I started this blog, initially, to learn how to take up space.
I’ve always been a bit shy. I’ve never liked being in pictures. I usually can be relied upon to agree with you on trivial matters to avoid being at odds. If the barista gives me the wrong order, I will drink it.
So in a personal challenge to grow, I thought I’d explore some of myself on here—writing helps me parse through intangible feelings and repetitive thoughts in a way that gives me relief. Often I don’t know what I really think until I explore it in writing.
But lately I’ve found that more difficult and I couldn’t really pinpoint why. I would sit down with an idea and feel it fade as soon as I wrote a couple words. Everything felt forced and I worried I’d broken my nice streak of consistency. So I took a step back to just exist and let it all come.
In this reflection I realized that I stopped because I got scared.
Writing this blog, putting it out there, in front of friends and family, sharing my thoughts, my feelings… has been a massive exercise in discomfort.
Once I started to receive responses to my writing (which I am so grateful for) fear strangled my ability to create.
“You can’t say that” “well they’ll think x if I write y” “I’m already cringing”
Every draft I’ve written in the past few weeks has been mired with self-edits before I even get halfway through; I have a list of ideas on my phone that I keep closing out of because they feel too personal.
But coming back to my original purpose here, which is to write for myself, for my wellbeing, for my own growth, and for perhaps others to relate to, I need to write through the discomfort and “discard” the anxiety.
Not an easy task, when I’m constantly judging myself.
So here’s a draft I scrapped because I was scared.
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I’ve reached the stage of my dwindling twenties where a single sip of alcohol jolts me into headache and instant regret. I so enjoyed drinking, every interaction centered around it, family events without it unthinkable—the warm dazed smile on my lips, I stop caring for a just a while as I float from conversation to conversation.
At parties the bar had a magnetic pull on me. Thoughtlessly, I filled my glass.
Somewhere in my 23rd or 24th year I started to notice the underlying anxiety, amping and accelerating every next sip. It waited for me with a vengeance in the middle of the night.
I knew drinking was a crutch but I gladly used it to get through interactions I had no interest in or to forget a particularly hard week at work, and maybe also to force a little more fun. But I started to find it more and more difficult to contain that low-level drumbeat of anxiety and barely contained stress that was building inside me.
As a Helping Professional and People Pleaser I thought the stress was a badge of honor and the drinking was my decompression. It came with the territory of being an aid worker; I was tough and I could handle it.
But as I found the demands and the environment of my job more difficult to manage, the after effects of alcohol became impossible to ignore and I started to clearly see this unhealthy identification not only with drinking and but also my job.
I felt trapped in my work and trapped by this substance and instead of breaking out of it by choice or proactivity, my body and emotional health collapsed in a jumble of events and circumstances.
I wish I could say that I just wanted to be healthier or that I just didn’t like the taste, but the truth is that I needed a hard fall to bring me back to myself. Inevitably, this meant quitting my job—a break up that has taken years to sort through—and reducing, eventually mostly quitting, alcohol.
Of course, I was never an alcoholic in the strictest sense of its meaning and leaving my job wasn’t related to my alcohol consumption. Rather, I think I acted in extremely predictable and normal, socially acceptable ways for a woman in her 20’s. But I think there’s an interesting association with the timing of quitting both: the breaking of a sort of addiction to this identity as an aid worker and to the substance itself.
My experience isn’t unique, most of us can’t wait to legally drink and I come from a culture that absolutely revolves around drinking. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with drinking—I can still enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail—but for me, it became a way to prolong getting to know myself and what I really wanted. A way to prolong making a change on my own terms. A way to ease the cognitive dissonance I felt in my work that kept me there for longer than I needed.
A way to people please and remain unseen.
After a long, imperfect hiatus from drinking (and coffee) I learned not only to make it through parties sober, but enjoy them too. I learned that, actually, I like m
y sober self and that my drinking personality wasn’t real, she wasn’t an upgrade, and she wasn’t that much fun to be around anyways.
I’m learning, still, how to be myself.
‘Going out’ these days has meant stalking through vintage markets, sitting through weird short film festivals, and going to dinner parties where I may or may not drink.
As I’ve gotten to know myself better, I’ve also gotten to know my community too. Neighborhood cleanup? sign me up. Indie theater? lets go. Thursday night pizza with the 100 year old locals? hell yeah.
I’m learning there’s a lot to see and do when you’re not so hung up on how you’ll look.