None of the Bad Things Happened
Welcome to TUL’s guest blog series, featured every Friday. These articles serve as a platform for guests to share their personal journeys, revealing how they embrace an unwasted life. This week, Todd Kinney graciously shares a chapter from his book, “I Didn’t Believe It Either,” providing readers with an intimate look into his compelling story.
The biggest thing, by far, that kept me from giving up alcohol was fear.
When you think of how ingrained alcohol is in our lives—work, social events, at home, everywhere we go—it’s no surprise that the idea of giving it up is scary. It’s not like giving up pizza. The mere suggestion by my therapist back in 2013 that I take a three-month break made me anxious and panicked—and I was already at the place where I knew I needed to do something.
I couldn’t fathom how I was supposed to do all of life’s events over those next three months without alcohol. Trips. Tailgating. Parties. Thanksgiving! Christmas! New Year’s Eve—who does New Year’s sober?! Work events. And those were only the big events. There were also the random Friday night happy hours or the lunches and dinners at sports bars with our kids’ teams and parents. How in the world was I supposed to do this? It was like trying to figure out how to do life without being able to see or hear. That’s how overwhelming and scary it was for me.
The crippling sense of fear associated with the idea of giving up alcohol that so many of us have is a testament to the marketing prowess of the booze industry. For me, the fear was powerful enough that it stopped any contemplation of quitting in its tracks for a long time. It was just too much, so it was easier to not go there. It was indicative of how much I relied on alcohol just to do life. If you had asked me at the time whether I relied or was dependent on it, I would have said no (while bristling at the question on the inside). After all, I didn’t drink during the week. How can someone “rely” on something if he can go Monday through Thursday without it? However, looking back to 2013, when I did my first three-month break, it should have set off more alarm bells that the thought of giving it up completely was so debilitating.
If the thought of giving up alcohol scares you, as it did me, ask yourself why. What scares you about it? Don’t stop at the first thing that comes to mind. My first thought was always something that, while true, was superficial. Something along the lines of, “How boring! Who wants to do sporting events and holidays without alcohol? That’s lame.” But there was more to it than that, if I was honest with myself. I didn’t know who I would be without alcohol. Drinking was so central to everything I did that it didn’t feel like I was just giving up drinking, it felt like I was giving up life.
So ask yourself, what really scares you about it? Dig beyond your surface-level stuff. You don’t think you can do it? You don’t think you’d want to live a life without alcohol? People will think you’re weird? People will think you must have had a really bad problem? You won’t be any fun? You won’t be able to get through a day without that drink waiting at the end? Whatever you’re thinking, I can promise you I thought it too.
I had a whole list of horrible things that I was 100% convinced would happen to me if I gave up alcohol. Guess what? None of them happened. I was wrong about it all. Here are some of the things I was afraid of:
People wouldn’t want to hang out with me.
What I thought then: I don’t really want to hang out with nondrinkers, so why would anyone want to hang out with me if I quit?
What I know now: Full disclosure: There will be people you stop hanging out with (or hang out with less) if you stop drinking. Another full disclosure: You won’t care. There are a couple of people in my life who I discovered I was connected to mainly by alcohol. Take that away and I didn’t really enjoy hanging out with them very much. They may feel the same about me. That’s okay. Aside from those people, I’m happy to report that I haven’t been excommunicated from my social circle. My interests certainly have shifted, and I don’t want to do some of the things I wanted to do before. Turns out, much of what I wanted to do before socially revolved around my ability to drink. I would tolerate so many social situations simply because they allowed me to drink, and I just don’t have much interest in those things anymore. If you need alcohol to enjoy certain people or activities, you probably need to find new people to hang out with and new things to do.
Your true friends are your true friends. That will remain the case even when you stop drinking. I’m fortunate to have some rock-solid friendships in my life. People I’ve known for decades, some literally my whole life. Those relationships didn’t go anywhere when I stopped drinking. In fact, they’re better now.
People would think I was a raging alcoholic and would judge me simplistically as “a bad person.”
What I thought then: If you have to quit drinking, you must have a real problem. As in, a vodka-for-breakfast-type problem. A losing-jobs-type problem. A cops-involved-type problem. Quitting is for people who failed, who couldn’t get their shit together, and who were hanging on in their lives by a thread.
What I know now: Honestly, I don’t know what most people think about what my drinking was like. I’m sure there are some who think it was much different than it actually was. Here is what I do know: I had so many people reach out to me after I “came out” on social media on my one-year anniversary of quitting. So many who struggled with similar issues or who knew someone close to them who did. I had people come to me and ask for help—I still do. I had people say they quit for the same reasons I did—only they made up reasons for quitting because they weren’t sure what people would think if they spoke their truth. I had many, many people thank me for telling my story. The feedback I got was so positive and so heartwarming. People don’t judge you like you think they will—not anyone who matters, anyway.
