardless of any and all consequences. I made friends and attained a certain amount of popularity. I started spending almost every Friday night of my life getting roasted. Drunk as a skunk. I did this almost every Friday night, for almost all my adult life. I had a really good time. I think. 

As a young-at-heart, middle-aged man and business owner, beer just wasn’t doing it for me anymore, no quantity of beer was enough. I stopped drinking beer and started drinking whiskey. I can remember that first whiskey buzz, sitting on the veranda of an upscale restaurant on the island of Majorca in the Mediterranean. The warm fuzzy glow after only two shots of whiskey, instead of drinking ten beers for an only half-assed dull buzz, was a revelation.

Friday night drinking eventually expanded to Fridays, Mondays, and Wednesdays, strategically timed with enough recovery time in between to party hard again. Often, I would start working in the late afternoon or early evening with a whiskey and continue working and drinking and listening to music until the early hours of the morning. But, I kept my promise to myself not to drink every night of my life, as my father had. 

Then some things started to change. I was not getting that lovely warm fuzzy glow anymore, no matter how much whiskey I drank. I considered drinking every night so that only a topping up was necessary the next evening, maybe that would bring back the joy in my drinking. But I had made an unbreakable promise to myself: I would never drink alcohol every night of my life. Also, I was really getting into sports again, especially surfing, and drinking was interfering with my other big love, surfing. 

I also desperately wanted to stop having no energy and feeling depressed. I wanted to feel good and have constant energy. I wanted to be a good surfer, and alcohol was holding me back, I knew. 

So, I cut back—or rather, I tried to. It would be easy to stop altogether, I thought, but why should I? I wasn’t an alcoholic, right? I allowed myself whiskey only once a week on Friday evenings. But I made exceptions; sometimes I allowed myself a session on a Monday or a Wednesday night, too. Right, that sure didn’t work. I felt no better. I then tried whiskey only once a month. Right, that sure didn’t work either. Too many “exceptions” crept in.

I then stopped drinking alcohol altogether for 2-3 months at a time. And then I would allow myself a Friday night binge, because, hey, once in a while isn’t that bad now, is it? I repeated the process of stopping and starting again after a couple of months, a few times. The positive health effects of not having drunk alcohol for a few months were honestly just not what I had expected and not a big enough motivation to stop altogether. 

But I had started the process. I wanted to change. I tried. I never gave up. And I succeeded. I succeeded. When I finally stopped after repeating the cycle a few times, it took more like 9-12 months to really reap the physical and mental benefits, but now I reap these benefits. And, yes, it is an ongoing process, and my life isn’t perfect now, but I now know with absolute certainty that the lack of energy and the depression were largely due to alcohol. And I feel great!

I sometimes wish I had taken another path, but such thinking does not help and isn’t realistic—my childhood trauma needed to be overcome, and alcohol was one of the major mechanisms for dealing with it. 

I can now honestly say that reducing my alcohol consumption to once or twice a year (not stopping altogether, to prove to myself that I am not really an alcoholic—it’s a process) was the best thing I ever did for myself—ever in my whole life. 

To stop drinking alcohol, as with achieving anything in life, requires you to really want to do it. It helps immensely to have motivating factors, such as loved ones and life goals, and it takes time and patience. But if you really want to, you try and you try again. You never give up. Be as gentle with yourself during this process as you are with others, and you will succeed. And you will forever be grateful that you did. Plant that seed of thought right now, and it will grow! 

Good luck! I love you as I should love myself, and you should love yourself!

Yours,
John Honey