Tonic and lime, please. No Vodka.

Note to reader: this post was originally started in January of 2014 and completed (finally) in January 2019. Please excuse the horrible inconsistencies in voice.

There’s something a little selfish about New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps it’s the timing of it all (as if January cares), or the inevitable praise when talking about resolutions with family and friends. For me I try to frame my resolutions in a different light than new year, new me, and often this amounts to just curiosity and experimentation or, in this case, for better or worse, … ego

Rewind to Sunday morning in late October, rolling out of bed at 10am, splitting headache from the night before. 2 beers was all. I was annoyed because I didn’t need alcohol, not if it treated me like this, and it had been treating me that way for the past few months. Life for me is one of feast or famine, at least in the habitual sense, and I had already tried many version of “drink less and not on weekdays”. In the past these attempts at change were too easily rationalized in the moment, and I wasn’t disciplined enough to actually keep track of how well I was doing. Not wanting another 2-beer migraine for quite some time, something more drastic was in order. I needed a whole year off.

Coming into December I had a lot of strange conversations telling people I would be removing alcohol from my life. And, not just removing but doing so voluntarily, for reasons not of dependency or trauma. People push on a decision like that; I felt I had to defend myself, and I hadn’t even started. Never mind that alcohol is one of the most toxic drugs we have around, or that it has a long history of ruining lives. Those facts were conveniently lost on people. The experiment was off to an interesting beginning and the year hadn’t even started.

I quickly got to work trying to back into what exactly made me so annoyed that particular morning, looking for something deeper that I felt I wasn’t in alignment with, and for which I could use as an intention for the year.

Intention and constraints

After some deliberation I arrived at what I felt was a worthwhile place to focus — my change in persona when drinking in social situations. I’m not a big party guy, but alcohol still has a pronounced effect on my social disposition — I feel like I need to be “on” in those situations, actively participating and fun to the people around me. It was going to be a year of being forced to be myself (whatever that was), to not have to try to maintain an elevated persona, and to just relax and be present with these people.

A secondary focus was going to be the busy work lifestyle I elect to have. It’s from an immense position of privilege that I’m able to start a company and have it be successful enough to want to work most waking hours, but that doesn’t obviate the mental and physical stresses that come with a demanding schedule. Alcohol is an easy, accessible crutch to take the edge off at the end of the day, and I wanted to end the year with a more holistic alternative.

Additionally, I made the following constraints and stuck to them:

• No changing plans because of no alcohol. Purposefully schedule drinks with people, and only have that conversation that you’re not drinking once you’re at the bar.
• No non-alcoholic beers, just try to drink water or tea. Tonic and lime would be my worst case replacement.
• If somebody asks if I want a drink, just tell them “I don’t drink”. Avoid any grandiose statements; the point is not to call attention to the year off. If people really press then talk openly about it.

Finally, I knew the experiment was bound to evolve over the year, and resolved to be open to the experience and just go with the flow, whatever that brought.

Getting started with a surprise

What a chipper month January is! Everyone bright-eyed with a new gym tag on their key ring and kale flying off the shelves. There’s a camaraderie that makes it exciting, and the detox had me feeling better, saving money, and admittedly a little ivory tower that my resolution was pretty ambitious compared to most. I really was wanting to drink, but a healthy supply of ambition helped carry me through the initial rough patch.

One early surprise was that I would go out with friends and hang out until 2am, just like I used to before, and the first few times this happened I was expecting to get up at 7a the next morning to go to yoga, only to be whacked by what felt a lot like a hangover when I woke up! My body felt physically depleted much more than could be attributed solely to lack of sleep. Social situations are apparently quite stressful and anxiety inducing for me. Even if I was good at handling it, my default was to be “on” in social situations. Alcohol or not I wasn’t intentional about relaxing and not putting expectations on myself. It turns out I owe a lot of the hangover to an elevated nervous system, and not to alcohol as I had previously assumed.

This kicked off an interesting awareness I would have throughout the year, where cause-effect relationships attributed to alcohol turned out not to be so, and left me having to re-imagine behavioral relationships with food and the role they play, especially in social and stressful situations.

Nature abhors a vacuum

Now over a month in and life is still happening. Most of my friends know what’s up and I’ve settled into a good routine of just knowing that having a couple drinks isn’t possible. January was hard, but the year is moving along a bit easier. My food consumption is starting to change, though. And not for the better.

I’ve been fairly paleo for the past few years, with fancy craft beer being the one vice I gave myself come the weekend, and by February it was very apparent to me. Beer was the single largest sugar binge in my weekly diet, and I started to miss it dearly. Paleo cuts so much sugar out of your diet, and I was unknowingly dependent on beer being that one sugar binge that I looked forward to. Without alcohol my vice turned to other sugar food and drink, and to taking the easy route of just relaxing my diet to feel like I was in control, like I still had a food lever to pull. Frapucinos and cookies, just like a sweet brown ale, became my semblances of control.