Think about it this way: Would you judge someone who gave up drinking to make a positive change in his life? I know I wouldn’t. So I don’t know why I thought others would judge me. But that’s what we humans do, that’s how our brains work. What’s great about where I’m at now is that I don’t care what people think my drinking was like. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that my alcohol use—or whatever you want to label or call it—was causing problems in my life, and I wanted to make a change. So I did.
At the time I quit, I was examining all this through an outside lens. I was looking at it from the point of “what are others going to think?” This is a fairly standard reaction, I think. But it’s also foolish. One, because we’re usually wrong about what people are going to think. We focus on the worst part of it. Say, for example, that you’re thinking about doing something that 99 people will view positively and one person will view negatively. What do we focus on? That one person, of course. Does that make any sense?
The second reason it’s foolish to examine things through an outside lens is that that’s not the lens that matters. Your lens is what matters. It sounds so simple when I write it down and read it on paper. But we all fall into the trap of becoming way more concerned with what other people think rather than focusing on what’s best for us. We let others’ opinions—or our perceptions of others’ opinions—drive too much of our behavior. As I sit here today (four years sober, at the time of this writing), I can tell you that for me the benefits of a sober life so far outweigh a life with alcohol that the concern about what others think has vanished.
Matthew McConaughey—who I’m convinced would want to be best friends if we ever met in person—writes in his book Greenlights about “voluntary obligations.” He calls them the “You versus You obligations.” They’re the things we know in our gut to be true that guide us, or should anyway, if we’re living right. Secrets “in the court of our own conscience.”
I wish I had understood this concept more when I was deciding whether to quit and when I was early on in sobriety. If I had, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time and energy worrying about what other people were going to think. Nobody else has to understand your decision to give up alcohol. And it’s not your job to make them understand. One second spent worrying about what someone thinks about your decision to change your drinking habits is one second too many. When you’re following your gut and living in alignment with your voluntary obligations, you can never go wrong.
You need to hit rock bottom—spectacularly—before you quit.
What I thought then: Rock bottom is waking up in a ditch. It’s your third DUI. It’s landing in the back of a cop car. It’s losing a job because you were drinking too much. None of that has happened to me, so I don’t have a rock bottom. Without a “sufficient” rock bottom, I don’t need to quit.
What I know now: What I did have was a hundred smaller, less-spectacular rock bottoms. Moments that, standing alone, could have served as THE rock bottom, but didn’t. Some of them certainly should have. Looking back, on the one hand I’m surprised that some of them by themselves didn’t jolt me into getting sober. But on the other hand, given what I know now about the rationalizing and negotiating I did with my drinking, I’m not that surprised. And in the end, that’s not really important. What’s important is that the “little” rock bottoms eventually piled high enough that they tipped the scale for me.
It doesn’t matter what your rock bottom is. You don’t even have to have one. We need to get rid of this idea that we HAVE to hit some sort of rock bottom to do something about our alcohol use. Rock bottom doesn’t have to be a singular place or event. Rock bottom can be a gradual slide—it often is. Or it can be several “minor” rock bottoms. It can be waking up the next morning not remembering going to bed. It can be driving drunk and getting away with it. It can be not remembering conversations from the night before. It can be checking your phone with that sense of dread about what you may have texted or posted the night before. It can be waking up in your own house not sure whether your kids are there or they slept at a friend’s house. It can be your son bringing up a conversation that you don’t remember. It can be jumping in a pool with your clothes on at a work event. It can be a DUI. It can be acting in a way you’re not proud of. It can be walking around downtown after a high school reunion with a dead phone and not being able to find an uber. Or it can be as simple as not liking how drinking makes you feel. It can be feeling sick of your own bullshit. It can be wanting to improve your relationship with your kids or your partner. It can be simply wanting to improve your health. It can be anything.
Yet the idea of quitting on my own, without some traumatic event to justify it, was completely foreign to me. For so long, all my thoughts about quitting were tied to something happening that would force me to quit—where I simply would have no choice. It got to the point where a small part of me was subconsciously hoping for something bad to happen just so it would prompt me to quit.
For years, my internal debate centered around this question: Is my drinking bad enough that I should make a change? I was looking at it the wrong way. The better question to ask is: Is this good enough for me to continue down this road? Is there a better way? And when you’re wondering whether the life you’re living is good enough, ask yourself this: How do I know whether it is? How do you truly know? You don’t until you’ve genuinely tried another path. Give that other road a try. See whether you like it. If you don’t, you can get back on the road you were on. Drinking isn’t going anywhere, you can always go back. At least you tried and now you know. But give it a try—a real try. That means time. That means not bailing on the new road the first, second, or third time that things get tough and uncomfortable.
