MY Life After Medicine: Choosing Sobriety in a World Obsessed With Alcohol

This week I celebrated one year of being alcohol free.

To start my sober life, I had to follow my gut feeling and choose not to drink, even though our society often revolves around alcohol.

This has probably been my biggest challenge in authenticity to this day.

And that's what I want to talk about on this episode.

How do you find and follow your authentic path, especially when it's different and no one else seems to be on it?

Is it really worth it to be true to yourself if it's hard and goes against what everyone else is doing?

Why not just fit in with everyone else?

This is what I am going to answer in my new monthly series, "My Life After Medicine.”

Where every first Thursday of the month, I'll share what I’ve experienced since leaving the medical field.

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Transcript

0:17

Before I could make my decision to leave medicine, the first big mental barrier I had to overcome, before I could even entertain in the idea of leaving, was overcoming the barrier, what will people think of me? Because for years, I had been using my career As a way to gain other people's approval, I thought that I needed to have a list of impressive accomplishments and accolades to feel at ease in social settings. And so if I dropped out of residency and gave up on being a doctor, then I would be sacrificing this guaranteed stamp of approval. And I had to be okay with that. I had to be okay with people. Not understanding my decision, not supporting my decision, even looking down on it. I had to be okay with losing other people's approval, potentially losing my social status, in order to start pursuing my authentic path. And really, like, that's what happens anytime you make the decision to go against societal norms, to follow your true path. There's always a price to pay. There's losses and sacrifices, and I went through that five years ago when I was making my decision. To leave medicine, and most recently, I've been going through that again with my alcohol free journey. So, for the past year now, I've been following this nudge from my intuition to live a sober life, to fully remove alcohol. And it's interesting how much this has mirrored my journey of leaving medicine. Because in order to start this alcohol free journey, I first had to listen to my inner wisdom, to be sober, instead of the conventional wisdom of society that makes alcohol so centric to everything. This journey of becoming sober in a world that's obsessed with alcohol has probably been my biggest challenge in authenticity to this day. And that's what I want to talk about on this episode. How you know what your authentic path is and how do you start to follow it when it's not the most popular path, when nobody else is doing it. And ultimately, is it even worth it to follow your authentic path when there's so much friction and difficulty involved with doing it in the first place? Wouldn't it just be easier to go with the status quo? Like what's the point of being so different from everyone else? This episode is part of a new series I'm doing once a month called My Life After Medicine. have you seen the Netflix series Love Life with Anna Kendrick? When I first started watching it, I was like, Oh, the title Love Life because it's about her romantic life. But once I watched the whole season, I was struck with this realization and it's not about the romantic parts of her life. It's about how to love life. Love is not the adjective to describe the sub genre of life that we're discussing. Love is a verb. And interestingly, I feel the same with the title of this podcast. When I named it Life After Medicine, I was thinking, okay, yeah, because it's about the sequence of events of my life that occurred after I left the medical field. And how other people could create their own version of that. But what I've realized through the podcast and through the journey I've been going on is it's actually about the life that I've found. The aliveness that I've cultivated. The way I've connected to the life force within me since leaving. And so life after medicine is my way of saying my do over, my fresh start, my second chapter. It's going from living by default, by other people's expectations, versus living from my own inner guidance and compass. And so during this, my life after medicine series, which my goal is to do once a month, the first Thursday of every month, I'm going to be sharing the journey of how I have become alive since leaving medicine, the journey of coming home to myself. And by sharing this, I'll be living out a huge part of my life's purpose. Because one part of my purpose is to be the experimenter. To be the person who just goes first. Who gives it a try. Who I just have this willingness to do it, this willingness to fail, this willingness to feel pain. And because of my willingness. I'm just going to go first and I'll give it a go and report back and let you know what's happening for me on the other side. And these episodes are my reports back. And I hope that by doing this, I can give you a sense of just like the real on the ground, raw report and the honest unfiltered truth and to give you a sense of what is possible. when you begin your journey of connecting back to yourself, of coming alive, of leaving the default path to pursue your own authentic version of success and happiness and fulfillment. So today we're going to talk about my alcohol free journey, but there's so many more pieces of my journey to come and I'm so excited to share them with you. You're