I spent the first year of my sobriety defending my decision to get sober. I quit drinking when I was 26 and every person that I told seemed to think I was way too young to make a decision like that.
I was constantly peppered with questions like, “So are you just never going to drink alcohol ever again?” or “Can we still drink around you?” A lot of questions about how my sobriety would impact them rather than asking how I was doing.
When I quit drinking at 26 years old, I was already married and had a son. It seemed I was old enough to start a family and career, but no one thought I was old enough to decide alcohol wasn’t right for me. I faced external and internal tension around reconciling the life I had built with my husband and the life I hoped to build in recovery.
I did not fit into the idea most people (including myself) had of an alcoholic. People wanted to know how bad my relationship with alcohol was that I felt like sobriety was the only answer? I wasn’t an alcoholic, and I was only 26. I hadn’t even survived the 27 club, much less been a candidate in the first place!
I genuinely considered continuing on with my toxic relationship with alcohol so that something “bad” would happen. One minor hospitalization would set me up perfectly to be able to say “there, see!” Maybe by the time I was 30 or 35, I would be experienced enough to make a decision as big as having to learn to say, “No thanks, I’m sober.” But I didn’t want to wait until I was 35, and I didn’t want my kids to have to wait for that either.
I was getting a lot of “oh-kay…” looks and was honestly giving myself a hefty side-eye as well. Not only was I asking myself, who did I think I was? But I was also wondering how did I intend to get sober and maintain the life I had. I had a full life. What if I become someone in sobriety that was completely incompatible with that life I was living?
I was more anxious about this than I let on. How did I intend to get sober and become a better person withoutfinding myself utterly uncomfortable in the life my drinking self had built?
I braced myself for an identity crisis of disastrous proportions.
To (Menty) Be or Not to (Menty) Be
As soon as everyone around me realized I wasn’t just sober curious, I had to put up another layer of defense for this new person I was undeniably becoming in sobriety. Apparently, people don’t like when others change?
I worked 10 years to establish myself as the person I was by the time I quit drinking. I met my husband in college and after graduation, I moved away from all my family in Virginia to be with him (and job opportunities) in New Jersey/NYC. I got a job in corporate insurance that had “enough PTO” and a competitive 401k employer match percentage. We bought a four-bedroom house with a yard for the kids we didn’t even have yet. I set my life up to provide for me and my family for years into the future.
The decision to quit drinking is one thing, but everything that comes after is something else entirely. Physical sobriety is not drinking, which is beyond significant. But recovery is doing the work to understand why you drank the way you did and building a life that doesn’t require alcohol in the way it felt like it did before. Journalist Tawny Lara, author of Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze, explains: “Sobriety means giving up the thing (booze, drugs, shopping, etc…) while recovery means a lifelong journey of addressing why you self-medicated with the thing in the first place.”
As I began focusing more on my recovery, I realized I had spent those 10 years wearing a mask, being the person I thought other people wanted me to be. It felt so good to take the mask off, knowing I would never have to pick it back up. But honestly, I struggled with the idea that people might like the masked-version of me better. I was able to recognize and truly love the version of myself I discovered once the alcohol was removed. Had I found myself stuck in a life I would have never chosen if I’d never self-medicated with alcohol?
I knew who this person was underneath, but I had no experience living my life as her. This “new person” wasn’t a stranger to me; she had been there all along. But I’d been hiding her behind alcohol for years. I was eager to let her out, but what if she didn’t like my life? And so many people in my life had never really seen her before either. Jump scare.
I was anxious I wouldn’t be able to reconcile the life that I had built for myself with the new life that I imagined I would build as a sober person.
I had to teach myself that first (and then actually do the work, ugh). Before long, I felt like I was constantly reassuring others that “Yes, it’s still me. And no, I still don’t want a drink, for the 4th time.”
What Can I Still Do Now That I’m Sober?
