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Five Things I Learned from My Year Long Alcohol Experiment

The most important lessons I needed in order to change.

Chelsey Flood
6 min readJan 25, 2020

My new year’s resolution in 2016 was to have a sober year.

I’d done a Dry January, and found it boring and fulfilling in equal measure. Two wholesome and productive fortnights of not drinking made me curious: what would life be like if I gave up for a year?

It didn’t go how I expected, but I learned a lot. Maybe you can learn from my experience. Here are the three most important lessons.

1. I cannot just choose not to drink and stick to it

My plan was to begin on the first of January, and I was excited. I knew, deep down, that drinking held me back, that I would be better off without it.

My boyfriend and I were in L.A., cat-sitting, and we’d had a comparatively sober time. There had been a few rows about drinking/not drinking/ behavour while drunk, but compared to some of the doozies of our life together, it was a peaceful and…

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