Wide Awake

Nine months without alcohol and the body is the last to get the memo

It was Friday evening, and Greg and I had walked out to watch the sun go down near the flower meadow the way we normally do when the week finally exhales. The mountains were glistening as they do at golden hour. The air smelled like dry grass, sage in the distance, and a big ol’ warm hug.

I said, out loud, without thinking, just blurting: “God, this moment would be so nice with a glass of Cabernet.”

I felt it before I finished the sentence. A tingle. Through my whole body. Not a craving exactly, not a siren, nothing dark or desperate. Just a memory the body carries before the mind can even name it.

It didn’t feel like weakness. And it was not even desire, not really. It was conditioning. Over decades, my nervous system had been taught to expect a certain thing at a certain hour in a certain kind of light. You see, the brain loves a pattern. It reaches, automatically, efficiently, for what it has always known to reach for. Friday evening, golden mountains, the exhale at the end of a long week. The body fires the old signal.

That is not a moral failing. That is biology finishing a sentence it started years ago.

Greg looked at me. “Is this hard?”

I thought about it honestly.

“There is not a single cell in my body that wants to actually go into that kitchen right now,” I told him. “The answer is no. But this needs to be noted. This is the de-programming. The unwiring. My body knows this scene all too well.”

Nine months in, and the body is sometimes the last to get the memo.

Day 273 alcohol-free.

What I did in that moment — what I am learning to do with regularity — is stay. Not white-knuckle it. Not distract myself or bargain or reach for something to fill the space. Just stay. Feel it. Name it. Let it pass.

I used to leave. Not dramatically, not consciously, but I left. A glass of wine was how I softened the edges of a moment that was already beautiful enough. Already full enough. I left anyway, habitually, because leaving was what I had always done at that hour in that light.

I am learning to stay.

An non-alcoholic Negroni from Felix in Venice. So good!

The next morning, a Saturday, Greg and I made a silly little dancing video for Instagram and then just kept the music going because why would you stop? The speakers were up. The eighties were loud. And at some point I grabbed my Sonos Move, the little one I can carry in one hand, and I just started moving through the house.

Through the kitchen. Down the hall. Into the living room.

Singing. Actually singing, at full volume, into no one and nothing. A one-woman concert for an audience of zero (except maybe a very perplexed Rufus).

And something happened in my body that I am still trying to find the right words for. It was joy, yes, but it was more than that. Cleaner than that. More electric. I was laughing because I could feel it — this freedom — moving through me like something I hadn’t been allowed to touch in a very long time.

I used to dance on tables. Several glasses in, fearless, or so I thought, laughing about it the next day as if that was the story. As if that was the good part. But here is what I know now that I did not know then: that feeling never reached the level of what I felt on a Saturday morning at home, sober, carrying a speaker through the house in my socks.

I was staying. Fully. Inside my own body, inside my own life, inside a joy that didn’t need anything more.

It’s the clearest I can say it: being alcohol-free feels like a drug. A better one. A real one. It is that alive. That free. That loud in the best possible way.

I can now go out to events (like YSE 3rd birthday party) and drink sparkling water. I took this pic after I got home. I don’t look dull or buzzed or ready for bed. My skin and eyes are clear. I still have energy. THIS makes me a kind of happy that is hard to describe. Self-love in full display.

And then there is the quieter thing, the one that’s harder to explain, which is what I’ve started to notice in the small and ordinary moments of my days.

I am a Virgo. Highly organized, productively wired, always moving. People who know me would tell you I’ve never been someone who fumbles. And that is true, technically. I’ve always gotten from A to Z with ease. Always checked the boxes. Always delivered.

But now, in comparison, looking back - there was a layer of fog over all of it that I could not see clearly until it lifted.

What I understand now is that I was rushing through my own life so very often. Not carelessly. Not lazily. But there was a low hum of urgency underneath everything, a need to get to the next thing, to accomplish, to arrive. I was productive in the way a person is productive when they are not quite fully present. Moving efficiently through moments I was not entirely inside.

I notice the absence of that fog now in the otherwise mundane moments in the kitchen. Everything has moved into a slightly slower gear and I am more available. Available is the word I keep coming back to. I add collagen to my coffee and I actually stir it, all the way through, feeling the warmth of the steamed oat milk rise up. I’m not rushing toward the next thing. I am in the thing I’m in. Completely there.

Yesterday I had a journaling session and I got out the colored markers. The stickers. I made something. Not because I had to, not because it was efficient, but because I deep down consider myself an artist and somewhere along the way I forgot that artists need to play. The session was unhurried and spacious and alive in a way I can only describe as: this is what I was supposed to feel like.

Nine months of this now and I am learning, slowly, to stop rushing toward the end of my own moments.

To stay.

I always loved flowers, I mean, who doesn’t? But now I have time for them. I stop and stare. The detail. The intricacy.

I get asked about The How more than anything else. Not the why — most women who are asking already know the why. The How.

• How do you get through the first days and what do they actually feel like?

• How do you continue to socialize in public?

• How much or how little do you explain to people when they ask why you’re not drinking?

• How do you handle five o’clock when the whole nervous system is remembering an old ritual?

A while back I wrote it all down. Everything I wish someone had handed me before I began. It is called The How and it lives on my website. It is not a program or a plan or a set of rules. It is more like sitting across from someone who has been in the exact moment you are standing in right now. If you are curious — or if someone you love is somewhere in this question — it is there whenever you need it.

Here is what I want to say to anyone who is sitting somewhere in their first weeks or months, wondering if the trade is worth it, wondering what you actually get in return for the thing you gave up:

You get the sunset without needing anything more.

You get the dancing, in all of its exhilaration and release - zero fog.

You get the stir of the oat milk. The colored markers. The Saturday morning concert, hangover-free.

You get to stay. Inside your own life. Inside your own body. Inside the moment you are actually living instead of the softer, blurred version of it.

You get to be wide awake.

Will I ever stop feeling that ghost of a tingle on a Friday evening when the light is right and the mountains are golden? Probably not entirely. I’m not sure I’d want to, though. It is now a reminder of how long I chose an accessory, this accomplice, I no longer need. It’s the brain completing an old sentence again. And each time I let it pass without answering it, the pattern loosens a little more. The rewiring happens slowly, quietly, one golden hour at a time.

But I am not in that kitchen reaching for the glass.

I’m outside. I’m watching the light. I’m feeling the breeze. My inner child thanks me.

I’m already full.

I am staying.

With love from the ranch,

Catt 🌱