One Year Later: How Quitting Drinking Changed My Life

This post was originally published on Colleen Welsch - Freelance Writing Coach.

Buddies, today I want to get personal with you. On Monday, I celebrated the one-year anniversary of quitting drinking. I’m proud of this accomplishment, and I’m excited to tell you about my journey. Maybe you will find it helpful, maybe you won’t. Regardless, I am passionate about this subject and I hope that my story will help someone!

Giving up alcohol was truly the biggest and best change I’ve ever made, and the decision has impacted every aspect of my life (including my freelance writing career). So if you’re curious about my story or if you just want to know what it’s like to stop drinking, keep reading!

Why I Quit Drinking

To be honest, it feels like it’s been a lot longer than just one year since I had my last sip of alcohol. When I think about what my life was like one year ago and what it’s like now, it truly boggles the mind.

Let me just paint a picture for you. A year ago, I had just returned from a 6-week adventure through Norway, Scotland, England, and LA. It was fun, but the fact of the matter is that I was traveling compulsively. I was living beyond my means and racking up credit card debt like there was no tomorrow. For me, there wasn’t a tomorrow. I wanted to find love, start a family, and have a home to call my own. I didn’t think those things were possible for me, so my plan was just to party my face off until I died.

Traveling and partying all the time made me feel glamorous and cool. If I couldn’t have what I wanted, I might as well be the cosmopolitan Vodka Aunt that makes everyone jealous with her fabulous and exciting life, right?

But the truth is, I was lonely. I used drinking as a way to bond with people, and I didn’t believe I could socialize or have fun without it. At the same time, my tolerance kept getting higher, and my hangovers worse and worse. I felt so isolated because I was dependent on the alcohol to be around people, but I knew it was making me sick.

I think that sometimes people are surprised to hear that I’m an alcoholic. We often think of alcoholics as wife beaters, people with multiple DUIs, or people who drink liters of vodka alone.

But alcoholism doesn’t always look like that. Sometimes alcoholism looks like the friend who is down for anything. The friend who plans bottomless mimosa brunches. The friend who buys everyone tequila shots. The friend who finds the afterparty so she doesn’t have to go home and be alone. The friend who won’t text back for several days because she’s too busy puking and sleeping off a hangover.

That was me, for years. I was what I like to call a “fun drunk.” I was a party girl. And since I rarely blacked out and required my friends to assist me (as I said, I had a high tolerance), I think everyone just assumed I was fine.

No one knew the extent of my issue. Thanks to my compulsive need to travel, I had friends all over the world. I could go to LA and get hammered with my LA friends, then take a one-way flight to London and get pissed there. No one knew what was going on. No one but me knew how much I was drinking and how many days I’d lost because of hangovers. It was so easy to hide.

From the outside, I’m sure it seemed like I was doing fine. My writing business was successful, I was traveling all the time, and I was having a lot of fun. But my drinking (and the lifestyle choices that came with it) were taking a toll on my body. I had cystic acne. I was bloated, and I felt bad about my body. Even though I tried to exercise regularly and eat healthily, I never saw any results because I was drinking poison all weekend and drunk-ordering McDonald’s on Uber Eats.

Professionally, things weren’t great either. I would still feel hungover on Mondays (and Tuesdays) after my weekend benders. Sometimes I also had hangovers during the week from going to happy hours. It was rare that I ever showed up to work feeling focused, refreshed, and 100% ready to serve my clients.

This behavior was fine when I had a 9-to-5, and my performance didn’t affect my paychecks. But when you run a service-based business, YOU are the product. When you’re not your best, your work will suffer. Because of my lack of focus, my income stagnated at $3k-$4k per month. I could never breakthrough that next threshold.

How I Quit Drinking

In the summer of 2019, I start seeing a therapist, ostensibly to help me with relationship issues. I am so thankful that I found my therapist! I won’t get into it too much, but we have done so much work since last summer and it’s been amazing.

Anyways, my therapist pointed out that my drinking was problematic and that I needed to quit altogether. I fought her on that for several months. Believe it or not, I didn’t think that I had a problem. But after a couple of months, I came around to the idea.

To be honest with you, one day I had my last drink and I didn’t even realize it. That is to say, I didn’t realize that a White Claw would be my last alcoholic beverage ever. Had I known, I might have picked something that I liked better!

The weekend that I had my last drink ever, I was so proud of myself because I had only had one alcoholic beverage. I drank one White Claw while sitting on the couch and reading a book. I was so pleased that I only had one drink, that I wanted to see how long I could go without drinking again. Apparently, the longest I could go was forever because I haven’t had drank since then!

In the beginning, my biggest struggle was fielding all the questions about why I wasn’t drinking. If you drink a lot, you probably have friends that drink a lot too, and when you order a Diet Coke at your weekly pub trivia night instead of a beer, people are going to have questions. Since I quit drinking at the end of September, I just told people I was doing Sober October. After that, I told them I felt so good during October, that I just decided to keep going. During the holidays, I drank non-alcoholic wine so my family wouldn’t ask me about why I wasn’t drinking.

It’s only been recently that I’ve told people I was an alcoholic. Honestly, I didn’t realize that I am an alcoholic for a long time. During the past year, I’ve been reading through all of my diaries (I have kept a diary since 1997). Once I got to the diaries I wrote in my 20s, I was shocked by how much I complained about being hungover. For the first time, I realized that all my drunk stories were actually kind of scary and not funny at all. But back then, drinking heavily was just a fact of life. It never occurred to me that life didn’t have to be that way. It never occurred to me that I had a problem.

Anyways, when I first quit drinking, I felt fabulous. It was so wonderful to wake up every morning and not feel hungover! I had so much more energy and my skin developed a healthy glow. However, after about a month or so, a lot of negative feelings started rearing their ugly heads.

