Where did this even come from?
"I'm never drinking again." You've probably said it before or definitely heard someone else say it. That phrase stuck in my mind and i even started to entertain the idea of what if i genuinely didn’t drink any alcohol the rest of my life.
You know, I'd like to think that i'm something of a scientist myself. So I thought up an experiment to be able to see what happens. I could have picked 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, but i decided on a year purely out of how intimidated i felt by the idea of not drinking alcohol for 365 days. It's quite a scary idea to me that when i go out for food i won't be getting a pint or when i go out with my friends I won't be getting ridiculously drunk at the pre drinks. It's weirdly daunting, but exciting at the same time. As for why I decided to just pull the trigger on this, it comes down to two main reasons; Challenge and Experiment
Why?
💪🏻 Challenge
Sobriety is a challenge in itself. But for me, there's a few "difficultly modifiers" that i think might make this a bit challenging for me:
- I've grown up in a place with quite a big drinking culture.
- Most of my friends and family drink quite regularly.
- I'm a 20 year old uni student in Leeds.
I don't think i'm really that worried about them making this harder. I have a decent amount of self control and I'm just going to take it on as more of an identity based rule that instead of "I can't drink", i'm just someone who doesnt drink.
I do think however that it's the scarier and harder decisions that are the ones worth choosing or worth having a go at. As a person, I'm all about challenging myself and pushing myself to try and be the best version of myself.
🧪 Experiment
I want to see how my life is impacted by the absense of alcohol in my life. This was one of the reasons behind going the full year. I want to see how everything from my birthday in February, to Christmas and New Years Eve in 2022
I can't clearly remember a week in my life since i've been about 16/17 that I haven't had a drink. That's weirdly pretty standard in the UK. But I've went my entire adult life so far with alcohol being a big part of my life, In both celebration and in stress and sadness, that i'm curious as to what my life will look like without it.
I can't wait to see if my life changes and how it does. I'm excited to try doing thing i would usually do drunk, but sober. It'll be interesting to see if my social life is effected as much as everyone seems to think it would if they didn't drink.
Footnotes:
I'm going to write about more of the things going on in my life in general, but if you’re interested then i'll be writing about this more and doing little updates on this experience. There's going to be a post about what it's like going clubbing sober at some point in the year too.
Finally, It might be worth mentioning, i don’t have a real issue with drinking. Like i wouldnt say that i'm an alcoholic at all. But, especially over the past three months at university, my relationship with alcohol has definitely gotten more serious and i've started drinking more or wanting to drink more. For me, this is purely out of curiosity and because I want to challenge myself and experience what year round sobriety is like. (also on my bucket list to do a year sober)