dangling triggers

100 days without alcohol

The best thing I did in 2025 was quit drinking for 100 days. (The truth is that I had 2 glasses of wine with dinner on Day 94, but that’s it, and I’m still calling it a win.) I’ve had a many-years-long red wine habit and wanted to know what was underneath, because surely there was something other than just: I like red wine.

Because I’m a school psychologist, I can tell you all about behavioral change and the Antecedent (trigger) - Behavior - Consequence (ABC) flow - that if you want to change B, you have to change A and C. And I could tell you what the As and Cs of my drinking habit were (are). I’ve tried to change those before, but it never stuck. I’d lasted 42 days once. 20-some days another time. A week or two here and there. But I had never gone this long without feeding the compulsion to drink.

I read a lot of “quit lit” (books about sobriety) and one of the best things I read was from Sober Curious (Ruby Warrington) discussing the concept of Dry Drunks. A “dry drunk” is someone who quits drinking but doesn’t actually address the underlying reasons they drink in the first place. Somewhere around Day 80ish I realized there was an entire additional - and very meaty - layer underneath the ABCs of my drinking. I had never let my triggers dangle unanswered long enough to get to it.

Turns out it’s all about Belonging. When alone, wine says: I belong to me. When with others, wine says: You’re likeable. You’re not too boring and weird to be here.

So dramatic. Yet so typical: Belonging is a fundamental and evolutionary human need. Loners get eaten by saber-toothed cats, so best not get yourself ostracized.

I don’t want this to be a drippy confessional. Here is my point:

1 - I was a little disappointed to find the wound in my underbelly so ordinary; and

2 - It shifted my perspective of solitude and aloneness.

I like being alone (most of the time). I love solitude. I love traveling alone. I love going out to eat alone with a book (and wine). I like living alone (when my son is at his dad’s). I like wandering around all by myself. These are all true statements. So what a thing to realize simultaneously that I have hangups about Belonging. It made me wonder which came first - the hangups? Or the love of solitude? Was one just a response to the other? And why did this perceived conflict compel me to drink?

I think I understand that we are inextricably/unavoidably/relentlessly in relationship - that we are in fact defined by it. Even someone who says: I’M A LONER! is defining themselves based on relationship (absence of it). It reminds me of a group of self-declared nonconformists who get together and cry in unison, “We think for ourselves!”

I have an under-developed idea about how this relates to The Big Sort (Bill Bishop). Bishop’s work shows us that as diverse as America is, we have been homogenizing ourselves — flocking and isolating ourselves in groups based on ideology. And that this causes detrimental fractures - an inability to communicate, empathize, and work together.

I think it’s true that the macro mirrors the micro (and vice versa) - that the systems we see in the external world are the same systems in our internal worlds (insert metaphors about cells and blood and synapses and whatnot). I think I mean that as we grow less willing to integrate and accept the complexities of the world around us, we also grow less willing to integrate and accept the complexities within us. Do you know what I mean by that? I mean that maybe wanting to belong and wanting to be alone are only disparate if we declare them so.

Too Long Didn’t Read: 100 Days without wine taught me that being alone is just another way of being in relationship with others. Happy New Year.