As newly established “adults” with money to spend, my husband and I spent every single weekend either at the local bar or, more often in an effort to save some money, planted in front of the TV in the basement with my two large Twisted Teas (usually just an appetizer) and his 40-ounce of Miller High Life. Maybe some friends would come over, but we usually ended up watching music videos until 2 a.m.
We usually cycled through the same songs, but we both loved it. We’d start somewhere random and before long, I’ve got a request or friends come over with their requests. Freaky Friday by Lil’ Dicky & Chris Brown, Hey Brother by Avicii, Party Rock Anthem, Happy by Bastille (watch if you want to cry), You Should be Sad by Halsey (guess whose favorite that was). If I hear a song today that was a regular for us, I can see the music video almost shot for shot. Every time I hear Thunderclouds by Sia, I see her kicking her legs out in front of her, arms wheeling to the sides, dancing on top of that bus flying through some sort of hallucinogenic outer space.
The first time I tried watching music videos at night after I quit drinking, I turned the TV off. I was newly sober and still figuring a lot of things out. Watching the music video play wasn’t triggering; it didn’t make me want to drink. Instead, I felt an overwhelming amount of anxiety. It was so activating. Apparently, once I removed alcohol from this thing I had done a lot with alcohol, I wasn’t distracted from myself. I wasn’t self-medicating the anxiety that watching music videos gave me. With the alcohol removed, all that was left was the bad feelings.
Luckily, music videos aren’t paramount to my life. I was able to make the decision “I don’t watch music videos” (generally) and be content with that. Although my son did go through a phase where he would watch the Gangnam Style music video over and over. This was during the time when he would wake up consistently at 5am so that one is activating for other reasons.
The Courage to Become Better
Our marriage wasn’t based on our ability to watch music videos until 2am, but a large part of what we did together was drink. Maybe I didn’t want to do the music video thing anymore, but what else would I not want to do? Did we even do anything together that wasn’t alcohol-adjacent? If I take the alcohol away, what’s left? There was lots of reassurance that just because we couldn’t drink together anymore didn’t mean that I didn’t want to do everything else together.
When I started to change as a person, everyone who used to be confused about why I didn’t want to drink was now re-confused about how I wouldn’t just continue to do the same things I always did. What I thought was boundary setting for the sake of self-respect, others seemed to receive as a personal offense. Fine, I didn’t have to drink, but why couldn’t I stay up late with everyone else? I don’t have to drink, but some people were personally offended when I didn’t find their obnoxious jokes funny anymore. Just because I don’t want to spend time together in a beer garden doesn’t mean I don’t want to spend time together.
My husband was nervous I was going to change too much or become someone else entirely. I think I even had the notion that I would become a completely different person, coming up with new hobbies out of thin air. Maybe I would start whittling or become an extreme athlete. Would I be tempted to sell all my possessions and go on a Euro-trip as part of my emotional healing process? How long until I returned to the states (if at all) with a Romanian accent? Who else was I going to leave behind?
But I didn’t want to be somebody different. I just wanted to be better. I can see now how those two things could easily be confused. How can you be better and not be different? So many people couldn’t see the difference, and I couldn’t either.
But through almost four years of sobriety and trial and error and (miracle of all miracles) still being “Syd” to my husband, and “Mommy” to my kids, I managed to find a way to be “Sydney” for myself. Even I realized the difference between “better” and “different.” I could (and did!) build an amazing sober life within the beautifully full life I already had. My whole life didn’t change; it was enhanced with sobriety (and recovery). Multiple career and personal accomplishments, a growing family, new relationships, strengthened relationships, improved communication and confidence were all direct results of removing alcohol from my life.
Sobriety didn’t change my life or make me a different person. It gave me the opportunity to enhance the life I already had because it made me a better person.
By Contributor: Sydney Allen
Sydney Allen is a writer who explores the intersection of alcohol, motherhood, identity, and modern wellness culture. On her Substack, This Is Not Okay, Sydney explores how alcohol has been historically marketed to women, from “Mommy Wine Culture” to workplace drinking norms— especially for mothers navigating labor, identity, and emotional overload. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, two kids, and two cats.
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