listening to Life After Medicine, the podcast for health professionals who want to make a difference, make a living, and still have the freedom to enjoy their lives. My name is Chelsea Turgeon, and my mission is to help you, the lost health professional, find your authentic path to helping others and generating stable income without having to sacrifice your own health and happiness in the process. So first let's start with how do you know what your authentic path is? And so for this, for my sober journey, really the question is how did I know that it was time to stop drinking? And for me, the simple answer is, I connected to my intuition. But, I want to go a little bit deeper because you might be wondering, like, what does that mean? What does that actually entail? What does that even look like? For the past four years, my intuition has been slowly nudging me to stop drinking. One way I noticed this was through my body because our intuition always speaks to us through our physical body. Would start to feel more and more hungover with just tiny amounts of alcohol. If I had two drinks, if I had a drink and a half, I would feel this brain fog the next day. I would feel this sense of hangover, this fuzziness that did not even make sense. And so my body was starting to react and Essentially, it felt like my body was just rejecting alcohol in general, I also was feeling really jealous of people who were sober. I would read a lot of quitlet, so books about people who had stopped drinking, and there was just this vibrancy and contentment that I was drawn to in the people who became sober. People I would meet in real life who were sober, I would feel this sense of like, Ah, I wish that was me. Like, I wish I could be the one saying that I'm sober, that I haven't drank, that I no longer need or use alcohol or find any use for alcohol whatsoever. I just felt this longing to know what it would be like to be sober. Like, who could I grow into? What could be possible for me if I didn't wake up hungover on Saturday mornings, if I could be really present with people while I was hanging out with them instead of kind of wondering in the back of my mind, when should I get my next drink? Just going through sort of the moderation, gymnastics in my head, I started to just feel this, like, longing for, like, who I could become and what could be possible for me. If I stopped drinking. I sensed that alcohol was a way for me to stay in my comfort zone, that it was a way to press the easy button, to Numb, things like social anxiety and boredom and feelings that I didn't want to feel. And I just started to wonder what would be possible in my growth, in my spiritual journey, in my connection to myself, if I wasn't pressing the easy button to numb. My intuition was inviting me into this new possibility, this new different kind of life. And I was curious. However, my head was terrified of this unknown. The idea of going totally sober felt like this big leap into the unknown. And although my intuition wanted it, mind was really scared of that. And so it had so many logical reasons as to what Why, I didn't really need to change that much. Would say, you don't need to cut it out completely, you can just be a special occasion type of drinker, like, let's not do anything too drastic. Or it would say, just, work on moderating more, let's just be better at creating a limit for the number of drinks that you have in a week, or given outing, and just get better at moderating. Because I kept thinking, okay, something is wrong with me that I can't make this poisonous substance work in my life. So I just need to get better at moderating it. My head would also go into this comparison mode to normalize, like, it's not that bad. Everyone else drinks like you, you're no worse than any of your friends, you're drinking just like everybody else, your friends even tell you you're fun, it's not a big deal. So I was going into this comparison just to sort of normalize my experience. My mind would also say. Oh, I just drink to have fun. And I deserve to have fun. I deserve to let loose every once in a while. And it was really embracing this work hard, play hard mentality, which really is just this misguided self care, right? So I was feeling these longings for my intuition of what it could be like to be free from alcohol, to be sober, to be clear. I was feeling this longing to step into this new trajectory of growth and possibility and opportunity, but it was also unknown, and my mind was totally freaking out. And for about four years, That really kept me in this start stop phase where I took a few extended breaks, but just really wasn't ready to commit completely to being sober. But the good news is that the intuition does not give up. It's really this nagging voice that's always there in the background, and, Finally, I decided to listen, that I was just going to go all in, once and for all, and just totally release alcohol from my life. And so, last April 1st, I was in Albania, I had gone to this happy hour the night before and went out and was drinking and had a good time, didn't drink too much, it wasn't anything crazy. But I remember waking up and we went on this hike the next day, we were in this like monastery, and I remember looking around and being like, this scenery is so beautiful, and I'm not fully appreciating it. Because I feel fuzzy. I feel a little hungover. My brain doesn't feel like I'm fully present. I feel like there's this barrier between me and the beauty of life. And I don't want this anymore. It's like I knew that I wasn't ever going to be able to reach my potential if