Sobriety stories should start with a dramatic moment, but I don’t have one. 

I never drove drunk with my kids in the car, never threw up on my mother-in-law’s shoes, never missed the school play. 

If you’re making a movie about my sobriety, it’s a montage of a lot of quiet moments: crappy mornings, sulky glasses of wine after bedtime, and the way that making time for a drink pushed other things out my life. 

Nothing about it is dramatic or emphatic. 

It’s maybe not a super interesting story! But it’s mine, and it’s a lot of other women’s, too. 

It’s gray area drinking.

My drinking was generational

I guess I should preface this with the fact that I grew up in an alcoholic household! 

I don’t think the rest of this makes sense if you don’t know that. 

My dad was professionally successful but a fairly heavy after-work drinker. Never missed work the next day. Got home late, ate dinner, drank for a few hours, and went to bed. We spent time with him, but he was drinking during. 

And I never saw my mom drinking in the evenings in our home, but at every family party, event, or celebration, she would drink heavily. Everyone in her family did too. 

Once, when I was seven or so, we had my birthday party at a gymnastics gym. None of my mom’s family came, and in retrospect I can see that it was because there wouldn’t be alcohol. We never did that again. 

Like I would someday grow up to be, my parents were doing “the right things”. They were both successful at work, supported us well, and truly did their best to be good parents. Mostly, they were good parents!

If I look back on it from today, I can see what I internalized about alcohol: it’s for stress relief, and it’s also mandatory for fun. 

I drank alcohol only once or twice in high school: I was a good-girl type and a high level athlete, and my parents were strict about going out at night. So I didn’t have that risk factor in my life.

Alcohol addiction is progressive

I drank fairly “normally” in college. (Though of course there’s not much normal about American college drinking culture!) Weekends, parties, bars. It was binge drinking by anyone’s definition, but it was social. 

I had a roommate who did drink excessively at that time: a bottle of vodka on the nightstand, drinking every night.

Once, she talked me into spiking a soda and bringing it into a night class. I was so uncomfortable and so afraid of getting caught that I threw that soda out and went back to the dining hall for a new one without telling her. 

(I’ve never told anyone that before!)

During the middle of college, I met my now-husband and spent less time at bars and more time hanging out. He was (and is!) an incredibly supportive partner, and I felt some safety and emotional support that I had never felt before.

But my drinking picked up in grad school. A glass of wine at night seemed chic and sophisticated, and I was under a great deal of stress, was living a few hours away from my now-husband, and had never really learned healthy coping mechanisms from my parents. 

They would have drank in my situation, so I drank. By then, it was gray area drinking.

Comparison and gray area drinking

For a long time I told myself that if I wasn’t the drunkest girl in the room, I was fine. 

Looking back, I don’t think it’s an accident that I ended up moving in with the drunkest girl in the room. Let’s call her Julia.

Grad school put me in a position where I was away from the true emotional support I had in college, and more stressed than I had even been in my life. And in response, I developed a habit of turning to alcohol that I had never really had before. 

I was drinking every night with Julia,  2 glasses of wine with dinner, which left me feeling queasy but functional in the mornings. She went out most weekend nights – I came for the girls nights. And I usually had to make sure she got home. I was the “responsible one” — but still drinking a lot on those nights.  

I don’t want this to sound like I am blaming Julia! There’s no one to blame but me. I knew what living with her would be like and I chose to do it! She never pressured me, never put a drink in my hand. She was fun and cared about me and was a good friend overall. 

At the end of the day, we can look at the influences we had and see if they impacted our choices, but our choices are our own. My gray area drinking started with my choices.

By 23, I was having a couple of drinks nearly every night and probably 5-6 on nights out. 

And it stayed that way for years. Got married, moved back to where I had gone to college, got a job. 

I worked in a very stressful school and drank more; moved to my current school and returned to that 2ish drinks per day baseline. My husband and I made a new friend group that went out more.

It went on for years. 2 drinks on weeknights eventually became 3. 

