Ask Schmutzie: How I Deal With The Social Aspects Of Drinking

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my sixth response to your questions. Check out my first, second, third, fourth, and fifth sets of questions and answers.



What do you do while you're socializing with your friends now? Substitute food or coffee for alcohol? (I know you separated yourself from many of your drinking friends.) Has the Palinode stopped drinking as well?
— Mrs. Wilson

When you want a drink, how do you resist? Also, does the Palinode drink when you're out together? (I'm assuming he doesn't at home.)
— Sheryl

Do you attend functions where people will be drinking alcohol, or go to restaurants where they serve alcohol? Does it bother you to just be around it, or is it like quitting smoking, when you get used to not doing it, it doesn't bother you as much?
— abigail.road

The formula of behaviour I had created to assure myself that the amount I was drinking was alright is one of my biggest hurdles with regard to dealing with my alcoholism. I tend to behave obsessively, creating patterns and rules for behaviour that I must follow in order to feel at ease, and it is these patterns that I have spent the last more than eight months mostly working to undo. Being that my pattern meant I drank almost solely in public with the same people for over a decade with the idea that not drinking at home meant I was fine, breaking free means that I rarely go out anymore.

Of course, where my old pattern had my drunken butt planted firmly on a wooden bench in a pub most of the time, my new pattern has my sober butt planted firmly on a coffee-stained couch in my living room most of the time. The only real differences are that my living room isn't packed full of drunken revellers and I remember what I watched on tv the night before. Oh, and there's that part where I like being alive now.

I thought that not going out would be hard for me. I thought I would miss seeing people. It turns out that my being out had far more to do with alcohol and far less to do with the people, places, and events around which I was drinking. It wasn't until I removed all the other factors surrounding my alcohol consumption that I realized how far my priorities had slipped, how little I really cared for anything other than getting drunk.

Now that I have been away from most of the social triggers for over eight months, though, I mostly have to deal with the emotional impulse to get drunk. Everything is an emotional trigger to drink. My cat died! I bought a new pair of shoes! They're drinking in this movie I'm watching! I'm depressed! I'm constipated! It's sunny outside! Since most of my emotional reactions trigger the idea to have a drink, it can be harder some days than others to say no, and on the harder days, I stay home. I stay home a lot some weeks.

When it comes to socializing, I have to play each situation by ear. The Palinode has not quit drinking, and he does occasionally have a drink in front of me when we are out, but there are occasions on which I ask him not to, and he's okay with that. When we are invited out to where people will be drinking, I check up in my head to see if I am having a strong and confident kind of day or a weaker and needy kind of day, and if it's the latter, I stay home, or I arbitrarily schedule myself to leave the social situation after one or two hours so that I know psychologically I have an out.

So, I only go out where there will be alcohol when I feel absolutely strong and confident. When I don't, I don't. If I waver when I am out, I go home.

Really, though, the only way not to drink is not to drink, and in order to do that, I have to make sobriety the primary purpose in my life above all else, at least for a while. I have to decide that I will do anything not to drink, and I have to choose to believe in that purpose with as much power as I can muster, because it is the knowledge that I would do anything to serve my sobriety that makes the smaller steps toward it seem more doable.

Can I say no to the wine I am offered at a party? Yes, because when I know that I am willing to give up my cats, my wee baby flufferkins, to serve my sobriety, it's not the worst thing ever to wave the glass of wine away. Can I stop myself from walking to that old, familiar pub upon hearing that its beloved outdoor patio is open? Yes, because when I know that I would give up a couple of fingers if I had to in order to stay sober, it's not the worst thing ever to walk in the other direction. Can I walk by that can of beer sitting outside the neighbouring apartment without leaping on it like a [bullied minority] on a [something that the bullied minority is stereotyped to love]? Yes, because when I know that I am willing to give up all of my worldly possessions to become a nomadic yurt-dweller in Northern Mongolia, it's not the worst thing ever to look the other way.

