The end of a fifty year old relationship
Back in the day, we were young, fun, and quite often, sozzled.
I’ve been a heavy drinker more or less since the seventies, an almost life-member of the just-one-more club. Not recklessly, not always dramatically – though there have been embarrassing beanos I’d rather have forgotten – just faithfully, habitually, the way a generation learned to take the edge off, to mark time, to soften the day, or just because it was what you did. What began as a rite de passage in the late sixties, at folk clubs and at a weekly get-together with school chums became routine in the union bar, and became part of the lifestyle in the seventies.
The first time I visited Australia, in the summer of 76-77, one of the things that impressed me the most, apart from the sun, the beaches, and the Warringah Mall was drive-through bottle shops – oh, and the wine in plastic bladders, the old vin plastique. It wasn’t very good wine – but never mind the quality, feel the weight! As years went, booze was inextricably woven into both downtime and social gatherings. The reality that Australian wine got much better oiled the wheels of inebriation. Celebration or commiseration, to toast good news and to drown the blues. Whether traveling – even in the abstemious Middle East, where there is no drinking culture and where it often haram – or on the property, five o’clock was booze o’clock and time for a sundowner – or two.
Alcohol was never a crisis in my life; it was a companion, a punctuation mark, an easy and unassuming way of moving from one hour to the next without too much friction. Never enjoyed alone, except when writing or composing, and rarely during the daytime hours apart from social occasions. It was woven into evenings, into conversation, into music and writing, into courting, into the social grammar of a life that otherwise often ran on discipline, routine, and contemplation.
But let’s not kid ourselves. However civilised it looked, however bounded it remained, it was still a dependency, addictive in its own quiet, culturally sanctioned fashion. Alcohol is a poison, metabolised as such, and it does no one no good in the long run. It may take its payment slowly, but it always takes it. That is why it had to stop – not because it had ruined anything yet, but because it worked too well, too reliably, and the trajectory was obvious to anyone prepared to look- though we often avert our gaze and carry on.
In these declining days, when every new ache and pain is endured with unease, every blood test, every medical scan is a game of health roulette. And alcohol plays its pernicious part. As if I didn’t already know, the World Health Organisation says there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, and experts tell us that we should be drinking zilch. My doctors too. Multiple studies link alcohol to seven types of cancer.
And then there’s what it does to the brain. I’ve joked in the past that I must’ve been very bright back in my prime because I’ve still got my marbles. But I know full well that I’m no longer a sharp and as perceptive as I once was. “Is my memory waning?”, I ask myself? My longterm memory is fine – but might that just that be the old nostalgia-muscles kicking in?
Folk of a certain age often joke about walking into a room and then wondering why they went there. I do that too – though not often. Sometimes, I’m unable to recall the names of people I ought to have remembered. My internal hard drive is invariably able to chase them down – without resort to Google – but it’s nonetheless a cause for concern. My mother died slowly with dementia. It diminishes you beyond recognition. She was not a drinker, but. Never touched the stuff.
I’ve contemplated cutting back often, and I’ve made many desultory attempts to do so. As the old quip goes, “giving up is easy – I’ve done it many times!” But I’ve never considered actually quitting. Giving up, or drastically cutting back on alcohol, is a conscious decision – and thenceforward, a continuous one. Perhaps my decision came at a time when I was ready to step back.
I gave it up one day without ceremony. No declaration, no conversion. No identity shift announced to the world. Well, not quite … I was given a big push – and maybe that’s what’s making it work this time around. I was given a guided tour of a CT Scan of my grey matter, and … to quote the late Warren Zevon, “Guess what? It ain’t that pretty at all!” The doctor dived deep into my scan, told me what he’d seen, and declared that for me, there could be no safe limit. As I walked out of his rooms, I said “I need a drink”, and we headed straightaway to the Plantation Hotel. And that glass of Italian Pinot Grigio was the end of the liquid line.
