Ready To Be Sober Or Not Ready To Be Sober? How Do You Know When It's Time To Quit Drinking?

I will never forget the day I quit drinking. It was the night of January 22, 2009. It wasn’t a birthday or anything else significant that night. I simply looked in the mirror and saw a flushed and haggard face of a forty-year-old staring back at me. I had six or seven beers already in me and three or four left in the fridge. If I had finished them, it would have only been a moderate night of consumption as by then my normal was now twelve to fifteen on the weeknights and more on the weekends. I didn’t finish them. I pulled the remaining out and put them in the trash.

I was done.

I never drank again. I didn’t check myself into rehab, didn’t go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I made a contract with myself to never touch the substance again. I pulled out my revolver, put a round in the chamber and put the gun on the table. Quit it or end it. That gun stayed on the table for the first forty-five days of sobriety. It had finally gotten to that point. I figured if I was going to kill myself, then just do it, don’t spend years in and out of a hospital letting John Barleycorn slowly take me.

How did I know this was the time to quit? I had vertigo every morning accompanied with light nausea. There were little knives now periodically digging into my kidneys and liver. My blood pressure was well above normal. I existed in a black depression most of the time. And that night of January 22, 2009, as I was drinking and thinking, I remembered the time in my life when I wasn’t an alcoholic. I had never denied that I was addicted to alcohol for the last decade. I wasn’t swimming in any river in Egypt. But that night the addiction smacked me right across the forehead. I looked in that mirror and saw what I had done to myself. I had no idea how I was going to recover. I couldn’t even picture a week without alcohol let alone the rest of my life.

But then I thought of that time before I was addicted. And I realized there was no law etched in stone that stated I couldn’t live alcohol free. After all, I existed in earlier days without touching it. I had four beers once and a few nips of vodka in my entire high school. I passed through almost every single day without the substance back then so why couldn’t I return to that? Just because I was long legal to consume didn’t mean I was obligated to do so. So I threw those remaining beers away, went through detox alone and walked through the phases of recovery solo as well.

THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK

When I quit it, I could not visualize never taking a drink again. Today I can’t picture ever shaking hands with Johnny again. I’m almost two decades clean and I buried that former version of myself. I recreated my physical plane and returned to a life of high fitness. I engage in yoga and meditation daily for the emotional sphere. I advanced my career and have written six books now: fiction and nonfiction. I learned how to invest in stocks, short term and long term, which only continues to give me financial freedom. I truly cannot imagine being that guy that I was with his twelve to fifteen beers a night and more on the weekends. That night I drove a sword through his heart. Today I don’t even visit his gravestone.

The question many will ask is why did it take so long to have this insight? I was an alcoholic for thirteen years. Surely, being the somewhat smart guy I am, I should have come to this conclusion earlier? What took so long to know this was the time to leave it for good? And how will the rest of you know as well?

The thing with alcoholism is it is a slow, insidious addiction. It disguises itself with normality. Everyone drinks when they are young and usually heavily. At eighteen through twenty-six, I wasn’t doing anything different than everyone else. All my late teenage and early twenties friends consumed heavily on the weekends. We all drank in the military as well. How come everyone else eventually drifted into the land of moderation and I fell off the landscape into the abyss?

The reason for that leap into oblivion for alcoholics can be traced to those initial drinking days. As I stated in another article, most of the young will consume alcohol and many times in great quantities. But the vast majority are consuming for recreation. The future alcoholic is using it to alleviate pain, usually from past trauma. He engages with his friends as well. But then he begins to indulge in it without the recreational component. He starts drinking alone. Then with enough years of that, he becomes physically addicted as well.

The physical addiction part is in a disguise because it also progresses in stages. In my very early days, in the years eighteen to twenty-two, I drank on the weekends. We all had two-day binges starting Friday when the whistle blew. But I never thought about alcohol during the week. I wasn’t an alcoholic yet, but I was planting the early seeds for it. I wouldn’t have thought about quitting it because I wasn’t drinking most nights.

