There's a moving item today in the Wall Street Journal: A personal account of how the writer gave up drinking. It accompanies a feature story, written by the same author, that describes how New Year's customs are adapting to accomodate the nondrinkers among us.
For those of you with online WSJ access: The New Year's I Turned Sober
Excerpts below ...
Kevin Helliker writes that his attempts to stop drinking began when he was 22 and in college, saying that "not since the age of 13 had I stayed sober on New Year's Eve ...."
He says his "flirtation" with sobriety began when he submitted some stories to his University of Kansas creative writing professor.
He liked my work, especially a short story about a teenager who was trying to quit drinking. During a private meeting in his office that January, this professor told me he hadn't had a drink since joining Alcoholics Anonymous eight years earlier.
Helliker says he then avoided his professor, even skipping classes, until he called his prof at 4 am one morning:
"Professor?" I said, without identifying myself. "I think I have a drinking problem." He knew exactly who I was. Within minutes, he met me at a Denny's restaurant just below campus.
Helliker writes that he started going to AA, but stopped because he felt no kinship with the older people at the meetings. ("At that time and place, the program wasn't teeming with the youth the way it is today ...," he writes.)
He thought he could quit on his own, but drank again at his brother's wedding. "The last thing I remember is lying tuxedo-clad on my back in the parking lot, looking up at the disgusted face of my 15-year-old brother."
He says he developed a plan to stay busy -- work 30 hours a week delivering furniture while also going to school. He'd be too busy to drink, he thought. When the Fourth of July came, he was off from work and from school and a buddy called to tell him of a nearby kegger.
You can imagine how well that went. Early next morning, haunted by the image of a destitute relative who had never managed to quit drinking, I knocked on the door of the sober professor, and told him I was ready to try A.A.
As the holidays aproached he dreaded it, "keenly aware that no date on the drinker's calendar is more sacred than New Year's Eve. But the idea of spending that night in an A.A. hall -- where my only friends were older than my father -- seemed like a worse fate than getting drunk."
Then came an incredible occurrence, of just the sort that people in A.A. predict will happen if you tough it out and stay sober. A journalism professor called and said that he'd secured for me a holiday internship as a reporter at the Kansas City Star. I was stunned. I hadn't applied for such an internship or even known that it existed. Barely advanced beyond Reporting 101, I hadn't even worked yet for the student paper. But this professor, knowing nothing about my struggle with drink, believed in me, and he had connections at the Kansas City Star.
So the day after Christmas I stepped into the newsroom of the paper I'd delivered since I was eight years old. On the night that I'd been dreading for months -- New Year's Eve -- I got my first assignment: to cover a Kansas City bus driver who was running his last route that night after 37 years on the job.
I left the newsroom that night as happy as I'd ever been, knowing that the next morning's edition would carry my first-ever byline.
After leaving the newsroom that night, I made a stop, and not at A.A. An old drinking buddy was having a party. When I walked in, I found everyone there was drinking, and it seemed to me that every one of them was encouraging me to have a beer. But I had no desire to drink and no concern what anybody thought about it, New Year's Eve or not.
Holding forth a large cup of 7-Eleven coffee, I said, "I'm good with this." And I have been ever since.
I have nothing to add, other than a thank-you to Mr. Helliker and his editors.