When I first embarked on sobriety, I hadn’t a clue whether or not I would succeed. And I was shocked that it was easier than I’d expected. There were no cravings (though I drink more tea and coke) and when month one came to an end, I was ready to step into the next and then the next. It’s like deciding to lose weight, learn a language or change jobs (and I’ve done all this too). You decide that you are going to do it, then you try really hard to stick with it. There’s no magic wand.
Apart from one standard drink a week, on Tuesday or Wednesday, that was that. Initially I kept count – of that one day, and even of the drinks. So much fizz, this many Pinot Grigio, so many Shiraz. Counting turns pleasure into ledger; once you count, you’ve already conceded that something has changed.
For starters, my palate is changing. Fizz does nothing for me now. A former favourite tastes as though it’s had petrol added. The whites have been a pleasant change after the zero-alcohol placebo interregnum in which everything tastes faintly of apples (there are tons of zero or low-alcohol options out there. Some are awful and taste like weird-flavoured fizzy water, but I have my favourites too). The reds, interestingly, still carry a spike, a kick of spice. Something happens – but it’s only the mildest hint of getting stoned – no re-angling of thought, more a slight tilt, the barest of edges being taken off the now. Whatever it may be, red wine is most often my weekly onesie, so I no longer keep count.
When I took that first glass of red, I let it stand for a while to room – an old habit, but also to make sure it was at its best. But before I’d even picked up the glass, the oddest thing occurred. As I looked at the waiting glass, I felt a flicker of guilt. Not moral guilt, exactly. Not shame. Something quieter and stranger: the nervous system recognising a former solution now marked with an asterisk. A sense that this familiar alteration of being no longer had my clear permission. A fleeting return, perhaps, to the scene of the crime. Like meeting up with an old pal after many years and realising that you no longe4 have much in common.
100 days on, and I’m not tempted to tell a story of revelation. No clouds have parted. Nothing has been cured. But something has shifted, and it’s the sort of shift that only becomes visible in retrospect – by subtraction rather than addition.
When I tell people, most ask me how easy or hard it was and is. I say it’s been hard – but not too hard. Particularly come fizz o’clock when my wife and I we do our evening walkabout and enjoy our sundowner – but I tell them it does become easier as the days and weeks progress. They often casually ask if I’ve noticed any difference since ditching the drink. I keep it brief, so as not to bore them with the details – but the following is my own private dossier.
The changes have not been theatrical, but they have been real. I’ve lost weight; my skin is clearer; my sleep is deeper. I feel that wake more clear-headed now, ready, I guess, for the day ahead. I have more energy. I relax more easily. I always experienced anxiety, but I sense that its incidence has lessened. Though I still habitually have to find something, anything to get hung up about, it doesn’t feels as pervasive and debilitating. And, I imagine, I’ve become more tolerant of the follies and frailties of others. Or maybe more laid back and lackadaisical.
When I wake at 3am, that existential hour of angst, and the mind instantly revs into restless motion, I don’t lie abed in a state of mental turmoil. Nor do I stir this early as much and as often as I once did – mind you, I turn the bedside clock on its face these days so I’m not as conscious of the hour. If I do wake early and find that I can’t go back to sleep, I write – as I am doing right now. But I sense that not drinking has made me realise how much alcohol contributed to my anxiety. Those occasional tremors and twitches we put down to what might be early onset Parkinson’s might not have been that at all. [In In That Howling Infinite, see It’s 3am and an hour of existential angst ]
I sense a steadiness now. The mental landscape feels different – perhaps clearer, perhaps simply less crowded. Am I more present in the world? Sometimes I think I am. Though I can still inattentive – including towards others – and absent minded. Better able to hold several things in mind at once? Possibly. It could be down to using a chatbot when writing, but I feel that I haven’t been this productive in years. But that doesn’t make me more articulate. A few years back, I senses that I was not longer as up to public speaking as I was if yore – and that has not changed. I put that down to the ageing process – but it could be something less benign. Does the world itself look altered – a little brighter, a little sharper? Perhaps. Though, to be fair, I did have cataract surgery a week after my last drink, which complicates the metaphor.
