I’m holding a Blue Moon.
It’s the zero-proof one. Non-alcoholic. The gentle ghost of the beer that kept me company through most of my adult life.
Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes knows that it used to be my go-to. A kind of companion. It sat beside me on the sun-drenched, laughing, luminous days, the ones I would call the best of my life. And it sat with me just as faithfully through the days that wrecked me. The breakups, the funerals, and the quiet collapses. Or, honestly, just an ordinary Sunday afternoon. The same bottle, every single time. It knew all of me.
Today, it’s the NA, zero version. And today, I am one year alcohol free.
I’m writing this from my mother’s home, looking out at the Pacific. If I’m honest, I had imagined something bigger for this day. A thoughtfully crafted video, maybe. An emotional IG reel. Something more intimate, where you could see my face and hear my voice. And I wanted that, not because I need to be congratulated for reaching a number on a calendar, but because there is something I ache for you to know:
I am living proof that a life can change. That a person can change, all the way down to the root. And that change can be for the better. Tender and hard-won and very, very real.
I also know this. When you finally learn how to show up for yourself, something pretty miraculous begins to happen. You become able to show up for the people you love in an entirely new way. More fully. More completely. More wholly, you.
I know this in my bones right now, because it is exactly what is being asked of me, and it is asking for everything I have.
For the last several months I have been grieving the slow loss of the mother I used to know. Every day I lose a little more of her and that’s not an exaggeration. There is no cure for her disease, no version of this where I get to fix it, and the ache of it reaches all the way back into my childhood (stories for my memoir in the making).
But here’s the irony I can’t get over. This last month, the final stretch of my first sober year, has been the hardest of all of it.
The rest of the year was, mostly, light lifting. I mean the first thirty, sixty days were slightly boring and somewhat flat, full of mocktail experiments and figuring out who I was at a party without a fancy glass in my hand. But I only white-knuckled it a few times that I can recall. I barely craved it. I know that’s rare but I guess I wanted to come back to the truest version of myself so badly that willpower never really entered the room. It wasn’t discipline. It was a choice, made over and over, to come home to the girl I was before the world taught me to cope by shoving my feelings aside. I wanted to return to the girl who didn’t carry shame.
And then, the last few weeks arrived and put me inside a storm.
I won’t reveal all of it but I will tell you that I have wanted, more than once, to leave my own body. To escape. To not feel this. And the old me, I know exactly how she would have done it.
If I were still drinking, this pain would not be smaller. It would be exponentially worse. I would be witnessing my mother’s declining health and drowning myself on top of it, which is a math I have run before and lost.
What this season is asking of me requires every ounce of who I am. My strength, my steadiness, my sharpness, my full and undivided presence. She needs me. And she needs the version of me that only this year could have built.
People love to roll their eyes at all the self-improvement wellness work. The growth talk. The healing. “Too self-absorbed,” I hear people sometimes say.
I don’t believe that. I don’t subscribe to that. Doing “the work” on yourself is the least selfish thing there is. The whole point, the entire return on all of that private, unglamorous effort, is that you get to hand the people you love a better version of you. You stop phoning it in. You show up for your family, your kids, your person, the ones who need you, as someone actually fully available to be there.
So here I am. Heart in pieces, genuinely sad and scared, the future about as uncertain as it gets. And still I can tell you, without a flicker of doubt, that I made the right choice. A beautiful one. A powerful one. I healed parts of my body and parts of my heart, and I am not the woman I used to be.
Let me tell you about her.
One year ago today, that woman was walking across a parking lot at noon on a Monday, headed into a liquor store for a six-pack of Blue Moon. Yep, noon. Monday.
They didn’t have it.
The man behind the counter suggested I go next door to the Publix. That was all he did. One ordinary redirection from one stranger.
But in the gap between his store and the other one, something reached me. Not a thought. A message, landing from somewhere deeper and higher than my own mind. God. My higher self. The oldest, truest part of me. Call it whatever you want. It told me, plainly, that I was better than this.
I stopped in the middle of that parking lot.
The six-pack I came for wasn’t there. A stranger pointed me one way, and then something far wiser pointed me another. And that was it. I made a decision, standing on the asphalt that day in that very moment.
I never made it to Publix.
And here we are one year later, on my mother’s deck with the ocean in front of me and a Blue Moon in my hand. The zero kind. Same beer, sorta. Completely different woman.
So now let me ask you. Are you tired? Tired of the negotiation that never ends. Do I drink tonight, or don’t I? How much is too much? Is it fine if it’s only weekends, only after the kind of day that seems to earn it, only when everyone else has a glass in their hand?
Here is what I have come to believe. The negotiation is not where your answer lives. Your answer is the voice underneath all of that noise. The very same one that found me in a parking lot at noon on a Monday. She is in you too. She is softer than the bargaining, and steadier, and she is telling you the truth. That you are better than this. That you were made for so much more. You do not have to wait for some dramatic, cinematic bottom before you are allowed to listen to her.
If any part of you is ready to set that chatter down, I made something for you. The How. It is yours the moment you want it.
I refuse to undersell what’s on the other side of your decision if you too decide to take a break from alcohol. You get lighter. Clearer. More awake to your own life. You become a kind of magnet, a brighter frequency, a higher vibration, quietly drawing in the people and the mornings and the moments you have been longing for all along. It is real. It is available to you. And it is pretty fucking extraordinary.
Come and find out who you are without it. I will be right here, cheering you on the whole way.
With love from Mom’s house,
Catt
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