a reflection: on drinking

Written By Katie Cunningham

This is about the time I stopped drinking and heard a building talk to me. 

Well, it probably wasn’t the building. It was God, or Source Energy, or our collective binding as humanity and nature. So I guess in a sense, it actually was the building. 

Do I still have you?

Let me back up. First, the disclaimer before I go into this story is that today, I partake in an alcoholic drink from time to time and every person’s journey with alcohol is unique to them. This is simply my account of my personal journey into sober curiosity, of bringing awareness to my alcohol consumption and building agency around when and how I drink. This is my account of looking at the risk of “otherness” that society, advertisements, and sometimes loved ones threaten us with if we dare to question the F-U-N that alcohol provides. This is what I’ve found on the other side. 

Okay, now that that’s covered – Back to the building. 

It was a couple of years ago and one of those nights where the living room was littered with wine bottles and friends dancing, singing, and scaling a door frame in the early hours of the morning. You know the scene – you’ve seen it in the movies meant to evoke a deep sense of friendship, belonging, connection… and that simple but ever-weighted word… fun. 

Until the next morning. 

That next morning I woke up in a spiral of anxiety that I had learned to anticipate well – a depressive ditch to balance out the fun I had the night before. I was 30 years old and up to that point I’d been drinking pretty well (if I do say so myself) for more than a decade. I’d wear my drinking abilities like a badge of honor. Margaritas with clients over lunch, wine with friends to unwind after a stressful day, tequila shots (“hold the limes! we don’t need um!”) with anyone who wanted to buy me a drink at the bar.

I’d like to think that with every shot there was a small tug in the back of my mind that I wasn’t doing all this for the right reasons, but who’s to say? Not me, that’s for damn sure.

The morning of the great anxiety spiral, I sat in bed and cried with my sister. I am so sick of feeling like this, I said to her. I’m so sick of feeling like I have to be larger than life and guzzle alcohol (truly – I remember saying the word “guzzle”…I’m not proud of it) to be fun. I am so sick of pretending. Through these words and hysterical hungover tears I told her sometimes I just want to sit on my couch and knit. 

I’m sure I threw in the knitting comment to be funny (but also, it’s true - I do like to knit) but also in this moment I was actually speaking a big truth to myself and a witness for the first time: I was overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed and ashamed of how I’d been moving through the world on autopilot never questioning the “why” behind my actions or thinking about how I actually wanted to be treating my time and my body. I mean, if I wanted to knit then why the fuck wasn’t I knitting?

In that moment, being in New York, with all of its stimulation, wasn’t what I needed. My sister and I brewed two mint teas in to go mugs and drove out of the city, north to Katonah, NY. 

Katonah feels like the small town that my sister and I grew up in – right down to the train tracks that run through the center. We walked along the main street, my face puffy and blotchy from the aforementioned sobbing and the alcohol oozing out of my system. I caught glimpses of myself in the store windows and felt so disconnected from the person looking back at me. 

We sat down to the first dinner out in years where I only ordered water to drink. I sat across from my sister and cried as I realized the magnitude of what I was up against. I felt for the first time the full weight of the conditioning, of the posturing that alcohol had allowed me to partake in. It was like someone had dropped a cinder block on my head. Or maybe that was the hangover. Or both. 

I sat there swirling questions in my mind instead of a glass of wine in my hand. Who was I if I wasn’t the person who had a glass of red with her meal? And how does this world expect me to be interesting and capital M Mature without one? I had built an entire personality, an entire world, around being this person. How would I begin to fit into the world I built for myself without it?

I felt deceived as I looked around to every other table covered with glasses of wine. And sitting there with my stupid glass of water with its stupid ice cubes in it, I felt the most othered I have ever felt. 

And that’s saying a lot. Because the few years before this dinner had been some of the most “othering” years of my life – divorce, dad death, dyslexia diagnosis. (Wow, it’s so satisfying that all of those start with D that I hesitate to throw in the gluten allergy…)

But truthfully, I felt more than othered. I felt like a child. My feet may as well have swung around under the table and not touched the floor. It was like a toddler had taken my seat and I half expected the waitress to ask me if my parents would be coming to pay the bill. 