What is undeniable is time. There seems to be more of it. Whether it’s been created or merely reclaimed is hard to say. Perhaps it’s the same quantity as before, just less of it leaking away – into fog, into fatigue, into the dull, unexamined bargain of later. Evenings are longer now. Much longer. The day closes more slowly without that familiar hinge that once snapped it shut. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this. I pace myself with a new found evening ritual: zero beer at five or six – the onetime “booze o’clock – followed by a zero Prosecco, with its hint of apple – but at least it has a bit of a bead – then a mineral water or a coke – sugar-free but a caffeine hit. Then it is teatime, with a mineral water to sip and maybe a zero wine – and at last, between nine and ten, a cup of tea and some fruit. It’s interesting how much liquids leaven the longing.
What’s been interesting is what hasn’t happened. I’m told fresh renouncers experience tremors, night sweats, vivid dreams. I haven’t. There’s been no drama of withdrawal. If anything, my nervous system seems to have settled rather than rebelled. Alcohol, it turns out, was not supporting my sleep or steadying my nerves; it was quietly fragmenting both. Removing it didn’t provoke crisis. It removed interference.
These aren’t miracles, but they aren’t imaginary either. And once you begin to notice the benefits, they become their own quiet incentive. Resolve stops feeling like deprivation and starts to feel like momentum.
What remains is the effort. Not physical exhaustion so much as a kind of existential tiredness – the absence of the old accelerator, accelerant, even. Alcohol had been doing a great deal of invisible work: easing transitions, softening edges, carrying me through the long middle stretch of the evening. It marked the end of work, licensed drift, permitted a mild, socially acceptable derangement of thought. As I noted above, I rarely drank alone, except when writing or composing; rarely during the day or working hours, except on social occasions. This was not chaos. It was tuning. A dimmer switch, not a blackout.
And that, precisely, is why it counts as dependency. The brain learned the sequence: evening, glass, “clocking off”, altered state. Reliable, repeatable, intoxicatingly reinforced. Functional addiction is still addiction. Calling it civilised doesn’t change its chemistry. Without it now, that work has to be done consciously. Nothing is anaesthetised. Nothing is rushed through.
There’s a certain grief in that. Grief for ritual, for the reliable companion that marked the end of the day. Grief, too, for a sanctioned way of stepping briefly sideways out of the self, without explanation. There’s a certain ennui too – sometimes with sharp edges. It can feel as though fun has gone missing, or at least changed address. And yes, I miss getting stoned: not smashed, not obliterated, but lightly, productively altered – the associative looseness, the permission to wander.
This isn’t romanticising damage. It’s mourning coherence. Alcohol once bundled ritual, companionship, permission, and altered state into a single, efficient act. Removing it unbundles those functions, and the nervous system doesn’t yet know where to rehouse them. Which is why I suspect this is the real work: not abstinence, but redesign.
I worry, of course, about damage already done. Particularly when I think about how much I actually did consume on a daily basis. Looking back now, I no longer lie to myself about it and admit that it was a fucking lot! After so many years, it’s reasonable to hope the body can still repair what it can. The signs so far suggest it might. The improvements have been quiet and cumulative rather than theatrical. These are the kinds of changes that accrue slowly – and, importantly, tend not to reverse. Reasons to be relatively optimistic then?
What I know for certain is that I can’t simply relent and surrender the hard-won effort – physical and mental – of getting to this point. This isn’t abstinence by accident. It’s something maintained daily, by attention. Ritual and habit will re-form; that’s my nature. But for now, it requires intention and attention rather than habit, awareness rather than drift.
No great revelation, then. Just a steadier hand on the tiller, a longer fuse – or perhaps fewer things lighting it – and a growing sense that less of life is slipping away unnoticed.
