Lately I have been surprised by the number of my friends who says ” what?? Are you okay? What happened to you?”; when I tell them ‘I don’t drink beer anymore’. I grew up in Rwanda, an east African country, where drinking beer is more like a symbol, it means you’re not a boy anymore, it means you’re a man now, drinking beer is something every guy looks forward to. I remember when I was 12 years old, my dad would say “it’s okay son, you can have a sip, I want you to be somebody when you grow up. So I grew up thinking that to be somebody, you have to drink beer and that’s how it was to my friends too.
This is why my friends are surprised. I can see it in their eyes thinking ‘oh my god, what happened to him! I wonder if he’s okay!’ Sometimes they ask me, because they can’t believe that someone would quit something they waited for a long time. That’s the culture I grew up in and it makes sense for them to ask me, because I would’ve done the same thing.
3 reasons why I quit drinking:
a) I hate loosing control of myself. I hate not having a schedule that I can follow or having a schedule and not being able to follow it. Some days I used to have just one sip of beer and when I did something I otherwise wouldn’t like forgetting where I put my phone last night, I would think ‘is it because of that sip?’
b) I journal every morning, and one of the questions I try to answer is ‘what would I do differently if I had to do yesterday over?’ I found myself doing things I would never do in a million years if I was sober (things like hanging with people I don’t like and don’t want to be around, waking up late and not being able to do my morning routine which involves exercising, writing, journal,…) and they kept coming up all over my journal. I kept telling myself that maybe it’s a behavior thing, they don’t have anything to do with me drinking “beer”, but after reading my journal couple times, it wasn’t hard to figure out that ‘beer’ was the common denominator.
c) Two of my goals are having a six pack and running a marathon by the end of this year. For me to be able to reach these goals, one of the things I have to do is ‘not drink more than 2 alcoholic drinks per day’ and if I had a choice, I would choose 2 glass of wine every night over 2 bottles of beer every night. (well I do!)
This is why I quit drinking beer and I only drink one glass of wine before bed and sometimes on a Saturday, I drink 4 glasses of my wife’s cocktail because she’s my wife 🙂
To those who drink beer, that’s great, so much fun, enjoy it! To those who don’t, wonderful, welcome me in the family!
I can’t wait to reach my goals and maybe we will celebrate with a beer or two, who knows!!!
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