My Fire Burns Out at Midnight

Thoughts on my first six months of sobriety and also some other things.

I’d like to write a little bit about my experience with not drinking alcohol for the last six months. But before I jump in, I’m thinking maybe I’ll start a little “what I’ve been listening to/reading” section because I saw my incredibly talented friend Elaine do so on her substack, which is an excellent read if you like feelings and beautiful thoughts and art.

What I’m listening to:

I feel like every summer for the last few years, I’ve been making up for a ten-year-long period of time in my early twenties where I said, absolutely-fucking-wrongly, that Dan Bejar was the worst part of the New Pornographers. Neko Case was everything to me from the ages of 16 to now, and I let that love blind me to the fact that Dan Bejar’s LEAST interesting addition to the world was what he did in that band. Destroyer has changed my life in very big ways since 2018 when I finally saw the light, and thankfully I’ve had a big catalog to work my way through atoning for my sins. Currently, I can’t get enough of this song.

The world's just bones
The world is black stones dressed up in the rain
With no place to go but home
Just like Nance
On a night like this, why, she's pro-stars, pro-sky

So if you get a chance to shame me in person, ever, for the time I didn’t like Destroyer, I hope that you will take that chance. I think that this complete 180 I did on Destroyer is why I am pretty fucking hesitant to ever say I’m sure of anything. Ever. I’m rarely ever sure of most things, and I’m honestly pretty bewildered by people who are.

What I’m reading:

I’m gonna be real here and say that I have a self-help-ish/non-fiction book problem. Something about appeasing the part of my brain that is fueled by the white-supremacist-capitalist belief that I always need to be bettering myself feels like a hack for doing what I actually want to do sometimes. Occasionally my brain wants some bullshit to chew on so it will let me live my fucking life. “Oh, you’re spiraling about a text you sent 8 months ago? Here, have this book about ‘becoming a tiger’ or whatever Glennon Doyle said.” Easy to read memoirs and “quit-lit” and biographies and quasi-science “CHANGE YOUR LIFE” books are the iPad to the hangry toddler that can be my anxious brain.

THAT BEING SAID, I am reading this book by Bunny Michael and I think it’s been really beautiful, realistic, and ACTUALLY super helpful at contemplating the thought of “Hey dude you are already enough and always have been” while acknowledging some pretty big systemic shit and harmful beliefs that this sort of genre can be really good at ignoring, and it’s been really nice!

Okay 500 words and I haven’t even gotten to what I want to write about yet. If you’re still with me, you’re a real one and also I’m sorry. “The Art of Conciseness” is a book I’ve yet to chew on.

Before I write about sobriety and my personal thoughts around what it’s meant for me - I just want to acknowledge that on the spectrum of addiction and alcoholism, I have been incredibly lucky to have had a pretty easy time quitting. While I’ve had a long-time dependence on alcohol, I have also had success quitting for a month here and there on several occasions before this bout, and have in general just not struggled physically too much with making this change. That is specific to me, and I know that for many, many people, including a lot of people I care deeply for, changing your relationship to alcohol and dependence on it is not such an easy jaunt and can be incredibly difficult and dangerous. It is a spectrum and at this juncture in my life, I was definitely on the lighter end of that spectrum. If you are concerned about an alcohol dependency, please, please reach out to a healthcare professional before you consider stopping. Withdrawals can be dangerous and deadly.

When I was a teenager, I was pretty adamant about not drinking. I had smoked weed a couple of times and didn’t love it, and I’d grown up around regularly drinking adults and just really had no desire to try it out. (Almost as if exposure to the thing doesn’t guarantee use of the thing and hiding it from teens almost guarantees curiosity, huh. Weird. Apropos of nothing, Utah.) My priority was being able to drive the 45 minutes from my hometown of Ogden, UT to concerts in Salt Lake City and even at 16, I knew that drinking would risk that privilege that was the most important thing in the world to me.

My BFF Alayna Roach’s rendition of me at 16 - a true millennial hipster.