I am often tempted if I see alcohol, whether it is on television or right in front of me, and while it's gotten a little easier over time, the urge is still there. That urge is so embedded in my history, in the entirety of my late teens and adult life really, that it feels more like an old friend than a threat to my happiness. This is why I have to embrace my sobriety so passionately and wholly. My present realization of myself as a happier, more hopeful, and more resilient person who is nearly free of suicidal ideation depends on those swift, decisive actions, and so I wilfully take those actions.

Also, I drink a lot of coffee. I have an addictive personality, so I'm letting it make love to coffee for now. My personality and coffee are presently mashed together in a passionate lip-lock that has me jittering through my days.

I know that I am not likely going to have to be a fingerless yurt-dweller in Norther Mongolia without the comfort of my sweet cuddlemuffins in order to defend my sobriety, but I know in my heart that I would do all of those things. I am married to it, I am committed to it, I am devoted to my sobriety as a spiritual soul lover. Sobriety sustains a me that I recognize, a me that loves more deeply, a me that hopes.

Not to put too fine a point on it: yes, I am tempted, and, yes, it can be difficult, but I can and I will do it, because I had a revelation last August: I'm some kind of pinko hippie who doesn't shave her legs, so I have an inner guru, and that inner guru said you can flow in the river, or you can be the river, and I believed it with my whole heart.

For reals. I smoked a lot of pot when I was younger.

I know that I have to defend my natural right — psychologically, spiritually, and physically — to be free, or the meaning I consciously seek in this one, unique life will be lost.

It is exactly that big.

Ask Schmutzie: When Is It Most Difficult?

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my fifth response to your questions. Check out my first, second, third, and fourth sets of questions and answers.



When is it most difficult?
     — cenobyte

Tonight. Tonight it is most difficult, and other nights like tonight.

If you read through all of my posts about sobriety, you'll see that I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I changed a major portion of my life to quit drinking. I summarily and without explanation quit going to the pub I went to most nights for almost ten years and stopped hanging out with 95% of the people I saw most often. I went from seeing lots of people most of the time to seeing almost no one most of the time.

Quitting drinking was such a remarkable life change that I rarely notice how much of a homebody I've become. Being sober feels busy after spending the last ten years forgetting most of what I did. There are nights, though, ones like tonight, when the Palinode goes out with friends and I happen to be feeling particularly vulnerable for no particular reason. I feel smacked upside the back of my head with grief.

I have a ton of things to keep me busy — design work, reading, phoneography, etc. — but I feel like I don't know what to do with myself. I feel wide open, vulnerable, and so very aware of my singularity, my separateness, my aloneness in the universe. I feel that hard reality that no one can feel this life with me, not truly.

I think being drunk with groups of people that I was drunk with a lot made me feel bonded to a whole, however falsely, for those hours that I was there in that state. Some days it can be an exceedingly lonely experience to make the decision, yet again, to say no to it all, to choose to sit with this sense of isolation rather than burrow into a fuzzy sense of togetherness.

There are sober people I can connect with if I need to, but it doesn't fix the truth of being locked into a body in a universe that demands this hard decision of me every day. I am happy to make this decision not to drink as many times as I need to make it, but on nights like tonight I get to feeling a little pathetic, a little tired, a little threadbare.

I may be happy to make this decision, but I don't want to make it, and I wonder when it will stop feeling like I am continually waving goodbye to so much of what I find familiar and comforting.

So, when is it most difficult? Tonight it is most difficult. I feel stretched thin and limp. I am tired. I feel existentially isolated. I am lost.

And I am reminding myself that it gets better, because it does. Every morning proves to me that it gets better than the hard night before, even if it is sometimes only a little bit.

Ask Schmutzie: Thrill-Seeking, Fun, And The Best And Worst Of Times

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my fourth response to your questions. Check out my first, second, and third sets of questions and answers.



