Here’s the Thing About Your First Sober Days…
Most of us don’t think of early sobriety as training for the rest of our lives. We think of it as something to survive - a season to grit our teeth through until we can prove we’re “fixed” or disciplined enough.
But the real gift of those first alcohol-free weeks wasn’t what I avoided. It was what I learned while life was still completely ordinary.
I’m 48 years old now, a homeschool mom, and a special needs mom. Three years ago I was also a woman who drank wine in my home office, who made rules I couldn’t keep, and who quietly broke promises to myself almost every day.
When I quit on September 10th, 2022, I clung to one sentence like a life raft:
“Drinking is not an option”.
That wasn’t motivation. It was a line in the sand.
And that line forced me to face everything I had been drinking over for years: boredom, anxiety, shallow connections, and the grief I was too afraid to feel.
Mundane days create mighty foundations
There is a moment in every alcohol-free journey when the novelty wears off and the mundane begins.
A Friday night that looks like folding laundry. A Tuesday that feels long and dull. A date night where someone else is drinking and you’re not. A holiday where you suddenly realize you actually have to feel your feelings.
If we don’t make the mundane our foundation, we will crumble when we hit big life moments.
That’s true for sobriety and it’s true for faith and health and marriage too.
The confidence I have now - the ease I feel even during hard seasons - isn’t because life got softer. It’s because I practiced on days that didn’t require heroics at all.
I kept doing the hard, ordinary, unglamorous things until they became second nature.
Early sobriety pays you back with emotional sobriety
Last fall our family walked through a guardianship process for my disabled daughter Dylan. It was months of legal paperwork and exhaustion. Right as that season ended, we lost our cat Sammy - our beloved companion of almost 18 years.
I hadn’t felt that devastated, exhausted, or alone in a very long time.
And still… alcohol never entered my mind.
That payoff is what three years of practice can do. You can’t want the skill and mastery without being willing to do the practice.
Radical accountability happens long before radical confidence does.
I learned how to:
take a walk when my body needed movement,
cry when I needed release,
set boundaries instead of numbing,
lean on God instead of wine, and
question the beliefs that had kept me stuck.
Those tools were forged in the everyday moments I used to call “too small to matter.”
Boredom and grief deserve better than a bottle
So many women tell me they’re afraid to quit drinking because they don’t know how they’ll handle grief.
The truth is: you learn how to handle grief by learning how to handle boredom first.
By learning how to sit with a quiet house. By realizing that shallow connections can be rewritten. By discovering that nothing in life is free - we sacrifice temporary comfort now to receive lasting peace later.
When we stop negotiating with alcohol, we begin negotiating with reality instead.
And reality, as it turns out, is where healing lives.
What’s in the way becomes the way
Challenges aren’t proof that sobriety isn’t working. They’re the curriculum.
Extraordinary moments simply reveal whether we’ve allowed ordinary ones to teach us anything.
Are you enduring not drinking… or are you becoming a woman you’re proud of?
Sobriety isn’t just the absence of alcohol. It’s the presence of you.
If you’re in a season right now where alcohol still has power, there’s hope … and there’s a roadmap.
The Alcohol-Free Blueprint is designed for the after of no longer drinking: after motivation dips, after real life shows up, after the calendar turns quiet and ordinary again.
Ask yourself this: what is staying in the same place really costing you?
You can keep having the same conversation with yourself for another year - or you can choose practice, perspective, and peace.
I’m here when you’re ready 🖤
Read more about The Alcohol-Free Blueprint and see how you can build the peace and confidence that will carry you through any season of life, without needing or wanting to drink.
xx -
Shannon