If you want to know who your true friends are, quit drinking for a month. I quit drinking for six months, and I lost so many friends, I became a writer. I went into it thinking, "I’ll just quit for a month or so, and lose some weight, no big deal." I didn’t realize the complete life change that it is.
Of course no one says “Oh you quit drinking? Well I guess that’s it for our friendship.” But that’s basically what ends up happening. I ran into a co-worker who asked if I still wasn’t drinking, and when I replied, “No, I started drinking again a few months ago” she said, “Why didn’t you tell me? We could’ve been hanging out this whole time!”
My friend Anthony put it to me, as we were battling the Saturday noon crowd at Super King, a multi-ethnic food market, with the cheapest produce in the city, that "it’s just something you no longer have in common. It’s like if you quit playing tennis, but still hung out with your tennis buddies." At this point, a little Asian lady ran over my foot with her cart to get to the cheap mizuna I was standing by. Five bunches for 99 cents, I couldn’t blame her. Anthony advised me to just carry a basket, and not get a shopping cart because “it’s suicide.” If Times Square were a supermarket, it would be Super King. And it was nowhere to be on a Saturday at noon. “I don’t know if you’ve ever done drugs,” he continued, “but it’s the same thing. You quit heroin, and there’s really not much you can do with your heroin buddies.”
Out in the zoo of the parking lot, we got in my car, and waited to get out of the parking spot. We continued our conversation. “I also think it’s a little of ‘You think you’re better than me?'” Maybe never out loud, maybe never consciousy, but that is the underlining attitude from your friends when you decide not to drink. If they are going to drink, so are you. When you go out, the inevitable, “Come on! Have one!” is heard from around the table. And then if you comply, a big collective sigh of relief silently happens, and no one’s really sure why.
It might just be as simple as bonding. In 'Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee', Jerry Seinfeld’s web series, he and Larry David go to a diner and Larry orders a tea. Larry says his wife hated that he drank tea, and couldn’t understand why. “Its tea rather than coffee, is that so disturbing?” Jerry responds “You wanna know the difference? We go to an ice cream shop, I order a cone, and you get a salad. That’s the difference…it’s a mood. Who can say what creates mood? Mood is a thing that’s just there, the reason we know it’s there is that we feel it.” You order a cranberry and soda at a bar, you ruin the mood.
One of the reasons I quit drinking was it was a nightly activity. Sometimes social, but most of the time I would get off work, and want to just sink into the couch with a glass of wine. It was what I looked forward to, my new carrot. Sure, I could have green tea, but green tea didn’t fuzz my mood, and make me happy to just be on a couch the way wine did. I imagine that is the appeal of heroin.
While your drinking buddies don’t really care to hang out with you anymore, you start to making more non-drinking buddies. They are revealed to you as you go along on your journey. There are those your sober friends tell you about, there are those you might see or meet in AA, and there are those you run into at coffee shops at 8pm on a Friday night. Soon you’ll discover a whole network of happy, healthy people, and it’s a secret! It’s like they all know how great sobriety is, but also know no one wants to hear it.
In those six months, I got into hot yoga, lost 20 pounds, and started meditating. I was getting up at 7am to run, I had a new lease on life, I was on an upward spiral! Basically, I was completely insufferable. Despite how good I had it, I’m back to drinking. I enjoyed my journey, but I missed my friends. I missed going on dates and not dropping a bomb on them, and I had to tell all my drinking buddies what I’d found. How good it is on the other side, maybe we can all go sometime? If only I could get out of this parking lot.
Maria Shehata is a comedian and writer for 'My Super Overactive Imagination' and lives in Los Angeles, you can visit her site HERE!