I also had already started to develop some interesting control issues with the world around me that I still battle with to this day. Being exposed to people who were drunk at a young age made me afraid of ever being that out of control. Big parties that devolved into drunk screaming matches in other rooms were a fairly regular occurrence in my youth. And I remember being 16 and helping my incredibly drunk friend out of her vomit-covered clothes into her bed, and barely sleeping because I was too afraid to take my eyes off of her in case she choked in the night. I have always dealt with a pretty fierce desire to never “be a burden,” (which is also its own big set of pickles to work through) and when I was a teen, drinking seemed like a pretty clear way to make yourself someone else’s problem. So I abstained, or partook incredibly lightly. I’d hold a beer, but rarely ever drank more than one.

By the time I could legally drink however, I had developed a taste for whiskey. I would buy a bottle on the way home after work and lose myself in sad records on the floor at one of my first apartments. I learned that while booze was a quick way to be out of control, in the right amounts, it was a helpful way to let go of it a little also. And while in college, working 60 hours a week to avoid asking anyone for help, letting go just a little was exactly what I wanted to do in my rare bits of downtime.

Next thing I know, it’s 2019 and I have been at least binge-drinking every weekend and a little every weeknight for most of the last decade. But at the time, thanks to my magical body, my tolerance had allowed me to rarely ever lose that control while also drinking quite heavily. I felt like it was necessary for relaxing and creating and connecting. It was always there, so it must be a key part of those things. My boyfriend at the time and I had a bet that summer that had us both going ONE WEEK with no booze, weed, or nicotine. I thought for sure it was going to be an absolute piece of cake. But by the end of the week, I realized how dependent I had become on alcohol, and how fucking hard it was to quit for 7 days. It was the first time I’d been a week without it since I was 21 and the feelings of needing it really frightened me, but I wasn’t quite ready to explore that at all yet.

In 2020, I jumped into coping through the first 6 months of the pandemic like a lot of us probably did. I was buying one of those BIG BIG bottles of Bulleit whiskey on nearly a weekly basis for a household I shared with one other person. My anxiety was out of control for really understandable reasons - the world felt so uncertain and uneasy and I’d just moved in with someone and very quickly discovered our incompatibilities after the last box was unpacked. I was thinking about how drinking was making things harder on myself, and I started doing sober months here and there. This helped quite a bit, but I was always so quick to crank my tolerance back up to a hundred, until it got to a point where every time I had a hangover, my self-loathing was so unbearable that I finally decided to attempt to give it up for longer.

In December of last year, I decided to stop for 90 days. After 90 days, I felt good and like if I could handle the holidays sober, then I could handle anything. As of June 21st, I haven’t been drunk in 6 months. Now I’m sure there are people who would not appreciate me using the word “sober,” because in the last two months I have attempted to have A beer or a glass of wine on less than five occasions, just to see how it felt. And I gotta tell you, each time felt bad. No longer having a tolerance at all just made me immediately feel like shit by half way through - ruining a meal or an experience and having me wishing I’d just gotten a sparkling water. So I’m still gonna use that word, for me.

My intention behind stopping still feels complex. I don’t have a clear number one answer for why. One is that I was sick of knowing that I didn’t love being dependent on alcohol, and trying to continue drinking with that knowledge was not helping me love myself. Another is that I am always incredibly concerned about what I’m spending my time doing. I want my creative practice to be my priority, along with my relationships with loved ones, and being fully present for those connections and that practice felt like a no-brainer. Another is that I felt like I could only be on that “moderate/heavy drinker” line for so long before I had a bigger dependency problem. When I quit, it was still easy for me to go a few days without it, but it did feel like that was getting harder and sometimes I felt like I could see into my future with it. Especially while dealing with some physiological issues in my body that were certainly not doing better after a night of drinking. Especially because each year that passes and I lose another person I love to substance abuse issues, I feel more and more afraid of how it could always be any of us.

