I wrote about this five years ago, when I was six months in and still finding the language for what was happening. I called it a pause. I wasn't sure what it was yet. I just knew that something had shifted and I wanted to honour it before I understood it fully. [A gentle pause: on temporary or lasting sobriety →]
Five years later, I understand it better. Not completely, some things resist complete understanding. But well enough to write the part I wasn't ready to write then.
The test I didn't know I was taking
For most of my corporate career, entertaining clients was part of the job description. Dinners, drinks, events, the easy social lubrication of a glass in hand and a room full of people all using the same prop to smooth the same edges. I was good at it. I knew how to hold a room, how to keep conversation moving, how to make people feel at ease and well-hosted and glad they'd come.
What I didn't know, or what I knew but didn't want to look at directly, was how much of that ease was borrowed. Not mine. Poured into a glass and handed to me every evening along with the menu.
When I stopped drinking, I had to keep showing up to those same rooms. Same clients. Same dinners. Same expectation of warmth and wit and connection. And suddenly the prop was gone and I was just standing there, holding a sparkling water with a slice of lime, in what felt, for a long time, like a test of whether I was actually the person I'd been performing.
That is an uncomfortable thing to discover about yourself. That you aren't sure.
What was the drink actually doing in the room?
Here is what I've come to understand about alcohol in social settings, at least in the professional world I came from: it doesn't just loosen inhibitions. It changes the entire nature of what the interaction is for.
Drinking together becomes a sport. There's an energy to it, a momentum. Stories get bigger. People talk faster, interrupt more generously, compete in that friendly unconscious way for the funniest version of events. It's entertaining and it can be genuinely fun. But it's also a kind of noise. And in the noise, actual presence becomes almost impossible.
You're not really with the person in front of you. You're in the dynamic, in the performance of the evening, in the collective story you're all building together. And that can feel like connection because it has the texture of it: warmth, laughter, shared history by the end of the night. But it isn't quite the same as actually being with someone.
Without a drink in my hand I had to find out what I was actually offering. And it turned out, once I got over the initial terror of the silence where the wine used to be, that what I was offering was attention. Real, unhurried, genuinely curious attention. I could listen to someone without waiting for my turn to be funny. I could notice when they changed the subject because something was difficult. I could be present with them as they were in that particular moment, not as the character they were playing for the room.
That is not a small thing. In a world that is extraordinarily loud and extraordinarily distracted, the experience of being genuinely listened to is quietly radical. And people feel it. You can see it happen, the slight surprise when someone realises you actually heard them, the way the conversation slows down and gets more honest.
The belonging question
What I didn't expect was how much not drinking would accelerate the question of where I actually belonged.
Because the social lubrication works both ways. It doesn't just make you more comfortable in the room. It makes you more tolerant of rooms that aren't quite right. It softens the edges of misalignment. You can spend an evening in a group of people who don't particularly share your values and the wine makes it fine, makes everyone entertaining enough, makes the differences feel minor and the similarities feel warmer than they are.
Sober, you feel it more clearly. The rooms that fit and the rooms that don't. The conversations that have somewhere real to go and the ones that are just passing the time. This can feel like a loss at first, because the number of comfortable rooms shrinks. But what you find is that the rooms that remain, the ones that still feel good when you're fully present in them, feel genuinely good. Not wine-good. Actually good.
It forced me to find out, much faster than I would have otherwise, who I actually was in a room. [The difference between being welcomed and being known →]
Five years in
It's been five years now. It stopped being a pause a long time ago. I don't count days or mark anniversaries particularly. It's simply how I live.
What I can tell you is that the impact goes so far beyond health, beyond sleep, beyond the clear-headed mornings that I used to think were the main prize. The real prize has been this: I know how to be with people now. Not the version of people that emerges after two glasses when everyone is performing their best self. The actual people. The one who is a little quieter than they seem online, the one who is more uncertain than their confidence suggests, the one who is carrying something they haven't found the words for yet.
I can hear those things now. I couldn't before, or I could but I wasn't quiet enough inside myself to really receive them.
And there's something that happened in the shift too, in the self-knowledge that came from having to stand in rooms without a prop and discover that I was still capable of connection without one. That I was, actually, enough without it. That my presence itself, unassisted, was something I could offer and someone could receive.
That took longer to believe than I expected. But it has been, quietly, one of the most important things I've ever learned about myself.
If you're somewhere in the early stages of this, whether it's a pause or a wondering or a six months that surprised you, know that the uncomfortable part, the standing in the room without the prop, the discovering who you are in it, is the whole point. Not a side effect. The thing itself.
The connection you find on the other side of it is worth every awkward sparkling water.