I kept drinking. And it was during this hike, during this trip to the monastery, I finally was like, I'm done. Like, it's like I knew in that moment that I was not going to drink again. And it's, now it has been over a year since that day, and I've been entirely sober the whole year. And It's been amazing. And so let's talk about that. How did I do it? Right, so I went from this knowing, from knowing that this is my authentic path, feeling this nudge from my intuition, but then how did I actually do it? How did I actually stick to this for an entire year? It was this process of freeing myself from alcohol. For me, it was alcohol that was hooking me, but you could literally use this process to free yourself from anything that's hooking you. any sort of addiction in any way. And one of my favorite definitions of addiction is from a teacher, Peter Krohn. He said, addiction is when you can never get enough of something that almost works. And that hits so much because that's how alcohol felt for me. You can never get enough of something that almost works. And when you're caught in any sort of habit or addiction that's hooking you in that way, that's almost working, then you can go through this really intentional process to start to free yourself. And so what I did first and foremost was I made a bunch of lists. To understand more deeply, like, why I drank alcohol in the first place, what did it give me, what were the parts that I liked, and what were the parts that no longer worked for me. I basically held my entire relationship with alcohol under this microscope and deeply analyzed it. I made so many lists. So list number one is why do I drink? So I was trying to understand what it gave me, you can never get enough of something that almost works. What is it almost working to do? what is the benefit that it's giving me? Number one was to dissociate, to essentially stop all of the mental chatter going on in my mind, to zone out from it, to have peace from all the noise in my head. To ease social anxiety, to feel more relaxed in social situations. Alcohol actually turns off the part of your brain that does self monitoring, and so if you're one of those people who feels really self conscious, who is super aware of exactly how you're being perceived by others, that can be exhausting, and alcohol can turn that off, to relax, to feel that sensation of ah, like when the alcohol first hits and it's like letting off some steam. To have that fun, carefree dating experience, want to be perceived as fun, because it seems like the default way to socialize, so it just feels easier to go with the flow, because I'm too lazy to come up with more creative and authentic ways to socialize and have fun. So that was the first list, and when I made that, it gave me this really deep understanding of what alcohol gave me in the first place, when you understand what your behavior gives you, then you can start understanding how to replace it. So that was the next list that I made is how can I achieve all of these things without alcohol? The main things that drinking gave me, how can I get those things, those feelings, those deeper desires in a different way. So relaxation, right? If one of the reasons I wanted to drink was just to relax, to feel that sense of ah, like how can I achieve that? Taking a bath, doing yoga, drinking tea, watching my favorite spiritual teacher Tara Brock, going for a walk in nature. Dissociation, just to check out and not be fully present with life. How could I achieve that? Um, fiction books reading novels, getting really like immersed and lost in a good book. What about carefree fun? How can I achieve that without alcohol? Hiking with friends, I always start to feel really carefree then, dancing, game night. so making these lists helped me understand the thing behind the thing. Because I never really wanted alcohol. I wanted what I thought alcohol gave me. So, if alcohol gave me relaxation, gave me the ability to dissociate, it gave me carefree fun and time passing faster, and belonging and connection, if it gave me, if I thought alcohol gave me those things, Is there a way to achieve those things without poisoning myself? Alcohol doesn't have a monopoly on your ability to do things. Have fun, right? There's so many other ways to have fun and actually learning that and exploring that has been so incredible Recently, I was feeling this way when I was in Buenos Aires just like two months ago So it was about ten months into my sober journey where I was feeling this urge to like Oh, I just want to go let off some steam. I just want to drink I want to have a night out or I'm just not really being present and I'm just letting loose so we went for a night out and went to a karaoke bar with my friends, and I did not drink alcohol, but I performed karaoke so much, like over and over again. And I sang and I danced and I did songs that felt really difficult, or I could just like literally sing my heart out. And I felt so good afterwards. It's like I achieved the exact things that I wanted through drinking. but I achieved them sober. I was able to let loose, have fun, be carefree, enjoy myself, hang out with friends. I was able to do all of that, which was wonderful because that in and of itself is fun. And then to recognize I did all of that sober while keeping my promise to myself to not drink alcohol, and it just, it's like, compounded. It felt so good. It was like, I'm proud of myself empowered too, because it's like, I have this ability to source these things from within me without relying on alcohol. And so there's just this deep confidence that