Week 1 is in the books and it was actually easier than I thought it would be! I did have a few weak moments, particularly at the end of a few stressful days when I normally would crack one open. But I found other things to do and actually I don’t miss alcohol at all. I will say that I have yet to be really tested because I haven’t been in any social situations where alcohol is present since I started. This weekend I am going to Springfield to visit my younger brother, Ben, who is in town for the weekend and we typically do go out one night for drinks when he is in town, but this isn’t going to be a high pressure situation or anything, so I’m confident the first 10 days will go by without a hitch.

I find that I am very at peace with my decision to stop drinking and that I don’t see that the quality of my life will decrease at all. I do think that I will have a few friends drift away since we historically have been drinking whenever we hung out for roughly the past 10 years. And I also will miss going to certain events, like house parties, Oktoberfest (which is huge in Cincinnati), SantaCon (also big here), and things like that. I will still go to some house parties but I will be much more choosy about which invites gain my attention and which aren’t important. Wedding invite from a long-time friend? Of course I’ll be there! Beer olympics with the regular crew? I’ll sit this one out.

They say that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, and so the 5 people I spend the most time with from here on out will be the people whose life approximates the life that I want to build for myself. Thinking in the long term is a high indicator of future wealth and success, and so every major decision I make, I think about how this will shape my life at 35 (I’m currently 27). That is probably too short term still but I need a goal that I can see and have some idea of what it looks like, and anything past 35 I have no idea what will happen yet. But at 35, I strive to be (1) a DPT grad, (2) have the house paid off, (3) have student loans paid off (so totally debt free!), (4) have a net worth of $500,000, (5) be married to or dating a high quality woman that truly makes my life better, and have the time to cultivate my family and positive social relationships, (6) in killer physical shape (my disciplines of choice are BJJ, yoga, and running), and (7) have several hobbies and personal projects that I spend my free time on that are positive.

Drinking will not prevent me from completing a DPT program, but if I continue, it will be hell on my long term financial and physical fitness goals. In addition, in the past I have failed to build strong relationships (both socially and romantically) when the opportunities have presented themselves because I was more preoccupied with getting drunk and having a good time than in meeting people and actually getting to know them past a surface-level acquaintance, and I’m sure their opinions of me have been defined by those interactions. And finally, drinking has taken up far too much of my free time that should be spent pursuing hobbies and interests.

In closing, I’m stoked about having week 1 in the books and looking forward to pushing forward! This week I plan on doing a lot of BJJ, submitting my PTCAS application, working a lottt, and possibly getting a Friday night job.

It’s a Tuesday night and I had a fantastic day. I woke up this morning at 5:30 and went in early to work. I had energy at work and finalized plans to play on an after work volleyball league starting next month at Grand Sands. I was able to finish up at work early and make it to the Gracie gym for BJJ tonight. Every class we practice 2 techniques for a total of an hour, plus I get a typically quick workout in beforehand. Today I did a few fast circuits of pull ups, push ups, single leg bridges, and technical get ups. In class we trained pull guard and elbow escape from side mount. I’m really getting the hang of the techniques and building some muscle memory, and I’m pretty happy to have found something to train for. It typically takes about 2 and a half years to earn a blue belt, which is what I currently have my sights set on. After BJJ, I chatted up some of the guys, came home to walk Keino in downtown Loveland, and worked on my grad school apps.

I’m really happy that my life is so full without alcohol. Literally every minute of every day I have something to do that is important to me, and I have a lot of things that I look forward to making happen. Without a sense of Purpose, I would not have any kind of feeling of fulfillment in my life and would probably have already caved and picked up a 6-pack out of sheer boredom. I think it’s important for everyone to know exactly what their Purpose is, or at least be looking to find one. The things that I consider my Purpose that give my life meaning are:

