Why I quit drinking alcohol

Do ever think to quit drinking alcohol? Alcohol becomes something that we conform to, it becomes yet another one of our indoctrination’s. Here is why I quit drinking alcohol and hope it will inspire others to release one of their many shackles towards their cosmic freedom.

I was always a heavy drinker and a party animal. It all started like most, in my early teens. Maybe fifteen, sixteen or so, in the streets of NYC.  It all starts with being part of the crowd. The influences of your friends and wanting to be part of something with them.

It started with drinking 40’s (Which is a 40 ounce of old english or equivalent) . We would get a 40 from the corner store and since we had no where to go, we would just walk around Brooklyn or Queens, where I would be hanging out around that time.

We would sit in the stoops and play some slick rick, some notorious and drink up. Get wasted. Go to house parties afterwards, drink some more.  During school hours, we would cut out and head on over to some hookie jams (parties from cutting school), drink our asses off and party.

That is how it starts for most people. We want to belong and fit in the crowd and rebel and drink because they said we can’t because we are under aged. Well we start this cycle of this lifestyle that moves on to adulthood,  for most people who did not start at their teens and would have waited until 21.  That is their day to finally let loose.

Now I can’t speak for their mindset, but I can speak about those who started early. But I think it is  pretty much the same. In NYC to enter clubs you had to be 21 to enter. The drinking age was 21. But I was sneaking in clubs at 17 with a fake ID.

I would party my ass off. Drinking alcohol became a weekly thing and it becomes a routine like everything in life. It becomes normal. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, go out and drink drink drink.  That is how it went and goes for most people. Especially being a DJ, I mean some of us become DJ’s to drink and party.  Now to DJ sober has become a strange thing for me.

“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Flash forward, Here in Puerto Rico people are allowed to drink at the beach and for the most part wherever you want to.  When I first arrived here drinking in the beach was a must. How can you go to the beach here and not drink. People would just offer you drinks, how can you pass that up.

Everyone would be drinking.  Now I am sitting out in this hot sun, drinking HO HO HO and a bottle of rum. Now if you don’t know, drinking in the sun rather than drinking at night, that sun tends to deceive on your state of drunkenness or maybe it is being in the ocean that tricks you since you are not trying to hold your balance, not like you can swim around side to side.  I believe it’s the latter. One minute you are like damn, “I don’t feel this shit”. Next minute, you are in the water drunk off your ass. Hey at least the water is holding you  up.

Now as to why I quit drinking. My days would go by and I would not remember my day. I drank so much, that my day would have went and gone and it would be a total blackout. Conversations and people I would have met, forgotten.

So I started to reduce my consumption. Initially I did not want to consume any liquor or beer that had genetically modified ingredients.  So during my non drinking days at the beach, I would see the whole beach in a different perspective.

Mostly everyone drinking, most people speaking to me with their speech slurred. I noticed everyone around me drunk. Some walking around sideways.

I started to remember my days, I started to appreciate the days more.  I then decided that I needed a “lifestyle change”. So I quit drinking alcohol.

Another reason I quit drinking alcohol, was because it made me-like most other people, hostile and aggressive, much more violent.  You start off as a happy drunk and end up an angry drunk when something irritates you.  I found that I lost all control of my thoughts. Everything was incoherent.  It was not somewhere I wanted to be.

Lastly, cannabis really helped me quit drinking alcohol as it has made me more aware of my consumption and how I felt with alcohol. It’s a sad world we live in that we live in this society that accept things that destroy us like alcohol and condemn things in which are beneficial like cannabis.

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

I am now at the time of this posting, 10 months sober.  I don’t miss drinking one bit. I don’t miss that feeling of being out of control. Another reason was those next days when you feel like shit. Why do we want to feel this way?

Well, for many like myself, we would drink to relieve the stress, to forget our misery of this world. We drink to escape.  To drown out our world. To forget about our worries. Drinking was, for the most part our courage. We go to the club, we need a couple of drinks to get loose to dance or to socialize or even to be able to tolerate other people.

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
― Charles Bukowski

But I believe it is something that becomes habitual. We condition our minds to think we need it.  For me it was conditioned as a teen to accept drinking as a normal thing, it became conditioned to need a drink to dance.

Everything in our life is conditioned by our confined thoughts. That is another reason why I stopped drinking. To recondition my mind, to conquer my mind. Self discipline.

I quit drinking soda over 4 years ago. So if i could conquer my mind from the things I have been used to, I believe I could conquer anything.

Since I quit drinking, I have taken a more positive life. I feel alcohol weighed me down and everything was just negative.

I spiritually awoken to a new way of living. I can see this beautiful world around us clearly now. Before I would see  the world through the glass of liquor and to me it was a dark place where I did not want to be.

What is addiction, but letting the mind conquer you. I know addiction is a hard thing, more so for cigarette smokers or for people with drugs (cannabis not included.) Most people see that this site has to do about cannabis and that I am a cannabis enthusiast and most people would think that I would smoke everyday, which is not the case and I don’t see a problem with people smoking daily as I believe cannabis does the opposite of what alcohol does, where as alcohol you lose your mind, cannabis you regain control of it. But that is if your mind is right.

Again conquering your mind, conquering your thoughts. Not letting them consume you. I don’t smoke cannabis everyday and I can have a pound right on front of me and I won’t be itching to smoke it, like most people think. It also has everything to do with willpower. But I think it goes with understanding your own mind,, understanding yourself.

Slowly but surely you can quit anything that weighs you down.  I even quit eating meat and became a vegen recently, but that is for another blog entirely.

Deep down inside, you must believe you can. We have to be strong deep down to our core. Strong and defiant and I truly think we can conquer whatever we set our minds to.

Now I do meditate, that has become my substitution for drinking, although it is not something that took place of it. But meditation can help with conquering your mind and knowing yourself deeply for you to truly conquer what this world throws at you.

But it is for us individually to find what works for us. Be it meditation, yoga, qi gong, even dancing. What ever works for you, dive deep into your mind and conquer that bitch.

Now I don’t really see a problem with drinking, per se. Wines and beer are found to be beneficial for our health in some aspects. But I think some things in this world from money to whatever is OK in moderation. Not in excess. Again it is all about control. But we often go overboard on what our limits are.

Now would I drink alcohol again? One in my new found philosophies in how I am viewing the world is that i want to produce for myself, to have a connection to the things I consume. I love Italian food and I use to love a good glass of wine to go with it. So if it is a well aged bottle of wine, sure why not. But if I make my own wine butt naked, stomping grapes or if i brew my own beer, I would drink it. But this time I know my limit.

Drinking alcohol would not be to drown out the stress and sorrow, but it would be to enjoy the splendor of what I produced from nature, it would be a for a good home cooked meal. Just like a good cannabis smoke before a meal.

It’s just a connection to things I have grown with love. If I don’t grow it, I don’t want it. Unless a friend brew his beer with love, then we could share in that love.

For now I am happy with my clear mind, my clear conscious. But in life you sometimes have to enjoy it, party hard have fun from time to time. Just don’t make it habitual, don’t make it something that has to be a must.  Party hard, live life accordingly, but never lose control and get your mind right.

Hope you found this posting somewhat inspirational for you to quit whatever it is you want to quit or found  it as a different insight on why you should quit something.

Please leave a comment down way below on why you stopped whatever you stopped or why you enjoy drinking alcohol or whatever you feel about this post. Thanks and share this, with your share, you are supporting my website.  Peace, love and freedom my lovely souls!