I wouldn’t make any more memories.
What I thought then: All my memories—the stories my friends and I tell over and over and over again, laughing just as hard each time—involve alcohol. How in the world can I ever make new memories if I remove alcohol from the equation? It’s impossible. It’s hard to make memories sitting at home staring out your window, which is what sober people do, right?
What I know now: I have a folder on my phone called “sober thankful.” Whenever I have a moment when I’m feeling particularly grateful to be sober, I take my phone out, document it with a photo, and put it in that folder. As of this moment, there are 232 pictures in it—each one a memory I thought I would never make. Each one represents a memory that fills me with a sense of gratitude and happiness different from, and better than, what my drinking memories ever did.
It’s a picture of Scarlett and two of her friends golfing, because I happily took them instead of staying back with other adults who were drinking. Rather than be annoyed that the activity was interrupting my drinking, I felt grateful that I got to watch these three girls do something fun on a perfect summer night.
It’s a screen shot of a post a friend made thanking me for helping her reach her one-year sober anniversary.
It’s a picture of a sunrise at Lake Tahoe whose breathtaking beauty I never would have discovered during my drinking days.
It’s a picture of my son on a random Friday night at 10 pm to document the conversation we’d just had that never would have occurred if I’d been drinking.
It’s a picture of my kids and their friends enjoying themselves in the pool on a Saturday night because I was sitting back just soaking it all in and feeling grateful that I was present in that moment instead of wondering what my next drink should be or whether I needed to slow down.
It’s a picture of a cup of decaf coffee and a book I sat with in a hotel lobby in Washington, DC, while traveling for work, because I liked doing that so much more than sitting in a bar drinking too much, as I’d often done previously while traveling by myself.
It’s a picture of my daughter at a board-game café, where we went between her basketball games one weekend. We had so much fun there, playing checkers and drinking hot chocolate. It was infinitely better than sitting in a sports bar, me focused on how many beers I could have between games and her on her phone.
It’s a random picture of nature, which brings me joy that I never knew before.
It’s a picture of me on the golf course with Austin, knowing that I was present for the whole experience instead of focusing on drinking.
It’s a picture of the kids on Christmas morning, knowing that I was clearheaded and not beating myself up for drinking too much the night before.
It’s a screen shot of a text from a friend, telling me I’m an inspiration to him.
It’s a picture of Landon and me at a football game, knowing that the game wasn’t affected by the Great Intruder and loving sober game days so much more than drinking ones.
It’s a picture of Bryant Park in New York City, where I was when I realized, after my text exchange with my therapist, that I was liking myself more sober.
It’s a picture of me playing four-square in the street with Scarlett and her friends at 10:00 on a Friday night, which I enjoyed so much more than my usual drinking Friday nights.
These are pictures of life happening. Each one represents a moment that filled me with a sense of gratitude, purpose, and joy that even the best drinking nights couldn’t compete with.
I would never have fun again because sobriety would be so boooooooring.
What I thought then: Drinking = fun. Fun = drinking. That’s life’s equation. Is it even possible to have fun—I mean, real fun—without drinking? I don’t think so. Every instance of fun I can think of involved drinking. How in the world can people have fun without alcohol being involved? It’s like trying to get full without eating food.
The first word that always comes to mind when I hear about someone who doesn’t drink is boring. Their life had to be boring, there was no other way around it. How could it not be?
What I know now: You know how you look back on things we used to do and you can’t believe it was socially acceptable: riding in cars without seatbelts, smoking in airplanes, spanking our kids? I don’t mean looking back with judgment, just with disbelief that nobody knew any better. That’s the same way I feel about thinking that I’d never have fun again without alcohol.
For one, as I get further away from my drinking life, I realize that drinking was not as much fun as I thought it was. Sure, it had its moments. But when I step back and objectively look at drinking through a sober lens, it’s not everything I thought it was. There’s the initial “ahhhh” feeling with that first drink. Then there’s the initial buzz that feels good. After that, though . . . what exactly are we buying with alcohol? We get more numb, we start to forget things, our ability to make rational decisions diminishes, we repeat ourselves, we get louder, we get sloppier, the chances of putting ourselves in dangerous situations goes up, the chances of us saying or doing something we’ll regret go up, the chances of feeling like shit the next day go way up. The list goes on and on. Does any of that sound like fun? If we were talking about anything other than alcohol, would you ever think of engaging in an activity that had those side effects? If we’re really honest about what alcohol does to us, it doesn’t seem like nearly as much fun.
But more than that, I’ve discovered that everything I do is more fun sober:
Going to the gym clearheaded and not sluggish from the night before kicks the endorphin high up a notch.