What’s normal anyway? 

This is quite ordinary, in many ways. I know many women who drink like this. 

I would say it’s more common on the East Coast, where I grew up, than in the Midwest where I live now (but possibly back East they’re just more willing to talk about it!).

And I certainly don’t want to cast this as judgement or say that every single one of them has a problem. 

But I had a problem. I don’t always feel comfortable calling myself an alcoholic, but I definitely had a problem.

I couldn’t moderate, and eventually I started to itch for a drink around 4 PM, and the itch wouldn’t go away til I poured a glass of wine while I cooked dinner.

Nothing bad happened. 

I got pregnant and was able to stop drinking easily for all three pregnancies. I generally did not start drinking again until each baby was sleeping through the night, and I was careful to moderate while I was breastfeeding. Overall I drank less in these years–I was less stressed. 

And nothing bad happened. 

When my youngest was old enough for preschool, I went back to my teaching job. Started drinking more again. Back to 3 glasses of wine most nights. 

Nothing bad happened. I was still pretty good at my job. My kids were still thriving. No one in my life would have told you I had a problem or that I was failing at my responsibilities in any way. 

I had a problem. 

What I couldn’t see then that I see now: this kind of drinking was a quite, polite downward spiral. 

I was stressed, overwhelmed, and didn’t know how to deal with negative feelings. 

And every night that I went home and drank made me one millimeter less prepared to deal with that stress, worry, and negativity the next day. 

Over the years, the cumulative effect of this was huge. I got less and less able to cope, and less and less able to improve my situation. 

When I knew I needed to get sober, I felt like, why me? 

Why could Julia drink nightly and keep it together and be so sunny and happy? I wasn’t even, like drinking that much. 

“Drinking that much”

Okay, let’s get it out of the way: the recommended alcohol intake for women in the US is no more than one drink per day. 

So, yeah, I was drinking that much. 

But I was drinking a lot less than a lot of people I knew that seemed to be doing fine! 

I think my job had something to do with this – every school has more than a few hard drinkers. If you’re not doing what they’re doing, you must be okay. 

Or, if you’re still a good mom, you must be doing okay.

Or, if you’re still doing the charity 5K, you must be doing okay. 

I wasn’t okay.

I was frustrated and my only outlet was hurting myself, but I was hurting myself in a chic, sophisticated way that looked great in an Instagram post. 

The truth is I don’t know about Julia. Maybe she’s in the same glass box I was. Maybe a lot of women area. 

And maybe a lot of them are just like me. Where the circumstances are unbearable, and changing is too scary and too unacceptable.  

(The cheat code you find out is that a decent amount of what’s unbearable comes from starting every single day at 40% capacity.) 

I truly have no idea if most people drinking 2-3 glasses of wine a night feel trapped. But I can say for sure that if you do feel trapped, putting down the wineglass is going to help. 

For me, the thing that ended up pushing me to get sober was that I started waking up at 3AM every night I had been drinking. 

That broke the camel’s back – I could not hold it together anymore after that. 

Getting sober from gray area drinking

It turns out my life is not as stressful as all that.

Every part of my life is less stressful–marriage, work, parenting— when I’m not testy and snappy. When I can bring my best self, or even a pretty good self, to interactions, I like most people and most people like me. 

When I took out the drive to drink, I was able to put back activities that brought me enjoyment, rather than the one that just dulled my anxiety. Getting active, getting social, and spending time making stuff all taught me to improve my mood, not short-circuit it. 

I did have to do a whole “get sober” process even though it was only gray area drinking. And it was hard, and it actually took me three tries. 

There was no rehab, but I did download a sobriety app (I Am Sober) and celebrated my milestones. I didn’t deal with a lot of physical symptoms, and I felt pretty good pretty quickly. 

It took a couple months for my sleep to level out–that’s always been hard for me. 

Again – I failed twice before it worked! Once, I made it six weeks before failing on a no-kids vacation. And the second time, I came home after a horrible day of work and drowned my sorrows. 