It got me thinking over the next few days, as my body metabolized the alcohol and I began to regain full function of my emotions and brain - when did I start wearing alcohol as a cloak? 

First, up to this point in my life, I spent a lot of time in my head. Just chattering away. Alcohol had been a way to relax my brain, a way to escape my ego. But when did that start? And why did an escape from ego become an escape from consciousness? Or what was kind of looking like a lack of free will if I looked hard enough…

I kept taking this journey day by day and slowly, I began to see that maybe the problem wasn’t all thanks to my own doing, but rather, the way I had been conditioned to move through the world. 

—

Those first few weeks without drinking brought the most awkward moments of my life. (And I’ve thrown up in my purse in front of my high school crush… while farting… so that’s where the bar was set y’all.) I would go on dates sober and feel like I was half my age. I felt damaged, like I had no self-made confidence anymore. I would hang out with dear friends and after watching them open a bottle of wine to split without me, I would cry. I would CRY. At dinner with FRIENDS. I was stunned at how vulnerable, left out, and rudderless I felt without being able to hit the easy button of a corkscrew for Confident And Fun Katie. I was dropping deep into a fear that everything I had built up around Who I Was was slipping away from me. 

And I couldn’t believe that after all of the otheredness I had survived, drinking would be the thing to take me down.

But this brings me to an important confession: through my grief of the previous few years there had been many times when I drew my self worth off of how “well I was handling things.” Or, how well I was hiding the mess. To offer myself some credit and compassion, I truly believe I did the best I could, but I will also admit I learned how to play the game of showing just enough vulnerability that you’d believe that was all there was to it. I learned how to give you just enough of myself that you wouldn’t pry for more. 

This was a pattern of part-playing that I was good at.

I became skilled at acting like a grown woman in touch with her needs, but left out the part about me craving a deeper intimacy or needing respect for my sensitivity. And alcohol made it easier. There was the man who went on a three day bender with me: champagne in bed in the morning, wine at night, no sleep whatsoever. The minute I showed a slice of softness, he left so fast I’m surprised there wasn’t a hole in the door. To this day I bet I’m still saved in his phone as Katie Funningham.

But because I’m a quick learner, I took experiences like that and applied them to how I lived my life; or how I subconsciously canvassed for acceptance. I was showing about 75 percent of the puzzle, and alcohol made it refreshingly simple to silence the remaining quarter. But the problem was that the remaining 25 percent– that was where the really good stuff was hiding. That was the pure; the delicate pieces of me and my needs that I had covered a long time ago. They were all still there, buried under lava perfectly preserved. And now with a fighting chance to be heard, they were bobbing to the surface. Little inner child zombies rising from the dead. 

—


Slowly, the weeks started to add up. I didn’t drink for two weeks. And then three. And then four. It’s safe to say that I hadn’t gone without alcohol for longer than 7 days since I was 18 years old until I started what I now refer to as the “Katonah Experiment.” Every day it grew a little bit easier, even with the weight of otherness like a boulder on my back. Sure, I started noticing how clear my brain was in the morning and how much easier it was for me to meditate or focus at work, but I would still show up for dinner with a wave of anxiety building through my body, crescendoing the moment when I’d have to compellingly deliver the line of “I’m fine with just water, thanks.” They should give me an Oscar.

After years of trying to cover up or control the otherness, it felt like I was voluntarily putting it on display. It felt fucking terrible. Until –  

I was walking home from dinner, going on about a month without alcohol. I was about a block away from my apartment. I had lived in this neighborhood for two years, but on this night, as I walked, I truly noticed it all for the first time. I noticed the way the soft living room light from the brownstones would spill out onto the sidewalks. The way the November chill settled on top of my nose. There was an ease to that block that many times before had felt too overwhelming. And in that moment there was a voice – as clear as if someone had been talking next to me on the sidewalk. 

