My favorite dive bar is a long dark room with a tin ceiling, where the only type of spirits you can get are well-drink quality and the jukebox has nearly every song Patsy Cline has ever written. I don’t go there as often as I once did, but for nearly 10 years it was a haven, a place to congregate, and a place to which I could escape.

For a few years, one of my best friends lived one building over from the bar, just slightly up the hill. Most everyone else we were close with lived within a 10-block radius or so, and the bar was between the subways and our apartments; in order to get home you had to walk past it and resist going inside, which few of us ever did.

Working as a freelance writer meant I could get there in the afternoon, when the last stretched-out hours of sunlight would slither across the low room. I’d take myself there whenever I finished a big project, buy a large, watery well whiskey, put a playlist’s worth of songs on the jukebox, and wait for someone I knew to show up. It was the kind of place where I would meet a friend for one drink and three drinks later have gathered five more and begun an odyssey that would span at least two more bars and one living room and/or rooftop. At the end of many nights I don’t entirely remember, we often met up there as though the bar were a final punctuation mark. I sent ill-considered texts and wobbled up to check my makeup in the reassuringly harsh bathroom light before somehow propelling myself home.

I suppose this bar is still all of those things. It still carries their echo and their shape in its low-crouched entrance and back booths, and though I can go there whenever I want, it is at the same time somewhere that exists for me primarily in the past tense.

I decided to stop drinking for a while in October of 2018—I don’t say “got sober” or even fully “stopped drinking,” because I am wary of conflating this relatively easy experiment with the very serious work of sobriety that many people I know do each day. What this has mostly been for me is an experiment in sorting obligation from genuine enjoyment, and habit from joy.

Drinking is a social language for New Yorkers. To be relational is to be drinking, and to have a social life is to drink. Or that’s how it’s presented, anyway, with a total ubiquity that’s stunning the minute you allow yourself to look straight at it. “Get drinks” is a euphemism that means “see each other socially.” Any kind of social gathering between two or more people is “drinks.” “Drinks” is how we distinguish that we want to have fun, that we aren’t going to try to ask any professional questions, like we might if we had said “get coffee.” “Drinks” is a word gone blank with overuse, so constantly present that it’s easy not to notice it at all; during the time I have not been drinking, I have probably made plans to get drinks at least once a week, every week. This euphemistic language carries the assumption that drinking is how one enters and participates in the social world.

“Drinking is a social language for New Yorkers. To be relational is to be drinking, and to have a social life is to drink, or that’s how it’s presented, with a total ubiquity that’s stunning the minute you allow yourself to look straight at it.”

Socializing has never come easily to me, and has always been a matter of imitation rather than instinct, following along in the back of the class, just one second off the beat. Alcohol was one of the obvious secrets of how to make friends—people wanted to talk about drinks and people wanted to get drinks. Suggesting a drink almost always seemed to be a relief to the other person, and it was an easy way to gauge someone else’s emotional state, and then match it: “Oh, you need a drink? Wow, yeah, me too.” This had been the case for so long that when I decided to stop drinking for a while, I no longer knew how much my drinking was a social mechanism, and how much was the actual desire for an actual drink.

Socializing wasn’t the only thing I found I couldn’t unhook from the supposed desire for a drink. The wood bar that I loved so much, where late afternoons were an exhale shaped like a drink—would I still love it if I wasn’t getting drunk there, or was getting drunk the thing I actually loved, and the bar only a fiction I had placed like a screen in front of it? Taking a cab home at night over a bridge, staying late at a house party, catching up with an old friend, shrugging off work on a Friday afternoon in favor of sitting outdoors and gossiping, making out, coming home late at night to be greeted by the person I love, demonstrating empathy with other people’s bad days and celebrating other people’s accomplishments, doing something special to mark my own achievements, holidays and specifically holidays with my parents (who love wine so much that it is one of their primary relational languages), getting to the end of a hard week and finally having a night to do nothing: I wanted to know how much of it I could still love without booze.

What was even less clear was how much I could maintain my love for bars, and all the specific details and experiences that attend them, if I wasn’t drinking. The thing is, I just love bars. I love the permissive relief of a bar, the just-perceptible sense of entering another world where the rules are ever so slightly different. I love how so many of them feel like caves. I love the small unspoken camaraderie, and the particular conversations one can have with a friend sitting in a tall chair at the end of the bar that one can’t have anywhere else, and I love the relaxingly transactional half-friendships that one establishes with bartenders if one goes back to the same bar even a few times—the sense of being very gently known.

I had no idea if, when I stopped drinking for a while, all of this would become inaccessible to me. At the same time, that worry was what made me feel most certain I had to give up alcohol at least for a little while, if only to know definitively how much these small but bright joys actually belonged to me.

My favorite fancy bar is perhaps a 200-square-foot room, if that, nestled between a record store and a bike shop. Shiny bottles and glasses and utensils gild the walls so thoroughly that it feels like an East Village version of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It’s only possible to get one of the very small handful of seats there if you arrive right at 5pm, but if you do then you can stay all night, and it’s all too easy to do so. The bartenders do, I’m fairly certain, actually wear vests, although I know that my memory paints a vest onto anyone who has ever made me a deeply considered $18 cocktail, but they are also informal and brotherly; the space is so small that it is difficult to be anything else. Unlike many bars of its kind, the lights aren’t dim here, but are always blazingly bright, which gives the sense that everyone is at the same party. Eavesdropping is encouraged, as is butting into the conversation next to you; it is a great place to have a very lovely two-hour-long friendship.