Binge drinking is the next stage in the progression of alcoholism. I had about nine months straight at twenty-three when I was consuming six to eight beers a night and maybe a little more on the weekends. I was in the first year of the military and things were at rock bottom in my life as an enlisted soldier who was greatly affected by his past childhood and just didn’t know it yet. My social dating life was none at all and I didn’t know why. So I used the painkiller that John Barleycorn offered. But I came out of it when I transferred from my first location to an army course located at Goodfellow Air Force Base. I went back to working out all the time and only drank on the weekends and just a little on the weeknights once again.

The first long binge is the warning sign that possibly one should consider giving it up. Having a binge for a long weekend is common. Nine months is not. But the future alcoholic isn’t aware of that yet. He likes the escape of alcohol but isn’t in a state of total physical addiction. John Barleycorn is playing a game with him, though. He advances two feet of the terrain then retreats one. When the former alcoholic looks back, he will note that as he waxed and waned in his growing addiction, the waxing always added another layer. It is something that is only noted in retrospect. Sure, at the air force base I was only drinking a lot on the weekends and just a few during the week. But it was still every week. This would be the time to stop the progression. Now is when the person should fade back to become a permanent light drinker socially or cease from alcohol intake altogether. Because he is beginning to get physically addicted to it. The addiction just hasn’t grown to needing the substance every day.

I’ve written before how I went from having alcohol under control to the day when Johnny finally stormed the breach and took the terrain. I was twenty-seven and on a spring break during freshman year. I drank large amounts every night during that interval. I figured I would go back to my version of normalcy when I returned. This time I didn’t. That’s when I transformed into a nightly drinker. And from that point on the amounts just slowly increased.  

This is when I knew I had a problem. When you definitely know you have a problem with alcohol, this is when you should be ready to leave it. One will try to negotiate with himself to go back to moderation. It will last for a bit. I tried to revert to what I was doing prior to that spring break plunge. When I left the military at twenty-six, I was having maybe two to three beers if I didn’t have a workout planned the next day and then six to eight on one weekend night. I wasn’t aware that my pal Johnny was slowly driving in the stakes. Every time I tried to revert to that, it now never lasted more than a week.

There is an easy self-test that you can do if you are trying to determine if you are ready to quit alcohol. When you are engaged in this negotiation with John Barleycorn of going back to moderation drinking, ask yourself: Can I just give it up? It’s very simple. It is not normal to believe that you couldn’t live without alcohol. Most people will enjoy social drinking. Some people may even relish getting drunk on a Saturday night. But those people could leave it without too much worry. If you cannot picture yourself without alcohol, then you are now addicted to it. I shouldn’t have waited until I was drinking four cases a week. By early thirties, I was doing this negotiation with Johnny. And John Barleycorn is known to renege on every deal. I knew I was an alcoholic and should have been ready to quit. Because at that point you are going to go through withdrawal no matter when you decide to give it up. Or you won’t go through withdrawal, you’ll just die young from alcoholism.

I don’t know why I picked the day January 22, 2009. I was forty years old, the traditional halfway mark to the celestial transfer. I had known for the last few years that if I kept going the way I was, then I would be gone by fifty-some years old and would be in constant misery until then. I counted myself lucky that I had never gotten a DUI or anything else that would follow me the rest of my days. I also knew the body was very forgiving at forty with excess substance abuse of any type.

I simply decided to change my life. The decision is just like the four-hundred-pound person who looks in the mirror one day and decides that he has had enough. I knew I was headed for the storm of initial detox. I knew it was going to be awful. But I also knew when I got through it and the first thirty days or so after that, I would reinvent everything in my being.

When I tossed the last few cans into the trash, I wasn’t testing the waters to see if I could quit drinking. I made the irrevocable contract that night that me and Johnny B were finished. I was going to figure out why I wanted him as a friend to begin with. I would sort out the abused past and come out far better than before I began drinking so long ago.

And that was when I took the first step on the path to reinvention of Self.

For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK

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John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913