Hi. I’m not sure what to do. I want to stop drinking.
Calling all ye Dry Januarians
Upcoming events with Self Made:
📝 January Office Hours: Once per month, I open my Zoom room for an hour. Come with a question, or something on your mind, and we can connect. Register here. Office hours are free and included as part of your Self Made subscription.
✍🏽 January 2024 Writing Workshop (virtual): Join me Sunday, 1/28, from 10am-12pm PST for a generative writing workshop based on the Amherst Writer’s Method. Cost: $33. For more information and to register, click here. Appropriate for all levels of writers—and remember: a writer is someone who writes.
☠️ January 2024 Community Workshop (virtual): Join me Wednesday, January 31st, from 5:30pm - 6:45pm PST for Close to the Bone: Stay Fortified to Stay Engaged—where you will learn a flexible, dynamic, self-generating, and *practical* approach to self-care. Cost: $13. For more information and to register, click here.
Finally: A reminder that as of January 1st, I consolidated some paid subscriber options and lowered the monthly fee from $30 to $8, and the annual fee from $300 to $88. I invite you to become a paid subscriber and to invest in this work and community 🤘🏽
Thank you!
For most of us, alcohol use disorder isn’t the drama we see portrayed in news and media. It’s far more subtle and insidious. It’s a murky underworld that no one talks about but so many of us live inside. It’s the murkiness of putting off until tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. It’s the murkiness of watching the people around you accomplishing Big Life Things, while you are treading water, exhausted and barely keeping your head above. It’s the silent and degrading everyday shame that has no end, a wound we privately pick at, yet another reinforcement of all the ways we are wrong and disgusting and fucked up. It’s the recognition that the moments of feeling care-free that we are so desperately seeking when we drink are increasingly being overshadowed by a knowing that this shit is making us feel worse than it is making us feel better, followed up by a denial of that knowing, a subsequent relegation of said knowing to a metaphorical back burner where it sits simmering for, well. You know how long.
And then one day, after however many days, we draw a line in the sand.
This is the moment we turn and face our lives.
🪐
This week an email rolled in:
Hi. I’m not sure what to do. I want to stop drinking.
This is a holy missive.
Step one is reaching out. So to this person I say, you are already on your way. You are already doing it and this is what it looks like.
Another thing that is helpful? Releasing expectations and outcomes. You don’t need any answers. You don’t need to know anything beyond this day, this hour. That will come.
Next, it’s good to get curious. Practice expanding your imagination. You don’t have to say any of this out loud. You don’t have to claim a label—now, or ever—unless you want to. You might talk to yourself in the shower, in car rides alone, on walks with the dog. Maybe you scribble what the fuck is happening in your journal. Get curious, and take your time. I know it might seem urgent but try to slow down, even a few degrees.
On a practical level: It also helps to drink a lot of water. Another thing you can do is find consistency with some daily routines and practices. Consistency means more often than not. Perfection is not the goal here, not ever. Gathering data is, and you can gather a lot of data from doing things more often than not. For example: If you journal for 10 minutes four mornings out of seven, that is frequent enough to gather some data. Is this helpful? You can ask yourself. Do I notice that I feel better—even a few percentage points better—on the other side of this practice? Am I learning something?
You can tend to skin, muscles, bones. When you don’t know what to do, you can tend to your physical self. There is always an action you can take, whether that’s drinking water, moving your body, taking a rest, getting in the shower, preparing a decent meal, sticking your nose in a sweet-smelling flower, pressing a cold washcloth to the back of your neck. Sometimes there’s no resolution or answer in the moment, and so you do what you can which is tend to skin, muscles, bones. Breath in your lungs. Feet on the ground, whole body on the ground maybe. Staying close to the ground is so helpful.
When you’re ready, you can begin looking for your people. One person is wonderful, plenty. Virtual friends can become forever friends. Doing this alone is not more noble or more worthy. It’s a lot harder and takes a lot longer than necessary. And if you’re like me, you know what it is for things to be hard, for things to take longer than they might. I’m not going to lie to you. You are in a dark wood. You are in a dark wood but the good news is you are not alone. There are lanterns all around. Your path is your own but there are other people in the forest. You are walking together.
You don’t have to know what’s on the other side. You just have to start walking. And then you keep walking. You keep walking when you don’t want to walk. You keep walking even when you fail. You keep walking when you’re angry, enraged, melancholy, sad. You let yourself be seen as you are by the other walkers. You show up in your messy humanity and you keep fucking going.
Slowly, slowly, over time, as much time as it takes, which is always longer than you want it to take (I told you I wasn’t going to lie to you), you begin the process of moving toward friendship with yourself, with the whole world. The forest gets friendlier. The lanterns get brighter, come faster. Pockets of joy arrive. You fall in love with the other people in the forest. The tendrils of your imagination creep past the limits and confines of the shitty story you’ve been operating inside of up to this point. Weird things start happening—coincidence, serendipity, happenstance, delight, stuff like that. A different horizon emerges. You keep walking, you practice and experiment with new things, some of which work, and so you hold those things close. You try other things, because what’s the harm, and you decide nah, not for you, so you let them go as part of the experiment.
I believe change is possible. I see it every single day, in my own life, in the lives of my clients, my friends, my community. It’s the most beautiful experiment I know.
Curiosity, consistency, community. And then you walk.
🪐
For many of you, Dry January is an opportunity to hit a sort of “health-reset” button and reevaluate the frequency with which you’re imbibing. This is a wonderful experiment and will give you some powerful information moving forward, including whether and how you want to continue to include alcohol in your life.
For others, it’s an opportunity for you to hit the reset button on, well, your whole life—that aforementioned line-in-the-sand situation. This is an extraordinary place to be and even though it might feel like it, I promise you are not alone. I’d love to be a lantern for you in any way I can, which could be a resource share, or a fist-pumping pep talk situation, or simply a space to receive you and listen with compassion, care, and forever commiseration.
Wherever you find yourself on the spectrum of sobercuriosity (or, if you’re anything like I was, the spectrum of total chaos), if you are Dry January-ing and want some support, or to talk about how it’s going (sometimes it’s so great to say the hard things out loud to someone who gets it!), or to check in about resources and toolkits, come to my Office Hours - I’d love to meet you.
SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!
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Thank you.