Drinking holidays

A time to laze

This is going to be a short one.

July 4th is a huge drinking day, and I’m here at the halfway house where I live cooking for the weekend and cleaning up. It got me thinking about what I would have done a lot of past 4ths of July (or fifths of July, as in 750 Ml if you know what I mean).

There are a few major drinking holidays if you’re a normal person: 4th of July, Thanksgiving, New Years, Christmas (for some), Saint Patrick’s Day, etc. If you’re abnormal like me, every day is an excuse to get drunk or high in a creative way. I used to go particularly hard on Thanksgiving.

But last Thanksgiving I spent with some of my best friends in Nashville. Most of them are pretty heavy drinkers, but a benefit of being choosy when it comes to people is none of them cared if I drank (the caveat being that, since I wasn’t drinking, I’d be the designated driver).

I found it easy not to want to drink after having spent a couple days with them going to concerts and bars and seeing them all get sloppy, but the point I’ve not even yet alluded to is that a lot of folks I’ve known in recovery have relapsed hard on drinking holidays (alcohol is a drug if you’re in NA, and it’s the drug if you do AA). Some of those folks are dead. It’s crazy to think about.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have even been able to conceive of a holiday without alcohol or morphine or weed or percocet or dilaudid or some combo of drugs and alcohol.

So what do you do to get through drinking holidays?

What are you missing out on if you don’t participate in the “festivities,” really?

No, really. Think of the average night spent messed up and what would you have missed if you weren’t there?

That thought experiment can take hours, depending on how deep a thinker you are.

I’m spending my day and night being productive, for one. Did an extra long gym session today. Cooked extra for my post-workout meal. Got out and walked in the sun for a while. Sent correspondence to clients that I could have sent tomorrow, so I look like I’m more responsible a business owner than I am. I have a non-12-step recovery meeting I’m going to later, and there are a number of leisure activities I can do like read, watch a movie, practice guitar, play drums, edit pictures/video, look on indeed for new w-2 jobs, etc.

What I’m saying is intended to be a little bit of the tough love I get a lot of from the “Jungle” community: If you can’t think of anything, do better. Try harder.

If you can’t think of something to do that’s not going out and getting drunk or high, maybe you shouldn’t be doing the “going out” part of that sentence. If you can think of something to do, do it, whatever it is.

Usually, I think the adage of “any day you don’t use your drug of choice is a good day” is stupid. People in recovery should aspire to more than that.

But on drinking holidays, it’s my opinion that literally anything goes. It doesn’t matter what you do with your time, just do something that’s not drinking.

I’ve conceptualized recovery and what it means to me and how it lives in my life on my own terms, and because of that, I feel like I can hang around people who are getting drunk or high without issue and figure things out myself. But if you’re not there, don’t go there. It’s as simple as that.