Dry January: Butch Edition, Part 2

So...what do I *actually* drink?

A week now into my intentional removal of alcohol led me to look at a seemingly simple question, but….what do I actually drink during the day?

Certainly consuming water is essential for life but beverages serve many purposes. They are soothing, exciting, or compliment my meal. For example, when I’m having pizza I almost always want a coke. The mixture of that salty savory pizza with the sweet bubbles of my Coke Zero are a nostalgic 90s kid experience. And I love it.

Drinking my morning coffee is an experience as well. It’s a marker to start my day. I’m a slow coffee drinker. I like to use it almost meditatively to ease into my day. My wife and I drink it together, it’s a romantic contact to make each other coffee every day. It’s an intentional time for us to connect and be just us, sipping on coffee, talking about anything and everything. It helps me start my day (and my brain) and is like my morning anchor. It also provides comfort to me on crazy mornings where I have a lot going on, refilling that mug and keeping it nearby keeps me tethered to the ground.

There’s water of course, constant, boring (but in a good way) Sometimes I drink it in different shape and sizes cups to keep it fun. My little nautical cup is fun for me, it’s low pressure and it’s fun to refill throughout the day (points for thrifting finds!).

Then there’s my love, the fizzy bubbles. That’s exciting to drink! I’m a fan of sugarless fizzy things all day long. Plain seltzer or club soda? Yes please. Flavors? Yeah lemon and lime? SOLD. Recently I discovered spindrift which tastes just like dropping lemon or lime concentrate in to plain seltzer, which is what I usually do when I’m looking for some flavor.

And then of course….soda. I was conditioned as a kid to drink diet soda (grumbles at diet culture) so I’m a Coke Zero drinker now. I try to stick to only 1 or 2 per day at most, just in general. Not for any particular reason other than that feels better for my body.

I’m no stranger to the idea at the end of a long day saying to my wife “man I need a drink after that day”. A rough work day, a difficult parenting day, or just a crazy day overall can lead to ‘man I need a drink after this’ conversation. 9 times out of 10 we say it but never really execute it. Drinking is a way to escape what happened or is happening, and as it turns out, dealing with what’s happening is a far better solution than trying to bury it down and avoid it. It almost always turns out that the idea of drinking is far better than the execution. I almost never feel better after, I don’t like feeling loopy, and I usually have work to do in the evening, and I always have parenting to do in the evening, so I need to be alert and coherent.

I’ve found that much more than an alcoholic drink, a warm cup of tea feels like a much better end to a chaotic day. It calms my nerves and connects me to something. Much like I enjoy starting my day with coffee, hot tea seems to provide the same soothing comfort for me. So I’m diving in to the idea of an evening routine of a nice hot cup of tea to wind down my day.

All in all, not much has changed in my daily routine, but I have been enjoying the awareness that this has brought me about what I DO drink, why and how and what it does for me. It’s given me a chance to reflect on the role all of this plays in my day, and the biggest change so far is the realization that a hot tea in the evening is definitely getting integrated into my evening routine from here on out!