The voice simply said: Stop. 

Without thinking, my feet stopped moving like a force had taken them over. I was standing in front of a beautiful brownstone with a grand front stoop and window boxes filled with pansies. I saw the lights on on the garden floor. Curtains were drawn across the windows, but I could make out two bodies shuffling around inside. 

I had this warm, true feeling about this place. Like I could sense there was something in there for me to find. Their mailbox hung on the iron gate by their front door and without any thought, I ripped a sheet of paper from my journal and I wrote a note along the lines of–  “Hi! I live around the corner and am looking for a garden apartment. I’m not sure if this place is even for rent and I can tell that it's occupied right now, but if it’s ever available, please give me a call.” 

I actually hadn’t been looking for a garden apartment before that moment, but I also had this strange knowing that I… had? I wrote down my phone number, took a deep breath, and dropped the note in the mail basket.

The next day, I received a call from a New York number. When I answered I heard a sweet, older man’s voice on the other end: 

“I don’t know what kind of witch you are, but we’re about to list this apartment. It’s available in two weeks if you want it.” 


—

There are not many things I declare as absolutes in this world. I am a deep defender of curiosity, of digging to the next layer, and feeling your way around in the dark as you go. I believe knowing something with all of your being is dangerous, because usually the answer lies somewhere in the questions that remain. But, I do know I had to find that home. And I know that the only reason I found that home was because I had, for the first time in years, a completely clear mind walking down that block that night. 


The healing that happened for me in that garden apartment after I moved in could not have happened anywhere else. In that apartment, I learned to care for myself. My entire self. I learned to cook soups. To self soothe. To show up unapologetically in my needs. To celebrate pleasure. I learned to dance feelings out of my limbs. I learned to really cry again. I learned to sit. I learned to pick up a dead mouse and dispose of it like the badass bitch that I am. I learned my tendencies to hold onto things long after they should be let go. I learned to revisit the things I had put down too quickly. 


In that home, I reunited with 25 percent that I hid from the world, and from myself usually. It was the home where I started to become whole again. Surrendering to the scary otherness and giving up the easy button of alcohol offered allowed me to finally feel my thread in the great weave of the universe, and now that I’ve felt it I can’t go back.


So, drinking.

I went about six months without alcohol (except for Christmas eve when I had a glass of wine at dinner and I felt horrible the next day.) I slowly began experimenting, noticing how I would feel after what and how I drank. Wine would make my head swell. Tequila would make my nose stuffy. I could offset those effects sometimes with cold plunges, early morning walks, and an incredibly healthy diet. But sometimes alcohol would still take me down the next day.

So now, before I drink, I weigh the scale of what's worth it and what’s not, but I no longer feel othered any time I’m not drinking. I sit there, with or without a drink, in my complete power. My 100%. 

Not drinking hasn’t solved my problems and ladies and gentlemen, believe me when I say we are still a Work. In. Progress. I bet in a few years I will read back on this essay and laugh at everything I think I have “figured out” today. That’s the equally wonderful and terrible thing about awareness - it’s humbling. I know I will read some of these essays with the same mix of tenderness and embarrassment that I read the AIM away messages I put up in high school. But I do know that mostly-sober living is keeping me on the track of getting to know myself better, and uncovering the things that I’ve yet to unearth. 

Removing alcohol for a while allowed me to see myself fully for who I was, and once I did, it gave the universe its opening to usher me into places where I feel welcome in this wild show just as I am. It’s probably been trying to tell me that the whole time.

Sure, there are still people who want me to be Katie Funningham, throwing back shots on a Tuesday. But here’s the thing – even though I’ve excavated the softness, sensitivity, and seriousness that I was convinced for years you guys wouldn’t be able to handle (sorry about that), I’m still fun as hell. 

If you’re interested in experimenting with reducing or removing alcohol from your life for a bit, here are some resources I found incredibly useful during the Katonah Experiment:

Katie Cunningham
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