5+ books on intentional sobriety
Content warning: alcohol
Hi friends,
Granted, I don’t know a lot (anything?) about American right-wing media, but even I have enough familiarity by osmosis to be surprised when I was featured in an episode by the controversial conservative commentator/podcaster Candace Owens last week as her origin point for evolving views on alcohol. Granted, I was described as “some random blogger” but in that apparently popular episode, she references and then actually reads aloud from an article I wrote on my then-blog in 2017 about my own relationship with alcohol, an essay which eventually made its way to Relevant Magazine a year later where it has lived ever since. And so she found it and it mattered to her.
Sometimes life is weird.
Regardless of our clear differences, I do wish her well in her journey and I’m glad to witness the conversation around intentional sobriety gain more ground.
But this was just the latest in a long string of folks either directly or indirectly talking about that particular article in reference to their own story with alcohol. I mean, it’s been out there on Beyoncé’s Internet since 2017 so why? I’d write a lot of aspects of it differently if I had the chance for a do-over. I couldn’t have imagined how many folks would read it. Over and over again, every few months, it has new life, then I get tagged, asked, emailed (and yes, judged) every few months like clock-work. Why does it keep being so relevant and relied upon? My current theory is that - especially post-pandemic - a lot of folks are rethinking their own drinking right now. And it seems we’re looking for stories, solidarity, and most importantly, hope.
I do keep circling around that topic of sobriety from the side, even here at Field Notes, such as in the essay from earlier this year, “The Questions I Haven’t Been Answering.” That was written primarily in response to the many folks who ask invasive questions about my body/health but sure enough, my choice for intentional sobriety cropped up anyway in one of the answers:
When we turn to alcohol for relief of pain, depression, difficulty, poor health, heartbreak, whatever, it’s totally understandable because our culture promises this will fix things or acts like it’s a treat that we deserve, but the secret is that alcohol just makes all of that even worse. It makes the pit we’re in even deeper and more despairing. It intensified the very problems I was drinking to numb….
So one of the biggest levers that I pulled and the one that makes me incredibly proud has been choosing intentional sobriety. When I cut alcohol out of my life altogether and completely, I didn’t just detox from the substance but also from the stranglehold of lies that the industry had created around me as well as my tendency to numb emotions rather than feel/heal them.
It turns out you can’t heal when you’re committed to numbing the pain.Who knew, eh? This was brand new information. I had to enter the full depth of my pain in order to begin to close the wound and heal further. That was a turning point physically, yes, but also mentally and emotionally.
I also talked about sobriety a bit more on the podcast Saved in the City called Rethinking Our Drinking with Katelyn Beaty and Roxy Stone. (Here’s that link if you want to give it a listen.)
A bit of inside baseball for you, beloved subscribers: I have been slowly working on a follow-up essay that would serve as a chaser (LOL) to that original one as my own views have evolved, my knowledge deepened, my experiences changed. I think part of the reason why I am struggling to finish it is because I’m still rather evangelical-ish about the topic in my fervour there so it’s in danger of being a fundamentalist screed at the moment. Basically, I’m a zealot who has been born again and so I can predictably be a bit of a bore about it. Plus I don’t often see my own personal story represented in a lot of quit-lit memoirs because I’m not the “hitting rock bottom” alcoholic narrative of trauma and tragedy we typically conjure up in our imaginations. I’m just one more person who connected the dots that booze was making me physically sick in cooperation with my own chronic illness and it was also making me very, very sad right at the same time I began to realise alcohol was basically a patriarchal/capitalistic/racist/nonsense scam with epic marketing schemes altogether.
So truthfully, I’d love to hear any input, questions, or comments you may have on the subject of sobriety as I slowly work away on the six-years-later follow-up essay. Stayed tuned, I guess. And chime in?
You know me: there isn’t a problem I won’t open a book to solve so I did a major deep dive into “quit-lit” for a couple of years there and these are a few I found either practically helpful or existentially illuminating on this matter. I also read a lot other books outside of quit-lit as a genre that served me along the way but I couldn’t include everything connected with that healing work here. There are a dozen other quit-lit candidates I’ve read and appreciated for their own merits and I’ve shared them on my Instagram Stories a time or two, but in terms of narrowing down to which I’d actually recommend for most folks most of the time, here you go.