I thought my relationship with food was good, but removing the primary source of sugar didn’t change things, it just turned on a flood light of awareness. There was a power vacuum around sugar and around exerting control over food, so a new cast stepped in to fill that role. Alcohol out, cookies and bagels in.

The thread that binds (or ostracizes) us

There’s a certain friction when people aren’t operating at the same level of inhibitions. Personal connection can feel impossible. Conversation is shallow. There’s a mismatch in consciousness and openness to experience, both parties brutally aware of it. This fraternal mismatch stands in stark contrast to when everyone is there to party; we’re loosening up and heading downhill in a hurry, but at least we’re doing it together.

Not wanting to change my lifestyle to make this experiment year easier, I resolved to attend all of the same events (work or personal), and very often I found myself frustrated midway through the night, wanting so much to retreat back home to go work on my Instapaper pile alone. This year was my choice but I felt ostracized nonetheless. Everyone was having an experience and I wasn’t able to participate; not because they wouldn’t let me, but because I wasn’t able to get there without the help of alcohol.

We’re a guarded culture, and we work so hard on the presentation of ourselves. Over the year I learned just how much drinking is a shared agreement we have to lower this presentation, with an unfortunately side effect of requiring everyone to be participating together to feel the benefits.

Flywheels gonna fly

StatusPage.io opened its doors in February of 2013, and was followed up with lots of business travel, emotional annoyances, Y Combinator, coffee meetings, and meetings at bars where I would inevitably also get coffee. Being a founder has its fair share of physical and mental challenges; most notably for me is the incredibly heavy price I pay in the form of context switching. We wear many hats and are expected to be on top of everything at all times.

This busyness and context switching operates much like a flywheel. A heavy one indeed, but one where alcohol can easily be my brakes. What’s wrong with a packed week when you can knock it down a peg with a 6-pack come Friday night?

Removing the brakes I was fairly horrified to learn I needed a good 2 — 3 day lead time to slow the flywheel down. 2–3 days just to start relaxing and reflecting on how life was going. A running flywheel commands execution — any execution — and doesn’t take well to quiet reflectivity.

Yoga worked for me in short bouts, but I always felt rushed and the mental chatter would be overwhelming. By September I could start to see how dependency is so prevalent in lifestyles and jobs that require you to always be emotionally on. “I work hard, what’s wrong with 2 beers every night to take the edge off?”

In my bathroom cabinet were some leftover prescription pain meds, and that bottle looked more and more appealing after the 70 hour weeks went on. Company in full swing, accelerator program for the summer, travel to see my co-founders and customers. The schedule was grinding on me and I was ill-equipped to slow it down; solutions I would usually stay far, far away from were now looking like realistic escapes.

August came and went. I still didn’t have a shutoff valve.

This is water

If you’re feeling like I was a bit in over my head and confused at how to proceed, that’s because I was, and the meandering of this post is no accident. Such a staple of my diet and social life going away in an instant gave way to many a shining spectacle of where I needed it. To my horror, also where I didn’t know I needed it.

As the year wrapped up, I began to find some gratitude for being able to get out of the fish bowl, to see it from the outside. Always being part of the ritual imposes blinders of sort, and getting to watch the song and dance without having to be part of that tribe gave me an appreciation that alcohol doesn’t need to mean what it’s always meant to me. My relationship with it up until January — my entire life since 18 — was a decision-by-omission, and now that it was my turn to introduce it back into my life I could control how far it went.

Regardless, it’s quite astonishing how much alcohol permeates all that we do. Celebration? Drink! Shitty day? Drink! New friends? Drink! Meeting up with old friends? Drink! Almost no event in western culture is safe. Alcohol is the numb to our pain, and the amplifier to our pleasure. Perhaps saddest of all was how captive people knew themselves to be. “Maybe a month, but not a year!” was a phrase I heard countless times.

Results and moving forward

If my original goals can be parlayed into hypotheses for this experiment — to embody a different part of myself in social situations, and to find some alternative to counteract an overextended work life — then the experiment was an abject failure on both counts. The changes I needed to make to allow for both of those to succeed were more than I was willing to do at the time.

I still speak of the year as a success in an overall learning sense. Any chance to discover something about myself, my environment, and the interplay of the two, is a win in my book, and I move forward now with a new understanding of what makes me who I am.

A year off of anything still comes highly recommended to anyone curious enough to try, but now comes advised with a strong caveat that the journeyman step onto the trail expecting far more headwind and turmoil than they can fathom. Sobriety is not for the feint of heart.