When you tell people you don’t drink, or you quit drinking, there is a lot of curiosity around the why. People want to know what label you apply to yourself. Ultimately, I decided the label didn’t matter.

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What I did know is that I drank too much. I was plugged into the health literature enough to know my consumption was unhealthy, for one thing. But more than that, my drinking scared me. Not the amount I was drinking each day, because sometimes it wasn’t that much. What scared me was that feeling that it had some kind of hold on me, that I was always too aware of it, and that the hold was likely to get stronger over time. I knew I needed to stop, but didn’t know how. Whatever bucket you put me in, or whatever label you put on me, it wouldn’t change my mind that I thought I needed to stop. So, what was the answer going to do for me? Nothing. The plan was to quit drinking.  

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The label doesn’t matter if the plan is the same.

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It reminds me of when my older daughter was an infant, and she was really really fussy. Just screaming and not sleeping and while I was rocking her, I’d shop online for any swing or noise machine or other device that promised to soothe a fussy baby. And I kept asking my husband, “do you think she has colic? Is this colic? Did you read the symptoms for colic?” And my husband said, “what will it change if she has colic or not? We try to soothe her either way.”

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Too many drinkers waste time on this question when it gets them nowhere. The conversation also takes people into a world of vocabulary that I found (and a lot of others find) alienating—addiction, sobriety, recovery, journey.  

I’m just someone who drank too much and then I quit. And if your drinking leaves you feeling stressed or sad or scared, if you ever googled “do I have a drinking problem?” late at night, I see you and I’ve been there.

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And I encourage you not to slow yourself down with the “am I or aren’t I” questions that aren’t going to help. The answer doesn’t matter if the plan is the same.