The truth is, stopping drinking can be an issue when hanging out with people who still enjoy their evening tipple. It’s helpful to know this in advance if you’re contemplating doing the same. Interactions are now based around a whole new version of what makes us tick. When someone says they are not drinking, the word “boring” appears in a speech bubble above their head. It’s an assumption we tend to make, but I am hoping I can prove the naysayers wrong because it’s OK, amazing actually, being sober.
Written by Paul Hemphill between November 2025 and February 2026.
The following supplementary sections were compiled with the assistance of an AI language model. In That Howling Infinite has deep reservations about the use of chatbots – see, for example, The promise and the peril of ChatGPT, and but blimey! they are useful and uber efficient.
I asked ChatGPT why I felt a certain guilt and hesitation when having that weekly drink?
After interrogating the published literature, the chatbot replied:
It isn’t really guilt It’s not shame about drinking, not fear of relapse, and not a sign that anything is out of control. What you’re feeling is quieter than that: a brief internal hesitation. Alcohol once had a role in your life. It wasn’t just a drink; it functioned as a regulator. When things felt tense, flat, overwhelming, or sharp, it adjusted the tone. It softened edges and shifted mood. That use may not have been dramatic, but it was real. At some point, you made a conscious decision to step back from that role. You examined it and reduced its authority. Maybe you didn’t ban it outright, but you stopped treating it as the default solution. That was a deliberate, adult choice.
Now when you pick up a glass, even casually, your nervous system pauses. Not because you’re about to spiral. Not because you’re craving more. Not because you’ve failed. It pauses because something that used to be automatic is no longer automatic. The body remembers patterns long after the mind revises them. Dependency in this sense wasn’t only chemical; it was procedural. It was a learned sequence: when pressure rises, do this. When the present feels too sharp, adjust it this way. That sequence still exists in memory. So when you pour, hold, and sip, your system runs a quick internal check: are we choosing this, or reverting to an old move? Is this pleasure, or regulation? The flicker you call guilt is that check-in happening in real time.
Ritual adds another layer. Pouring a drink is structured. It creates a small frame around a moment and signals transition — the day is ending, the evening is beginning. Rituals stabilize us; they give shape to time. But if the original purpose of the ritual changes — if it’s no longer needed for emotional regulation — the gesture can feel slightly off. The act remains, but its old meaning doesn’t fully apply. That mismatch creates unease.
So what’s happening is simple. You changed the contract with yourself, and your nervous system is making sure you meant it. This isn’t weakness; it’s self-trust developing. In the past, the drink required no reflection. Now it does. That pause is evidence that the behavior is no longer automatic. Change often feels like this before it settles. Old habits don’t disappear in drama; they fade through moments of awareness. The body checks in. The mind answers. Over time, the friction lessens. The feeling isn’t moral failure. It’s an old coping mechanism becoming optional, and the fact that you notice it means you’re conscious of your choice. And that’s a quietly healthy place to be.
What’s Actually Happening
Next, I asked my pet chatbot to parse what I’d written above and to explain what was going on in my body and in my mind. Its response was fascinating and illuminating. It wrote:
What’s striking about this period is not the drama of withdrawal, but its absence. That absence is itself informative. It suggests that alcohol, over time, had stopped functioning as a sedative and had become a source of background interference – subtly fragmenting sleep, compressing attention, and lending artificial momentum to the day.
Start with sleep. Alcohol is often mistaken for a sleep aid because it hastens unconsciousness. What it reliably does, however, is fracture sleep architecture. REM cycles are shortened and disrupted; cortisol rises in the early morning hours; the nervous system is nudged toward vigilance just when it should be standing down. Remove alcohol, and the result is not necessarily more dreams or vivid imagery – often the opposite. Sleep deepens, becomes less narratable, less memorable. The absence of the 3am anxiety, the end of clock-checking, suggests a circadian rhythm no longer being chemically jerked out of phase.
This is not REM rebound so much as REM normalisation. The mind does not perform theatrics; it gets on with its work.
