A Manufactured Struggle
Real work doesn’t happen in meetings. It doesn’t happen in programs. It happens in moments—small, unremarkable choices that no one else sees. Standing alone in a parking lot, deciding whether to walk into a liquor store or keep driving. Sitting in the quiet of my own mind and not reaching for a distraction. The quiet, personal decisions.
Yet for some reason, we’ve turned sobriety into an obstacle course—a process so overburdened with requirements that it feels impossible before you even begin.
The alternative to using isn’t complicated. It’s not drinking. It sounds simple. But the moment you decide to stop, the world makes sure you don’t feel capable of doing it on your own. You can pick up a beer whenever you want—no questions asked. But the moment you want to put it down? Suddenly, everyone has a prescription for how you should do it. Call yourself an alcoholic. Admit you’re powerless. Commit to a program.
Follow the steps. Surrender to the process. The more rules they handed me, the more I felt like I was failing before I even started.
It’s a manufactured struggle. Drinking is a choice so small it feels effortless. But quitting? That’s treated like an uphill battle requiring a roadmap, a sponsor, and a lifetime commitment to proving you’re in recovery. I remember sitting in meetings thinking, "How did getting better become more exhausting than staying sick?"
Most people assume quitting has to be a war. They picture the battle—clenching your fists in a meeting, gritting your teeth at a bar, white-knuckling through cravings. They expect a dramatic transformation, a full identity shift, like you’re supposed to wake up one day a completely different person. But the real change? It’s subtle. It’s a string of quiet moments where you just decide not to go back.
I remember a friend telling me I needed to “earn my sobriety.” Earn it? As if I hadn’t already paid enough—in lost years, broken relationships, and self-inflicted wounds.
That’s the trap—believing the process has to be harder than it already is.
But here’s what the recovery industry won’t tell you: Some people quit without the theatrics. Without rock bottom. Without proclamations. They just stop. No proclamations. No confessions. No steps. No permission. They just stop.
For some, the steps provide a lifeline, a guide when the path feels too dark to navigate alone. And that’s fine. If it works, it works. But for me, the steps felt like a contract I never agreed to—one that kept me tethered to the identity of being broken instead of simply moving forward.
We’ve romanticized addiction and recovery into a hero’s journey—one where you must suffer before you’re allowed to be free. But I don’t need a redemption arc. I just need to live.It wasn’t addiction that held me back. It was the belief that I needed permission to be done.
I remember the first night I tried to stop. No beer in hand. Just silence. It wasn’t the craving that got to me. It was the weight of being alone with myself. The raw edge of everything I had been drowning out.
Putting the beer down isn’t hard. What’s hard is facing what has been waiting in the quiet. The memories. The questions. The parts of yourself you don’t know how to sit with.
The real withdrawal isn’t from alcohol. It’s from the identity it built around you.
People think addiction lurks in the corners of your mind, doing pushups, waiting to pounce. But addiction doesn’t do the work—fear does. Fear of the space. Fear of what you’ll hear when the noise is gone.
Quitting doesn’t require you to dismantle yourself. It requires you to meet yourself for the first time. And that’s the part no one likes to talk about. The part where you stop running and start listening. The part where you look in the mirror and see someone you don’t fully recognize.
Sitting with yourself means confronting not just what alcohol numbed—but why you needed it in the first place. It means admitting that alcohol wasn’t a disease—it was a decision. A distraction that became a script you didn’t know how to rewrite.
We’ve complicated the narrative because it’s easier to focus on steps, sponsors, and slogans than to admit that quitting is terrifying in its simplicity.
If you’re always recovering, you never have to be recovered.
The system thrives on that—keeping you tethered to the struggle instead of freeing you from it.
But there’s no drama in deciding not to pick up the bottle again. The drama is in realizing why you ever did.
Not drinking isn’t complex because it’s impossible.
It’s difficult because it demands honesty.
It forces you to see the cracks you’ve been covering, the lies you’ve been telling yourself, and the person you’ve been avoiding.
It’s not a disease that makes quitting hard. It’s the world convincing you that you need a lifetime of proof to believe you’re allowed to stop.
At the heart of it, quitting is a choice.
But the real battle isn’t in putting the beer down.
It’s in deciding what to do with your hands once they’re empty.
It’s in learning how to live when there’s nothing left to hide behind.
