Wine at Thanksgiving.
Eggnog through the Christmas season.
Champagne on New Year’s Eve.
And more wine and whiskey through the fall teaching term that I would like to admit.
Looking back at the past year I can’t help but cringe a little at the amount of alcohol I purchased. Currently there are 3 bottles of wine in my fridge, 2 unopened full bottles in the wine rack, and 12 half bottles from an advent calendar tucked away for a rough day. My rocks glasses probably got as much use as my coffee mugs this year! I know 2020 was one for the record books, but I didn’t intend to set drinking records along the way! Especially when I had started out with Dry January!
I know I’m probably not the only person feeling this way right now.
For me, I did Dry January 2020 for some personal reasons. I had never been a big drinker. One glass of wine and I’m ready for bed. But after receiving divorce papers for Christmas 2018, I let down my guard and drank away my pain. I’m pretty sure I had more hangovers in 2019 than I did in all of college! At the end of the year, I took a solo trip to Charleston and when I had my 3rd strong drink in one night and didn’t even feel slightly fuzzy, I realized something needed to change. Since drinking wasn’t the be all and end all for me, doing Dry January was a piece of cake decision. My friends and family may have cracked a few jokes here and there about it, but they supported the choice.
It was a little harder once February came around and my rules for myself were that I would have 1 drink on Friday or Saturday only. I am a rules person, even if the rules are self-imposed. I like knowing what is expected and following it. But that was hard with some travel (obviously pre-Covid!) and family time that would have been much easier to stomach with a drink stronger than Ginger Ale. But I did it. I wanted to make sure I didn’t slip right back into bad patterns from the year before. I did great! Made it into March and allowed myself one drink on both Friday and Saturday, but nothing on nights when I worked the next day.
Then the world turned upside down.
All the sudden I was losing track of what day of the week it was because I didn’t have to go in to work. I was teaching from behind a computer screen and making more phone calls home about kids not signing on in a week than I probably made in a month for behavior issues when we were in the building. Everyone went from normal life to quarantine in the blink of an eye and it was easy to let all good habits go to the wayside. While I still stuck to my rules of no school-night drinking, my weekend drinking was getting to be less of a glass of wine and more of a bottle.
Fast forward through summer and beach drinking (or drinking by the inflatable pool in the backyard) was sneaking into my days more and more. I was back to drinking whiskey instead of wine and wasn’t proud when I’d see how quickly a bottle would be gone. And with quarantine it wasn’t like I was drinking with friends! It was so easy to blame COVID, blame stress, use the circumstances as an excuse to drink the way I wasn’t proud of.
It wasn’t until December, when I got a phone call from my doc saying that I had some new health problems that I got the kick in the butt I needed to go backwards again. To make the plans to start 2021 without a drink in my hand. To remember that I don’t like to use that as a crutch to cover emotional pain. And the added bonus of helping my health improve before they run new blood tests doesn’t hurt. So just know that while I may say I need a strong drink to make it through the next few weeks of teaching virtually, the strongest thing in my cup will be my coffee. And if you’re joining me in my Dry January journey, we’ve got this! Cheers!