When Something Changes
It’s been almost four years since I woke up and decided I wasn’t drinking anymore.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had that thought.
But something was different that morning. I’d spent the night with massive anxiety, real fear, and a question I hadn’t let myself ask out loud before. Can I go on?
The reasons I thought I drank were simpler than I wanted to admit. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to be out with everyone else. I was a newly empty nester trying to figure out who she was now that the job she'd organized her life around was done.
And underneath all of it, my hormones were changing. My career had shifted. Everything was rearranging itself at once.
My body just couldn’t handle alcohol anymore.
So I subtracted it.
What I didn’t know yet was that alcohol wasn’t the only thing that no longer fit.
What it revealed was that I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted.
Which was destabilizing in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
And embarking on the hero’s journey sober wasn’t exactly helping. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
I recently shared on Instagram that at the end of that first day, at 5 after work, I grabbed a wine glass, filled it with sparkling water and made the decision to be conscious of what I was feeling. I was instantly clear on why I had been reaching for wine at the end of the day; my system was wound so tight and riddled with anxiety. The sensations felt terrible and the thoughts were all consuming. And so I took long breaths and rode the waves.
I did this every day for at least 3 weeks for a minimum of 20 minutes. I didn’t know it then, but I was self regulating my nervous system.
As time went on, I saw the blank canvas I was working with. Only, I didn’t really know what to put on it.
The Layers We Wear
Sitting where I am now, I have so much compassion for that woman. The one who made every decision by asking what does a good mom do? A good daughter? A good girl?
Never: what’s good for me? What’s in alignment with who I’m becoming?
Some people would say, well, you’re a mother. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
Coming out of the other side of it, I’d beg to differ.
The demands. The expectations. The lifelong grooming to care for everyone else, to take on the invisible labor without complaint, to never ask for help or speak up for yourself.
That is the perfect recipe for, well. A cocktail.
It’s little wonder the alcohol industry targets women with mommy juice, rosé, and skinny margaritas. We are crawling out of our skin. And this is the only thing that makes us feel comfortable in it.
The harsh truth is that’s a lie. Alcohol isn’t relief. It’s compression. Like Spanx. Except you never take them off.
And every year, every role, every expectation you absorbed without question: good mom, good daughter, good girl. That’s another layer.
By midlife you’re wearing twenty years of them.
You can barely breathe. But you’ve forgotten what breathing felt like, so you call it normal.
Your life just gets tighter.
What I can tell you is this: as I’ve focused on taking the layers off, old identities, dated beliefs, resentments, past experiences, I’ve felt something I didn’t have a word for at first.
Lighter.
Not happy, exactly. Not fixed. Just… less compressed.
I can breathe inside my own life in a way I couldn’t before.
The Question Underneath It All
The question you’ve been asking, is it my hormones, a hangover, or something else entirely, probably doesn’t have just one answer.
It didn’t for me.
It was all of it, arriving at the same time. Hormones, exhaustion, a creeping awareness that something about the way I was living no longer felt right.
It didn’t feel like a neat crisis. It felt like the slow realization that the life I had built no longer fit inside my own body. And something had to go.
The layers are real. But they do come off.
Slowly, one by one, they come off.
What’s the thing in your life right now that no longer fits?
