The Good Girl Quits Drinking

At five o’clock yesterday, I wanted a large pizza with everything on it, a bottle of red wine, and a piece of key lime cheesecake.

Not metaphorically.
Literally.

I was laying in bed staring at the ceiling thinking, “Honestly, fuck it.”

Which is interesting, because thirty days ago, I quit drinking.

And before you imagine some dramatic rock-bottom moment involving tequila and public humiliation, let me stop you there. This wasn’t that.

I wasn’t waking up in alleyways.
I wasn’t drinking in the morning.
I wasn’t blowing up my life.

I was doing what a lot of women do:
working hard, holding everything together, and rewarding myself every evening with wine because “I deserved it.”

And I enjoyed it.

I love sitting on a patio in Europe drinking red wine.
I love first-date cocktails.
I love girls’ nights.
I love the ritual of pouring a glass at the end of the day and feeling my shoulders drop an inch.

Wine felt sophisticated.
Rebellious.
Adult.
Free.

Especially after my divorce.

There’s this strange phase after you leave a marriage where you think freedom is going to look like being a little reckless. Like maybe healing means becoming the woman who stays out late, drinks expensive wine, says yes to everything, and finally stops caring what people think.

And to be fair, I did some of that. Okay….a lot of that.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something uncomfortable:

A lot of what I was calling “freedom” was actually just another form of abandoning myself.

That was the plot twist.

Because the good girl thinks rebellion means indulgence.

More wine.
More chaos.
More “fuck it.”
More numbing.
More escape.

But I’m starting to realize that real freedom is much less glamorous than that.

Real freedom is being able to sit with yourself at five o’clock on a Tuesday without needing to disappear.

That’s the part nobody posts about.

The evenings are the hardest.

Not because I’m physically crawling out of my skin with cravings, but because drinking used to smooth out all the edges of my life. It blurred the sharpness. It turned the volume down on loneliness, uncertainty, fear, exhaustion, grief, overstimulation, boredom, restlessness.

Wine wasn’t just alcohol.
It was transition.
Reward.
Relief.
Sedation.

And now… there’s no blur.

Now I actually feel my life.

Some days feel incredible. I wake up early. I go to Equinox. I meditate. I journal. I walk through Vancouver listening to Italian piano music feeling like the main character in a film about a woman rebuilding herself.

Other days I lay in bed eating sugar-free Jell-O wondering if my personality is gone forever.

Both are true.

But something strange has happened in the middle of all this.

I can hear myself again.

I didn’t realize how much noise I had been living under until I removed the nightly ritual of disappearing.

I started noticing that my intuition got louder.
My emotions became clearer.
My body started talking faster.
My instincts became harder to override.

It was like I had spent years dimming the lights every evening and suddenly someone turned them back on.

And I don’t think this is really about alcohol.

I think it’s about consciousness.

About presence.

About asking myself why I needed to leave myself every night in the first place.

I’m not writing this as someone who has everything figured out. I still romanticize wine. I still think a glass of red in Paris sounds fabulous. I still have evenings where I want to order pizza and disappear into oblivion for a few hours.

But I also know this:

For the first time in a long time, I’m no longer confusing numbness with peace.

And maybe that’s what getting out of good girl conditioning actually looks like.

Not becoming more reckless.

Becoming more honest.