“Enough about you professionally. I see from your resume that you write ‘SavoyStomp.com’. Tell me about the Aviation Cocktail. I’ve been trying to perfect it…”
One of the biggest challenges to stopping drinking, well, more accurately, continuing to not drink, is redefining your life without alcohol, and finding the acceptable parameters for interactions in your life, which might, in the past have included alcohol.
One method is to stop hanging out with drinkers when you stop drinking.
However, for most of us, after, say, 30 years of drinking socially with friends and family, it’s pretty impossible to completely isolate yourself from alcohol and drinkers.
I mean, unless you pick up and move yourself to a Muslim country and start a new life, you’re going to have to talk to your friends and family, and you’re probably going to have to talk about drinks and drinking. Not to mention deal with people drinking around you when you’re not.
I may have a particular problem here, as, for most of the last 10 or 15 years much of my identity, and many of my interactions with friends, have revolved around a singular obsession with cocktails, spirits, and drinking.
So, frankly, with a lot of people I know, we don’t have much else to talk about besides booze and cocktails.
And, also, I do still know A LOT about booze and cocktails.
I didn’t forget everything I know about alcoholic drinks because I stopped drinking, (though I did try a bit to forget and avoid those conversations for a while.)
I don’t have any real answers.
But it’s something I’m going to be thinking about, and writing about for this blog.