What Happened When a Booze-Loving Writer Indulged Her Sober Curiosity
I love a White Russian in a hot tub under the stars. An old-fashioned in a retro bar. A margarita sipped to a mariachi tune. A sparkling wine when there’s something worth celebrating, like a day ending in y.
But as the poet William Blake reminds us, “joy and woe are woven fine.” As I headed into my mid-40s, I began to realize that the delight of the jaunty rhythm of a cocktail shaker, the icy liquid magic-carpet ride of that first sip, would soon be offset by distress: bleary mornings, straining jeans zippers, a brain that felt like a fuzzy barnacle.
So a few years ago, when I heard about the“sober curiosity” movement—a mindful reexamination of one’s relationship with alcohol, a world of craft mocktails, booze-free bars, sober dance parties—I took it as an opportunity to seriously look at my habits and let go of that which did not serve me.
LOL, just kidding! I guffawed like Elaine Stritch on her 14th martini and thought, What will those self-serious millennials come up with next? Doesn’t anyone just cut back anymore? And speaking of cutting back—I was absolutely going to do that. Someday.
I know it beggars belief, but when the coronavirus hit, I thought that day had come. Along with everybody else in New York, I’d be sheltered in place, which sounded almost cozy. Locked out of my regular routines, I could develop healthier habits! And then I, like many of my fellow Americans, fell into a wormhole in which time and good intentions were meaningless. Life became a nonstop booze cruise—but it was like that line in The Muppets Take Manhattan: There was no boat, and we weren’t actually going anywhere. The week that 19 governors across the country issued stay-at-home orders, online alcohol sales went up 262 percent.
A colleague turned her stacked wine crates into a standing desk. Ina Garten poured a giant cosmo into a glass as big as a foot bath. In year 9—I mean week 9—of lockdown, the New York Times did a story on “walktail parties,” in which cabin-fevered carousers took to the streets. The lithe woman in the accompanying photo, who strolled through her sun-dappled Austin neighborhood in a sassy halter dress, said she’d made a pledge that each day of sheltering in place, she’d get fancy and have a drink: “It was my way of flipping off the coronavirus.”
I was sitting in my un-sun-dappled 400-square-foot apartment, wearing an unsassy Yankees T-shirt crusted with LeanCuisine, headachy and bereft. I was pretty sure the only thing I was flipping off was myself. Since lockdown began, I’d discovered how easy it was to get to the bottom of a bottle of Vinho Verde. (So low in alcohol! Why not open another?) The video socializing was killing me—I loved being my own bartender, always ready with a top-up, but I felt bloated and pickled. I knew alcohol can exacerbate anxiety and depression, but I’d never felt it in my bones the way I did now. If I had one quarantooni ti many, the next day the walls would feel a little closer together, in both my apartment and my head, an uneasiness only made worse by the new surreality of pandemic life, when every grocery run felt like a sortie behind enemy lines.
Someone sent me one of the drinking memes that were going around, a riff on that old joke about how your stripper name is your first pet plus your childhood street: “Your quarantine alcoholic name is your first name plus your last name.” This wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. I had to admit that I was a little curious about sober curiosity.
A Sobering Discovery
The woman who wrote the book on the subject—Ruby Warrington, author of Sober Curious and The Sober Curious Reset, coming in December—is not the twee hipster of my imagination. At 44, she’s closer to my age than I thought, and she used to like drinking for many of the same reasons I do. To have fun. To ease social anxiety. To blunt the dread of her perceived shortcomings. To quiet the voice that says something awful is about to happen.
Ten years ago, however, fresh off a weekend yoga retreat, Warrington—who says she was a “moderate to heavy social drinker”—woke up and realized that her mouth didn’t feel like a dryer lint trap and she was missing that familiar looming sense of Monday dread. A question bubbled up like a sloe gin fizz: Would her life be better without alcohol? She started to think about when she imbibed, why, and how she felt afterward. How would it go if she went on a dry date? Was that hungover Saturday morning really worth it?
Sober curiosity is not about setting rules (“No drinking on weeknights”), which Warrington always found were too easily broken. It’s also not about abstinence. She tried Alcoholics Anonymous, but resisted the notion that she was powerless over booze. “AA is great for a lot of people,” Warrington says, “but much of its language has a very judgmental tone. I don’t agree with the idea that we drink because of a character defect. Also, for me, abstinence is like putting alcohol in a box and marking it as so delectable, I can’t trust myself. Living with alcohol while also questioning what place it has in my life is what ultimately proved sustainable.” Being sober curious is a kind of mindful drinking that involves a lot of questions: How will this drink make me feel? Will it enhance this experience or detract from it? What are the reasons—social, emotional, physical—I am choosing to drink?
Here’s the thing, though, about sober curiosity in a pandemic: When there’s nowhere to go and nothing to celebrate, asking yourself why you want to drink tends to yield only one answer—namely, because life sucks. When I said as much to Warrington, she told me, “I think the challenge is to remind ourselves that there really is no such thing as escape. Here in Brooklyn, the bars are doing to-go cups—it’s like a street party. I see the relief people find in it. But who knows how those drinks feel the next morning when you’re waking up to another Groundhog Day of this crisis?” Girl, sing my life with your words, I thought. But what else is there to look forward to? “When you get used to alcohol not clouding your system, small things really do start to feel delicious, like this breeze that just came in and kissed my face,” Warrington says. I imagined Elaine rolling her eyes, shaking the ice in her glass. She adds gently, “I wouldn’t have noticed that pleasure if I was used to the intense sledgehammer effect of a cocktail.”
