The true story of how I lied about my drinking for two years too long, and not in the ways you might think...

It does not reflect well on me that one of the first questions in my mind after I quit drinking was: “What will people think?” I became so obsessed with mitigating this public opinion problem that the answer, when it arrived, seemed self-evident: “Just don’t tell anyone.” So I didn’t. It wasn’t until I had been pretending to drink alcohol—at business dinners, industry conferences and corporate cocktail hours—for nearly two years that I realized things had probably gotten a little out of hand. 

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Let’s begin with some brief credentialing. For more than a decade, alcohol was the primary coping mechanism I used to manage memories of childhood abuse, discomfort over failed relationships, and the crushing stress of adulthood. I understand the numbing, sanitizing, anesthetizing function of alcohol as well as anyone. I needed it, that satisfying mix of chemical consolation and temporary amnesia that always, always took my pain away—even if it had to knock me senseless to do it. The Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton once said in an interview: “One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.” No, of course not, Anne—that’s why one drinks vodka on the rocks. 

I understand the numbing, sanitizing, anesthetizing function of alcohol as well as anyone. I needed it, that satisfying mix of chemical consolation and temporary amnesia that always, always took my pain away.

I started drinking for real in college, as one does. As the years passed, I progressed from college student/restaurant server to graduate student/bartender, then to my first “salary and benefits” job in corporate pharma. While the bartending years surely honed my drinking skills, it was the corporate job, in an industry notorious for its sales-driven “work hard-play harder” culture, that ushered me into the professional leagues of high-functioning alcoholism.

The higher up the ladder I climbed, the more stress I absorbed and the more I drank. Within that world, it is impossible to over-exaggerate just how much corporate politicking, information sharing and even decision making happened at the bar. That was where we met: after the meeting, before dinner, after dinner, at the end of the night, while waiting for the plane. We drank to entertain the customer, close the deal, prepare for the meeting, debrief the meeting, curb the jet lag, take the edge off, pass the time. After I quit drinking, I knew it would be a challenge to keep my sobriety a secret in such a booze-soaked setting, but—bizarrely—I couldn’t see a better option.

I had no evidence to suggest that my decision to avoid alcohol would be met with sympathy, let alone identification. I have always been very secretive about my moments of sadness; it’s a practice I learned early in life and never quite abandoned. As I grew older, I discovered that alcohol is what successful people use to deal with complicated emotions: a technique consistently modeled by every one of my corporate mentors. One of the executives I worked with closely at the time had been known to down four top-shelf gin and tonics during the course of dinner and then chase them with an ouzo shot as he paid the check. No judgment—I had been on exactly the same trajectory, so much so that he often joked that I would take his job one day.  

As I grew older, I discovered that alcohol is what successful people use to deal with complicated emotions: a technique consistently modeled by every one of my corporate mentors.

By the time I quit drinking, I had spent half a decade building a career from the delightful, character-building experience of being the youngest and often, only, woman in the room. An abrupt swerve into sobriety would tarnish my image, raise questions about my “cultural fit,” undermine my already tenuous ability to belong. Loss aversion is a powerful force; at the time, telling a few dry little lies seemed like an entirely noble and reasonable sacrifice to make for my career.

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Since corporate drinking culture is relatively predictable, there were really only a few scenarios to navigate. In situations where I was lucky enough to be able to order my own drink, without an audience, my go-to was either tonic water with lime, which still kind of smells like a G&T, or alcohol-free beer, which is disgusting, but looks exactly like real beer once served. Ordering a drink as part of a group, at dinner or at the bar, required far more complex machinations. In general terms, the goal was to order something that 1) didn’t scream “mocktail” when I said it out loud and 2) looked plausibly like something a grownup would drink.

Loss aversion is a powerful force; at the time, telling a few dry little lies seemed like an entirely noble and reasonable sacrifice to make for my career.

Before I quit drinking, I had no idea that other people could care so much about the liquid in someone else’s glass, but my God, did they ever—even when they thought it was alcohol. I learned to cheerfully deflect the inevitable comments from coworkers whenever I chose poorly and a mocktail rendition of Chiquita Banana’s headdress showed up on the bar in front of me. It was preferable to be thought of as someone who had shitty taste in alcohol than to be known as someone who didn’t drink at all.  Taste—in any sense of the word—was no longer a factor in my dry new world.

