Learning to Feel the Hard Things

How eliminating alcohol allowed room for clarity and growth.

Aug 12, 2026

This post is adopted from my book, Living on Purpose, still in development. Subscribe for updates on publishing and opportunities for purchase.

When my father-in-law died in 2018, my husband and I both lost ourselves for a while.

Mike was carrying a grief he couldn’t put down. I was carrying Mike, along with three kids, two jobs, and a house that never stopped needing something. We were still functioning. We showed up to work, got the girls where they needed to be, kept the lights on. But underneath it, we were worn down to almost nothing.

Alcohol was part of how we coped, the way it had always been part of our lives. We both grew up in families where drinking was simply what you did. A beer after work, wine at dinner, a toast at every celebration, a drink to take the edge off every hard day. It was casual and it was constant and nobody questioned it. So when the grief settled in, we did what we knew.

One drink leads to two, the way it does, and that’s never helpful. We drank a little more to feel a little less. But the guilt we felt in turn was palpable, and with three young kids, we knew something had to change.

Mike cut it out first. I followed a short while later. For me it wasn’t some dramatic moment. When you grow up a social drinker, a couple of glasses at night feels normal. But I watched what happened to Mike once he stopped. He was healthier, more confident, more focused on where he wanted to go. I wanted that. I wanted to find clarity in the mess. Which meant I had to face it, head on.

By then COVID had arrived, and everyone was grappling with some version of the same thing. For a lot of people, confinement meant boredom. Not us. Three kids, a move to Ohio, and a brutal job search meant we were anything but bored. But the stress and the fear of it all were enough, so one day I simply decided I was done and I never looked back. Nobody likes to drink alone anyway.

We were going against the grain, though we had no idea at the time. When the lockdowns hit, Americans drank more, not less. Liquor store sales jumped more than fifty percent in a single week that March. One large national study found heavy drinking rose about twenty percent between 2018 and 2020, and it stayed elevated for years after. What I couldn’t have known then is that the country would eventually turn the other way. By 2025, the share of Americans who drink had fallen to fifty-four percent, the lowest Gallup had recorded in nearly ninety years of asking, down from sixty-two percent just two years earlier. The people who still drank were drinking less than they had in decades. We were early to something a lot of people are only now arriving at.

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The irony isn’t lost on me now. Both of our families, the ones who taught us that drinking was normal, hardly drink at all anymore. Mostly for health reasons. The thing we all treated as harmless turned out to be something nearly everyone stepped away from once they knew better.

Cutting it out became the catalyst for something bigger. Once the alcohol was gone, we could finally see the industry for what it is. A business that profits by selling people something that harms them, dressed up as celebration and connection and reward. We started seeing the food industry the same way. We cut most of the junk out too, with a few honest exceptions. Pizza on Friday nights and the occasional Chinese delivery. We still indulge in fast food when we’re on the road and there’s nothing else. We just stopped being blind to the fact that these products are not made with our wellbeing in mind. They are being made in spite of it. And as registered dietician and hormone expert Kelly O'Hara says, you still have to live your life, it’s all about balance.

We’ve tried to raise our girls to see it clearly, too. These industries build their fortunes on people who trust them, and the distance between the people at the top and the product is hard to miss. Not long ago the CEO of McDonald’s posted a video of himself taking a small, reluctant bite of a new burger and calling it “the product.” He claims to eat there several times a week, and maybe he does (I’m not buying it), but the moment went viral because it named something people already felt. The ones who profit most from this system seem to live at arm’s length from it, and from what it does to the people who actually indulge in it. Our daughters are growing up understanding that an ad for McDonald’s or Miller Lite isn’t speaking to them. It’s selling to them. That distinction matters. They’ve learned to notice it and to walk away from it.

We’d rather they understand how these industries work than absorb the story the industries tell about themselves. We’ve watched documentaries with them about how the food industry operates and why it matters where your food comes from. I’m teaching them to grow our own herbs and vegetables. It’s fairly small right now, but I plan to keep building on it as they get older and these industries keep doing what they do.

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In my mind, alcohol, fast food, cigarettes… they’re all the same thing. We just don’t treat them that way. That’s the part I can’t get over. I refuse to get over it.

As for me and Mike, taking those things out of our lives made room we didn’t know we were missing. Cutting out alcohol didn’t force us to wake up one morning with a grand new purpose. It wasn’t that direct. What happened took place over time, and it mattered more. It cleared out the guilt we’d been carrying, of doing something we knew wasn’t good for us. It also sharpened our sense of what we owe them as parents. Not just to raise good humans, but to raise kids who take their own health seriously, are aware of some of the unfortunate pitfalls of the consumer industry, and feel some responsibility to the people around them.

Once that guilt was gone, we had space to think about what we actually wanted. Mike left a job in the tobacco industry that had slowly eaten away at him. He went back to school for his master’s and focused his job search on community impact organizations. He returned to his music and produced his first album and many more songs that followed. He also saw a therapist and did the work of processing his dad’s death, and unlearning what had been handed to him.

As for me, I invested more time in myself, how I was raising my kids – not just through the lessons I was teaching but through the behavior I was exhibiting. I started building my own company and created more autonomy over my day-to-day. Those choices came later, and they came from a lot of things. But cutting out the bad habits came first.

Today, we are happier, healthier, our relationship is stronger, and we are more fulfilled than ever before. The grief of losing Mike’s dad resolved itself in time, the way grief does. Losing a parent young is never easy, no matter how you approach it. But we healed. We still miss him every day, and we honor his life through memories, laughter, love, and by living the best way we know how.

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