We were standing out on my roof in the post-midnight hours of a Saturday morning when Ten said, “Want to do Sober October with me?”

We were on the last of several bottles of wine consumed that night, after martinis with dinner, a beer here and there in between the white wine and then the red. To be clear, it was a special occasion—the first time Mom had visited New York since I moved and the perfect late-summer night had been festive with oysters and cocktails and rose. Mom and her BF had retired to their Airbnb hours before, and Ten and I were continuing into the wee hours.

“What? No. FUCK no,” I said. I thought about a full month without red wine for another moment as I sipped my malbec. “Yeah, no way. I cannot even. No. I mean, I fully support you in your Sober Octobriety, but for me, no way.”

It has been a heavy-drinking year, to be sure. February started with a boozy dramatic bang that had my liver reeling, but that was nothing to how that month plowed to an end like a drag racer wiping out into a crowded grandstand. What do you do when you find out your boyfriend has been lying to you about his identity and the ensuing epic breakup drama, complete with daily phone calls with police and a very pricey specialized cleaning service, overtakes your life and drives you from your home?  Well, you drink. Quite a lot. Throw in a cross-country move just weeks later, unemployment, frantic job-hunting, a general transformation of self, and Brooklyn’s plentiful $7-beer-and-a-shot specials, and next thing you know, you don’t even remember the last time you spent more than 16 hours at a stretch without a drink in your hand.

No amount of hot yoga is going to wring all that out of your system.

In college I discovered that alcohol transformed my social anxiety into social bravado. I would go to parties, but I felt like an interloper, a foreign exchange student in the land of the socially adept. But with a flask in my pocket, I was indestructible. I’d have a few shots and lean myself somewhere I could observe the goingson without being obliged to partake in them before I was sauced enough to do so. With the bottle and a pack of cigarettes on display like bait, it was always a short matter of time before someone would sidle over for a nip or to bum a smoke. By then the liquor had worked its transformative magic on me and my anxiety gave over to lugubriousness. I would fall into the easy banter of the semi-inebriated, fearlessly delving into life’s stickier subjects while we passed the flask around.

Some of my most formative and longstanding friendships were forged by wine and whiskey, tequila and beer. My fondest memories are around a table sprouting bottles and full glasses. My life’s heartbreaks have all been tended by glasses full of intoxicating, comforting booze. The velvet tang of red wine, the scalp tightening burn of bourbon, the bracing medicinal sting of gin—these are my frequent after-work companions, my weekend evening pastimes, my Friday night indulgences. Alcohol is embedded in my life like an intrepid journalist is embedded with a battle-weary platoon. No wonder I fell into panicked palpitations when Ten asked me if I wanted to do Sober October with her. She may as well have asked me if I felt like doing without my big toes for a few weeks.

Then I realized how telling my reaction was. If the thought of a month without the comforting possibility of wine made my palms sweaty, then that was an excellent sign that I needed to dry out.

So it has been three weeks since I’ve had a drink. No beer, no wine, no whiskey. Not a tiny little cheating sip, not even a longing whiff. I have not gone this long without imbibing some adult libation since I drank my first double Jack Daniels on the rocks at the Crofton Hotel in London when I was 19.

Ten years working behind a bar gives one a familiarity with alcoholism in its many functional and semi-functional forms. I watched people move in and out of dependency, struggling with their own demons. I know people who struggle still, some who have let go of alcohol totally, and some who haven’t, even as their relationship with it becomes more troublesome. There is no doubt I have tiptoed unsteadily on that fuzzy line between being an enthusiastic drinker and an excessive drinker, played ding-dong-ditch at the door of physical dependency. I've had countless occasions to ponder the deleterious effects of overindulgence: The mornings I awoke with mysterious bruises or with men whose names I couldn’t immediately recall, or on strange couches in houses I didn’t recognize; there was the routine purge before bed to quell the spins; there was the broken collarbone procured under the influence of whiskey and Xanax. To this day the details of how that happened are lost to the blackout, and I still feel guilty that I blamed Travis Thumm for it for years. (Sorry, Travis!)

But that was my twenties. Obviously I’ve toned it down quite a bit since then, trading in the quarter-hourly whiskey shots behind the bar for happy hour martinis after work and red wine with dinner. But this year, as I’ve stated, has been a different beast and my moderate drinking had tipped into something that could be described as moderately heavy.

I decided Sober October would act as a reset, a reorientation, a resolution to put some equitability back into my long-term relationship with alcohol. Because like any relationship, this one too must be reevaluated and adjusted from time to time. I love the cozy darkness of a comfortable bar and the taste of whiskey. I love the singeing relief that comes halfway through a martini after a stressful day. I love the loose, convivial conversations with old friends over a long wine-fuelled dinner. I love the sweaty trouble a shot of tequila evokes. I don’t want to not drink. So I must drink mindfully. And maybe the next time someone asks me if I want to take month off drinking, I’ll see it as an opportunity to check in, evaluate, and adjust—and not a spiritual amputation.

Is it Halloween yet? So. Thirsty.