Why You Should Never Stop Drinking Forever

Life is much more manageable when you live it a day at a time.

When I first quit drinking, I had no intention of stopping for good. I wanted to have a break, to sort a few things out in my life, and start afresh. Nothing especially untoward had happened, but I knew that soon it would if I didn’t do better.

I wanted to get my writing back on track, to feel better in my relationship, to look less puffy and dehydrated.

And so, for the first time in my life, I decided to do something about it beyond swearing off. I took myself along to a support meeting someone had recommended, and I sat in the circle and listened.

It was a women’s meeting, and I was surprised to see lots of young, professional women, sitting in the circle. They hugged each other and stood together in twos and threes, chatting.

“Just keep it in the day,” they said to me when I admitted I didn’t really know what I was doing there.

It proved to be some of the best advice I would ever receive.

It is overwhelming and confusing. There are so many decisions. So many ways you can approach the thing. But occasionally, you learn something that can be applied to everything, and for me, ‘keep it in the day’ was one of these lessons.

Walking to town the next day, I passed a sushi shop, and my stomach lurched at the idea of never drinking Kirin Ichiban again. Keep it in the day, I told myself.

I probably would drink Kirin Ichiban again, just not today. I breathed a sigh of relief.

When my boyfriend and his friends pulled beers out of their rucksacks after we’d swum in the river and my heart twanged with longing, I told it, Keep it in the day. We could have a beer after a swim another day. We just wouldn’t drink today.

Related posts:

It was our regular Monday morning staff meeting and my team was assembled around the conference table. I opened by saying we were cancelling the seminar I was currently touring the world with…

I am sure many of you heard name Deming as PDCA cycle or understanding of variation in Kanban Systems as special causes and common causes While reading the Book — Out of Crises, W. Edwards Deming, I…

Hey there! In this blog post, we will build a twitter bot that let us tweet using the command line directly. We will use twitter — a client library for the Twitter REST and Streaming APIs. This npm…