It’s Dry January, which is pretty hard to escape noticing these days. On Instagram, I’ve been posting recipes and tagging them #dryjanuary and #sobercurious. Until this year, my feelings about Dry January have been something like gratitude. I’m happy to have more people join me, if only for a month, in abstaining from alcohol. It feels less lonely. I’m happy to see not drinking receive some normalization across social platforms. It makes me feel less weird. And seeing all the discussion of the positive outcomes of abstaining gives me a little (smug?) boost. Yeah, I sleep better too. Yeah, I have more energy for working out.

My own relationship to alcohol is in the form of a permanent break-up. I am a person who should not drink again, and I don’t intend to do so. I suppose I once fell somewhere in the gray area drinking spectrum, in that I drank too much for years, but people around me didn’t see me as having a problem. My drinking spiked during the early pandemic, and my problem became more visible. I couldn’t hide from myself that I was miserable. I quit. It was difficult. I attended 12-step meetings. My early foray into non-alcoholic mixology helped me make sobriety into a public project, so that I wouldn’t give up.

Earlier this month I was reading Julia Bainbridge’s newsletter Good Drinks and read her interview with John DeBary about Dry January. I noted that he was drawing a distinction between people who stop drinking for “medical” reasons, and people who do Dry January “recreationally.”   At first blush, this pissed me off. This is me resisting the idea of being medicalized. I don’t subscribe to the idea that I have a disease. I subscribe to the idea that alcohol is an extremely addictive substance and I was addicted to it.

A few days later, I read this headline, shared by someone on my social media: Valerie Bertinelli is doing Dry January to ‘regulate’ her body: ‘This is mainly about sugar.’ That’s what he meant, I realized. This person is doing Dry January recreationally, and it’s annoying. (Maybe I am extremely grumpy?) It’s weirdly puritanical and curiously American to give up enjoyable things “recreationally,” I thought. Sugar is WAY LESS BAD for you than a neurotoxin, I thought. This isn’t a game, I thought. 

But when I stopped drinking, I was just taking a thirty day break. I wanted to show I could do it, to show that I wasn’t an alcoholic. Then I realized how extraordinarily hard it was, I became afraid, and my worldview shifted. Looking back at the effort, self examination, and general experiencing of emotion that it took, and takes, to stay sober, I see the version of myself who was just starting out as hopelessly naive and also a person who used the idea of a thirty day detox as a way to begin, and to persist.

I think that some people doing Dry January may have misguided beliefs, maybe some wishful thinking, but trying it is good for them anyway. I also think the line between a medical and a recreational reason to quit drinking is blurry at best. As veteran 12-step meeting folks extend grace to the stressed out and sometimes misguided ramblings of the newly sober, I want to make space for everyone starting out on a thirty day break to find out what it means for them. If they need to think of it as a reset, a ‘sugar detox’ or a diet, okay. That idea can serve a purpose, at least for a while.

_{(For anyone needing extra support or reading material on stopping drinking, I recommend the following books and podcasts; they helped me tremendously: This Naked Mind by Annie Grace, Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker, We are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen, This Naked Mind podcast, Recovery Elevator podcast)}