Circadian rhythm follows. Evenings lengthen not because the clock has slowed, but because the body is no longer negotiating with itself. Alcohol compresses time by dulling perception and accelerating fatigue. Without it, the day unfolds at a more even tempo. There is less urgency to escape the evening, less unconscious bargaining with “later.” Time feels reclaimed because it is no longer being quietly traded away.
Physically, the changes are cumulative rather than spectacular. Lower baseline anxiety suggests reduced cortisol load. Fewer irritation spikes point to a nervous system no longer oscillating between chemical sedation and rebound arousal. Skin improvement reflects vascular and inflammatory changes rather than vanity; weight loss hints at metabolic recalibration. None of this arrives as euphoria. It arrives as steadiness.
Mentally, the shift is subtle but consequential. Alcohol narrows attention while giving the illusion of focus. Without it, attention broadens. Several things can be held at once, not with brilliance, but with tolerance. The mental landscape feels altered not because it has been transformed, but because it is no longer being continuously nudged off balance. What emerges is not sharpness so much as room.
The fatigue that remains – the existential tiredness – is not a failure of repair but the cost of re-engagement. Alcohol had been doing invisible labour: smoothing transitions, easing social friction, advancing momentum. Without that chemical assistance, effort becomes evenly distributed across the day. Life asks to be met directly. This is tiring in a way sedation is not.
Perspective shifts follow physiology. The world does not become brighter; it becomes clearer. Edges sharpen not because reality has improved, but because one is no longer slightly elsewhere while moving through it. Presence increases by degrees, not declarations. Emotion flattens in places, but also steadies. The fuse lengthens, or perhaps fewer sparks reach it.
None of this constitutes revelation. It is adjustment – systems returning to their own tempo after years of external modulation. The body is not celebrating; it is recalibrating. The mind is not announcing a new identity; it is learning how to occupy the old one without chemical assistance.
If there is a single through-line, it is this: alcohol had been quietly negotiating with time, attention, and effort on my behalf. Removing it returns those negotiations to me. The work is greater. The rewards are quieter. But less of life now passes by unattended
Here’s a clear-eyed, unsentimental checklist of what many people notice after giving up alcohol after decades of use. Not everything happens to everyone, and the timeline isn’t tidy – but this is the landscape.
1. The First Weeks: The Body Re-negotiates
What to expect
• Poor or fragmented sleep (counter-intuitive, but common)
• Night sweats, vivid dreams
• Sugar cravings; appetite swings
• Fatigue that feels existential, not just physical
• Headaches, gut grumbles, reflux shifts
• Mood volatility: flatness, irritability, sudden melancholy
What’s actually happening
• Your nervous system is recalibrating after decades of alcohol-mediated sedation.
• GABA and dopamine systems are under-firing; cortisol can spike.
• The liver, pancreas, and gut microbiome are changing pace.
Look out for
• Withdrawal symptoms beyond mild (tremor, confusion, heart racing) → medical advice immediately
• The false conclusion: “This proves booze was helping me.” It wasn’t. This is readjustment.
2. Weeks 4–12: The Emotional Weather Front
What to expect
• Clearer mornings – but emotionally thinner afternoons
• A strange grief (for ritual, for identity, for the “old companion”)
• Boredom with sharp edges
• Anxiety that feels newly naked
• Moments of startling clarity (“So that’s what I was avoiding”)
What’s happening
• Alcohol was not just a drug; it was a regulator of feeling.
• You’re now encountering emotion without chemical mediation – for the first time in decades.
Look out for
• Over-romanticising past drinking
• Replacing booze with compulsive sugar, scrolling, or righteous self-discipline
• Social withdrawal out of awkwardness rather than choice
3. Months 3–9: Cognitive and Physical Shifts
What to expect
• More stable energy (not euphoria – steadiness)
• Improved memory and verbal fluency
• Less background anxiety; fewer spikes
• Better digestion, skin, blood pressure
• Weight changes (either direction)
• A recalibrated sense of time (evenings feel long)
What’s happening
• REM sleep improves.