came with it too. List number three I made is reasons I want to stop drinking. And this was essentially, like, what could be possible for me on the other side of alcohol. If I could make alcohol totally insignificant in my life, what could that look like? So reasons I want to stop drinking. Number one, hangovers. I don't want to lose days feeling fuzzy and hungover and like I'm not fully happy or present. Freedom. I want to see that I am more powerful than a beverage. The empowerment that comes from keeping promises to myself and making changes. Drinking is an easy comfort zone behavior and that's not on brand for me. It takes up a lot of mental space and bandwidth thinking about alcohol. Anxiety, it's boring, same old, same old. I want to feel confident that I can source joy for myself. I want to feel more authentic connections that last, that are based on real shared interests and not just based on getting drunk. I want to be more athletic and healthy and fit and have more energy. I had to start painting a picture for myself and imagining a life that was so good. that alcohol was insignificant. Then I started to make lists around questionable drinking moments, right? Because this thing happens called the fading affect bias. And you can almost think of it like if a woman is giving birth and, you know, labor is so painful, but then the oxytocin come kicks in and she's cuddling her newborn baby. And it's like, you kind of forget How painful and horrible that experience was. And we do that with alcohol so often. We romanticize these drinking moments. We romanticize what a fun night out was like. And I wanted to stop doing that. I wanted to really look closely at that. And the moments where drinking was not my friend, so I went through and I itemized every questionable drinking, regret filled, shame filled moment that I had while drinking to drill the pain in even more. And that's important because I needed a written reminder that like, Drinking alcohol for me is not what it looks like in the movies, there's some, like, very negative realities to it that I needed to remember, so writing those down was really helpful. And then as I started to have experiences sober, one of the first things I did was. I just went out on a sober date, like the very first Friday that I was sober, and it was actually really lovely. And then I went to this happy hour meetup with friends, and I had a good time. And so I started to write down these moments of I call them solid sober times. And it started to become my evidence list of like, you can have fun sober. You can do all the things you want to do sober. And that was really important. And so that was step number one of like how I freed myself from alcohol and then I had to start this deconditioning process. I had to start questioning external influences and breaking down all of the false beliefs and mental constructs that I had around alcohol. And I had to be willing to deeply question my perspectives and to see things in a new way. Some of my biggest beliefs that were difficult were like, I need alcohol to have fun or let loose or be more confident. That I need alcohol to fit in. I was trusting these cultural messages around alcohol more than I was trusting myself. So I had to go through this process of deconditioning to really question everything that I've been told about alcohol. One way I did this was through reading. Um, So many books about alcohol. I read probably every quitlet book out there on the planet at least one time. I started following a bunch of sober accounts on Instagram. I also stopped watching TV shows and movies and surrounding myself with media sources that romanticized alcohol. so you'll notice so many shows, even things like Modern Family and shows that seem really wholesome, alcohol is present and rampant and things, people are drinking, you'll start to notice the way that the media and TV shows portray alcohol. alcohol and the way it really just goes into our subconscious. I was watching the bold type at one point and they go out and drink a lot and they're like carefree in their twenties, working girls in New York. and it's like watching that show, I just kept associating like alcohol, good times in a bottle, alcohol, fun, youthful, like playful, you know? So I had to remove those sources. as I was doing this, I actually wrote myself this pep talk to help anchor me into what was really true for me. And so here it is. You are never actually craving alcohol. You are craving what marketing has told you that alcohol can provide you. The truth is that alcohol is a poison at its best. It's a second rate substitute for what you are truly after. And at its worst, it is a bait and switch. That gives you the opposite of what you actually desire. You deserve more than second rate substitutes. You deserve more than poison. You deserve the real thing. So when you are craving alcohol, it's a sign to go deeper, my love. What are you truly after? What is the thing you really want? Is it connection? Call someone you love and let them see you. Is it fun? Go sing karaoke in a Hawaiian shirt on a Wednesday. Is it relaxation? Put your phone down and lay in the park in the sunshine. Is it to feel wild and free? Go participate in a full moon ecstatic dance party. Is it to check out of life for a bit? Put the self help books down and immerse yourself in a fiction novel. Listening to your body and giving yourself what you are truly after is what will make your life so full. Alcohol becomes completely insignificant. That's how you follow your authentic path when it's not the most popular path. You make lists, you