Lifestyle
After 25 years, I wanted to quit drinking and couldn’t. Here’s how I finally got sober
“Want a glass of wine?” my friend yelled at me down the hall, yanking a cork out of a wine bottle. My writer’s group had rented a lake house in Vermont this past June on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain, where shorebirds and ducklings paddled past.
The thought of relaxing at the firepit in an Adirondack chair with an ice-cold glass of rosé made me salivate, the way my dog does when I pull the lid off the treat jar. Any other time, I would’ve had a glass (or two), but I was trying out sobriety.
For years, I toyed with the idea but couldn’t ever seem to do it until my drinking started to keep me up at night. I tried natural sleep supplements and acupuncture but neither worked.
At 44, I didn’t drink enough to experience major hangovers like I did when I was a journalist in my 20s living in New York City. And though I imbibed nightly during the initial throes of the COVID pandemic, I’d recently cut way back. When I unexpectedly hit perimenopause in my early 40s, my body began reacting to alcohol differently. Even if I had just one glass of wine, I’d wake up multiple times during the night. I suppose I could have avoided those moonlight bathroom trips with a sleeping pill, but that would have only masked the bigger problem: I wanted to quit drinking and couldn’t.
“People’s relationship to alcohol changes at different stages in life.”
— Elaine Skoulas, L.A.-based marriage and family therapist
I wrote about my frustration in my journal. Was a Thursday night Grey Goose martini worth the three cappuccinos I’d need to shake off brain fog on Friday morning?
I was not alone in my sudden questioning of a lifelong habit. Elaine Skoulas, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in L.A. who specializes in addiction, said it’s not uncommon to reevaluate your drinking habits as you age.
“Often I hear how much people’s relationship to alcohol changes at different stages in life,” said Skoulas, who has been sober for 12 years. Whether it’s due to aging or a change in metabolism, many people slow down their alcohol consumption as they get older because the negative effects of drinking worsen over time, she said.
But what would quitting do to my personal life? Alcohol was entwined with some of my biggest life milestones. I met my husband at a bar over a Northern Standard cocktail and then wrote about it for Food & Wine magazine. I received a bottle of Vermont WhistlePig rye for my 40th birthday and a Merry Edwards Russian River Pinot as a wedding present. And I did unabashedly love to drink — Miraval rosé under the summer stars, mezcal margaritas on lazy Saturday afternoons, boozy Bloody Marys with scrambled eggs and croissants on Sunday mornings.
If alcohol hadn’t started affecting my sleep, I probably would have never given it up. I didn’t even stop when my husband and I started fertility treatment in 2020. Ordering a cozy whiskey cocktail at my favorite local bar dulled the disappointment of every IVF failure.
I don’t think anyone would have called me an alcoholic, but I knew I had a problem when I realized how often I was writing in my journal about how crappy wine made me feel.
Then last December, an astrologer told me that my chart suggested I could benefit immensely from giving something up. It made me think about how I was only 7 years old when I stopped eating meat. I’d managed to stick with it my entire life.
Could I give up alcohol too? Christmas was just around the corner. I worried that my friendships would suffer. And what would my husband and I do for fun if we couldn’t go to our favorite bar on the weekend?
I finally reached my breaking point in March when I met two friends out for dinner. We all ordered drinks, then spent most of the meal discussing our not-so-great relationship with alcohol. I slept terribly that night and decided the next morning to try and stop for good.
I was tired of feeling guilty for giving my body something that made it miserable, tired of strategizing and rationalizing my alcohol consumption and tired of trying to get my brain to focus with so little sleep.
My husband was supportive, and so were my friends. I was lucky. Skoulas says having a reliable circle of loved ones can make all the difference in staying sober.
“It creates a sense of accountability because if you’re trying to get through an event on your own and nobody knows, of course it’s easier to reach for alcohol than if you have a friend standing next to you who knows that you weren’t planning to drink for the night,” she said.
“It’s kind of like a jet airliner: It takes a lot of energy to get it up into the sky, but once you get there, it’s much easier to manage.”
— Steve Kobashigawa, L.A.-based marriage and family therapist, on getting sober
I couldn’t have picked a worse time to try out sobriety. One week in, I attended a funeral for a woman in my writer’s group, then went out for dinner later that night, where I kept replaying the events of the day. I was grieving her absence, and I urgently needed a drink to take away some of the sadness. I leaned toward my husband.
“Maybe we could split a drink?” I asked.
“Do you really want one?” he replied.
I did. Anything to take away my emotional pain. But then I thought about the next morning. My sadness would still be there, and even harder to process on poor sleep. By the time we saw our waiter again we had finished our meal, and my wave of wanting had passed.
The following weeks were really hard. I was still waking up in the middle of the night, and it felt like I was competing against my own desires. I drank seltzer at weddings and took my 83-year-old father to stressful doctors’ appointments without later unwinding with a martini. When my friend’s fiancée took his own life, I was surrounded by wine bottles strewn across the kitchen counter, but each time I walked out the door stone-cold sober, I could breathe a sigh of relief.
