Will Sobriety Take Over Your Identity?

When I quit drinking, I feared who I might become.

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

The first time I tried to quit drinking, I was in my early twenties. I remember going to AA meetings and meeting a lot of people much older than me—typically in their forties and fifties, and sometimes even older than that. Many of them had been sober for decades.

Maybe I should have been inspired by their long-term success, but instead, I found it distressing. I wondered to myself why they still had to regularly attend meetings so many years after they had quit. Couldn’t they just move on from their alcoholism? Did they really have to turn sobriety into their entire identity?