Robyn Ashley Schleihauf

People used to smoke cigarettes, do drugs, and fuck in the back stairwell of Tribeca, the first bar I worked at in Halifax. Stumbling past the bathrooms, I would push the crash bar on the heavy metal fire door with one hand and draw a King-sized Belmont from my pack of cigarettes with the other, hoping no one was pressed up against the railing when I went back there to take my break. At 22, I was a veteran binge drinker, but at Tribeca I was learning to be a functional alcoholic, tiptoeing the line between being drunk enough to tolerate my life and too drunk to count the cash at the end of the night.

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By the time I applied to law school at 29, I always kept a bottle of cheap scotch nearby.

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The day after I turned 36, I woke up face-down on my bed, my dried sweat like a chalk outline around a corpse.

 

The Thirst: how getting sober finally sated me is for people who loved Blackout: remembering the things I drank to forget by Sarah Hepbola and Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp.

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I used to think drinking was rebellious. Now I think there is nothing more conventional than getting wasted.

I am a freelance CBC contributor, a lawyer, and I am 7 years sober from alcohol. But I used to be a bartender, and when I wasn’t behind a bar, I was pulled up to one. I was in thrall with alcohol from the time I took my first drink when I was 16 until I stopped at 36.

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The Thirst is for millennial and Gen Z women who are worried about their drinking or are simply ‘sober curious.’ When people ask, ‘why get sober?’, my question is, ‘why stay drunk?’