Steve Kobashigawa, a marriage and family therapist based in L.A., said that when you feel a craving come on, do what you need to do to get into a more positive headspace. Call someone, journal or use a mindful drinking app like Sunnyside. Sometimes avoiding alcohol can seem impossible, but staying sober gets “exponentially easier” over time, he said.
“It’s kind of like a jet airliner: It takes a lot of energy to get it up into the sky, but once you get there, it’s much easier to manage,” said Kobashigawa, who specializes in addiction treatment and has been sober for 25 years.
Skoulas advised staying away from places where you used to drink regularly while you set new, healthful patterns and rewire your brain. If you go back to where you used to drink, even if you don’t have alcohol, your brain still experiences some of the more euphoric parts of drinking, which can be triggering.
“When you walk into familiar places, some of those neurotransmitters start to get released,” she said.
I learned that if I’m going to be around drinkers, it’s best to plan ahead. When I went away with my friends to the lake house, I called my local cocktail bar ahead of time and asked if they could make me a nonalcoholic beverage to-go. I felt silly doing it, but they told me that my order wasn’t all that unusual.
I had a great time that weekend, even though I was the only sober one in the group. Sometimes when people ask why I’m not drinking, it’s easier to say that I’m suffering from insomnia than it is to talk about my complicated relationship with alcohol.
Recently, a friend asked why I wasn’t drinking.
“I’m just taking a break,” I said. She responded with a sly smile — she knew I’d tried IVF before.
“I’m not pregnant,” I said, surprised that I could talk about my infertility without getting upset. That’s when I realized how much alcohol — a depressant — had been affecting my mood. A cocktail could only mask the pain for so long. I eventually had to face reality.
Alcohol provides a surge of dopamine and when that’s taken away, you initially might feel sad, but that usually fades within a few months, Kobashigawa said. Sometimes giving up drinking involves anhedonia, which is an inability to find pleasure in the activities you once enjoyed. But you can help avoid that feeling by keeping active.
“If you’re feeling flat, it’s unfortunately part of the recovery process, but try to take a walk or re-engage in the activities that used to be pleasurable for you,” he said.
In a few months, I’m going to Italy on my honeymoon. I had thought I’d want to spend evenings there imbibing with a Super Tuscan wine, but now I’m not so sure. These days, I feel more like myself. I’ve lost weight and have fewer wrinkles. Sobriety, it turns out, is way cheaper than Botox. It’s hard to imagine going back to how things used to be.
I had always thought that if I gave up my weekend martinis, I’d be imprisoned by the desire to drink, but here I am — sober for almost five months. Aside from the occasional craving, I don’t really think about alcohol. I drink raspberry shrub cocktails when I vacation with my girlfriends and go out for ice cream with my husband on the weekends. I’m less anxious and more present in conversations and in the world around me. In sobriety, I actually feel freer than ever.
Betsy Vereckey’s’ debut memoir is forthcoming next summer from Rootstock Publishing. She lives in Vermont with her husband and four boisterous terriers.
Online prediction market platforms allow people to place bets on wide-ranging subjects such as sports, finance, politics and currents events.
Photo Illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images
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Photo Illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images
The rise of prediction markets means you can now bet on just about anything, right from your phone. Apps like Kalshi and Polymarket have grown exponentially in President Trump’s second term, as his administration has rolled back regulations designed to keep the industry in check. Billions of dollars have flooded in, and users are placing bets on everything from whether it will rain in Seattle today to whether the US will take over control of Greenland. Who’s winning big on these apps? And who is losing? NPR correspondent Bobby Allyn joins The Sunday Story to explain how these markets came to be and where they are going.
This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Liana Simstrom and Brett Neely. Fact-checking by Barclay Walsh and Susie Cummings. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez.
We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.
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Now you can pair your big show with dinner and a more intimate listening experience. The Hollywood Palladium, an Art Deco music venue graced by performers like Frank Sinatra, Richard Pryor, Jimi Hendrix, Lady Gaga and Jay-Z since 1940, has debuted a swanky lounge known as Vinyl Room.
Inspired by 1970s Japanese high-fidelity (hi-fi for short) listening rooms and operated by entertainment company Live Nation, it’s a space where concertgoers can have dinner, grab drinks and catch a vinyl DJ set before, during or after their ticketed event in the same venue.
With a name like Vinyl Room, you can expect to see vinyl records everywhere.
“You’re in [for] a whole night of music,” says Geni Lincoln, president of the California region for Live Nation, adding that her team put “so much thought” into the sound and design of the space, which was in development for more than two years.
“I’ve been coming to the Palladium since I was a teenager, so it’s really special to see,” she says.
Entering Vinyl Room feels like you’re stepping into a secret speakeasy for music lovers, one with iconic music memorabilia, a thoughtful food menu and premium sound quality. Want to check it out? Here are five things to know.
Everything inside of Vinyl Room is inspired by the sounds and the musicians who’ve played at the Hollywood Palladium since 1940.
