I quit alcohol 6 months ago but 1 thing is making me really sad
The other day, I was climbing stairs at the gym and I realized I might have passed the 6-month mark since I decided to quit alcohol.
I quickly counted the months on my fingers and confirmed that, yes, it had been more than half a year.
I should have been happy, but in all honesty, I started feeling a bit melancholy about the whole thing.
A massive turnaround
It wasn’t that I was unhappy with my choice — quite the contrary, actually.
In the 6 months since quitting alcohol, I feel like I’ve accomplished so much:
- I stopped feeling tired, ill, and depressed every single day of my life
- I improved all the relationships I wish to have and ended the ones that were toxic and detrimental
- I rediscovered the magic of a full night of high-quality sleep
- I got my fitness back in order and healed up from major spinal disc problems
- I got through COVID relatively unscathed
- I started new mindfulness practices that keep me calm and focused
- I rekindled my love of writing and connected with an amazing community on this platform
- I started a YouTube channel and have gotten myself halfway to monetization
- I stabilized my finances
- I built a stock portfolio of companies I’m proud to own and I feel I can trust in a recession
- I finally achieved my dream of starting my own business — one that now brings in about $40 per day in relatively passive income
The last one is really, really important.
The main reason I wanted to quit alcohol was that I was tired of disappointing myself and not reaching my potential.
Health, relationships, etc., those are important and certainly factored into my decision.
But, for once, I just wanted to be proud of myself and accomplish the goals I’d dreamed of throughout my entire life.
Here’s what I wrote when I started this whole quit alcohol journey:
“But I was tired. I was tired of feeling tired. I was tired of not sleeping well enough. I was tired of having low energy all the time. I was tired of cycling from caffeine to alcohol to bad sleep and back to caffeine and alcohol the next day and over and over again, just to get through the day on my feet.
“I was also tired of disappointing myself.
I’d always wanted to accomplish something outside of the typical commuter life. I wanted to write on my own terms, to build a business. But when you’re approaching middle age and have work responsibilities and family responsibilities and home maintenance responsibilities and financial responsibilities, who has the energy for that?”
Me, it turns out.
Here I am.
So why am I sad?
Time marches on
As I walked those stairs with my 42nd birthday on the horizon, it struck me how quickly time is passing now.
Sure, time speeds up as you get older. After you have kids, it really hits the afterburners.
But when you don’t build your life around alcohol anymore, your perception of time shifts.
Before, when I was drinking every night, the days kind of just blended together.
Every single one was the same, unremarkable. I didn’t give a damn, either.
Since I’ve started over, every aspect of my life acknowledges time.
Every day that I wake up and do my Morning Pages, I write the date at the top. Every day I sit in front of my computer, I add the date to new spreadsheets tracking by business and investment income.
At the start of the week, I put the date at the top of the page and do this weird bubble outline checklist thingy with all my personal and work tasks for the week.
I’m finding that every time I make a fresh one, I look at the week before and think, “damn, another seven days already?”
The other day, I re-watched watched a YouTube video by a creator I like that I’d seen around the time it came out.
It popped onto my screen again recently and below was the publication date: “2 years ago”.
Sheesh. Two years?
What will I feel like when I look back at my own channel, see the younger version of myself, and find “2 years ago” underneath?
If only I had known time would move like this, I wouldn’t have wasted more than a decade’s worth of it drinking it away.
I’m unabashedly proud of what I’ve accomplished in six months.
But it upsets me to think about what I could have done with 10 years.
Move forward
Whenever I’m feeling sorry for myself, I think of a line from the old show Mad Men when Peggy makes a big mistake and Don is visiting her in her hospital room.
She doesn’t know what to do because it might end her career.
He tells her that yes, she does know what to do. Put the past in the past.
“Move forward.”
That’s all we can do, isn’t it?
I don’t want to go back to a time when each night blended into the next as my life trickled away — when I didn’t even care.
This way is better (even if it has its own challenges).
But, if you’re just now considering quitting drinking, don’t let another moment go to waste.
Trust me: you’ll regret it later.
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