Like a lot of people, I used alcohol as a way to medicate myself. I had issues I wasn’t dealing with, and I used alcohol to avoid feeling the pain. So once the glow of being freshly sober wore off, I felt awful. This is where I needed the help of a therapist the most. She helped me to see that it was both normal and necessary to feel bad. She encouraged me to rest and journal and do whatever I needed to do to get through the bad feelings (besides drink). During this time, I watched a lot of those cheesy Netflix Christmas movies. They helped!

Since my drinking was also linked to social anxiety, I did lean on edibles while I was getting used to not drinking in social settings. I ate a 2.5mg Sativa mint whenever I felt stressed in social settings (which, at first, was every social setting). Eventually, I phased these out because I didn’t need them anymore. But it was nice to have a non-alcoholic crutch that I could use while I got my bearings.

I never attended AA during this time. I’ve only been to one AA meeting, and that was about two weeks ago (spoiler alert: I didn’t like it). I think that AA is a wonderful organization that’s helped countless people to recover from addiction issues, but it’s just not for me.

I have read that the only way to successfully quit drinking is to create a new life for yourself that doesn’t involve alcohol. Eventually, you just start to think of yourself as a person who doesn’t drink. After that, it’s much easier to say no.

So, what I needed was time and space to get a new life. I was lucky because I was living with my parents at the time. I was away from my top party friends, so it’s not like I had to turn down a bunch of invitations to go out drinking. I didn’t have to go to a club and order a cranberry juice while everyone around me had shots. Plus, since it was winter in Ohio, it was easy to avoid being around other people. There are fewer social invitations in the winter. And once spring rolled around, the pandemic hit so there were zero social invitations!

Honestly, this has been the real silver lining of the pandemic for me. It’s allowed me the time and space I needed to get to know myself and create a new life without alcohol. I feel really solid and good in this identity now, and I look forward to continuing to build a new, alcohol-free life once the pandemic is over.

What Happened When I Quit Drinking

I find it difficult to describe just how much quitting drinking has changed my life. I feel like a different person. But, since I’m hoping this post will help someone, I’ll try to list out some of the benefits I’ve experienced:

1. I feel more confident.

Confidence and self-esteem are an ongoing battle for me, but overall, quitting drinking has made me feel more comfortable with myself. I used to feel like I had two personalities: Drunk Colleen and Sober Colleen, and I liked Drunk Colleen so much better. But I just felt like nobody knew the real me. Almost every time I was around people, I was drinking.

Since quitting drinking, I feel like I’ve gotten to know myself so much better. I now have a better idea of what I like and what I don’t like. I no longer just go along with everything because I’m a “cool girl”. I feel more comfortable setting boundaries and enforcing them.

2. I feel healthier.

Since I’m not poisoning myself on the reg, I feel so much better. I have more energy. I don’t lose days to hangovers. I never get sick anymore.

I’ve also lost quite a bit of weight. Honestly, losing weight was perhaps one of the main reasons I wanted to follow through with quitting drinking in the first place. My therapist told me that, on average, people lose 15 pounds in the first year they quit drinking, just from eliminating those extra calories (and finding more energy for healthy habits). And here I am now, one year later and down 15 pounds. However, I hesitated to include this reason because of course your weight is not a reflection of your worth as a person. But my weight WAS a reflection of my inattention to my health and emotional needs, and I feel like I’ve now shed some of that. As a result, I feel much better.

3. I look better.

I feel more comfortable in my body now, though I still have a long way to go in terms of loving and accepting myself. But besides that, my skin looks way better. I no longer have cystic acne, and my face is less bloated. I can stick to a skincare routine. I also have my life together enough to get my hair cut and colored regularly, which makes a big difference.

4. My business is doing better.

After the initial shock of quitting drinking (when I had to spend more time practicing self-care), I started making at least $2k more every month. I was more present for my clients and I did better work. I had less unexpected “off” days due to hangovers. I was even able to hire my first employee!

5. I am more in tune with my emotions and intuition.

For years, I didn’t feel or process my emotions. I believed I had no emotions whatsoever. And I never listened to my intuition. I didn’t know such a thing existed.

Now I’m getting so much better at having feelings and expressing them, which allows me to have closer relationships with my friends and family. I feel less isolated, and I feel like when I do get to know someone, they’re getting to know the real me.

I’ve also been more in touch with intuition and open to receiving messages from The Universe which has helped me to make great strides in my business. The Universe told me to help freelance writers, and here we are! I definitely would not have started educating others if I hadn’t quit drinking.

My biggest accomplishment post-drinking has been buying a house. When my best friend told me the house across the stress from hers was going up for sale, my intuition immediately told me that I needed to buy it. And since I was making more money as a freelance writer, I was able to move forward on that ping. Now I have a home to call my own, checking off one of those things on my list that I never thought I could have in my drinking days.

Should You Quit Drinking?

Quitting drinking is not for everyone. In a culture where seemingly everyone drinks, it’s a big step. It’s a huge lifestyle change. It’s amazing how eliminating such a small thing from your life can change so much.

If you feel called to take a break from alcohol and do Sober October, I encourage you to do so. I think everyone can benefit from reevaluating their relationship with alcohol, even if it’s just for a month. And if you are thinking, “I could NEVER quit drinking,” my friend, you probably need it the most. That’s exactly how I felt a little over a year ago.

If you want to talk about it, I’m here. Seriously, you can DM me and I’ll answer. I know how isolating it feels to be an alcohol-free person when it seems like the whole world is casually sipping mimosas.

And if you’re another alcohol-free person, let’s be friends! I only have a couple of people in my entire acquaintance who don’t drink (and none who identify as alcoholics, as far as I know), so I would love to connect with more alcohol-free people.