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- I’m Sober Curious — This Is What That Looks Like
I’m Sober Curious — This Is What That Looks Like
The best way to describe my relationship with alcohol is difficult. For background, I grew up in the US, where the drinking age is 21, and didn’t start drinking until I was 18 and at uni.
In school, I idolised the cast of Laguna Beach with their red cups at parties and hoarse-voiced, hungover debriefs the morning after. I desperately wanted in — and at uni, I got that and more.
Within the first couple weeks of drinking, I blacked out for the first time. I’d heard the term before and couldn’t believe it was possible for someone to just not remember part of the night. But then it happened to me, and it was terrifying.
My anxiety for the next few days was out of control. Though I’d woken up in my own bed the morning after, fully intact — though, admittedly, with a banging headache — I didn’t know what I’d done the night before and who had seen it. While I’d been excited to meet new people at uni, for the next couple weeks, I avoided eye contact with people and burned with shame.
You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson after that, but I hadn’t, and I did it again. And again. And again. The next few years of uni were a blur of blacked-out nights and feeling horrible the next day, both physically and mentally. And while the gaps between those nights did get bigger and bigger, the heavy drinking continued all throughout my 20s.
Knowing what I know now about why people drink and how badly it can aggravate anxiety and mental imbalances — countless studies have found alcohol can drastically change your brain’s chemistry — I feel really sad for my younger self. I wish I could go back in time and give her a big hug.
But this isn’t a sob story. Nor is it a story about how I went on to cut out alcohol completely and am now so much better for it.
It’s a story about the place before you stop drinking entirely. Or, I should say, it’s about the place after realising you don’t like your relationship with alcohol anymore and want to change it. But not necessarily by quitting entirely. Because I’m not really sure I ever will give it up entirely. Or that I need to.
I completely acknowledge that for some, cutting out alcohol completely may be the only option. But for me, over the last couple of years, I’ve been working hard to better my relationship with it — and my life has been better for it.
I’ve been practising new behaviours, like drinking a glass of water between alcoholic drinks and being okay with smoke bombing and going home if I feel like I’ve drunk too much. And I’ve been working on correcting negative thought patterns that lead to me being anxious and wanting to binge drink in the first place.
At a lunch recently, where I was sampling and learning about non-alcoholic wines (they were by Edenvale and tasted like the real thing, by the way), I was chatting to my seat neighbour about the term “sober curious”. I’d first heard it last year when The Weeknd announced he was sober lite, which prompted people to start talking about the similar term, sober curious.
If you’re not familiar with the term, sober curious refers to people who are starting to take a closer look at the role alcohol plays in their life. They’re becoming curious about their reasons for drinking and how it affects them.
My seat neighbour, a fellow journalist, told me that at her publication, they were covering sober curious topics more and more. That’s when I realised: I was sober curious. Like is the case whenever you find a label you feel really fits you, all of a sudden, I felt seen. Sober curious is exactly what I’d been for the last couple years, and though I hadn’t been looking for a way to define my situation, I felt a sense of relief for finally being able to.
Can you be sober curious all your life? Or does it ultimately end with you quitting alcohol for good? I decided that, like with any label, sober curious doesn’t have to be rigidly defined. What I think its introduction has done, though, is allow many of us to become more mindful of our drinking.
The label seeping into the mainstream, along with the many celebrities publicly identifying with it, is making it that much easier for many — me included — to say no to a drink. To hint at the fact we’re being more conscious of our drinking, but don’t have to explain it if we don’t want to.
Again, for many, quitting drinking entirely might be the only solution, but for me now, being sober curious — without feeling pressured to take a step forward or backward — is exactly where I want to be.