A question that often gets brought up when talking to former addicts: were you ever addicted to the adrenaline rush that comes from knowing you quite literally can die in this moment, that a mere tip of the scales will decide on which side of the life line you will land?
     — Barbara@TheMiddleAges

There is apparently a gene identified with thrill-seeking behaviour, and I definitely do not have it. My father coerced me into going on a kiddie roller coaster once when I was ten, and I still hold it against him.

Sometimes I did want to die, but I was less attached to looking for an adrenaline rush and more attached to the then-chronic depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation I used alcohol, in part, to outrun.


I'll ask you the question I get asked the most from those contemplating sobriety: What do you do for fun?
     — Tricky

This question is surprisingly difficult to answer. I have spent the majority of my fall, winter, and early spring primarily engaged in not drinking and not running back to that pub where most of my social life happened, so what I do mostly looks like sitting at home. The relative quietude of my life since I quit drinking, though, belies the joy I am finding in living the full psychological/intellectual/emotional experience of my life without being anaesthetized against it.

It turns out that hanging out at non-drinking events like movies in theatres and podcast recordings are more than thieves of good drinking time.

So, what I do for fun these days is soak up whatever I do sober — whether it be writing, recording a podcast, or talking with the Palinode — and relish my ability not only to actively take part but also to recall it later. It's amazing how much more interesting life can seem when you are actually able to remember how you've been occupying your time.


What is your worst memory from your drinking days? What is your best one? What is your worst memory so far from your new sobriety days? What is your best one?
     — Bobbi

When I originally read this question, I thought it would be so easy to answer, but as soon as I tried to nail down a best time and a worst time, my entire twenty-some years of drinking came back to me.

The thing is, as a grand avoidance tactic, I think part of what I was looking for was the best of times every time I sat down with a beer. I wanted epic conversations, epic parties, epic play, and I got it a lot, or at least the self-induced rush of it, because alcohol made me feel energetic in between the first glass and the eventual glimmer of a blackout, indefatigable even. I was on.

And so I was on throughout most, if not all, of my major life events over the last more than twenty years. I was intoxicated both times I got engaged. I drank before I walked down the aisle at my wedding. I was drunk during most of my sexual encounters. I was good and tipsy whenever I met any of my blogging heros. And it is the same for my worst events. When being out and being social was pretty much synonymous with being drunk, almost all of my best and worst times were drunk best and worst times. Being drunk was no longer a special occasion separate from the rest of my life; it was my life outside my house.

What I'm saying is that it doesn't mean much to ask about best and worst drunk times when almost all of my life events were drunk times. Being drunk is barely a differentiating characteristic when talking about the events of my past.

When it comes to defining the best and worst times of my recent sobriety, I am doing my best not to cast my experiences since August into good or bad categories. I am too close to the now, to making it through one day at a time, to be able to look at the broader picture and pick out a best and worst.

Sober life has been hard, and, although I haven't liked most of it, I deeply value all of it. I am learning to live a daily life that doesn't involve the constant pursuit of anaesthetization and instead to live one that embraces and honours real movement both within and without.

My new sobriety has been both the best and the worst of times, and I don't think I can effectively pick one apart from the other right now without losing the integrity of the whole.

Ask Schmutzie: Why I Can't Just Cut Down And Go Back To The Pub

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my third answer in response to your questions. Check out my first and second set of questions and answers here: Is There A Point Where It Won't Feel Like I Should Just Give In? and How Do You Deal With The Urge To Drink?



My question is — will you ever be able to go back to those "places" of alcohol consumption, or have you, and how have you handled it?
     — Rhonda

Why did you decide to quit instead of just cutting back?
     — kris

When I publicly admitted to having a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, I had accepted the fact that I couldn't alter my habitualized interaction with it. I finally understood that my relationship with alcohol was entirely one-sided. It didn't know me, love me, or want me. I was its dewy-eyed stalker, taking what I could of it whenever I could.

