Why Can't I Drink Like a Normal Person?

Am I Past the Point of Drinking in Moderation?

For a long time, I convinced myself that my drinking wasn’t that bad. In college, I spent Thursday nights in the campus pub, playing quarters and drinking cheap beer from red plastic cups just like everyone else I knew. In my twenties, I club-hopped through Manhattan with friends, often coming home to my parents' house just as the newspaper "boy" was tossing dailies out of his car window onto the pristine suburban Jersey lawns. And later, in our first home, in our first married neighborhood in the burbs—surrounded by wine cellars and book clubs flowing with Chardonnay—I felt like part of the crowd. I didn’t stand out. I certainly wasn’t as bad as the neighbor who hid Bailey’s in her morning Starbucks.

Sure, I drank more than I wanted to. Sure, I made rules and broke them. Sure, I was starting to feel sick, stuck, and a bit concerned—but I wasn’t an alcoholic. Right?

Whenever I started to wonder—or worry—about my drinking, I’d take a break. A cleanse. A reset. In my thirties, I could do this from time to time. Proud that I had “the willpower,” and relieved I didn’t really have “a problem,”

I could drink like the other women in my circles. I was fine. I was "normal".

But then, in my early forties, I went through a trauma that shook my entire world—and my drinking took a steep nosedive. The wine bottles turned to boxes.

I knew something had shifted. What once felt optional had become non-negotiable. What once felt fun had started to feel like survival.

And when I tried to stop—I couldn’t. Not for a week. Not for a day. Toward the end—not even for a minute.

There’s a saying in recovery:

“Once you’re a pickle, you can’t go back to being a cucumber.”

It sounds silly at first, but this quirky metaphor holds a truth I wish someone had told me sooner: Addiction progresses—and once it changes you, there’s no undoing it.

We Don’t All Crash—Some of Us Slide

Addiction doesn’t always look like a dramatic fall. For many women—especially high-functioning ones—it looks like a slow slide. A shift from occasional drinks to nightly ones. From “I’ll just have one” to pouring a second before dinner. From “I’m just stressed” to “I need this to cope.”

We keep it together—for a while. We show up for work. We tuck in the kids. We go to the gym. But inside, we feel it: the anxiety, the fog, the shame, the exhaustion of trying to appear fine.

And even then, we think we’re still in control. Until we try to stop. Or cut back. Or moderate. And we find that we can’t.

That’s the progression nobody talks about. But as early addiction researcher E. Morton Jellinek (1890–1963) revealed in his groundbreaking studies, alcoholism unfolds in distinct phases—each one bringing deeper dependence and greater consequences. Jellinek developed a framework now known as the Jellinek Curve, a visual tool that maps the path many of us unknowingly follow: from social drinking to psychological and physical dependence, from hidden consequences to emotional and bodily collapse, and—if we’re lucky—into the steady climb of recovery and restoration.

There’s no going back to the early stages once that line is crossed. The cucumber has become a pickle—and while it can’t return to what it once was, it can move forward into something new: recovery.

The Myth of Moderation

Most of us don’t want to quit drinking. We just want to drink less. More mindfully. More like the people who seem to handle it fine.

So we try every trick:

Only drinking on weekends
Switching from vodka to wine
Limiting to “two drinks, max”
Taking breaks to “prove” we’re not addicted

And maybe we can hold those rules—for a little while. But eventually, the rules break. The spiral returns. And we’re right back where we started… or worse.

“If you have to control it, it’s already controlling you.”

That’s not just my truth—it’s backed by decades of addiction research. In his book The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. George Vaillant, who studied alcoholism over the course of 60 years, concluded: “Attempts at controlled drinking by alcohol-dependent individuals almost always result in relapse or eventual abstinence. There is no stable in-between.”

In other words, pickles don’t turn back into cucumbers.

Why the Pickle Metaphor Matters

A cucumber is crisp and untouched. But once it’s soaked in brine, it’s chemically altered. It’s not “bad”—it’s just different. The change is irreversible.

Alcohol affects us the same way. It changes the brain. The dopamine system. The reward center. The way we cope with stress, pain, and joy. That’s not about weakness—it’s biology.

Dr. Harry Tiebout, an early psychiatrist who worked closely with Alcoholics Anonymous, explained it this way: “The alcoholic is dominated by a need to control… yet that very need to control is the barrier to recovery.”

And so we keep trying. Keep bargaining. Keep spiraling. Until we finally surrender to the truth: We’ve changed. And we’re not going back.

What I Thought I Was Losing… Wasn’t Real

I used to mourn the idea of “never drinking again.”

It felt like a punishment.

Like I’d be missing out forever.

But here’s what I know now:

The version of me who could “just have one” didn’t exist anymore. She is long gone. And honestly? She never really had it all together anyway.

That woman was anxious. People-pleasing. Struggling silently. She was surviving, not thriving.

The woman I’ve become in recovery—without the bottle, without the numbing—is stronger, calmer, and more me than I’ve ever been.

As Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.”

I thought alcohol made me fun, free, interesting.

But it actually made me disconnected, scattered, and sick.

Letting it go wasn’t the end of something good.It was the beginning of something honest.

You’re Not Alone in the Pickle Jar

If you’ve crossed that line—if drinking no longer feels optional, if moderation never lasts, if you feel like you’re trying to hold back a tidal wave—please hear me:

You are not broken. You’re waking up. And you’re not alone.

Millions of women are realizing the same thing:

We don’t have to keep fighting to go backward.

There’s freedom in moving forward.

Pickles have flavor.

They’ve been through something.

And so have you.

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Early sobriety can feel overwhelming—

but you don’t have to do it alone.

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