My Dry-ish January
Reflections on a month of considered imbibing.
Well, 5 pm on February 1st has come and gone. Dry January is officially over. Cheers. Raise a glass to a month of sobriety — then start drinking again as fast as you can.
The first time I heard of COVID-19, it wasn’t by any of the names we would come to use for it. No, the first time I learned of the virus that would come to dominate our lives it was just a red dot labeled “Unknown respiratory infection. Wuhan, China” on a map at the end of an exhibit on epidemics and pandemics the National Museum of Natural History. The red dot on the map barely registered.
My friends and I had practically stumbled across the exhibit while bouncing around the Smithsonian on a trip to Washington, D.C. in January of 2020 (I can assure you, the concept of “Dry January” was far from our minds that month). The significance of that red dot only clicked a few months later, when one of us was flipping through photos of the trip. Maybe we should have paid more attention because two months after seeing that map, we were all in lockdown.
As dark a concept as it is, and for as much pain and fear as there was floating around in those early days of the pandemic, the first few months of COVID were, in their own way, kind of fun. I performed Zoom concerts for kids, re-did my grandparents’ garden, and solved way too many puzzles; in Rhode Island we had spectacular weather that first summer, so I spent a ton of time outside, playing tennis and going on walks. And at the end of the day, my family would cook a great meal, and I would drink.
I wasn’t really getting drunk, but I was drinking every day. From the looks of the bare shelves at our local liquor store, I wasn’t the only one. In hindsight, had we known how long the pandemic would stretch, I might have adopted slightly different habits, but we didn’t and I didn’t. By September 2021, I was cognizant that my drinking habits had changed over the prior 18 months so I decided to do a “Sober October.” My thinking was that a one-time reset would shake me of my pandemic-induced habits.
I didn’t abstain from alcohol completely that month, although I did pretty well. In the space of 31 days, I only had 1 drink — a martini at dinner with my dad before seeing No Time To Die. But despite my one cocktail, my month of near-total teetotaling certainly felt like something of a victory. It didn’t do much to change my drinking habits though. Come November, I was quickly back to a drink or two each day.
In the little over two years since I’ve probably skewed more towards that drink-a-day count than I have towards abstaining. So, since I am in a period of change in my life when it came time to consider Dry January this year, I felt like it would be a good time to re-examine my relationship with alcohol again.
Dry January has become a bit of a phenomenon over the last few years. Per the New York Times, just under 20 percent of American adults participate in Dry January each year. According to CNN, in 2022 a massive 35% of drinking adults participated. The question of where alcohol should or does fit in our lives is a big one, and it is not one I am remotely qualified to weigh in on, but it is obvious to me that — especially since the easing of the pandemic — there is a clear re-evaluation of alcohol happening all around us.
So all of this might lead you to think that I participated fully in Dry January, that this is some sort of victory post stating “I did it! I did the thing! Let’s all go have a drink!”
Well, I didn’t do Dry January. I didn’t make a strong commitment to avoiding alcohol for 31 days in its entirety. But I did make a commitment to re-think how and when I drink alcohol, and in that, I would like to think that I have been successful. Or at least, I’ve been relatively successful thus far.
When I woke up on January 1st, I had a hangover. Whether you blame it on the “Blackout Juice” my friend had mixed up for New Year’s Eve or the pre-mixed Negronis I had made, the reality was, I didn’t feel good. This is a relatively new experience for me. Until sometime last year, I didn’t get hangovers. So the consequences of drinking are somewhat new to me, despite having been drinking consistently for about a decade and being much closer to 30 than I am to 20, or even 25.
I had already been toying around with Dry January, but waking up bleary, nauseous, and headachey on the first day of a new year was certainly a nudge in that direction. But as I hung out in my apartment that day, I thought about it and realized that total abstinence, at least for me, didn’t make much sense.
I wasn’t looking for a magical reset, some excuse to ignore my drinking habits for the rest of the year, or to win some hollow victory. I wanted to look beyond a month and shift how I drink. So rather than stop drinking altogether, I decided to do what I called dry-ish January. I decided to stop drinking at home for the first month of 2024.
If I was out with friends or family, I would drink as I normally would, but the glass of bourbon sipped watching a late-night movie, the cocktail while cooking dinner, the beer on a lazy Sunday afternoon, that I would put a hold on.
In this, I had some specific goals. For one, I started working from home recently. Now that I was spending most of my time in one space, I wanted to avoid using alcohol as the delineation between work time and personal time. I also have some personal fitness goals to work towards in the slightly more than two years between now and my 30th birthday. Reducing my drinking is one step towards those.
And so my liquor shelf has remained (mostly) untouched for the last month. I have to say, it’s been great.
There was some strangeness in the first few days. Alcohol, though it reduces the overall quality of sleep, does make you fall asleep faster. So I started staying up later, which required adjustment. A few years ago I mostly gave up drinking soda, and I’ve never been much of a coffee or tea drinker (I generally avoid caffeine), but I had somewhat forgotten the sheer boredom that comes from only drinking water and sparkling water.
After a few days, I gave in to some temptation and stocked my fridge with ginger beer and non-alcoholic beer, just to give myself a reprieve from the endless monotony of water. I forced myself to get up and go to bed earlier to adjust my sleeping patterns. I started taking five-mile walks in the morning and walking more than driving, to tire myself out and make sleep easier to find.
As the month wore on, it all became easier. I think less of drinking when sitting in my apartment at the end of the day, and I do genuinely feel better. Oh, and as fantastic as a perfectly poured pint is at the right bar, I am unlikely to buy beer again anytime soon. If I want that experience at home, NA beer has gotten really good (something James Stacey also pointed out in a recent episode of The Grey NATO) and is probably what I’ll stock at home from now on.
Does this mean I’ll never drink at home again? Of course not. An ice-cold martini made just the way I like it or a pour of a favorite bourbon will always be a wonderful treat. I just don’t need it every day. Aside from anything, I think I’ll enjoy them more if I pick my moments. That does lead us to one unavoidable question: Am I going to have a drink tonight?
The answer? Possibly, but probably not.