How Alcohol Stole My Time
If you’d asked me where the hours in my day went, I’d have blamed social media, books, or binge-watching every variation of 90 Day Finance on HBO. But that was only part of the story. Time wasn’t vanishing into thin air, it was being siphoned, one glass at a time.
Alcohol is the greatest time thief of all, and it usually started working before I’d even brushed my teeth. Every morning began with a resolute promise: never again. By mid-morning that softened into negotiations: well, maybe just not today. By lunch, my vow was forgotten as I decided that today had been rough/good/special/boring so really, I deserved it. Evenings kicked off with pre-dinner drinks, rolled into more drinks, and ended with a nightcap. By the time I crawled into bed, I hadn’t just lost hours, I’d lost the entire day to a one-item agenda: Will I drink today?
Honestly, it’s kind of embarrassing to admit just how much of my life was dedicated to alcohol’s loop. It wasn’t only the drinking - it was thinking about drinking, planning to drink, recovering from drinking, swearing off drinking, and then starting the whole cycle all over again.
That’s one of alcohol’s strangest side effects: the invisible time-suck. Once I quit, I was stunned by the sheer volume of hours that came rushing back. It wasn’t just mornings freed from hangover fog - afternoons and evenings opened suddenly, like a book falling open to chapters I didn’t know were waiting.
The Checklist
You’d think something called Happy Hour would be, well, happy. But when you’re caught in a drinking obsession, it feels less like fun and more like an unpaid second job. And one that’s entirely devoted to making sure alcohol made the schedule.
Every outing came with a checklist: Will they be serving drinks? Should I bring something? Do I have enough at home in case the night ends early? Even a simple dinner out required low-level investigation of the restaurant’s bar menu.
The wild part is how normal it all felt at the time. I didn’t see it as an obsession; I saw it as preparation. Like packing a sweater in case it gets cold, except my “sweater” was a backup bottle of Cabernet.
Looking back, it’s exhausting to realize how much energy I poured into arranging my life around drinking. Energy I could have used for, well, literally anything else.
Recurring Event
The funny thing is, even though I never wrote “2 p.m. – spiral about whether to drink tonight” on my calendar, the one-person recurring meeting inevitably showed up each day.
None of it felt like time spent; it just felt like thinking. But when you add it up, it’s astonishing. Hours upon hours lost to endless negotiations with myself. It was like having a browser with a hundred tabs open and every single one was about drinking.
Once I shut those tabs down, the silence felt strange at first. But it was the kind of quiet that makes room for something new. Something that would bring renewed joy where I was currently numbing away.
Borrowed Time
The hours I lost to drinking weren’t just gone, they were borrowed against tomorrow.
Entire Sundays slipped away, traded for recovery from bottomless mimosas at brunch. Vacation days vanished to all-inclusive, never-an-empty-glass mai tais. Even weeknights disappeared, swallowed by the promise of “just one glass” that turned into four. And birthdays and holidays blurred too, occasions I thought I was celebrating but was really drinking straight through.
Writing projects I swore I’d start someday stayed in drafts gathering dust because I never seemed to have the energy. Conversations with my kids blurred into half-listening nods while I refilled a glass. Books I meant to read stayed stacked on the shelf, untouched.
Alcohol made me feel like I was buying time in the moment - time to relax, time to connect, time to celebrate. But in reality, I was trading those moments for lost hours and days that I’ll never get back.
The Present Tense
Realizing just how much time I lost to alcohol is sobering in every sense of the word. It’s not a pretty inventory to take in with the weekends blurred out, the conversations half-lived, the pages left unwritten. And for a long time, I didn’t even know it was happening. I thought I was in control, but really, I was quietly handing over my hours, my days, my memories, one pour at a time.
And yet, here’s the part that surprises me still: when I stopped drinking, time didn’t just trickle back, it rushed in like a flash flood. Mornings arrived sharp and clear. Afternoons stretched longer. Evenings became wide open in a way I hadn’t felt since childhood. What alcohol once claimed as its territory was suddenly mine again.
I can’t get back the hours I lost, and I’ve made peace with that. But I also don’t live in borrowed time anymore. Every day I stay sober is time that belongs to me, time I get to spend fully awake, fully present, fully alive. And for anyone who might be wondering what sobriety gives you, here’s the answer I never expected: it gives you back your life in minutes, hours, and days. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll find that’s more than enough.