But the third time, four years ago now, it stuck.

What you get back

I’m so much better at everything now. 

That shouldn’t be the point! And I see now that that’s not the most important thing. 

But for a lot of us who struggle with gray area drinking, what we’re putting out into the world is important to us. We don’t think about caring for ourselves – that’s why we take our pain and frustration and push it inward with alcohol. 

So, we’ll get to the emotional journey, but the truth is: I got better at everything. Better at parenting, at teaching, at being a wife and a daughter and a friend. 

You feel like a hero when you push your problems down and inward, but really, even if you’re “doing everything you’re supposed to”, you aren’t doing it as well as you could be. The people around you aren’t as protected from your struggles as you think they are. 

My first month was all about finding other ways to spend my time that would build me up and give me an outlet. 

The second month, all of a sudden, I had this extra energy. 

I had time to make the lunches properly. I had time to prep the copies the afternoon before. And I had all this free time in the evenings to really talk to my third grader. If I’m being honest with myself, I wasn’t really listening before. 

I got so much better at my own life, and I was able to show up for everyone else better. 

And showing up for everyone else better helped my self esteem, and that helped me admit that maybe I could possibly show up for myself better too. 

A coping mechanism for getting gray area sober

If I could do it all over again I would know better now.

If Julia, or any other person that I love, said “I need to quit drinking”, I’d say, survive the first weekend, then go do the thing you loved when you were ten.   

I didn’t know that yet. 

When I was finally around to the idea that I needed to take care of myself, I started with baths and skincare and self-care and all that. 

And I love that stuff. Like, literally, 90% of this blog is about beauty and self-care. 

But I was pretty good about it while I was drinking, and it didn’t really scratch the itch. 

I scrolled a lot too. I followed sobriety influencers, which helped. But scrolling didn’t calm my mind. 

I started doing workout videos, and I ventured back into a new gym post-COVID. That didn’t quite do it either. I had been reasonably active all that time. At that point, it was a way to self-punish, not a release valve. 

But when I started reading a lot, and sewing craft projects and clothes – the things I could do for hours when I was a kid – I started to feel that release valve. 

Your thing might not be either of these! But get back to what childhood you loved. If someone I cared about wanted to get sober tomorrow, I’d tell them to have ice cream right after dinner and then lean into their favorite childhood activity.  

And now? 

After 4 years of sobriety, I have a tool belt full of coping mechanisms. 

I still sit down to sew or work on a craft project sometimes, when something is troubling me that I need to make a decision about. Having busy hands lets me think things through in a calmer way. 

When I feel overwhelmed, I am usually going to turn to an intense workout – a short, fast run or kettlebells. I exhaust some of the tension and reset my body. Then, I can generally come back and see my challenges for what they are. 

And when I’m angry with someone, I can talk to my husband about what I’m feeling, plan my conversation a little, and then I can go talk to that person! (And if you feel like, ‘yeah, duh’ – I guess I just never saw someone upsetting me as something I could speak aloud and expect something different.) 

Some people will meet your needs, and some people will refuse to meet your needs, and either way you know how to approach that person next time. 

Sobriety gave me absolutely all of this. I was never going to get this foothold while I was pouring 3 glasses of wine on my problems every night. 

Does this sound familiar? 

If you’re identifying with this post, maybe you need to get sober. Even if it’s just gray area drinking. Even if it’s the same as everyone around you.

(I knew I would need to do it eventually for years before I did it, somewhere deep down. I didn’t tell anyone.)

If you’re running yourself ragged to do everything for everyone, and drinking to quiet the voice that says, what about me (or the shame that that voice even exists), maybe you need to get sober. 

And if you fail, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. 

If you feel like you’re not ready today, you can start to think about your someday, when you are ready. 

I can’t tell you for sure that you need to. Maybe you don’t. I needed to; there was so much more for me on the other side that I didn’t know was possible. Maybe there is for you, too.