It Was Never Wild or Sober

I keep seeing women on social media asking the same question.

Should I go out and be wild this weekend? Or should I be sober?

Like those are the only two versions of a life.

Wine was sold to us as the thing that would make us looser, freer, more ourselves. Sex got sold the same way, as something that required a drink first. Most of us bought both, without noticing they were the same pitch.

The promise is always the same: drink this and you'll finally be free. Liquid courage exists as a phrase because we've collectively agreed that the sober self is the inhibited one — and alcohol is what removes the obstruction between you and your real self.

But look at what's actually happening. The woman at the dinner party who's had two glasses isn't freer. She's numbed. The thing that was inhibiting her — the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the people-pleasing — is still there. She just can't feel it anymore. The inhibition didn't leave. It went underground.

There are two words I want to distinguish, because most people use them interchangeably and they are not the same.

Inhabited is a relationship with the interior. It is about whether you are actually present inside your own experience. A woman who is fully inhabited feels what she feels when she feels it. She has moved back into the house.

Uninhibited is about what moves between interior and exterior. It is about expression, flow, the absence of obstruction between what's happening inside and what you allow to come out. A woman who is uninhibited says what she actually thinks. She takes up space without apologizing for it.

You cannot be genuinely uninhibited without first being inhabited. Because if no one's home inside, there is nothing to express. You're not actually uninhibited. You're just performing it.

Alcohol produces the sensation of being uninhibited by removing your awareness of the inhibition. The anxiety goes quiet. But the inhibition itself is completely untouched. You didn't become freer. You became temporarily unaware of what's been holding you in place.

A woman who has done this work — who has met the anxious part, the performing part, the good-girl part — that woman is no longer controlled by those parts in the same way. The parts that used to require wine to surface are just available. Integrated. Hers.

That is genuinely uninhibited. Not chemically unaware of her inhibitions. Actually able to move with them without being blocked.

Inhabited is the work. Uninhibited is what becomes available after the work.

Which means the thing wine was pretending to sell — freedom, aliveness, access to yourself — is real. It exists. Women have it. They just don't find it at the bottom of a glass.

They find it on the other side of having stayed.