1. Working toward my DPT, which currently means completing my applications, paying down the house, saving up money, preparing for grad school interviews, and doubling down at work.
2. Being a good family member. It is hard to visit family as often as I should with them being spread out (the closest ones are and hour and a half away). But that isn’t a good excuse. Family comes first.
3. Taking care of Keino. I don’t really like having roommates and feel like I’ve outgrown them anyhow (I’m 27), but I can’t imagine living alone happily without some kind of company. Keino is very good company and in the rare instance when I don’t have things to work on after work, I always have him to look after. I always get shit for saying so, but a dog is basically a child. You feed them, you exercise them, and eventually they learn where not to poop.
4. Training BJJ. I was very lucky to find the quality of gym nearby that I did. Whenever I have free time I find myself watching tutorials on different techniques and watching UFC fights, which used to look like complete chaos to me, but is extremely technical and amazing to watch when you know enough to appreciate the sport. I consider myself someone who appreciates a perfected art when I see it, whether or not it is something that I understand fully. On a certain level admiring a finely crafted watch is not so different than a finely crafted fighting style.
5. Supporting the community. I became a homeowner for the first time a year and a half ago and have a lot of pride in the beautiful Cincinnati suburb that I call my home. As such, I regularly support the local businesses, races, street festivals, bands, and volunteer my time at the fire department, and I can regularly be found on the bike trail running through downtown.
6. Being financially successful. I spend a decent amount of time researching stocks, putting my money to work, and picking up extra hours at work. I find it very rewarding to work and invest and watch my money grow, but I listed this last for a reason, and that is that each of the five items I mentioned earlier are more important to me than money, and warrant a higher Purpose than financial success does.

Obviously I did not include my social or dating life in my Purpose, although those are things that are important to me, I consider them more leisure time activities. And I have no problem with leisure but I prefer to spend the majority of my time working on those things that make me feel fulfilled. If I start to feel weak and am tempted to revert back to drinking, I can look back on my Purpose and be reminded of what is important to me and why I do what I do.

It’s a Monday night, and I’m just working on a few things around the house. Dinner is in the oven and before I go to sleep, I’m going to take my very excitable husky, Keino, out for a walk in the rain, finish the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen, make a plan for tomorrow, and rewrite (again…) a few of my essays on my grad school apps. It’s not that my first essays weren’t good, but I keep thinking of better angles and more honest things to write about. Work went okay but was a little stressful. Normally I would be nursing a good IPA right about now and enjoying the fact that at the moment life isn’t a complete shit storm. Everything is getting done, so what’s the harm in that?

Why now? Why not after that next party on the calendar? Why not a New Years Resolution, or after the holiday season coming up where I’ll get invited to about 3 parties each to Halloween, Christmas, New Years, and Oktoberfest? It’s important to know you’re “why”, and it’s important for me to start things right away. So this post is dedicated to my reasons why.

1. Because I’m strapped for cash.

Okay, so that’s only kind of true. I did the math and this calendar year, I have spent roughly $650 on alcohol, which equates to almost $1000 if I kept spending at that pace for the rest of the year. That’s a full mortgage payment. And this has been a dry year. To be fair, a good piece of that amount was spent on a few long days/nights at the bars. I don’t necessarily regret those nights, but they don’t hold any place in my life going forward. With luck, I’ll be starting PT school in the spring/summer and won’t be able to work nearly as much, and will need to scrape everything I can together to pay off the house before the program starts. I also have other plans for my money that alcohol keeps siphoning away. Every dollar has a job, and beer money isn’t doing its job.

2. Because I’m tired of feeling like shit.

After the last several boozy nights I have woken up with a hangover and the feeling of disappointment, and spent half the day trying to feel normal again. I look in the mirror and at pictures from the night before at my glassy eyes and plastered over face and I don’t feel good about who I am at those times. And that’s before I check my credit card statement. I’m tired of skipping a work out in the evening because I’m lethargic from those beers I had at lunch. I’m done wasting away weekend nights that I could spend working toward something awesome and lasting, or just appreciating the night. I’m done feeling like I need to pick up a 6-pack every time I want to drop by a friend’s house.

3. My Time is Worth More Than That

This is the most important point to me. I have written down all of my goals and personal projects that I want to work on in my free time, and to be fair I do spend a decent amount of time doin those things. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t have THAT much free time through the week, and if I am drunk all weekend then that accounts for most of my time. And I have a lot of things that I am passionate about and I would enjoy my life more if I spent my valuable time doing those things:

