this week, i came to the conclusion that i have to go completely sober from alcohol. this is not a choice that i made completely on my own. if it had been a choice that i’d made on my own, i think i'd feel a bit more excited about it. i was forced to make this decision against my own will. let me explain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why did I decide to go completely sober from alcohol?
So this week, I came to the conclusion that I have to go completely sober from alcohol. Completely sober. Like, no little glass of wine here, tequila soda there. I'm talking completely sober. I'm talking I go to a bar and order a sparkling water with lime. Sober. possibly for the rest of my life. Now, I know what you're thinking. Wow, that's great. That's amazing. That's beautiful.
In a lot of ways, I agree with you. However, this is not a choice that I made completely on my own. If it had been a choice that I had made completely on my own, I think I'd feel a little bit more excited about it. I was forced to make this decision, in some ways, against my own will. Let me explain. It all started in 2021. In the midst of COVID, Emma is drinking a lot of alcohol. Okay?
Chapter 2: What were my drinking habits during COVID?
Emma was drinking a lot of alcohol. I wouldn't say I was abusing it by... I mean... I think maybe a little bit, but I wouldn't say any more than the average college student. It's very common for kids, you know, in their early 20s to drink a little bit too much, right? That's not out of the ordinary. Does it make it right? Does it make it healthy? Absolutely not.
But it's to be expected in a way, right? I was drinking a I mean, when 5 o'clock would hit, I was making a drink. At best. And taking shots at worst. You know, COVID was rough. I think a lot of us were drinking. And so, I was one of them. I was one of them. And I didn't see it as a problem at the time. I saw it as normal. And I still... in a way, see it as normal.
But now hindsight being 2020, I look at it and I'm like, just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's OK for you to do it. Right. Just because everybody else drinks a lot in their 20s, just because everybody else was drinking a lot because it was the pandemic and everybody was feeling nihilistic and confused doesn't mean it's OK that I did it. Not everybody makes that choice.
So I don't give myself a pass because everybody else was doing it. I still see that as problematic and unsustainable behavior. Anyway, I was drinking a lot. 2021. And at a certain point, I started to develop rashes and hives, particularly on my face, whenever I drank. I actually wouldn't say whenever I drank because I was drinking kind of a lot and I wasn't getting rashes every single time.
But I would say 75% of the time when I drank, I would develop hives. And it was really frustrating for me because I'd be drinking and then all of a sudden my face would start to feel really hot. And if I wasn't wearing makeup, you could very quickly start to see red patches all over my face and on my neck. And my face would swell up a little bit.
And not only was it incredibly uncomfortable and hot, like my face just felt hot and swollen, but it looked kind of jarring. Like you'd look at my face and be like, oh, she's definitely not doing well. Like something's going on. And this would happen, you know, after two drinks, right? Yeah. And for a long time, I was perplexed by this because it wasn't happening every single time.
I think if it had been happening every single time I would drink, I would have paid closer attention to it. But at the time, I wasn't in a particularly protective state of mind. Whereas now I'm very protective of myself. When something starts to go wrong or go awry, I immediately am checking in on it. If I feel like something's off in my body, I listen to it.
Because I care about my well-being today. But there's been times in the past where I haven't. And in 2021, I wouldn't say I really cared about myself very much. So me getting hives was the least of my worries. I was like, I just want the hives to go away so I can keep having fun and have another tequila soda or have another vodka seltzer.
You know, like that's what my priority was more than anything. I was like, I just want to keep drinking and having fun and escaping. And I want to look cute. And having hives all over your face and getting kind of puffy doesn't look very cute. Even when I was wearing makeup, you could still kind of tell that something was wrong with my face a little bit. But it would eventually pass.
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Chapter 3: What health issues did I experience while drinking?
So like to look at alcohol as potentially a problem for me physically, like health wise, it was like, I don't even care. Like it wasn't even something I was giving any attention to because I was like, this is such a big part of my life right now. There's no way I'm gonna stop. It was like weird, but it was all subconscious.
2021, 2022.
Then around 2023... I stopped drinking vodka and I started drinking tequila. In addition to that, I stopped drinking as much, okay? So my habits around drinking started to shift. I was still drinking relatively frequently, but it wasn't as much of a habit. It wasn't as big of a part of my life. And the rashes sort of stopped. I kind of stopped getting the rash.
I would get them occasionally, but before it was like frequently, okay? I would get a rash almost every time I'd drink. You know, it was sort of unpredictable, but it was more frequent than it wasn't. When I cut back and started drinking tequila, they pretty much stopped completely. And alcohol slowly exited my life. Like, it wasn't playing as big of a role.
Chapter 4: How did my relationship with alcohol change over time?
I wasn't relying on it as much for entertainment anymore. I was starting to realize, hey, you know, I kind of have relied on alcohol to be social for a while now. Maybe I should take off the training wheels and be social without it, like a big girl. And so, yeah, my relationship to alcohol improved and it seemed I wasn't having any adverse reactions to it and it was kind of great.