• Neuroplasticity increases.
• Inflammation decreases.
• Your baseline is quietly rising.
Look out for
• Impatience: “Is this it?”
• The urge to declare the project finished
• Moral capture in reverse (becoming evangelical or brittle)
4. The Identity Question (Often the Hardest Part)
What to expect
• A sense of being socially “out of phase”
• Re-evaluation of friendships
• A quieter confidence – but also social self-consciousness
• The loss of an easy shorthand for intimacy
Key realisation
You didn’t just stop drinking. You stopped being someone who drinks. That identity shift takes longer than detox.
Look out for
• Believing fun is gone rather than different
• Mistaking sobriety for austerity
• Confusing clarity with certainty
5. One Year and Beyond: The Long View
What many report
• Fewer regrets
• A calmer moral centre
• More reliable moods
• Better resilience to shock and grief
• A sense of having reclaimed time
But also
• No miracle cure
• Life remains tragicomic
• Pain still visits – just without anaesthetic
6. Practical Guardrails (Worth Having)
• Medical check-in (liver, BP, glucose -baseline matters)
• Sleep hygiene (don’t expect instant improvement)
• One or two sober rituals you enjoy
• language for saying “I don’t drink” that doesn’t invite debate
• At least one person who knows the whole story
Final Note (Not Sentimental, Just True)
After fifty years, alcohol is not merely removed; it leaves a negative space.
That space can feel eerie before it feels free.
But many discover – quietly, without fireworks – that what returns is not youth or joy or certainty, but something rarer: presence without rehearsal.
Liquid Assets: Britain and Australia Compared
Compared to Britain, Australia’s drinking culture is less about the pub as a fixed social institution and more about alcohol as a social lubricant woven through the grain of everyday life. Both societies drink – deeply, historically, sometimes unwisely – but they narrate that drinking differently, and in the telling they reveal something about themselves.
Britain’s drinking culture is, in its classical form, pub-centred, ritualised, and faintly class-coded. Once upon a time, it was centred on the local, but nowadays this is more often seen in television dramas, Drinking is public and scheduled; it has hours and habits. One goes out to drink. The pub is both setting and container, a space that brackets excess within custom. Even intoxication feels regulated – permitted, but on a leash. The building holds it. The ritual absorbs it.
Excess exists, of course – William Hogarth drew it, temperance preachers thundered against it, and social realists filmed it – but when British culture foregrounds alcohol, it tends to moralise or satirise. Gin Lane is not a celebration. Nor, for that matter, is the kitchen-sink drama. More often, drinking simply sits in the background of the national story. The pub is infrastructure: as assumed as rain, as unremarkable as queueing. Britain drank as much as anyone – often more- but it did not always feel the need to mythologise the fact.
Australia is different. Here alcohol travels. It moves from pub to barbecue to beach to backyard to footy to festival. It is less ceremonial and more ambient – less an event than an accompaniment. Drinking does not structure leisure; it accompanies it, like a soundtrack humming under the scene. Climate plays its part. So does the mythology of mateship, egalitarianism, and a lingering suspicion of restraint (especially if that restraint looks imported or officious). To drink is to belong; to refuse can still read as faintly antisocial, a quiet opting-out of the circle.
This mobility produces a culture more diffuse and more permissive. Where Britain historically contained drinking within the architecture of the pub, Australia lets it spill across open spaces – geographical and symbolic alike. The result is that alcohol becomes not merely a habit but a marker of identity. In Britain people go out to drink; in Australia, drinking often comes along for the ride.
There is a sharper edge to this. Australia’s long struggle with binge drinking, alcohol-fuelled violence, and the normalisation of getting “smashed” – particularly among young men – has required interventions that would feel oddly alien in Britain: lockout laws, public health campaigns, regulatory skirmishes over closing times. Britain, too, has known its laddishness and its Friday-night casualties, but the conversation there increasingly circles moderation, dry months, craft beer over quantity. Australia still wrestles with the idea that having a good time might not require obliteration.