That put a lump in my throat, the thought that I’d been sledgehammering my nervous system. I didn’t feel shame then. I felt sorrow, as if my anxiety were an unruly, clawing creature I’d been trying to care for. When it was too hard to soothe her, I beat her instead.
Just as no one ever lost weight simply by buying a diet book, I knew that merely thinking about sober curiosity wasn’t going to change my drinking habits. But putting the principles into practice was tough. Although I knew wine wasn’t an effective exit strategy, I, like all humans, am wired to seek experiences that increase pleasure and dull pain, both of which alcohol does brilliantly in the short term.
Warrington recommended sitting with the impulses the way I’d sit in a difficult yoga position, just experiencing the discomfort, then feeling the relief when the urge passes—or I wake up the next morning hangover-free, whichever comes first. Some days I wobbled but then held steady. At times when I’d normally uncork, I’d hide in a hot bath. I’d hunker on my couch with a grapefruit soda and 53 episodes of The Good Place, which I enjoyed much more when sober.
"Instead of waking up with what the French call a guele de bois (“mouth of wood”), I’d look with a clear eye out at the world, right there where I left it."
I did miss the dreaminess I found in wine. I also missed my more expansive social self. When my husband, who put in long days as an essential worker, finally came home, I was quiet. I didn’t want to prattle on about our neighbor who’d been outside in a wig and booty shorts, presumably making TikTok videos. I felt as if I’d been put on mute.
The upside, however, is that Lady Operetta was canceled. Lady Operetta is my alter ego who rears her mascara-smeared head after I’ve had a couple glasses, and she feels deeply, y’all. She might get weepy about the news, or all the rescue cats, or my husband’s refusal to wear a bike helmet, or the fraught but beautiful friendship between Anthony Fauci and Larry Kramer. And trust me, you don’t want to get her angry. I’m guessing that if my husband missed my tipsy loquaciousness, it was a small price to pay in exchange for a break from Lady Operetta. Honestly, she wasn’t my BFF, either. Her crying never felt like a cleansing release; it just left me like a wrung-out prizefighter. I didn’t miss those emotional hangovers, or the physical ones, either. Instead of waking up with what the French call a gueule de bois (“mouth of wood”), I’d look with a clear eye out at the world, right there where I left it. That world still sucked at the moment, but I felt more solid within it.
And then there were plenty of nights when I wanted a glass of something, and I asked myself why, and I didn’t have a good reason, and I had one anyway. One night I drank because I’d scheduled a FaceTime wine-and-chat with a good friend. I could have made it a juice-and-chat, but even with people who loved me, I thought I was better company when I was slightly liquored up. I lay in bed with my other buddy, Sauvy B, and all three of us talked long into the night. At one point I began to nod off, as if I’d stretched out in a bed of opium poppies, and my friend said it was apparently time to hang up. The next morning I called her and blurted, “I shouldn’t drink if it makes me check out on people I love.”
Were it not for this experiment in sober curiosity, I doubt I’d have said that. Sure, I talk with friends about our boozing, but we either joke about it or have a furtive conversation about lost brain cells that quickly turns into a joke. Striving to be more honest with myself had led me, even in this small way, to be more honest with someone else. My friend said, “It’s okay. Friends don’t have to be perfect for each other.” I felt loved then, hearing that I didn’t need to be perfect. Could I really believe that? And if I could, would I be more open to juice-and-chats?
Previously in my life when I’ve focused on drinking less, it’s been a dance of restriction and indulgence. This experience felt different, like a conversation with myself. In that spirit of inquiry, I followed my curiosity to a “sober event,” a virtual version of the alcohol-free dance party Daybreaker, cofounded by social entrepreneur Radha Agrawal. It tends to involve a lot of bare midriffs and group hugs, neither of which is normally my jam. But since this one was happening over Zoom, everyone would be sweating privately, and I could just leave my camera off and dance like no one was watching, because no one would be.
It was Bollywood themed, and it was a lark but unexpectedly moving, too, seeing thousands of people of all ages shaking it. The video panned to living rooms and backyards around the world where everyone held up signs with their location: a perfect little family with a baby in Paris, a roomful of sari-clad women and their daughters in Detroit, a glamorous couple who held up a Toblerone package they’d relabeled "Switzerland," one lone woman just like me who’d scribbled “Maryland” on a Post-it. Everybody, all over the planet, shut up in their homes, perhaps lonely or cranky or stir-crazy or even enveloped in despair—here they all were making a concerted effort at joy. It was enough to make a person teary-eyed. Who needed Lady Operetta? I could still feel deeply without being numb.
As I read in Sober Curious, the psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that people use
alcohol because they’re thirsty for spiritual experience. In a letter to the founder of AA, he wrote, “Spiritus contra spiritum”; roughly,“It takes spirit to cure spirits.” I have a tiny mustard-seed grain of faith that this could be true for me, too, that a sweeter life might be out there waiting if I could just see my way clear.
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