And now 2024, where we are today. I mean, we're at the end of 2024 when I'm recording this, but 2024. In the beginning of the year, I was still on my tequila soda grind. Like that's what I was drinking when I was going out, you know? And then as the year progressed, I kind of stopped enjoying drinking hard liquor and I started getting into wine.
for majority of this year, I was drinking a lot of wine, okay? I became a wine girl. And my desire to feel drunk or buzzed pretty much went out the window. And it was all about the experience of drinking the wine. I like the flavor of wine. I like... the, you know, different types of wine and like being like, oh, I'm gonna order this one. Oh, this one sucks.
I'm gonna get a different glass next time the waiter comes back. Like I loved the experience of wine and it became more about the experience of like having wine with food, having wine at a wine bar, you know, drinking it slowly, savoring it, not really getting drunk anymore, barely even feeling buzz, but like enjoying the experience. I absolutely fell in love with wine.
Everything about it, the culture around it, the experience of drinking it, the taste of it, the way it pairs with food, the, you know, going into wine shops and picking out bottles of wine, splitting a bottle of wine with somebody. Like I just fell in love with wine. Okay. Like a complete fucking person entering their mid twenties. Okay. Like, like everyone does. I started to love wine and,
And I think ultimately it was a really healthy thing for me because it made my relationship with alcohol healthier than it's ever been. It made it about a beautiful experience, not about getting super drunk, not about, you know, using it to help with the nerves. It was more about providing third spaces for me to hang out at like a wine bar.
It was about having something fun to order with my dinner at a restaurant. it was about the places that wine would take me. Okay. The fun little wine shops in LA that I would find. It was about that. It wasn't about getting drunk, you know? And I, and I really loved that about it. And I was like, wow, this is adulthood. You know, this is maturity. This is beauty.
This is the beauty of, you know, of wine. I get it now. I'm in. Then there's something about it, like reminds me of coffee too. It's like, There's a ritual to it. It's just, it's just beautiful. Anyway, but this summer during the heat of my wine craze, something kind of odd happened. I was on vacation in the South of France and I was drinking a lot of wine on this trip.
Not a lot of wine, but I was like having, you know, a glass of wine in the afternoon and then having another glass of wine at dinner. Like I was having wine. And one of the days on the trip, I have two glasses of wine, white wine, nothing out of the ordinary at all. And I get back to the hotel that night and I'm feeling incredibly nauseous. Okay.
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Chapter 5: What happened during my trip to the South of France?
Nausea and vomiting, sound familiar. And diarrhea, doesn't sound familiar probably, but not to tell you too much, that has always been a part of the drinking experience for me. Oh, I might be experiencing alcohol intolerance. So I looked into it. And basically, it's interesting because apparently this is caused by inherited genetic traits.
Having hay fever, allergies from the seasons and stuff, which I do have very badly, that is a risk factor. And according to the internet, having a mild intolerance to alcohol or something else and alcoholic beverages might not require a trip to the doctor. Simply just avoid alcohol, limit how much you drink, or avoid certain types of alcoholic beverages. So now I'm faced with a choice.
There's definitely something going on with me and with alcohol. So now I'm faced with a really harsh reality, which is that alcohol simply does not agree with my body. Now, I could go to the doctor and get it checked out and potentially understand, like, if there are certain types of alcohol that impact me worse or if I should just avoid everything altogether.
Like, I could get some sort of confirmation from a doctor or Or I could save myself an afternoon and just take this as a sign that maybe I shouldn't drink at all anymore. Now, when I first came to this conclusion, I was like, that's not really that big of a deal. And then about five minutes into coming to that conclusion, I genuinely started to mourn the loss of alcohol in my life.
Like genuinely, I was I genuinely began to feel sad. Number one, because and this is not like morally the most admirable thing I'm ever going to say, but I don't have a lot of fun stuff left. OK, I used to have a really severe nicotine addiction. That's something that I've been working on. Over the past year, I've come a really long way.
I'm not ready to talk about it yet because I want to make sure I'm really in a good space before I discuss it. But let's just say that I'm not consuming nicotine on a consistent basis anymore. Like I'm going weeks and weeks and weeks without having any nicotine at all. I don't even drink to get drunk anymore. Like I was just drinking for the experience of alcohol.
Like I can't smoke weed because like it gives me panic attacks and it's actually given me like it's triggered some really unfavorable mental health challenges for me. Smoking weed, like eating edibles. I've had some really bad experiences that have left lingering effects for me mentally. Like what do I fucking have? Like, everybody has their vice, you know? Like, they smoke cigarettes.
They have a vape. They drink wine. They, you know, smoke weed. Like, it's... And none of these things are good. None of these things are healthy. But I feel like everyone fucking has at least one... And every single fucking one for me, it doesn't work with my body. And maybe it doesn't work with anyone's body and I'm just more sensitive than others.
But part of me is like, for fuck's sake, let me have a vice, goddammit. I look up to the heavens above and I say, where's mine? Okay? Like, now I can't even have a glass of fucking wine? Are you kidding me? Like, I feel like I've... Holy shit. Like I'm somehow by some miracle almost completely like eradicated my nicotine addiction.
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