With my public declaration, I had to take action, but I couldn't do it like all the other times when I had told myself after five pints of beer that I needed to cut back. That half-hearted conviction only resulted in me having one less beer the next night and one less blackout that week before I resumed my regularly scheduled bingeing.

It is important to know here that I never ever, under any circumstances, wanted only one or two drinks. I only ever wanted as many drinks as it would take to black out, so cutting back still meant getting loaded, which always lead to not cutting back, which lead to blacking out two nights later.

The only way out was to stop, and the only way to stop was to discontinue the triggers that I followed down that road again and again. This was a decision I had avoided making for years, being that my triggers were at least one hundred people and one particular drinking establishment to which I had very close ties. Everyone who worked there and most of the regular patrons knew me by name. I had drowned my sorrows about cancer there. We had celebrated the Palinode's back surgery and ability to stand upright again there.

My life had become work (to make money for alcohol), pub (to drink said alcohol), and home (to sleep off said alcohol) on a revolving carousel. I was going to have to break up with a substantial portion of my life, and I had to do it NOW. There could be no second-guessing or one last hoorah.

And so, without any fanfare, or even a word of explanation to anyone, I chose to simply disappear. I walked away from the pub I frequented and nearly ten years of friendships within a fairly expansive circle, and I forged three rules to help carry me through:

1. I can never again set foot in the pub I inhabited for so many years.
2. I cannot continue my friendships with most of the people with whom I drank during that decade, because my social ties are inextricably bound to my alcoholic triggers.
3. I can never drink alcohol again with the idea that I can control my relationship to it, nor can I be left alone with it in my home.

This first year away from that place and my friends hasn't always been easy. It's as though I am grieving a death, and I suppose that I am, in a way. Each major holiday, shifts in seasons, and birthdays and parties that come up on Facebook have me waxing nostalgic, and, especially now that spring is here, I am finding it hard to imagine that I won't park myself on that patio through long summer afternoons. As it stands, I avoid even the street that the pub I drank at sits on. In the past eight months, I have walked down that block a sum total of four times, three of which were by accident when I turned the corner to it out of habit.

What makes it easier, though, is reminding myself that the expansive circle of friends I thought I had was not the so-called chosen family I sometimes espoused it to be. Of the people I saw most often there near the end, of the couple of hundred people I knew in that place, a surprisingly tiny number have bothered to check in with me over the last eight months to see how I am, and most of those who checked in did so to tell me that I should come out for a drink. Quite a few more have unfriended or blocked me on Facebook.

I get the warm fuzzies all over just thinking about it.

Of course, I just dropped out without a word and have made no motion to contact most of them, either, so don't think that I am blaming a hamlet's worth of people for not declaring their undying support of my life decisions. I have not been the best example of how to win friends and influence people. If you want to know how to dump almost everyone you socialize with and spend an entire winter holed up in your apartment, though, I'm your gal.

It's just a little eye-opening in the clear light of sobriety to see how easily most of my supposed ties were cut, and it's surprisingly freeing. And, to be perfectly honest, I rarely, if ever, truly miss the configuration of the life I had just less than a year ago. I was lonely and sad and lost in a sea of people whose friendships I used to prop up that night's drunk. They deserve better, and so do I.

So, Rhonda and Kris, my answer to your questions is no. I cannot cut back when it comes to alcohol, and I can never revisit the pub I once thought I loved so much. My relationship to alcohol threw all of my other relationships tangential to it askew. I very nearly broke myself and the few parts of my life that I truly love, my liver among them, and I'm kind of attached to that little guy and all the living that he makes possible.

Ask Schmutzie: How Do You Deal With The Urge To Drink?

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my second answer in response to your questions. You can read my first question and answer here.