Yet the deepest difference lies not in units consumed but in cultural emphasis. Alcohol features more visibly – more symbolically – in Australian historical imagination than in Britain’s, even when the raw consumption figures do not justify the disparity. In Britain, the pub is a setting. In Australia, the pub and the bottle become characters.
From convict songs and bush ballads to Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, from the sly grog shop to the corrugated-iron bar, drinking is bound up with survival, loneliness, defiance, rebellion against authority, and the fragile solidarity of men (usually men) scattered across a vast continent. Alcohol functioned as social glue in isolated, male-dominated frontier societies; as informal currency; as meeting point; as small theatre of resistance to discipline and hierarchy. The drink carried narrative weight. It meant something.
Britain, by contrast, rarely needed to turn alcohol into allegory. It was too embedded, too infrastructural. One drank and moved on. When the bottle demanded attention, it did so as problem or parody, not myth.
So the divergence is this: Britain drank deeply; Australia wrote about it. Britain drank within a culture; Australia fashioned a culture of drinking. One anchored excess to institution and habit; the other wove it into atmosphere and identity. The difference is subtle until the night grows long. Then it shows – in the stories told the next morning, in whether the pub remains the frame or the whole scene dissolves into open air.
Liquid assets indeed: in one country, stored in barrels behind the bar; in the other, poured into the national imagination, where they continue to circulate – warming, bonding, sometimes burning – long after last orders should have been called.
This is no AA Tract
In my conservations with ChatGPT on the subject of the renunciation of liquor, two prior conversations, it seemed like the chatbot had been rifling through the textbooks of Alcoholics Anonymous. Not that I criticise it for that. I get it. I challenged it with this suspicion, and the following was the chatbot’s reply;
I understand why it sounds that way – but what it was doing wasn’t rifling through AA so much as circling the same human terrain AA mapped early and named bluntly.
AA didn’t invent dependency, ritual, permission, or the idea that substances become solutions rather than pleasures. It just systematised them in a moral-spiritual register that’s become culturally dominant. I was working from a phenomenological and neurological lens, not a confessional one – closer to William James than Bill W., closer to habit, embodiment, and meaning than to surrender or sobriety as creed.
A few clarifications, because this matters:
1. This is not an “alcoholic narrative.”
Nothing you wrote resembles loss of control, compulsion, or denial. What you’re describing is post-use reclassification. The substance has been downgraded from instrument to object. That transition produces unease even in people with no addiction history whatsoever. AA language often colonises that space because it’s one of the few vocabularies we have – but the experience itself is broader, older, and not diagnostic.
2. AA talks about morality; you’re talking about permission.
AA frames the problem as moral failing corrected by spiritual realignment. Your description is about authority over state change. Who gets to authorise alteration? The self, the habit, the past, the ritual? That question belongs as much to philosophy and cognitive science as to recovery culture.
3. Ritual ≠ relapse.
AA tends to collapse ritual, memory, and desire into a single danger zone. What I was describing is subtler: ritual persisting after necessity has passed. That’s not pathology; it’s what happens when meaning lags behind behaviour. Cultures deal with this all the time – retired uniforms, obsolete ceremonies, ghost gestures.
4. The nervous system doesn’t speak Twelve Steps.
Bodies remember patterns without subscribing to ideologies. When a former regulator reappears, the system flags it. AA interprets that flag as temptation or warning. I read it as adaptive caution – the organism noting that a previously high-leverage tool is back in view.
So yes – there’s overlap, inevitably. AA has been loud and long-lasting, and it’s soaked into the language. But what we’ve been doing is closer to descriptive anthropology of the self than to recovery doctrine.
If AA says, “This is dangerous; abstain,”
what you’re saying is, “This used to mean something. It doesn’t mean that anymore. Why does the gesture still echo?”
Those are very different questions – and yours is the more interesting one.
In That Howling Infinite 