Recently, I made the conscious decision to stop drinking. Here’s why:
- I was easily putting away a bottle and half of wine every night. EVERY NIGHT. And it was the cheap shit on the bottom shelf at the grocery store because that’s an expensive habit.
- I wasn’t parenting well (obvi). I wasn’t reading with my daughter or helping her with her homework, and she was falling behind in school.
- I was steadily gaining weight.
- It was the number one thing on my to do list every day.
- I was setting a horrible example for my children.
- My husband and I fought a lot. About dumb shit. The same dumb shit over and over again.
- I could never find anything. Nothing was ever where it should’ve been because I put it away somewhere random the night before.
- I didn’t put the kids in after school activities because I would rather go home and open a bottle of wine
- I felt like shit 95% of the time but I didn’t know it because it was how I always felt.
- I drank to escape. Everything.
- I justified all of it by telling myself I still got up and got shit done, so it was all good.
This isn’t a list of things that make me a bad person. This is a list of things that I get the chance to change.
I don’t fault myself for any of it. As humans, we cling to the familiar. We have a way of fantasizing and distorting things in a way that makes us feel safe.
Drinking wasn’t the scary thing. NOT drinking was.
And that’s how shit gets normalized. A bunch of people are too scared to change, so everyone turns a blind eye.
That stops with me.
I’m meant to do big things in this world.
I’m doing this for me. Everything I desire so deeply in life is already mine, I just couldn’t see it through the drunk goggles.
