How Dry I Am...
How Dry I Am...
At 52 I stopped being able to tolerate alcohol, so I gave it up. How has your relationship to alcohol and drinking changed as you've gotten older? An open thread...
Readers,
I know many of you are in the midst of observing “dry January,” so I thought it might be good to post an open thread about drinking before the month is out—how drinking affects us as we age, and the ways we adjust our habits as a result of that.
Me? Some time in 2018 I realized that I just can’t drink anymore. To clarify, I’m not an addict, don’t have a substance use disorder, am not in recovery. I’ve never been much of a drinker to begin with. I stopped drinking because consuming even small amounts of wine, beer, or spirits began to make me feel rotten. Half-way through, say, a glass of wine, I began to feel hung-over, and that’s no fun.
In the comments, I want to hear from you about how your relationship to alcohol has changed as you’ve gotten older. (*I ask that everyone refrain from judgement about other reader’s choices, and from trying to persuade them to your way of seeing, as can often happen with this particular subject.)
This isn’t about morality, or whether alcohol is good or bad for you. (There have been so many conflicting reports. Red wine is good for your heart! Too much wine causes cardiovascular disease and cancer! A recent New York Times article about a study that determined drinking even just a little bit is bad for you acknowledged how confusing the messaging has been, and continues to be.)
If it didn’t make me feel lousy, I’d have continued being a social, occasional, moderate drinker. On a night out I was good for one, maybe two drinks, with rare exceptions. Honestly, I was always a lightweight. On my 18th birthday at college, after one-and-a-half watered-down screw drivers I got sick, then spent the rest of the night with a terrible case of bed spins.
I’d like to understand what change occurred in my body so that I can’t tolerate alcohol at all, now that I’m older. I had my liver checked out—blood work, a sonogram—and it appears to be fine.
For a while I tried to research diminished alcohol tolerance in women as they age for an article that a New York Times editor was interested in. But when I interviewed medical experts, every one of them told me the same thing: there hasn’t been a single study on this. (I’m shocked. SHOCKED.) No findings to report on = no article.
These days, I enjoy beverages like these instead: Athletic Brewing’s “Upside Dawn” gluten-free (I have celiac), non-alcoholic beer; Spindrift’s sparkling waters with just a bit of juice; Sierra Nevada’s “Hop Splash”; and Hoplark 0.0 “Really Hoppy” water.
I once tried non-alcoholic gin, and it wasn’t terribly good. I haven’t yet dabbled in non-alcoholic wines, but someone recently pointed me to Boisson, an online shop for all kinds of non-alcoholic drinks, and the wines intrigue me. If you have any recommendations, put them in the comments.
UPDATE: These Little Saints non-alcoholic cocktails just arrived. I just tried the “Paloma” flavor and really liked it:
Okay, your turn. Has your tolerance for alcohol, or your relationship to it, changed as you’ve aged? Tell me…
Thank you!
-Sari
.I never thought about stopping until that night I spent in jail for drunk driving. The matron was kind, offering me an extra paper thin blanket for the damp San Francisco night, but all my stories about myself as a social drinker evaporated in the shock and shame of it. Me? In jail? I had been in jail many times, but it was always on purpose. Getting arrested was a part of my political life. A source of pride. Not this time. Now I was on a steel shelf, huddled under two unsuccessful covers, dizzy, still drunk, cold and trying to avoid the three other women in the holding cell. Thankfully, they wanted to avoid me as well. Each of us is there because something that was supposed to work---didn’t. The drug deal that fell through. The boyfriend who got mad. The customer who wouldn’t pay. The runaway who got caught. And me, the woman who marched, picketed, demonstrated and even got arrested in the service of these women with whom I was now sharing a cell.
I think in retrospect it was the dissonance that kept me from constructing yet another story about what had happened that would allow me to avoid identifying the heart of the story. My drinking.
Drinking accompanied my life, but anxiety did as well. Of course they’re both loosely related, anxiety and the drinking, although I began drinking as a public way to be chic. In 1954 I thought sophisticated people wore lovely clothes in fine restaurants while holding a Chesterfield. I didn’t have to know anything, do anything or be anyone to appear elegant. Just a drink and a cigarette signaled your all around suaveness. Plus my parents drank every night.
Then, in my 20’s, I discovered I actually felt shorter, smarter and more confident when I had a drink and a cigarette which was a triple plus. And off I went, careening down the decades, my props at the ready.
After my divorce, I had a long ivory cigarette holder imagining panache which I now embarrassedly recognize as a touching pretentiousness especially when my alcoholic tastes still ran to rum and Tab. But the shorter, confident and smarter me continued to be emerge with each drink, although now I shudder at decisions that I imagined were daring and kind of in-the-know-ish which were risky, and several potentially dangerous.
But while I wasn’t becoming shorter, I was becoming smarter, had returned to college and my confidence was growing. Eventually, after the third try, I stopped smoking. One prop down, one left to go.
Over the years, my neck and everything else began to soften. My drinking had progressed to gin and bourbon, expanding in periods of stress and receding in more emotionally stable periods. But even the receding periods were becoming more than I needed for that rush of alls right with not only the world but with me-ness I sought.
I remember reading that alcohol allows you to know what it is you feel without the necessity of actually feeling it. My insights during my drinking years were rich and deep and complex. But gin and tonic allowed them to remain astonishing, oft repeated insights. No change required.
Then I got cancer. In my neck. And a surgeon had to make an incision to cut it out. Now my neck is soft with a scar across it. And my partner died. And my children started to make their own mistakes. And I was growing older and older. Soon after my sixtieth birthday, I stopped drinking. Knowing I would never be able to be a moderate drinker, I removed choice from the equation and stopped. For nearly a year I drank a cold Fresca in a chilled wine glass at 5:00 which helped. But after a while I didn’t need that either. I was left alone with myself, nothing to remove me from where I was.
The nearly twenty four years since then have been some of the best of my life.
I love drinking, and I love the Friday night ritual that my spouse and I have, where we put an end to. our week of work (and our habit of not drinking Mon - Thur) with a cocktail or glass of wine, standing on a little hill behind our house, where you get a good view of the sky. My problem is that -- like others here -- my body is less tolerant of alcohol that it was when I was younger (I'm 65). I can handle two glasses of wine, or a cocktail and a glass of wine, no more. When I exceed those limits (which I find too easy to do), I sleep badly and wake up feeling parched and sad and wobbly. I've considered just giving up alcohol and probably should, but it feels like giving up a piece of my marriage. That's where I'm at.