Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

Alcohol puts you in such a box, leaves you with such an impossible equation: you have to sexualize the relationship in order to feel powerful, and you have to drink in order to feel sexual, and on some level you understand it’s all fake, that the power is chemical, that it doesn’t come from within you.

if you retain the desire to have an occasional drink, you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to resist the temptation. And you won’t be seeing alcohol like strychnine!

I had a fantasy of myself drinking just then, not drinking in the sophisticated, martini-glass sense but in the raging, obliterating sense, drinking to get drunk, drinking in order to yield to that rebellious urge and show everyone in the room just how angry I was, just how out of place I felt, just how self-destructive I could be in response.

sobriety is about freeing yourself from any behavior, relationship, or way of thinking that enslaves you and keeps you from being present to life.

addiction is when we’ve “lost the freedom to abstain.” Let us reclaim that freedom.