Airport and hotel bars were once my favorite places. I adored the atmosphere of travel and travelers, the quelling of anxiety, the ease of conversation and the typically-fleeting but memorable connections. Oh, and I also just adored drinking, plentifully. So it’s fitting that I had my final martini – and one of my most life-changing situations – in a hotel bar exactly one year ago. I decided to raise the bar for myself and stop being such a lush.
Downtown Knoxville, east Tennessee. I’d met an attorney in the airport bar the last time I’d flown. He said he had some legal research I could do for him, which was music to my unemployed ears. To discuss the job, we met in his hotel bar on his next visit to the city. Halfway through my drink, it was dreadfully obvious that there was nothing LEGAL about the “research” for which he was offering to pay me… But I stayed at the bar, smiling at his terrible yoga jokes (“downward dog, heh heh”) because I’d made the effort to drive across the city and paid for parking. The least I could do was finish my ironically dirty martini.
When the woman beside me got up, I did also, to use the ladies’ room. Crossing the lobby, she did an about-face and asked, in a screechingly harsh yet still Southernly-sweet accent that carried across the large space, “Are you a PROSTITUTE? You don’t look like one, but that guy you’re with obviously thinks you are.”
I was taken aback by this stranger’s frankness but managed to find some words. “No! Of course not! I just want to be polite and finish my drink.” All I really wanted though was to finish the drink.
She rolled her eyes and shouted, “Get a CLUE!” as she rode away on her high horse. I gathered my thoughts in the gilded restroom and then gathered my jacket back at the bar, making an excuse to leave. I downed the second martini that the not-so-legal expert had ordered in my absence and scurried out, feeling on me the stares of lobby patrons.
I wandered around the town square and wondered what in the hell I was doing. I had just sat through one of the most tawdry, tactless and slighting situations of my life, nodding and smiling, simply because I wanted to have a drink or two. I was not an alcoholic, but I felt like my life might be better without booze.
I gave up hard liquor that night. A month later, I stopped drinking beer, having already given up wine a few months prior after too many bottles in Italy. Unlike other times when I’d sworn off drinking only until happy hour, I stayed sober for nearly six months, even through a cruise which is tailor-made for heavy drinking, and even back in Denver where pot shops and microbreweries beckon every few blocks. It was extremely transformative. I’d never had more confidence in myself, my decisions or my direction – even though I still hadn’t found a job, I had clarity unlike any other time in my life. I decided that I’d come so far through fall and winter, so the first day of spring meant Phase Two. It was time have a beer.
I drank beer all spring and summer. There were some good flavors and some good times, I fondly admit. But drinking again made me feel physically terrible. Anything more than two beers sent me straight to a nap and a pounding headache, even though two beers barely used to get the party started. That light, silly buzz I used to love now felt dense yet frivolous. My body did not agree with Phase Two of this experiment.
It was my heart, though, which was really at odds. Comparing my relationships with and without booze, I faced some harsh truths, as harsh as that Tennessee woman’s voice had been. I am very happy that almost all of my friendships have not only survived but thrived. Romances, on the other hand…
Fast forward to Labor Day weekend, unofficially the end of summer and the dawn of autumnal beers. I was on a date, and it was just NOT going well. Sipping my Pumpkin Spice Harvest Barn Maple Moon whatever, I realized how much I’d changed and yet how I had returned, metaphorically, to that hotel bar almost a year earlier. I had changed in that I used to love fall brews but was now perplexed. Why did I ever think that squash, hops and carbonation are a good combination? Yet I was in exactly the same place, sitting through a bad date, wasting my time and his, just because I wanted a beer. That was that. I finished my drink, and I finished drinking again.
Sobriety organizations tout “one day at a time.” I didn’t set out to be sober for a week or a year or the rest of my life, but I set out to live each day to its fullest. Maybe someday I will have a drink again, like if I go to Scotland and sample the world’s best single malt. But my Lush Life is long gone, and moving on has brought a lushness to my life in a sense of growth, strength, awareness and abundance.
I’m not saying that non-drinkers are better people than drinkers, not at all. This is just my experience and experiment with sobriety and a lack thereof. I can only speak for myself that *I* am definitely a better person without alcohol. It’s a lot more complex than can be summarized in 999 words, but this is the gist.
Why then am I sharing this? If even just one person reads it and thinks, “Well if she can do it, I can too,” and also finds life improved with a break from booze, then it’s worth putting my dignity and heart on the line. From airport bars to hotel bars to raising the bar for ourselves… cheers.
Your voice matters!