I went to this bar soon after giving up drinking, and I was nervous about it. I should note that this place makes a truly impeccable cocktail, and it felt like I’d be insulting the professionals behind the bar, many of whom were halfway-almost-friends at this point, by refusing to be an audience for their artistry. Instead, it was one of the first places that affirmed that the things I loved about drinking might be far less connected to alcohol itself than I had worried they might be.

The bartender that night was both enthusiastic and chill about my decision, and shared lightly that he, too, often went weeks or months without drinking. He made me silly seltzer concoctions all night, trying to use the weirdest non-alcoholic ingredients he could find. At one point he started adding every garnish available to each successive seltzer, so the fifth or sixth (not-drinking at bars does usually involve consuming an uncouth volume of soda water) was weighed down with a gift basket’s worth of small fruits and candied ginger and floating cucumbers and every other nominally edible item meant to punctuate cocktails. “Here, I made you a snack plate,” he said. It became a game, and diluted any embarrassment I might have walked in feeling.

“The wood bar that I loved so much, where late afternoons were an exhale shaped like a drink—would I still love it if I wasn’t getting drunk there, or was getting drunk the thing I actually loved, and the bar only a fiction I had placed like a screen in front of it?”

Bars are a kind of confessional space, oddly public and private at once. When you say something while sitting at a bar, you enter into an agreement that the bartender is the third person in your conversation, even if they never acknowledge it—or you. A bartender at one of my local haunts could hear me tell a very distressing story and might express a few rueful, passing words of sympathy, or might not react at all. It wouldn’t be their job to engage, or try to solve it, or care. And that in itself can be a relief; it has at times made my problems seem manageable, in the same way a very dark joke about a bad situation can make the situation feel bearable. This relationship not only persisted when I wasn’t drinking, but applied to the fact of my not drinking.

Bartenders at whose bars I was a regular were among the most supportive and the most nonchalant about my decision. “Oh yeah, I did that for six months last year,” one said, even though a particular friend and I used to regularly drink at his bar until closing time. He said it as though I had picked up a sport he had used to play; the comment was supportively disinterested, a reaction to an activity and not an emotion. This shared experience was a common type of response to my not drinking at bars, but so was a shrug or a complete lack of reaction; I ordered off the food menu, I took up space, I made sure to tip well.

Since then, I have watched this same interaction happen over and over again. A bartender at a cozily dark, dive-ish bar striking up a sympathetic conversation about a friend’s choice, genuinely interested in the answers; a bartender at a very fancy hotel bar joking with me about how much we both dislike mocktails, and then pointing me toward the menu’s excellent selection of teas; friends working behind various bars sharing their own stories of alcohol-free months or years; a bartender at a place I had never been before excitedly sharing her new shrub recipe when I nervously asked if I could have something without alcohol; the same person not batting an eye when she offered my friends and me a free round of shots and I asked if I could have a non-alcoholic one (I’m pretty sure I did a shot of grapefruit juice, but the point was that I still got to participate in the ritual, and I was grateful for it); a bartender at the dive bar I love so much reacting exactly zero, in the same way I expect she would react if a murder took place in her bar, when I ordered a ginger ale instead of a whiskey on the rocks. Sometimes a lack of reaction is the most supportive reaction of all.

Not-drinking, drinking less, partial sobriety or casual sobriety—whatever label one wants to put on it—is trendy. Sometimes this makes me question my decision: I wonder if I’m only doing it because so many other people are, because this is what the cool kids are doing, and I feel some competitive instinct to prove I can do it just as well as all these other people. It’s necessary to acknowledge that many, if not most, people’s relationships to alcohol are more difficult and more complex than that, and that cool-kid sobriety, the kind of easy “well, I’ll see how this goes for a while” choice that I’m making, runs the risk of diminishing or minimizing the excruciatingly difficult work that people with serious addictions do every day when they fight those addictions.

“Not-drinking, drinking less, partial sobriety or casual sobriety—whatever label one wants to put on it—is trendy. Sometimes this makes me question my decision: I wonder if I’m only doing it because so many other people are.”

But there’s nothing wrong with a nudge toward examining the difference between what makes us happy and what is merely habitual. For me, alcohol turned out to be almost entirely the latter. It has been, in a simple way, a relief to know that choosing not to do one particular thing for a while does not shut me out of the spaces intended for that thing, and to realize that those spaces are perhaps not as defined by drinking as I had understood them to be.

Bartenders, one can assume, have seen the worst faces of drinking. Perhaps it makes sense that they have been uniformly respectful and calm about this choice—that someone seeing alcohol’s effects up close all week doesn’t need an explanation for why a person who used to drink a lot would stop drinking for a while. Both of my favorite bars are still good in the same way they always have been; the light still melts down the afternoon across the dive bar on the way to the jukebox and I still feel entirely invisible there, and in the fancy bar it still feels like a pleasantly frantic, brilliantly lit house party. I order a lot of seltzer and ginger ale, and tip 30% on it, and find that almost all of the same joys remain.