As Jia Tolentino points out, “it’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible.” It was out of precisely such a sense of obligation that I began to analyze alcohol-free cocktail lists like they were the lost pages of a sacred text. I worked out my sobriety in fear and trembling, ordering drinks with embarrassing, botanically suggestive names like Mosquito, Pink Chia, or Secret Garden.

I began to analyze alcohol-free cocktail lists like they were the lost pages of a sacred text. I worked out my sobriety in fear and trembling, ordering drinks with embarrassing, botanically suggestive names like Mosquito, Pink Chia, or Secret Garden.

In fact, I once suffered through four consecutive Secret Gardens in quick succession when a male marketing executive made it his personal mission to get me drunk at a company holiday party. (He never realized his failure, as he succeeded in getting himself drunk in the process.) I endured an entire purgatory of “pink drinks” in those years—mocktails that looked like menstruation in a glass, made with jejune ingredients like grenadine, raspberries, Sprite. For a girl who once drank Grey Goose on the rocks on the regular, who had firmly believed in the sanitizing function of alcohol, it was hard to stomach.

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According to the Mayo Clinic, “Heavy or high-risk drinking [for women] is defined as more than 3 drinks on any day or more than 7 drinks a week.” I laughed out loud the first time I read that. Once upon a time, a normal Saturday required 6 to 8 drinks to get me from brunch to bedtime. Even now, I take a sort of perverse pride in remembering that at my alcoholic peak, I could manage a week’s worth of drinking in a single day—that is, by Mayo Clinic standards. 

In those days, outside my working hours, I was constantly thinking about where my next drink was coming from—brain waves continually quivering on a secret frequency, like the kind of low-level electricity that an appliance pulls when it’s turned off but still plugged in. I can remember, with distressing vividness, the flutter of sheer panic I used to feel when I wasn’t sure there was enough alcohol in the house to get me through the night, or when a server disappeared just as my drink was starting to get low. To me, that constant experience of fear—uncontrollable, senseless, looping—was the worst part of being a full-blown alcoholic, worse even than the blackouts and the hangovers and the vomit. 

To me, that constant experience of fear—uncontrollable, senseless, looping—was the worst part of being a full-blown alcoholic, worse even than the blackouts and the hangovers and the vomit.

By the time I was nearing my thirtieth birthday, I had begun attempting to gently de-risk my alcohol dependence without actually acknowledging its existence. I had more or less stopped drinking liquor; I stopped keeping wine at home; I started drinking from the hotel minibar on business trips instead of meeting colleagues at the bar. I had come to accept my drinking habits in the same way that you think about a mildly sexist great-uncle at your wedding: a necessary but terribly embarrassing presence, which you hope everyone else will be too drunk to notice.   

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Sobriety is a hard thing to talk about publicly without coming across as sanctimonious. Women in particular, especially when they write about themselves, are supposed to be self-deprecating, snarky, homely. To take oneself too seriously is a cardinal sin. We are supposed to leave the moral meanings to David Brooks, the tidy endings to Disney+. We are also not supposed to make people uncomfortable, and recovering alcoholics make other people deeply uncomfortable, in a variety of ways that are both psychologically revealing and very funny.

I can only assume that Americans have been so frequently accosted by the “lifestyle” abstinence of vegans and the “non-celiac but still gluten-free” that any phrase beginning with “I don’t eat...” or “I don’t drink…” produces an immediate traumatic response. In the US, if I happen to let it slip that I don’t drink alcohol, my hosts typically begin twitching involuntarily. They seem to be bracing themselves for a Goop-sponsored upper-middle-white-class PSA, when all I really want is a glass of water and to not be asked if I’m pregnant.

Sobriety is a hard thing to talk about publicly without coming across as sanctimonious. To take oneself too seriously is a cardinal sin.

I think people worry primarily that recovering alcoholics are going to tell them they should drink less. The truth is, drunks in glass houses generally know better than to throw stones. When it comes to my sobriety, I don’t have an evangelical bone in my body. I’ve never attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting; I couldn’t tell you a thing about the famous Steps except for the fact that there are Twelve of them, which seems like too many to remember for people who have destroyed essential brain cells through years of binge-drinking.  One of the AA Traditions states, “Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.” It’s a noble goal, for sure, but it isn’t exactly my vibe. 

