My interest in yoga and subsequent decision to do something totally out of character and get certified to teach yoga was how my cherry got popped into the wellness industry. Yet for a decade plus on I lived an incongruent life of professional yogi and high-functioning wino. Thursday – Saturday I would be out late drinking either red wine or vodka tonics at the club (*I always loved how tonic glows under black lights) and then my Saturday and Sunday mornings we spent at the yoga studio doing back-to-back vinyasa flows to sweat out all the alcohol. Healthy? Hardly, but it is important to not discredit this massive step in the right direction my life was going.
Fast forward to birthing my babies
Fast forward, two pregnancies and two beautiful boys breast-fed. I was given a window in time to see what life felt like without alcohol in my system for almost 4 years in a row. Sure, I had a sip of wine with dinner a few times while pregnant (*judge me all you want) but it never tasted the same when I was pregnant or breast-feeding. It wasn’t the taste of guilt, it was seriously a chemical shift in my body that made it taste off and totally unenjoyable. The wisdom of nature, right?
Mommy Juice enters the scene – can I manage both?
Almost 3 years into motherhood I was delighted to be finally free to sip as I please and yet I was starting to question if it was possible for me to be the kind of parent I wanted to be and casually drink. I mean parenting hungover was not something I was willing to do more than once. Again this flashing red light of incongruence between my desired internal state and outward behavior and every message I had been fed since birth: Mommies who wine are so much cooler than Mommies who don’t.
Slow and steady wins the sober race
It didn’t happen overnight, in fact like most alcoholics I started by negotiating my habit with myself, what I very avant garde-fully called ‘mindful drinking’. Aka, I put a bunch of rules on my own bad habit to try to control it more than it controlled me. Less than a year in, maybe I got halfway before I hit what I consider rock bottom – I drove my kids home from a Sunday pool playdate after drinking white wine all afternoon. So many lines I swore I would never cross.
2018 was both the end and the beginning of reinventing myself
March 18th, 2018 was the last time I woke up hungover. The last time I woke up trying to piece together the details of the night before. I woke up not quite sure how I got home. The last time I woke up full of that sick feeling of guilt, shame and lack of self-respect.
Spontaneously Sober
I’m a spontaneous sobriety story. I learned that term several years after getting sober when I started to really connect with sober communities online during the pandemic. While I didn’t do a program, I just decided it was something I needed to do. Along with the help of decades of knowing that alcohol was no longer serving me as it once did to help process my father’s alcoholism and suicide.
Doing it for myself first, but I also wanted to be a better mom to my boys
I was determined to provide a different ‘norm’ for my kids: there is life and there is fun without alcohol! Of course, it was one of the last everyday toxins I considered getting rid of from my lifestyle. Optimal wellness and alcohol rarely mix, at least they didn’t for me, and the health stats are pretty undeniable at this point.
I am so grateful for social media sober communities like The Sober Curator, chic sober lit and my best friend who got sober long before I did who provided an alternative narrative from which I could reimagine life beyond alcohol. I never imagined it would be better, I was just hoping for just as good.
Click here to learn more about Megan Swan
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