do a deep self inquiry to understand yourself. You go through a process of deconditioning and questioning all of these external influences so that you can build trust from within, and then you start taking action. Before I went fully sober, I took some breaks. I did some dry Januaries, sober Octobers, took some time off drinking, and then in this past time, when I Was like fully, this is it. This is going to be my one time. I started taking action pretty early on to prove to myself that being sober didn't have to mean turning into a 70 year old cat lady. and so within the first two months, I, you know, I went out sober dates, did sober karaoke. I went to Nomad Cruise Sober, which was this networking event with 400 other digital nomads on a boat for five days. And I didn't know anyone. And it's like, I did all of these things over and over again. For the growth. Because I wasn't giving up drinking because I had a problem and I can't control myself. I was giving up alcohol because I realized it was no longer serving me, and I was really curious about who I could become in the process. And because I'm very much an all or nothing person, and doing the medium moderation just like did not work for me when it came to alcohol. And so I've talked about how I did it. But what I'd also love to talk about is like, what is hard about it? Honestly, it's been probably one of the hardest things I've ever done. And so, what have been the hardest pieces? I mean, one is just that the whole world drinks. And it makes me feel other. When I'm in a group text and people are chatting about happy hour, I can't wait to see you guys at happy hour. And I start to feel like, Oh, I don't fit in. I don't belong. When I'm at a cocktail mixing Skillshare, which I probably shouldn't have gone to. And people are talking about how to make the perfect cocktail and how much they like the taste of different alcohols and mixers together. I just. Just, I feel on edge, I feel uneasy, like I don't fit in. when I'm traveling with people and they want to go to a brewery sometimes I feel resentful and angry that other people want to drink and I feel left out and I feel other, and all these defense mechanisms start to pop up. I start to judge people because I feel separate and threatened, and then I want to at least feel superior in that, and so I start to judge others for their drinking, for their reliance on alcohol, and I try to make myself feel like I'm better than everyone else. it's like my ego feels separate, and so then it tries to be superior, and it tries to judge, and that's hard, because That's disconnection, anytime you're judging somebody, you're disconnected from them, and so going through that feels really difficult. that's something that I'm working on. And then there's also the, Watching this collective delusion around alcohol when I know it's not true. One of the most prime examples that I can give you, because it just happened, is I'm on this group kind of travel experience right now where, there's another girl here who's sober with me, and one of the very first things Days when we were all together we did this boat trip, but we're here in Argentina, and it's actually getting into the fall right now So it's not like beach weather. It's actually pretty cold and on this boat trip one of the girls decided to jump into the water and basically do a cold plunge. And she was totally sober, and she jumped in, and she did the cold plunge, and was just like swimming around, and just being a total rock star in the cold water. Meanwhile, there was another group of us who were drinking water. And they're like, Oh man, like we're not drunk enough yet to get into the water. Like, we're going to need more liquid courage. We're going to need more alcohol to be able to get into the water. And so they were like drinking and like doing pulls of scotch and then finally they like, they're like, okay, we're at the right level now. And they like jumped in. And it's like so interesting to me because it's so clear We don't need alcohol. Like, this one girl didn't need it. No one else actually needed it. But the reason you need it is because you tell yourself you do. Because we have this belief we buy into this idea that we do. And so that can make me really annoying sometimes. One of my friends was like, don't be the vegan, right? Nobody wants to be the vegan. and to be that person who's like, judging everyone else and feels superior, and, and yet there's times where it's like, ugh, come on guys, let's not believe this collective delusion anymore that anyone needs alcohol for anything. It's poison, and it's, yeah, it's just really hard to watch it, to watch people drink alcohol. Um, so that's a hard part is just how, is social dynamics and interactions. And then there's the deeper stuff, right? Like the things that you're drinking to cover up. Usually, um, you're drinking to solve for some sort of problem or some sort of deficit in your life. And for me, one of the big ones was social anxiety, um, the critical voices in my head just to get a break from those, but then also sometimes solving for the deficit of like boredom, not enough fun, not enough stimulation. And so, not really the problem. Usually there's something deeper. I call it the personal growth whack a mole, where you kind of let go of one detrimental behavior, but that's not you really have to heal the thing beneath that. You can't just change the behavior. You have to really understand what is deeper and get to the heart of the wounding and healing the root causes. And that's not easy work. There's a lot of tears in