I feel like I see a lot of people on social media talk about how much better your life is when you get sober. And I do think that by the metrics of energy, sleep, and just physically FEELING better, that has been my experience. But I also don’t think I fully realized the change I was bringing into my life when I decided to do this, and I wish I would have been a bit more prepared. Questions like “how do I signal to my body that it is the weekend/vacation time and time for rest/fun?” “How do I feel the absolute restorative joy of dancing with my friends at the club if I don’t slam 4 white claws first?” “How is this going to impact my new romantic relationship that has so far been built on drunk nights out, dancing to Carly Rae Jepsen in my kitchen with a bottle of whiskey, and being disaster boys at the bar?” “How do I bond with my friends that I know but don’t quite know THAT well yet?

These have been CHALLENGES. These have taken multiple attempts and heavy conversations through tears and long, awkward, sober pauses that I was simply NOT prepared for when I thought “maybe I just stop drinking for good for now.” It has been a surprisingly lonely experience as well. Sometimes I find myself feeling like my relationships would be easier and more comfortable for everyone if I still drank. But that feeling never comes from outside of me - I am endlessly thankful for the love and support of my close friends, and particularly the willingness and dedication of my incredible partner Dylan to get into some crunchy conversations with me and be so willing to learn new ways of connecting when we’re stone-cold sober.

The biggest and most surprising thing I am proud of myself for in this experience is not that I have not been drunk in six months - it is that I have had the heart and dedication and stamina to PRACTICE things that alcohol helped me skip so many levels on. It has also taught me a lot about my ability to be resilient and handle discomfort, and also where my personal preferences and boundaries actually are. I don’t want to dance to music if it’s not good anymore. Drunk me would find the beat no matter what. I want to leave and go to bed when I am tired now. Drunk me would have pushed my body passed its limits again and again. I find my friendships worth the awkward, messy, beautiful moments of clunking through the beginning of a conversation now and earning vulnerability in its purest form. Drunk me would find the fastest, shortest route to crying together about how much we love each other. (Also there is so much I have learned and gained and love from drunk memories with friends that I am NOT discrediting and will never regret).

I wake up early and I prioritize time to write now. Through most of the last decade, creative inspiration was a fleeting thunderstorm and I would be lucky to catch it for long enough to sprint through. Now my creative work feels like constant preparation of putting out the buckets to collect the water when it does show up, and having them around and full when it’s dry for a while. I’ve never done that before, and I think that sobriety has played a big role in finding the energy and dedication to do so.

I hope that the people in my life that are still drinking always feel that they can continue doing whatever feels right for them in front of me, and have the trust in me to talk through it when it feels like they can’t. Those closest to me know that I want to go meet up with you for a drink - I want to dance at the bar - I want to be at the baseball game. This adventure has felt so personal and complicated that expecting anyone to change themselves around me feels inaccurate. I also don’t like absolutes - I don’t like saying “I’m done drinking forever.” Because forever is a long time and things change every day. Like I’m still listening to that Destroyer album right now. But for now, this has felt like an incredibly big but ultimately very positive change in my life, and I’m so grateful I get to keep experiencing new ways to be here. Every single time I think I have something figured out, I figure something else out that changes the game.

I have been drinking a “brine and soda” lately as my special little beverage, which is just equal parts pickle brine and sparkling water. If you like pickles, it might be your jam.

I have a remix album project coming out on July 11th to celebrate the one year anniversary of my album In The Garden, By The Weeds. You can check out the first two by Pacing and Color Temperature (and everything else magic by those artists) streaming everywhere now.

I also will be playing shows in Boise, ID, Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR on August 8th, 9th, and 11th respectively. This will be my FIRST EVER TOUR. IT IS LITTLE BUT I AM DOING IT. Follow my instagram for more information on those.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. If there is something you’ve been thinking about doing for a long time but has felt too big and scary, like quitting drinking or booking your own tiny tour, I believe in you with my whole heart that you can do that thing! The time will pass regardless and you deserve to show yourself that you are tough.

Love,
Josaleigh