Hanging out with my kids, or my wife, or really doing anything in life without the intrusion of “when can I have that first drink” or “I could be drinking now” allows me to be present in a way I never was before. The Great Intruder is gone. Everything is more fulfilling when you’re present. Who knew?
Going on vacation and being free of the regret and shame-filled mornings feels phenomenal. So does not needing three days to recover once you get home.
Work events without the effort of staying in control are actually more enjoyable. (I haven’t jumped into any pools with my clothes on since getting sober!)
Handling the stresses of everyday life, big and little, is infinitely easier with the calmness and peace of mind I have when sober, which I never knew when I was drinking.
This didn’t happen overnight. There were social and family events early on when it felt more like I was just getting through them than truly enjoying them. But that’s part of the process. The first football game, the first vacation, the first party—those can be tough. But they get easier, little by little. If you’re going to get to the place where you enjoy all those things more when sober, you have to get through the first one.
In We Are the Luckiest, Laura McKowen writes about the “nice little life” that a friend had discovered in sobriety. Laura, who was early in her sobriety when she heard her friend describe her new life, initially was underwhelmed because it felt like the opposite of the “big, vast, expansive, exciting” life that she longed for. But eventually she came to view her friend’s description in a much different light:
How wrong I had been in my understanding of Sara’s words. How wrong I had been in my understanding of nearly everything that makes this life worth living. I understood her expression “a nice little life” to mean a paltry, pale existence. I didn’t know the difference between the cheap, thin drama of a drinking life and the rich, layered texture of a sober one. Which is to say an awake one. I mistook the limited expression of outer life for the unlimited expanse of the inner one. I didn’t see—couldn’t possibly have seen—all that would come forth from simply allowing space to exist.
I had a very similar initial reaction to the idea of “a nice little life” as Laura did. Even reading about how wrong she realized she’d been didn’t sway me completely. Like Laura, at that stage of my sobriety I couldn’t possibly comprehend the beauty and magic of what “a nice little life” meant.
I do now. A “nice little life” is fuller than my old life. It’s calmer. It’s more peaceful. It’s better. It’s happier. It’s easier. It’s the opposite of what I thought it was when I first heard of it. My nice little life has gifted me a sense of peace and calmness that I never had before as an adult. If that’s boring, I’ll sign up for it every time.
The best testimony I can give is this: I’ve done all these life events both as a drinker and a nondrinker—and it’s no contest which is more fun.
Being totally and completely convinced that all these bad things were going to happen, and then having none of them happen, opened my mind like few things in my life have. It’s removed so much of the stigma and anxiety around BIG changes. Change isn’t as scary now—how can it be? I made a decision to give up something that I thought I couldn’t live without, and I ended up discovering a life that I didn’t know existed. The downsides weren’t downsides, and the upsides were greater than I possibly could have fathomed. This doesn’t guarantee that every change I make from here on out will be as profound (or even work out), but it does mean that a lot of the angst, stress, and natural pushback that accompanies the idea of big changes has melted away.
That, in and of itself, is a powerful life lesson.
Todd is an attorney who lives in Omaha, NE with his wife, four kids and two wiener dogs. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, golf, hanging out with his family (when they let him) and spending an unhealthy amount of time and money supporting the Iowa Hawkeyes. He quit drinking in 2019 and considers it the best thing he’s ever done for himself or his family.
Find ‘I Didn’t Believe It Either’ on Amazon and at https://www.toddkinney.com/.
Synopsis
Todd was a classic gray area drinker who looked like he had it all together on the outside. But on the inside, he was tormented by his relationship with alcohol. He loved drinking and being the life of the party, yet there was so much about drinking he didn’t like: the control it had on him, how it consumed his every thought and how he felt after drinking too much.
He spent six years evaluating his relationship with alcohol and employing every moderation hack in the book. Some of them worked, but it was exhausting and the victories were always short lived.
By 2019, Todd was growing tired of fighting his internal battle. He was worn down by the constant negotiating and obsessing, and he was sick of the torment, shame and regret. Then in the fall of that year, his wife whispered something into his ear that would end up changing his life forever. He decided to quit drinking.
Giving up alcohol was scary and overwhelming. Even though Todd knew it was the right decision, he also thought life without alcohol would be a little dull and boring, a bit like a prison sentence for not being able to “drink like a normal person.”
What he discovered, however, was that giving it up was the farthest thing from a prison sentence. “I Didn’t Believe it Either” is the raw, honest, vulnerable and sometimes funny story of Todd’s journey to quitting the one thing he thought he couldn’t live without and his discovery that sobriety is better than he ever imagined.
Todd, heartfelt gratitude for gifting us with this poignant chapter from your book. Your raw and authentic exploration of the journey from alcohol to sobriety is a precious offering. Thank you for sharing the transformative narrative of embracing a 'nice little life' - it’ll resonate deeply with many.
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