1. Fix the damn leak in the ceiling (ugh there’s a leak in the damn ceiling).
2. Master BJJ. I loveee practicing jiu jitsu and being surrounded by people with a warrior’s mentality. It makes me feel alive. But it’s not just BJJ. I just love the process of training for things and mastering them. There’s beauty in taking advantage of your potential. Like, most people look at something they’ve never done before and think “oh I wouldn’t be good at that thing”. Because they haven’t taken the time to train and learn. I like to find things I don’t know how to do, and master them. Usually that’s what I do when I work on my car or fix things around the house.
3. Get in killer running and physical shape. I used to consider myself a good runner, but have for the past few years called myself “retired”. I usually chalk it up to frequent knee injuries (which, fair enough) and that I’m usually working anymore (which, fair again), but there’s no reason why I had to go from competitive runner to couch potato.
4. Spend time with friends in a meaningful way. Like doing new things. Getting hammered isn’t a new experience.
5. See my family more. It’s hard to make the trip from Cincinnati to Springfield when you’re drunk.
6. Spend more time volunteering at the fire house. This is something that I really enjoy doing but frequently gets placed in the “if I had more time” bin.
7. Make some extra cash at night. Again, to pay off the house in prep for grad school. I used to bartend some and could start doing that again. I don’t want my ENTIRE life to turn into work, and I have a tendency to let it do that, but taking care of that seems important.
8. Take my dating life seriously for once. LOL
9. Go kayaking on the river.
10. Take Keino on more walks. He gets lots of walks. I just think he deserves more walks.
11. Be involved in the community. Loveland has a LOT of ways to get involved and is REALLY happening for a town its size.
12. Travel more. I have a lot of plans for places I want to go (like everybody does).

So obviouslyyy there’s no shortage of things to replace booze with. I rearranged my social calendar so that I won’t run into any serious temptations early in the game. That was actually hard for me to do. I live alone (well, not really ALONE if I have a dog, right?) and don’t socialize THAT much through the week except for the firehouse and the Gracie gym, which don’t count as socializing in my book. I omitted a housewarming party that I was looking forward to and decided not to go with friends to the Renaissance Fair this year, even though last year it was a ton of fun. Instead of those things, I’m visiting my family in Springfield one weekend and still need to make plans for the other. The only weekend that I am going to be in a party setting is at the end of this month I’m running a Ragnar race in Michigan with some old high school friends and some of their friends, and we had planned on partying in Kalamazoo after. Which I’m still going to go do, but it will be my first party not drinking in, I don’t know, 10 years? I’m pretty sure I’ll be alright though.

Hey people! (just me so far, whoops). I am starting this blog because I have made the decision to quit the booze, at least until May 2020, but possibly forever. The reasons why I’ll get to in my next post. But suffice it to say that I have for a long time had a negative relationship with alcohol and have decided to come to terms with that and take a hard stand. I expect this decision to be very difficult for me at first, but I know that I will be much happier in the long term for it. But this blog will not be some melancholy drawl! I expect many areas of my life to continue to be exciting and fun, and for me as a person to just generally become more interesting.

I’ve always been someone who has used free writing as a way to sort through my thoughts and decisions. Sometimes (usually) it is just chicken scratch on the back of an envelope, but some of it I’ve deemed worth keeping over the years. This is my second blog I’ve started (peep my first one! click here)although the first didn’t last THAT long due to a lot of life changes at the time. Basically I’m writing this one because this decision is important to me and I want to have something to look back on in the coming months and possibly years.

For the time being, I’m not going to tell anyone I’m writing this blog, for several reasons. The first is that I think that some of the content will be controversial to my friends (we are often pretty hard drinkers) and I’m just not ready for that, yet. The second is that I need to prove to myself that I can do this before I share it with the world. For all of the times that I have told myself that I’m going to cut back on alcohol over the years, I realized that I have not strung together a complete dry month since I was 18, and that was a bitter pill to swallow. I think kicking the habit entirely will be easier than “cutting back on my drinking” because I can always find an excuse when I try to compromise like that, and it’s just really wishy-washy bullshit. Like I can think of 6 upcoming social events that I would definitely get hammered at if I make an indecisive commitment like that here.

My hope is that this blog becomes something that is at least kind of worthwhile, at least to me. If and when I’m successful for a few months, I’ll make it more public. I want this blog to be fun and empowering and I think that I’m going to do a lot of cool things in the absence of my boozey nights, but also I’m firmly taking a stance not to just post the positive aspects of this decision and the aftermath, because that would be worthless and part of the point of this is to remember how difficult it is for me, and have that to reflect on, and eventually be proud of it later. I want to be able to look back on my life and see more than just an endless string of nights sitting at the bar and waking up with a headache. Maybe other people will read this who are going through a similar thing, and maybe no one will read it but me.

A couple of things that I want to finish with is that this is definitely not a food blog, and I don’t know why the domain name indicates that is but I don’t know how to change it sooo… Also I chose the name “Iron Sharpens Iron” because it is one of my favorite mantras (comes from Proverbs, although I don’t consider myself to be Christian) and finding a like-minded social circle is imperative to me doing this thing. To date, most of my social calendar involves alcohol or at least have it present.

Thanks for reading.

Zachary