that. There's a lot of just confronting of yourself and facing yourself. And that's difficult. And then also just learning and using healthier coping mechanisms. Like when I read through my list of, Oh, what are all the other ways I can achieve this? Like, Those are all very time consuming. It's not, like, convenient always to, to live an alcohol free life. Alcohol is pretty easy and everywhere, so learning these healthier coping mechanisms, using them, doing the deeper inner work. That's not easy. Like, all of that is really hard, annoying sometimes, and inconvenient. All of that being said, it is the most worthwhile journey I have ever been on. Because over this past year, I have fully removed my desire to drink. I no longer desire it. I no longer have any thought that, like, life would be better with alcohol in it, or that drinking would add anything to my life. I am so clear on that. Fully removed my desire to drink, which is amazing. And my life is fundamentally different from the inside out. There's this, like, wholesome feeling you get. When you're laughing so hard your stomach hurts while you're sober and there's something that feels so nice about that. I'm so fully present for the scary things, right? Doing karaoke sober in front of a room full of people or going in for the first kiss while you're sober being fully present to those waves of electricity as you go out of your comfort zone, like, I don't want to miss that. I've also had so much clarity. I've deepened my spiritual relationship. I've had these moments of opening my heart chakra and my third eye and just being so connected to my intuition. for your attention. for your attention. And I feel more connected to my clients. I feel like I'm a better coach because I am pushing my own edge and challenging myself and getting out of my own comfort zone of what's easy and going on this authentic path I feel contentment It doesn't feel like I'm chasing anymore. I'm just here like soaking in life and appreciating little moments much more naturally. I'll literally get delighted when I see like a hummingbird or flowers and it just feels like this real natural high and delight and I'm not waiting for anyone or anything to happen. I'm just. Present, and here, and content, and experiencing goodness. And my relationships, and the social dynamics, like, that's really where things have changed the most. And like I said, that is where things still can feel difficult. for the first time, probably in forever, I feel this deep sense of belonging. And I attribute that to giving up alcohol, and then overcoming my social anxiety that caused me to drink in the first place. And I feel like I belong. And I have this really incredible social circle of humans that I am so obsessed with that I connect with very authentically. I just feel like I've healed so much of the parts of me that say I'm not worthy, I don't belong here, I don't fit in. I've just healed it. It's like the best feeling I can ever describe to just feel like you belong in the world. And in order to feel that, I had to also experience the most intense feelings of not fitting in. it's such an interesting paradox, so over this past year are some of the times where I have had the most intense feelings of I don't fit in. But what I've noticed is when I'm willing to feel that, when I'm willing to be in a social situation and feel very deeply like I don't fit in and still be unwilling to compromise my authenticity, what happens next is that because I don't I stay true to who I am and what I want and what is authentic and true for me. On the other side of that feeling of, I don't fit in, is this deeper feeling of, I belong. I had to be willing to go through this intense pain of, I don't fit in, I'm not like them. And yet, I'm still going to stay true and do what feels right for me. And then when you do that, slowly you start to feel like, I don't have to fit in or contort myself here because I belong and I'm steady in my belonging. And that feels so freaking good. That's the work. That's the journey. And so, man, like, is it worth it to follow your authentic path? Hands down, it's so worth it. It's the most worthwhile endeavor that you'll ever do. Even if it's not easy, even if it's not popular, following your authentic path is really the only way to feeling contentment, fulfillment. Freedom. All of those things that you really want, that's what you find when you follow your authentic path. I want to share a quote that I think sums up kind of what I've gained from being alcohol free. This is from Lucy Rocca. The founder of the Sobiristas, a social platform. And the most startling truth I've come to realize since quitting drinking is that alcohol muffles life and all the incredible, beautiful, remarkable things in it. When we are drinking, we fail to notice the intricacy and fragile components of all that is around us. And that's really what this journey has been. It's been this coming back to life. It's been removing the muffler, removing that filter, that blandness, that barrier between me and life. And it's just been opening myself up to being fully present and there for all of the hard parts, And showing myself I can do it. And the confidence and self trust that grows when I see, like, I can do this. It's amazing. So, being sober has been, for me, like, coming back home to myself, and also coming back to life. I hope this inspires you to start following your authentic path, whatever that looks like. Even if it's not popular, even if it's not easy or convenient, I hope this shows you how freaking worthwhile it is to follow your own authentic path