A sobering January

On not drinking through the worst of times

I decided to try the Dry January® thing this year. (Did you know Dry January was a registered trademark? I didn’t either till just this second.)

I wasn’t particularly worried about my alcohol intake, which has rarely exceeded a small drink with dinner maybe five nights a week. At a party or special occasion, I might have two.

But I still wanted to know if I could abstain from alcohol for an entire month, as an exercise in—what? Personal discipline. Will power. Seeing a thing through. Et cetera.

I also wanted to start the year with a renewed commitment to my flagging writing practice, and it felt like the two things—committing to writing every day and not drinking—might go together in some semi-monastic, synergistic way.

The good news? I did not find this particularly difficult. The not-drinking part, that is. The writing part was harder, but most days in January, I managed.

And I learned some things about myself, none of them earth-shattering, but useful:

• I did not ever feel like I needed a drink. But I often wanted one, especially the first week or so. Come six p.m., I would think, Damn, I’d love a drink right about now. “Now” always correlated with sunset, dinner preparations with its attendant aromas & appetite, and the end of my husband’s work day. I realized the desire for a drink was more about having a ritual to mark the end of daylight than anything else.

• This desire for a tasty treat to signal the shift into evening was, for me, completely fulfilled by the making & consumption of a fancy, alcohol-free drink served in a pretty glass. I concocted one that I’ve enjoyed now many times: Fill a tall glass with ice, pour in an ounce of Seedlip Garden 108, top off with Fever-Tree Ginger Beer, decorate with a sprig of rosemary or thyme or mint or whatever pretty thing you have on hand, and voilà! an easy, tasty mocktail. It’s called the Spicy Naomi. You’re welcome.

  

  The Spicy Naomi, ingredients + finished project (no garnish today, alas)

• I thought my resolve might be tested when I went out to eat, but restaurants have really embraced the whole mocktail thing (along with cocktail pricing—$13 for a virgin margarita!—come on, really?), and I didn’t much miss the alcohol even when dining out.

• When shitty things happened, and quite a few really shitty things happened, most of them on a national or global stage, as you all know, but a couple closer to home, which I won’t disclose here, I’d definitely have a knee-jerk, Jesus Christ, I need a drink reaction. But I was able to recognize this as a habituated, almost stock, response, and not a statement of actual need. This was a useful insight on many levels. How many such “pre-programmed” responses to stress do I carry around in my body & in my head?

• I thought not drinking might clear up some chronic physical stuff, but it didn’t. Not at all. I still had hot flashes. I still woke up with mild headaches. I still suffered all the annoying IBS-ish symptoms that have dogged me most of my life. In a way, this was a relief. Because I don’t actually want to stop drinking altogether. I like my glass of wine. I like the occasional pricey cocktail—like the purple Empress gin & tonics they serve at Kings games at the Golden One arena. I like the mild buzz. Anyway, I’m already gluten-free, which I’m used to after fifteen years, but it’s a pain and I still miss croissants. Also, I’m a recovering Baptist. I don’t want to give up more pleasures of the flesh, thank you very much.

  

  Purple gin & tonic at Kings opening day, 10.24.25 (I think maybe the dude behind me knew what kind of season we were in for)

• Here was the biggest difference I noticed: Mental clarity & physical energy. I already knew that even that modest glass of wine with dinner pretty much makes it impossible for me to write afterward, although I could still do other things—read, watch a movie, complain in my journal, doom-scroll, talk on the phone, etc. What surprised me wasn’t feeling more focused & energized in the evenings. I was also more focused & energized during the day.

In the end, I had the most productive month of my life since before the pandemic. Maybe since way before the pandemic. I felt younger. I felt smarter. I was way less prone to depression than usual, even while the news outside grew more & more grim, with no end in sight. It was … startling. I had days where I’d do some class prep, some volunteer work, some housework; write 500 words; attend a Pilates class; have coffee with a friend; join a protest; see a movie in the theater—all while walking three or four miles around the city.

My sign at 1.30.26 protest, Cesar Chavez Park, Sacramento

On Sunday, February 1, I celebrated the end of Dry January with a hard cider at Tower Theatre, where we went to see The Secret Agent, part of my annual watch-as-many-Oscar-nominated-films-as-possible project. The movie was engrossing, if baffling. The cider: delicious!

Golden State Cider: cold, crisp, & refreshing!

But I want to keep the clear-headedness and oomph I found in January. The future isn’t particularly promising right now, and I’m also trying to draft a new novel. Whatever is in store for me and for all of us, I need more clarity and more get-up-and-go to meet it.

So. My intention going forward is to restrict alcohol to weekends and special occasions. We’ll see how I do with this. Last night, my husband asked me if I wanted a glass of sauvignon blanc with the very tasty GF pasta with chick peas, spinach, & lemon that he’d made for us. The pasta was excellent, and the wine would have been a perfect accompaniment. But it was a Monday night, and I hadn’t had a particularly productive day (maybe because of the previous night’s cider?). I said no and felt only a tiny bit deprived. Turns out I’ve gotten out of the habit of weeknight drinking.

And here I am the next day finally posting again on my Substack after more than a year of silence.

Today’s bit of erudition (and encouragement): Do protests work?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I’ve been to not a small number of protests in my life. The first one I ever attended was an anti-apartheid rally on campus when I was a college senior. I would later go on to attend rallies or protests for gay rights, women’s rights, gun violence prevention, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the end of genocide in Gaza, No Kings, and most recently, in solidarity with Minneapolis in protesting ICE.

Has any of it mattered? (Okay, apartheid did end in South Africa, and we do have marriage equality today, but most of these issues still feel like intractable or even escalating problems.) I often wonder if I’m just trying to make myself feel better. If I just want to not have to say, “Nothing,” when one day a grandchild asks me what I did during the baleful Trump era.

Today I finally decided to look it up. I went to DuckDuckGo (which I’ve been trying to use lately to buck the hegemony of Google), and typed the words “do protests really work.” And read this very heartening article at The Guardian, “How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very.”

I recommend reading this. It cites multiple scholars who’ve studied this exact question. And yes, one of the benefits is improved mental health for protestors. But also: mass movements are, eventually, effective. Apparently there’s also this “3.5% rule”—maybe you all know about this already, but it was new to me—that suggests that, historically, if 3.5% of a population protests a regime, it will fall. Wow. (That’s actually a lot of people. But still. Wow.)

So let’s keep getting out there.