The addictions I'm battling are unhealthy mental/emotional reactions. I've been using cognitive behavioral therapy to help re-program my automatic negative responses. How have you dealt with the instant impluses or cravings you might have?
     — musingwoman

What do you do , when, at some moments, you recall the warm, liquidness of your body when you've had a good, full glass of wine? What do you do when that siren's call is so strong...the gold warmthness of a glass of wine at the end of the day? What do you do?
     — alexandra

How do I deal with my urge to drink? Good question.

It really depends on the situation and the mood that accompanies the craving. It is much easier to deal with when I am out in public with friends, because I have been open with them about my sobriety, and I have an inbred compulsion to appear composed and collected at all times when in front of other people.

Even while I was drinking, I had a strict set of private rules I would not allow myself to break that, when followed carefully, made me appear to be very together and not at all a deeply sad basket case. I kept little if any alcohol in the apartment. I only drank if in the company of other people. I kept a tight focus on my level of inebriation so that I could pour myself into a cab and head home before I blacked out.

I was adept at the art of appearing not completely fucked up. I was a middling con artist with compulsive tendencies.

Strangely, those compulsive tendencies that turned me into such a successful functional alcoholic are the same ones that are helping me to avoid it now, but while my behaviour can make me look externally as though I am handling everything with aplomb, internally I can be quite the mess of emotions and impulses.

That mess of emotions and impulses is slowly easing up over time, though. In the beginning they were constantly in the background when they weren't in the foreground, hammering away at me to JUST LEAVE THE APARTMENT AND GO HAVE A DRINK ALREADY. Now, they pop in, say hello, and mess around with my well-being intermittently rather than incessantly. It is such a relief to have the space to think about other things, because it was not terribly inspiring to spend all my time pouring my energy into not doing something.

To answer your questions more directly, here are ten of the things I do to distract myself in the moment when I fondly recall my favourite pint or want to drown my emotions in an entire vat of the stuff:

1. Eat chocolate ice cream or potatoes or popcorn.


2. Talk to the Palinode in run-on sentences rife with non sequiturs.


3. Crawl back under the covers and declare it a Mental Health Day.


4. Soak in a hot bath as a form of gentle physical restraint.


5. Cry into my fists. I know that a pillow would be a whole lot more comfortable, but fists add that extra bit of drama.


6. Examine my feelings in that moment and trace them back to their truer origin, the real trigger that predates the kneejerk response to drink.


7. Get lost in movies from my teens and twenties like Party Girl and Sixteen Candles.


8. Breathe as slowly and deeply as is comfortable while imagining my breath pooling into my belly and flushing through my extremities.


9. Dive into my design work and cut and paste and erase and adjust until my eyes refuse to focus anymore.


10. Write a weblog entry.

Basically, I do anything but drink when the urge hits, and I allow myself to do whatever feels most natural to me in that moment. Sometimes none of those things work, and I just sit on the couch and practice Not Getting Up. This activity involves much tensing of the muscles and low-level grumbling and is not at all relaxing.

It doesn't sound fantastic, and it isn't, but I get through, and, in these early months of re-learning how to feel my emotions from beginning to end and how to socialize without feeling high and how to make it through my day not because there are several pints of beer at the end of it but because I actually want to be there in that day, I'll take it. As long as I'm still sober, I'll take it.

Distractions only take me so far, though. The rest is this:
I make a decision every day when I wake that I am not going to drink, and then I stick by that decision, because that decision is very much like a small child. I have to be firm yet nurturing with it to keep it steady.

I can live with this, or I can live with that, and this is proving to be immensely more satisfying than anaesthetizing myself into blackouts, living with a near-constant hangover, and being distanced from everything that could touch my heart. Funny thing, that.

There is no way out but through, I'm learning, and the longer I am sober the easier it gets to go through things rather than numb myself and push them aside. It is becoming more and more natural to choose the better of two options rather than the lesser of two evils. It's a relief to exercise my power to make decisions rather than follow all paths to the local pub.

I am learning how to be free.