THE PERSON BEHIND QUIT DRINKING PLAN
My Story
It took me years to find my way to a life without alcohol. Here’s how I got there—and why I want to help you find your own way. Here is my journey to quit drinking.
I Knew Drinking Was a Problem Long Before I Cared That It Was
My relationship with alcohol was complicated.
I knew fairly early that I seemed to have more of a dependence on it than other people I knew. I can remember conversations with friends going all the way back to college when I wondered aloud whether I drank too much.
So it’s not quite accurate to say I didn’t know I had a problem.
I knew alcohol was a problem in my life long before I cared that it was.
Because alcohol wasn’t just my problem.
It was my solution.
At first, I thought drinking made me popular and well-liked. Later, it became part of the bond I shared with my husband and many of my friends. Eventually, drinking was simply part of everyday life. It was something I had to have, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about that.
Why would I want to give up something I believed was making my life better?
That began to change in 2008.
I was stagnant. I was a freelance writer but couldn’t tap into my creative energy. I actually thought alcohol made me more creative. Turns out I was wrong.
I went to see a psychiatrist about this problem. I told her I was depressed. My goal was to get a prescription for happy pills so I could add another layer of numbing to the alcohol.
One of the first questions she asked me was “how much do you drink?”
Shit.
She was right but I didn’t want to admit it. She believed alcohol was the cause of the problem I had come to see her about. Again, she was right! So instead of leaving her office with that coveted prescription for another mind-numbing substance, I left with a pamphlet for AA.
That’s when I got serious about trying to quit.
Notice I didn’t say that’s when I quit.
That’s when I started trying.
It would take another thirteen years.
My journey to quit drinking was a long one. It is my hope that Quit Drinking Plan can help shorten yours.
Thirteen Years of Trying
I went to my first AA meeting that year.
Immediately afterward, I stopped at a convenience store and bought beer.
I didn’t even wait until I got home to drink it.
That pretty well sums up where I was.
But I kept looking for answers.
I found an online recovery forum and threw myself into it. I was there day and night. I formed a close friendship with a young man who had started trying to quit around the same time I did. We became “sobriety partners.”
I was vulnerable, and that relationship became far more important to my ability to stay alcohol-free than I understood at the time.
Then one day I experienced what people call the pink cloud—that strange, exhilarating feeling when suddenly everything seems possible. I felt almost invincible.
That same day, I received a message from my sobriety partner.
He had been drinking.
I was devastated.
Eventually he dropped out altogether, and without him, I felt lost.
I think I made it about five months during that attempt.
Then I started drinking again.
Soon I became the person on the forum posting some version of:
“I’m on Day 1 again.”
Over and over and over.
There were periods during those thirteen years when I tried very hard to quit. There were other periods when I didn’t try much at all.
But I never really stopped looking.
“What's Your Plan?”
Some of the old-timers at AA kept telling me:
“You have to have a plan. What’s your plan?”
It frustrated me.
What plan?
I was trying AA. I tried working the Steps. But I struggled with some of what I was being asked to believe, particularly the idea that I was powerless.
And I couldn’t find the plan everyone kept telling me I needed.
AA wasn’t the only thing I tried.
Early on, I discovered Jack Trimpey’s Rational Recovery and what he called the “Beast”—the voice inside you that tells you to drink. That idea stayed with me and eventually influenced how I came to understand and work with my own drinking thoughts.
I read The Easy Way to Stop Drinking. I read The Tao of Sobriety. I read My Way Out. I read other books and explored other approaches.
I got my psychiatrist prescribed Topamax.
And something fascinating happened when I took it.
I could pour myself a glass of wine—and forget about it.
The desire simply wasn’t the same.
But sometimes I would drink anyway.
That experience helped me begin to understand something important: not all of my drinking was coming from the same place.
There was dependence.
But there was also habit.
There were thoughts and beliefs.
There were relationships.
There were routines and associations.
There were reasons I believed alcohol made my life better.
Over the years, I kept finding pieces that helped.
The problem was that, for me, no single piece was the complete answer.
Something might work for a while.
Then it wouldn’t.
And I’d find myself back at Day 1.
The First Version of This Book
Somewhere during that first serious attempt to quit in 2008, I decided I wanted to write a book.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking about creating a business or helping people.
I wanted to help my sobriety partner.
That early book was very different from the one you’re reading about today. And over the years, I would pick it up, put it down, rethink it, rewrite pieces of it and put it away again.
Sometimes I think the universe always intended for me to write this book.
It just made me wait until I could get it right.
Because I hadn’t lived the whole story yet.
The Time It Was Different
For most of those thirteen years, quitting felt hard.
I’d decide I was going to quit on Monday, so I’d drink like crazy on Sunday. Then Monday wasn’t so bad because I felt terrible and didn’t particularly want anything to drink.