(CW: Some of these recommendations have very traumatic stories of the losses that accumulated in their lives due to booze and its connection to abuse or they relate their stories with alcohol in a lot of detail, so I encourage you to be aware if that is a trigger for your own self for any reason and take care of what you need before requesting these from the library/downloading to the e-reader. )
The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Gray - Catherine has the ability to talk about being sober without being annoying or preachy, which is a needle I have yet to thread on this topic. I revisited this multiple times as sometimes I wanted the science behind sobriety, sometimes I wanted the story and solidarity, but I always craved the permission to not see sobriety as something to “knuckle through” or endure but instead as a light-filled positive choice that brings accumulating goodness.
Sunshine Warm Sober: The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober Forever, also by Catherine Grey, is a great response to that misguided thought and articulates my own experience of all the goodness/life/awakening on the other side of this choice. One of the biggest questions I get from folks is “so like, no booze FOREVER?!?” as if it’s a jail sentence which is not at all my experience. Loved this counter narrative to the idiom of being “stone cold sober.”
This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness and Change Your Life by Annie Grace - One of the first quit-lit books I ever read and still one of the most impactful as it helped me see not-drinking as a joy and positive conscious choice, rather than one of deprivation and loss. She unwinds a million tangled threads we have about alcohol in our culture so thoroughly that by the time I was done listening to it, I literally could not imagine drinking ever again. It was very “oh, the Emperor has no clothes!” kind of realization. This is the rare time I recommend the audiobook. It’s a bit woo-woo and even repetitive at times to keep reinforcing the ideas as it has more of a cognitive-behavioural-therapy approach.
Sober Spirituality: The Joy of a Mindful Relationship with Alcohol by Erin Jean Warde - Some of the hardest spaces to be sober are progressive faith spaces, who often flaunt alcohol consumption as the unifying flag of their rebellion against fundamentalism. It’s problematic for a lot of reasons, sure, but it’s also just not caring for our neighbour well if we don’t acknowledge that. Plus I have found sobriety deeply connected to a major spiritual awakening for me personally. Erin Jean leans into that nuanced Venn diagram of faith, sobriety, and spirituality well.
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison - I really loved how Jamison explored alcohol’s narratives for creativity, writers, religion, and loneliness. It’s sad, insightful, slow-moving, meditative, and wise. I really liked the literary criticism aspect in this one but there is this passage near the end about recovery and doubt that almost reads like an evolving faith memoir that I found particularly powerful. And - a bit of a rarity in most quit-lit - this book is exquisitely written, almost Joan Didion-like.
Listen, before we say goodbye, I know this is a fraught and deeply personal topic. I have no judgment on your choices or reasons for or against your own relationship with alcohol at all (it’s the gift of being an Enneagram 9 to see everyone’s perspective! there are so few gifts, let me enjoy this one) so don’t feel the need to defend or justify yourself with me, promise. But if you are feeling that alcohol has a hold on you, if you feel dependent, if you know you are struggling even if the morning-after googled online quizzes don’t quite confirm it, if you are losing yourself, if your health needs a lot of care, if you are paying the price already, if you are tired, sad, sick, miserable, and tired of waking up promising yourself that tonight will be different: please seek out and ask for help. You certainly don’t need to wait for rock-bottom. Your life is worth saving. You deserve better than mere survival. Your flourishing in every area is worth it.
And we will all be cheering you on, promise.
Probably should have bought stock in La Croix or Bubly by now,
S.
Maybe it’s less of a haunting and more of a homecoming after all: On moving "back home" and the weird feeling of being haunted by your own self (for everyone)
Out and about on the Internet: A small family check in + links, clicks, and other items of note (for subscribers)
Small goodness matters, maybe now more than ever: Music, podcasts, Pride service, food, a new author photo, and the other good things of right now (for subscribers)
👀 Book cover sneak peek: Preorders are open for "Field Notes for the Wilderness" now! (for everyone)
ncG1vNJzZmirkaeuqa7ErKqesV6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6bpqijo2LAsK7RopytsQ%3D%3D