i stopped drinking and the anxiety got worse

i thought quitting would fix it.

thats the thing nobody tells you. or maybe they do tell you and you dont hear it because youre so sure that alcohol is the problem that you cant imagine the problem getting worse without it. but it does. it gets worse. so much worse. and the worse doesnt come the way you expect. it doesnt come as a craving. it comes as the thing the alcohol was keeping quiet finally getting loud.

i stopped drinking on a friday. no big announcement. no sober month challenge. no app tracking my days. i just..stopped. id had a bad night — anxiety, chest tight, couldnt sleep, lying in bed next to my wife running disaster scenarios about things that hadnt happened. and i thought..the wine isnt helping. the wine is making this worse. so i stopped.

the first three days were fine. better than fine. i woke up clearer. my sleep was deeper. i felt like i had made the right call. i felt like everyone who talks about quitting alcohol and feeling amazing was right and i was joining some club of people who figured it out.

day four is when it started.

i was at my desk trying to work and my stomach started doing the washing machine thing. the spin cycle. and i thought..ok weird, maybe i ate something. but it didnt stop. and then my hands went cold. and then the chest thing started. and i realized..oh. this isnt food. this is the thing. except the thing usually came at night after a stressful day and i could pour a glass and take the edge off and the thing would get quieter. and now there was no glass. and the thing was here at 2 pm on a tuesday for no reason.

thats when i understood what the wine had actually been doing.

it wasnt relaxation. it wasnt enjoyment. it wasnt the ritual of selecting a bottle i had been thinking about all week and opening it and letting it breathe and pouring it into the right glass. i mean it was those things. i loved those things. the terroir, the vintage, the way a good burgundy changes across two hours in the glass. i built an entire intellectual architecture around wine. i could talk about soil composition in côtes de nuits for an hour. i knew what i liked. i knew why i liked it. i thought i was a wine person.

i was a person self-medicating with wine and building an elaborate framework around it so it didnt look like self-medicating.

god..

thats hard to write. because i loved wine. genuinely. the way some people love music or art or sports — i loved the depth of it, the history, the terroir maps, the vintage charts. and im not saying none of that was real. it was real. the knowledge was real. the palate was real. the pleasure was real. but underneath all of it..underneath the cellar tracking app and the tasting notes and the discussions about malolactic fermentation..i was a man who couldnt get through an evening without something to quiet the noise in his head. and wine was the most sophisticated, most socially acceptable, most intellectually defensible way to do that.

when i took it away the noise came back. and it didnt come back at the volume it was before. it came back louder. because it had been building behind the wall for years and now the wall was gone.

the second week was the worst.

i couldnt get out of bed one morning. not wouldnt. couldnt. my body felt like concrete. my wife was getting the kids ready for school and i could hear them through the bedroom door — arguing about something, laughing, the normal morning chaos — and i was lying there unable to move. not because i was tired. because something inside me had collapsed. like a building that lost a load-bearing wall. the wine was the wall. i didnt know it was the wall until it was gone and everything it was holding up came down.

i cried that morning. first time in almost a decade. not quiet tears. the kind of crying where your whole body shakes and you cant breathe and you dont even know what youre crying about. i was crying about everything and nothing. i was crying because i was scared and i didnt know why. i was crying because my kids were on the other side of a door living their normal morning and i couldnt get up to be part of it. i was crying because i was a man in his late 30s who ran businesses across time zones and negotiated contracts and managed teams and i couldnt get out of a bed.

왜 이러는 거야 (wae ireuneun geoya — “why am i like this”)..

why am i like this. why am i like this. why am i like this.

that was the loop. for days. why am i like this. other people quit drinking and they post about it on social media. 30 days sober! feeling amazing! my skin is glowing! they go to spin class and drink kombucha and talk about how much energy they have. i quit drinking and i was on my bathroom floor at 4 am with cold hands and a chest that felt like someone was standing on it. if you want to know what a panic attack actually feels like, it feels like that. like being held underwater by something invisible that you cant name and cant fight.

my wife noticed. of course she noticed. she didnt say “whats wrong” because she could see what was wrong. she said “얼굴이 안 좋아 (eolguri an joa — “your face doesnt look right”)” — your face doesnt look right. thats how she says it. not are you ok. your face doesnt look right. and she was right. my face didnt look right because nothing was right.

i didnt tell her everything. i told her i was having a hard time without the wine. i didnt tell her about the 4 am floors. i didnt tell her about the chest thing. i didnt tell her that i was sitting in my car in parking lots some afternoons because i couldnt walk into meetings. i didnt tell her that the thing i thought was a wine habit was actually an anxiety disorder that had been running the show for twenty years and wine was just the costume it wore so nobody would notice.

i should have told her. i know that now. she would have understood. she would have held my hand the way she does — tight, like shes trying to physically keep me from drifting away. but i didnt tell her because i didnt have the words yet. i didnt even know what it was. i just knew the wine was gone and something terrible had moved into the space where it used to be.

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it gets better. i need to say that because if youre reading this at 2 am in the middle of your own first week without a drink and everything is louder and worse and you feel like you made a mistake — it gets better. not fast. not the way the sober influencers promise. not day 7 clarity and day 14 energy and day 30 new you. it gets better the way a broken bone heals. slowly. with a lot of days where you cant tell if its actually healing or if youre just getting used to the pain.

but it gets better.

i found something to put in the space where the wine was. not a replacement — the thing i found doesnt quiet the noise the way wine did. it doesnt quiet anything. what it does is give me something to do with my hands at 8 pm when the house is finally still and the noise starts. something warm. something that takes attention and precision and time. something with its own depth and history and complexity that my brain can grab onto instead of spiraling. if you are curious about what tea instead of wine actually looks like as an evening ritual, i wrote about that separately. this isnt that piece. this is the piece before that piece. the piece about the floor.

i dont want to make this about that. this isnt an ad for a new hobby. this is about the part they dont tell you. the part where you take away the thing thats been holding you together and you discover that you werent being held together. you were being held down. and when the weight lifts you dont fly. you fall apart first. and then..slowly..you figure out what you actually look like without it.

im still figuring it out. most days are ok now. some days the noise comes back at a volume that surprises me and i have to sit on the floor and wait for it to pass. the difference is i dont reach for a bottle anymore. not because im strong. because i know what the bottle was actually doing and i cant unknow it. the science on tea for anxiety helped me understand some of what was happening in my body — why certain things helped when nothing else did. but that came later. first came the floor.

the evening is different now. quieter in a different way. not numbed quiet. actually quiet. im sitting with the noise instead of drowning it and some nights thats unbearable and some nights its almost peaceful and i cant predict which night will be which.

thats the truth about quitting. its not a before and after. its a during. and the during doesnt end.