I saw a client the other day who's getting ready to leave rehab, and he's struggling with a question a lot of us in sobriety ask ourselves at some point: what if I'm not really an alcoholic?
One of the hardest parts of getting sober is the notion that you can never drink again. It feels so final, so daunting, so overwhelming. It's a little like being told you can never speak to a good friend again — sure, they were kind of toxic, but man, you had some good times together.
Here's the thing about sobriety: there's no blood test that's going to definitively confirm whether or not you're an alcoholic. At the end of the day, it's something you have to determine for yourself.
But you also don't have to commit to never drinking again. That's why the AA motto is "one day at a time." All it's ever really asking of anyone is: don't drink today. Decide tomorrow if you want to drink tomorrow.
Sobriety Is a Choice, Not a Sentence
The whole idea behind sobriety is that it improves your life. Things get better when you don't drink. But if that's not true for you, you always have the option to go back to drinking. If you genuinely think your life will be better with alcohol in it, then have a drink!
Brad Pitt just made that exact decision. Earlier this month, he shared that after seven years of sobriety, he's drinking again — "in a more restrained manner." Is that going to go well for him? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. But either way, he'll always have those seven years to inform how he wants to live going forward. His time sober doesn’t become meaningless just because he’s gone back to using alcohol.
I haven't had a drink in over nine years, and I still wonder sometimes if I could go back to it. But my life is so much better without alcohol that it doesn't make any sense for me to reintroduce it. Too much risk, no real benefit.
But that's just me. And maybe that will change someday. It remains my choice, same as it is yours.
The trick is this: once you start seeing sobriety as a choice you get to make every single day — instead of a lifetime prison sentence — you start to understand it as a lot more liberating than limiting.