By Tuesday, I’d be white-knuckling it again.
And somewhere underneath every attempt was a belief I barely questioned:
Eventually, I’m going to drink again.
And, of course, eventually I did.
Then came 2021.
My dog died after suffering a grand mal seizure.
I was devastated.
That same day, I had committed to work for a friend at a festival. All I wanted to do was grieve, but I had made a commitment, so I went.
Normally, drinking would have been part of working a festival.
Normally, drinking would also have been what I turned to when I was hurting.
But that day, something was different.
I didn’t want to drink.
In fact, I made myself have a beer, because that’s what I did.
It didn’t help.
And somehow, in that moment, I realized:
I don’t need this anymore.
I wish I could give you a perfect explanation for why that attempt was different from all the others.
I can’t.
After thirteen years of trying to quit, something had changed.
I stopped drinking.
And then my life started changing too.
When My Life Opened Up
The first year wasn’t some magical transformation.
Life was still life.
My husband and I became increasingly distant. Our children were becoming adults and leaving home. And while I had stopped drinking, my husband’s drinking became worse.
I tried to help him, but I also understood that I couldn’t save him while I was trying to save myself.
Eventually, I told him that when our lease ended, if he was still drinking, I wouldn’t continue living with him.
Then life started moving very quickly.
On February 2, I lost my job in a downsizing.
That same day, my sister’s husband died.
I received severance from my job, and instead of panicking about being unemployed, I remember telling my husband that I would find an even better job.
Then I went to stay with my sister.
By the end of March, I’d done exactly what I’d said I would do: I landed a better job.
A couple of weeks later, my husband came home extremely intoxicated.
I didn’t want to deal with it anymore.
He was the one who finally said the words:
“I think we should separate.”
I was so relieved that he had.
I left.
Eventually, I moved halfway across the country to live with my sister.
And an entirely different life began.
I Started Living
My new job gave me opportunities I’d never had before.
I traveled for work. I earned a promotion and a raise almost immediately. Then another promotion took me from Florida to Colorado.
Within three years, I had more than doubled my salary.
But the money wasn’t the important part.
For the first time, I began to really experience my life.
I traveled to places I’d once only dreamed of visiting.
Being single was difficult at first. Then I embraced it. I became independent. I met wonderful new people.
I reconnected with my sister.
I became creative again. I started painting.
I picked up that old book I’d been carrying around since 2008 and began working on it seriously.
My health eventually became a priority too.
I want to be careful when I talk about that because the story isn’t the simplistic one you sometimes hear: I stopped drinking and the weight just fell off.
I did initially lose weight.
Then I gained it back.
Later, I made the deliberate decision to take care of my health. Today I exercise regularly, I’m much more fit, and I feel fabulous.
And sleep!
I sleep about eight hours a night now, and the quality of that sleep is incredible. I have energy I didn’t have before.
My life isn’t perfect.
Life still happens whether you drink or not.
But when I look at everything that has changed—my relationships, health, career, creativity, travel, confidence, independence, friendships, family, and this book—I don’t think the biggest transformation is any one of those things.
I found myself.
Why I Created Quit Drinking Plan
Looking back over those thirteen years, I can finally answer the question those crotchety old AA people kept asking me:
What’s your plan?
My mistake was thinking there must be one plan out there somewhere that I simply hadn’t found yet.
I don’t believe that anymore.
AA contains things that have helped many people. Rational Recovery gave me ideas that helped me. Books helped. Online support helped. Medication helped me understand something about my drinking. Changing my habits mattered. Changing the way I thought mattered. Understanding my motivation mattered. Building a life I wanted mattered.
Different things helped at different times.
And what worked for someone else wasn’t necessarily what worked for me.
That’s what I felt was missing all those years.
Not another single solution.
An ongoing plan with multiple solutions for multiple people and multiple stages.
That’s what eventually became Quit Drinking Plan.
I’m not here to tell you that the way I stopped drinking is the way you should stop drinking.
It isn’t.
Your relationship with alcohol isn’t mine. Your life isn’t mine. Your reasons aren’t mine. Your challenges aren’t mine.
So your plan shouldn’t have to be mine either.
I want to help you understand the pieces. Explore your options. Figure out what alcohol is actually doing for you. Discover what matters enough to you to change. Build support. Change habits. Work with the thoughts that pull you back toward drinking. Prepare for difficult moments. And create a life that gives you reasons to keep going.
Most importantly, I want you to know this:
You can do it.
You don’t have to figure out forever today.
You can start with this moment.
Then the next one.
And the next.
Your life will change.
I can’t promise you exactly what will happen on the other side. My own life certainly didn’t unfold the way I would have predicted.
But that’s part of what makes it exciting.
I spent years thinking alcohol was my solution.
Eventually, I discovered how much life was waiting for me without it.
I stopped drinking.
And I started living.
— Skye K. Robinson