People don’t usually quit drinking because they want to, or because sobriety is a super fun, trendy thing that lots of people are trying, like paleo or Peloton.

What I do feel compelled to say is this: if someone you know mentions that they don’t drink, or they’re not drinking right now—especially if that person happens to be a woman under the age of 45—that’s a perfect opportunity to practice empathy and keep your curiosity to yourself. People don’t usually quit drinking because they want to, or because sobriety is a super fun, trendy thing that lots of people are trying, like paleo or Peloton. Whenever someone asks me why I don’t drink, I’m always tempted to reply, in my most Southern-saccharine tone, “Oh honey, I’m a raging alcoholic.” The truth, like karma, can be a bitch.

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If I seemed the same on the outside, I thought, no one need ever know what was happening inside.

All these stereotypes and imagined scenarios coalesced into my decision not to tell anyone in my work universe that I had quit drinking. I had no illusions about how cruel my peers could be if they found out I was battling a substance abuse disorder; I was desperate to hold onto even the scraps of the professional status I had worked so hard for. If I seemed the same on the outside, I thought, no one need ever know what was happening inside. It was an impossible mission, because remaking my relationship to alcohol had very little to do with managing the “what” and “when” and “how much” of my drinking habits, and everything to do with facing up to why I was drinking—and then learning how to live with those hard truths.

Remaking my relationship to alcohol had very little to do with managing the “what” and “when” and “how much” of my drinking habits, and everything to do with facing up to why I was drinking.

The story of the incident that finally convinced me to quit drinking once and for all is one that I can’t share, because it doesn’t belong only to me. It must suffice to say that there are moments in our lives that pull back the veil to show us the hidden mechanisms inside ourselves. In one such moment, I saw a foreshadowing—the tiniest beginning—of the damage and loss of everything that I love most in this world, all of it rooted in the influence of something I had already begun to hate. Days later, in early January 2018, I poured my last drink. 

In “Four Quartets” T.S. Eliot writes: “Say that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end. / And all is always now.” My last drink was a Gordon’s Gin & Tonic in the can, bought at the supermarket on my way home from work. My decade-long love affair with alcohol culminated in as stylish and radiant a manner as it had begun, back in my college days—with a cheap drink in a tin can. Goodnight, gin, I thought—goodnight and goodbye.

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The withdrawal process was short but excruciating; the grieving process was longer and angry. No one tells you that you work through the stages of grief when you walk away from a decade-long relationship with alcohol, but I can assure you that I did. Once, walking home from work on a warm spring night, I started crying on the street as I passed a cafe filled with people drinking wine at their sidewalk tables. “That will never be me again,” I thought. The word “never” is one of the most powerful in the English language, because it implies a kind of death. To “never” drink again—it felt like the death of the person I had been for my entire adult, professional life. 

No one tells you that you work through the stages of grief when you walk away from a decade-long relationship with alcohol, but I can assure you that I did.

The charming, competent corporate communications professional who always had a drink in her hand, who had closed down the bar more times than she could—literally—remember: she was suddenly no more.  More accurately, it was like she had been woken from a long coma. I had to relearn how to manage my stress, deal with family, plan a holiday, even navigate a menu. Because everything had once been an occasion to drink, life now seemed to consist of an endless series of sobriety tests. The milestones began to accumulate, slowly, painfully, absurdly—first sober wedding, first sober trans-Atlantic flight, first business trip, first summer vacation, first sober Christmas.  

“Our days are links in a chain, connecting past and present and future,” I wrote in the first days of my sobriety. “Our choices make us, not only who we are, but who we become.”

Eventually, I did acknowledge the fact that “convincing my coworkers that I’m the same high-functioning alcoholic I always was” is not the kind of goal that a healthy life is organized around. In time, I came to understand that rewiring my relationship to alcohol meant rethinking every aspect of my life. “Our days are links in a chain, connecting past and present and future,” I wrote in the first days of my sobriety. “Our choices make us, not only who we are, but who we become.” Two years after I got sober, I left my corporate job and started writing full-time. I also stopped telling dry little lies—but then, you knew that part already.

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