At the time, to be in your early twenties and unwed was something of social suicide — her family and friends thought her

You think you’re giving up booze, but actually, you’re becoming another kind of person. The new you might need a less stressful job. A more supportive partner. A less hectic weekend routine. It isn’t the same for everybody, but that’s how it went for me.

For me, the payoff wasn’t there anymore. It hadn’t been for years. That’s why I longed to be sober. At 33 I’d done the party years, the pub years and the student years to death. I was sick of chatting shite and chain-smoking when I would rather read a book and have an early night. I was desperate for something else. And yet, I kept getting drunk.

There will be times when it seems like the whole world is paired off like Noah’s Arc, parading around in their perfect little twos while you sit there, patiently waiting for someone to stand with, and share your life with, and live with for the rest of your days.

She chose to ignore their whispers and their taunts and the rolling of their eyes. She chose not to quit on the love that she believed in — she chose not to quit on them. For her, she said it was better to be alone than in bad company.

I’ve winced at wedding invitations, avoided dinner parties, and wondered how I could not attend another bridal shower without hurting the people I loved while still keeping my own heart intact. I told myself more than once that perhaps the forever kind of love I wished for and hoped for and prayed for was not in the cards for me.

Except maybe, just maybe, you’ll find hope in the words. Maybe you’ll find it there in the letters and these syllables and the sentences that I’ve strung together. If you’re in the season of waiting for your forever human, the one who you wish to grow old with, the person you want to call home and your greatest adventure, perhaps finding hope within these words will stop you from quitting.

Personally, I found all this change exciting, because — spoiler alert — before I quit drinking I was miserable. That’s why I quit. But not everybody quits because they’re unhappy (apparently.) The sober curious crowd do it for the perks. Others do it as part of their spiritual path.

In early sobriety, you need to be surrounded by people that understand why it’s important you don’t drink. And you need a job that matches your energy levels now you can’t use wine to get you through.

We don’t all have the same burdens, psychological profiles, traumatic histories. In fact, the only way you’ll know if your life would be better sober is if you try it. For at least a couple of years. Okay, maybe five. Trust me, it takes a while to get clarity.

Except maybe, just maybe, you’ll find hope in the words. Maybe you’ll find it there in the letters and these syllables and the sentences that I’ve strung together. If you’re in the season of waiting for your forever human, the one who you wish to grow old with, the person you want to call home and your greatest adventure, perhaps finding hope within these words will stop you from quitting.

For five years, she and my grandfather exchanged letters — he wrote to her of his new life in The United States and the dreams that he was hoping to build for the two of them. She wrote to him about the comings and goings of the small town they both knew and loved in Italy.

And yet, my understanding will not make the sting of the loneliness and longing any less. There aren’t any words that I can string together to make the pain you’re holding any easier, either.

It was tough at first. In my first year, I had to entirely reimagine what fun was. That’s how far I was from having any. I had to let go of the cool and silly and spontaneous drinking persona I had enjoyed (and hidden inside) for so long.

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, we use curly brackets to establish that we want to create a dictionary (as opposed to a list where we would use brackets). Then, as we loop over num_list, we are creating key:value pairs as follows: num:num_list.count(num), where the key is the number (or num), and its value being the count of that number in num_list.

Sometimes I think there’s no way I would have managed to quit drinking if I’d known what it entailed. Sometimes I wish I’d known what was coming as it would have spurred me on. The truth is that for some people, their life will still be difficult long after they quit drinking.