I had never paid attention to Dry January, now winding to a close as “Feb Fast” winds up, until a colleague reached out before the New Year to tell me he was “sober curious” and intended to stop drinking for a month. He had seen my reference in an earlier blog post to being sober and was looking for support and affirmation, which I happily provided.

That’s what those of us in the recovery community are called to do.

Since then, I’ve been awash in information about Dry January, from recipes for mocktails — my own go-to is orange juice and club soda — to guidance about how to “cut down” if you’d rather not quit outright (“Not Drunk, Not Dry,” a New York Times headline calls it) and what to tell people who wonder why you’re not drinking. Apparently “that’s my business” doesn’t suffice, especially at a work function.

“If you decide to quit alcohol for a month but still have the identity of a drinker, then any change can feel unsustainable.”

Amid all the podcasts and magazine articles and the interesting statistics — one third of adult Americans participate in “some form” of Dry January, according to Newsweek, while nearly half of young adults try to abstain — have come two serious, significant milestones:

• The U.S. surgeon general issued a report in early January linking any use of alcohol to a greater risk for cancer. That led one wine aficionado (otherwise called an oenophile, which I won’t pretend I can pronounce) to decry the warning as a “very unnuanced, binary solution to what feels like a very nuanced problem.”
• I celebrated 15 years of sobriety on January 10, 2025, a hard-won victory for which I am humbled and grateful — and, yes, not a little bit proud. Acknowledging and accepting myself as a problem drinker (say it, an alcoholic) remains a daily practice of outreach and introspection. And it is something entirely different than gritting your teeth and giving up alcohol for a month or a few weeks, or even a year. Trust me, I tried.

“If you decide to quit alcohol for a month but still have the identity of a ‘drinker’— physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and relationally — then any change can feel dissonant and unsustainable as we’re only addressing a part of the problem,” wrote psychologist Amanda Charles in an article a year ago about why Dry January often fails.

Well-intentioned, likely health-conscious people equate not drinking with sobriety when they toss around terms like “sober curious” and “sober-ish.” They’re not aiming to be sober, with the lifelong dedication that requires; they just want to feel better for a while: to clear their head, lose some weight, improve their sleep. I applaud their efforts, even as I know firsthand that some of these temporary teetotalers are deluding themselves, unwilling or unable to face a larger problem.

I first talked about my sobriety publicly back in 2016, when I published a blog post at six years sober. My mother, who had seen me through outpatient treatment at Hazelden in 2010, had died the year before, and though I shared the post on Facebook, I didn’t point other family members to it. If any of them read it, they never said anything.

This year, I wanted to be different. More open, less ashamed.

I texted my three surviving siblings on the morning of my 15th year anniversary (the fourth sibling, my older brother, died of acute cocaine toxicity back in 1988, a tragedy that underscores the importance of my sobriety). My younger brother and I exchanged texts about the distinction between being dry — or clean, the more common term for drug users who are abstaining — and sober. “Clean is not using,” he said, repeating what an acquaintance of his younger son had told him. “Sober is more about making good decisions, if I recall.”

“Yes,” I replied, “and following the steps” — meaning the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, a worldwide society that is becoming less secretive in a digital, more enlightened age. “The steps,” I told him, “are about owning our own shit, helping others and recognizing what we can and can’t control.”

If you can’t control or stop your drinking, you will have to set aside your ego and ask for help.

My shorthand, somewhat crude description speaks to a more eloquent and essential truth: If you can’t control or stop your drinking, which I could not — despite all the self-discipline in other areas of my life — you will have to set aside your ego and ask for help. It’s both the hardest and the best decision I’ve ever made.

That is where AA comes into play. The 12 Steps require chronic alcohol abusers to examine why they drank, whom their drinking harmed (for years, I fooled myself that my consumption hurt only me, even though I didn’t get sober until my sons were 15 and 18) and how they will live a moral, more honest life. My favorite is Step 10 — “We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it” — because it helps me try to be a better person every day.

When my older sister praised me for helping others, I explained that unity, service and recovery are the three pillars of AA: “The first word in the first step is ‘we.’ No one gets sober alone,” I said, “or at least I couldn’t.”

Rather than viewing that as weakness, we have to learn to see humility as a necessary strength. My sponsor put it this way during one of our weekly phone calls: “If we could have put the pause on our drinking, we would have,” she said. “The great, great joy is in the connections we are now able to make. We learn how to be vulnerable and share our beautiful brokenness.”

The gift of being sober is so much more than putting down the bottle, and it’s something that Dry January alone will never teach you.