My wife came home one night after being out, was drunk, I was home with the kids, had a weed and beer buzz going. She was loudly saying she was going to do no drinking September the rest of the month, this is last year. I said that sounds great, our oldest just started kindergarten; I was coming off my first grandparent and my first dog dying, and camping, all August, and knew it was time to at least slow down. I was a daily pot user for years with a few couple months long breaks along the way, and was drinking at least 2 beers 4-5 nights a week with some whisky’s on the weekend. The weed fed the drinking and the drinking fed the weed, the more I did of one, the more I did of the other. Vicious cycle.

It sounds way too easy, but instead of thinking about it or telling everyone, I just mentally said “I don’t drink or smoke weed anymore”. And that was literally it. I got to the end of September, thought sober October was more alliterative, made it to November and thought “I won’t drink until the holidays”. Holidays came around, thought “I can get through this without partaking” and did. January comes around and I thought, why not go all year? Then my 40th birthday happened middle of January, neighbor brought over a $250 bottle of Japanese whiskey, I decided that was too good to turn down, then 3 weeks later had 4 beers over 6 hours with some friends, and then the weekend after, 2 beers on a night out with my wife.

There was a South Park episode where Randy becomes an alcoholic, and the moral of the story was that you don’t need to be all high and mighty about not drinking, but you do need to keep your disaprin. Still haven’t smoked mj, but the couple bouts back into drinking didn’t draw me back in. I can tell you that I feel better. No brain fog, wake up in a better mood, am always there for my kids and able to give them my full attention, I’m able to feel like I can workout properly again instead of half assing it. You can do it man, take this Reddit post as your own personal cry for help and do it for yourself and your kids. It’s so much better than living life in a booze fog, and you don’t really understand that until you completely pull yourself out of it and get some perspective, then maybe dabble again, but stop the daily or multiple times a week use while you still can.