My last drink was a shot of Hpnotiq. 

Yes, that weird, fruity, hip-hop famous blue stuff that was popular in the early 2000’s. 

It was January 1, 2020, and I was sitting at the bar of our local dive talking to strangers. Normally, the last thing I’d want to do on New Year’s Day was go to a bar (far too hungover), but I think we’d taken it easy the night before, knowing my husband had a DJ gig that evening. Still, I wasn’t really in the mood to go out. I knew I had to work the next morning, and it was New Year’s Day after all, and I always had high hopes of this year being better than the last. Plus, I’d just started a Whole30 and knew I’d feel bad about myself if I couldn’t even get through Day 1.

On the other hand (said my internal bad influence voice of dumb ideas), I could always just push back my Whole30 start and end dates. I did want to be supportive of my husband, plus the bar was only a 5-minute walk from our house, so I decided to go for just 1 beer. 

Well. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve successfully gone out for just 1 beer (I think the number is somewhere around zero). I guess I had the confidence that the patterns of my life had completely changed because it was New Year’s Day and that’s totally how that works, right? I didn’t go crazy, but I didn’t stop at one either, and I was getting loose enough to feel comfortable talking to random people on the stools next to me. I could see far enough into the future to know that it was looking a little too easy to keep ordering drinks and taking my chances with how the following morning would go.

At this point, I noticed the bottle of Hpnotiq on the shelf, and after first wondering how long that had been sitting there, I tried to remember what it tasted like and could not, so I decided my new besties and I should give it a go. It was actually better than I expected, and although I mostly felt fine, I started to beat myself up for once again failing to have just one drink. 

I got to thinking about how easy it was to “just push back” my Whole30 start dates. And about how long I had been thinking about taking a break from alcohol but there was just ALWAYS a reason to push that back too. And that if I continued to make excuses and push things back, I’d be waiting for the rest of my life. I had to stop thinking about this experiment as something I was losing, and instead get curious about all the ways it could drastically improve my life.

It felt like the new year was a good opportunity to take a hard look at my actions and patterns, and to question some of the power I was giving to alcohol. Did I really need it to relax and have a good time? How much was it really affecting my sleep and ability to progress in my career? Did it actually give me courage, or was it sneakily stealing my self-confidence? 

And there was something magical this time that made it finally stick. Maybe it was just a deep knowing that something TRULY had to change; I had to make different choices if I wanted to start seeing a different result. Using the excuse of “doing the Whole30” gave me a socially acceptable way to experiment on myself, to see if I could take a break for 30 days and observe what happened in that time, if anything. 

Even though I got myself into some not-so-great situations over the years, I’m thankful I never hit a stereotypical rock bottom. I never got arrested, got fired, or worse. But why should we have to wait for things to get as bad as they possibly can before making a choice to turn the trajectory around? I just got sick of my own bullshit and not being able to trust my promises to myself. I didn’t wait for a rock bottom, and you don’t need to either. I just decided to start choosing the bigger life.