1. Vinyl Room is exclusively open to members and concertgoers with an upgraded ticket
Vinyl Room is open only on Hollywood Palladium show nights, starting 90 minutes before doors open, and remains open one hour after the concert. Admission is limited to concertgoers who purchase a ticket upgrade, which starts at $35. Early reservations are recommended.
Vinyl Room also offers annual membership packages, which start at $2,000 and come with various benefits such as complimentary guest passes to Vinyl Room, access to an exclusive menu, valet parking, table reservations inside the lounge, a dedicated private entry, complimentary coat check and concert ticket credits.
Tip Dunn, also known as DJ tenSpeed, played records during opening night at Vinyl Room at the Hollywood Palladium.
2. Hi-fi is having a moment in Los Angeles — and Vinyl Room delivers on sound quality
From Common Wave Hi-Fi in Boyle Heights to Slow Jamz Gallery in the Arts District and Gold Line bar in Highland Park, hi-fi — a 1950s term used to describe the high-quality reproduction of sound — venues and experiences have been slowly popping up around L.A. over the last few years. Vinyl Room joins a short list of places where audiophiles can go to listen to music on hi-fi equipment, which many argue is the best way to experience it.
Much like the Hollywood Palladium, which is known for its top-tier sound, Vinyl Room also makes sound a priority. The lounge utilizes hi-fi sound equipment including Master Sounds Clarity-M speakers to ensure that the records sound as crisp as possible. Live DJs spin records on a set of turntables, which helps to create a richer and more analog sound that is closer to the original track than compressed versions such as MP3s.
Ruthie Embry, vice president of architecture and design at Live Nation, says the records and other memorabilia inside the space “connects you directly to the venue’s history the second you walk in the door.”
3. All of the decor ties back to music and the Hollywood Palladium’s rich history
With a name like Vinyl Room, you can expect to see vinyls everywhere. Records line most of the walls and shelves, drinks are served on vinyl-shaped coasters and tables and light fixtures are designed to the theme. There’s even vinyl wallpaper in the photo booth. In one corner of the lounge, you can dig through records under a neon sign that reads, “But have you heard it on vinyl?”
Ruthie Embry, vice president of architecture and design at Live Nation, says the records and other memorabilia inside the space “connects you directly to the venue’s history the second you walk in the door.”
Some standout items include a Red Hot Chili Peppers show flier, a Hollywood Palladium postcard signed by late musician and host Lawrence Welk and a photo of late singers Bonnie Baker and Orrin Tucker at the venue. Even the bathroom creates a memorable photo moment: The stalls are filled with photos of musicians and an “on air” studio sign lights up when a stall is occupied.
Vinyl Room’s menu, created by Chef Ryan DeRieux, is inspired by Asian flavors and includes items like the “Vinyl Roll,” which is made with spicy tuna.
4. Don’t worry about dinner plans before or after the show. Vinyl Room has got you covered
Eliminating the need to find a pre- or post-show restaurant, Vinyl Room has a full Asian-inspired menu created by Chef Ryan DeRieux.
Think sushi tots (like crispy tuna but with tater tots instead of rice), tuna poke nachos, chili crunch chicken wings and shiitake tempura burgers. There’s also a mouth-watering 10-ounce American wagyu skirt steak served with shishito peppers, pickles and charred carrots. For dessert, try the taiyaki, a popular fish-shaped Japanese street food, which is served with a delicious passion fruit cream that I wanted to take to go because I liked it so much.
Signature cocktails at Vinyl Room, inspired by popular songs, include the Superfly, Escape (if you like piña coladas) and Smoke on the Water.
5. The craft cocktails aren’t just delicious — they each have a story
Vinyl Room’s old-fashioned is made with Nikka Yoichi whisky, which is made in Japan.
The cocktail program, developed by third-generation bartender Sean Kenyon, is inspired by the songs created by musicians who’ve graced the Hollywood Palladium stage. A nod to the 1970s, the Superfly is a fizzy, citrus-forward play on Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 track and is made with Roku Gin and yuzu and sencha syrup. Other signature drinks include the rum-based Escape (if you like piña coladas) with coconut oolong syrup, pineapple juice and miso, and the tart yet sweet Smoke on the Water, which is reminiscent of Deep Purple’s 1972 song. The bar also offers an espresso martini (called the MT Joy), a signature old-fashioned (made with Nikka Yoichi whisky) and a Japanese whiskey highball (made with Hibiki Harmony whisky). The bar offers a number of non-alcoholic options as well.
A screenshot from George Mélière’s Gugusse et l’Automate. The pioneering French filmmaker’s 1897 short, which likely features the first known depiction of a robot on film, was thought lost until it was found among a box of old reels that had belonged to a family in Michigan and restored by the Library of Congress.
The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
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The Frisbee Collection/Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has found and restored a long-lost silent film by Georges Méliès.
The famed 19th century French filmmaker is best known for his groundbreaking 1902 science fiction adventure masterpiece Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
The 45-second-long, one-reel short Gugusse et l’Automate – Gugusse and the Automaton – was made nearly 130 years ago. But the subject matter still feels timely. The film, which can be viewed on the Library of Congress’ website, depicts a child-sized robot clown who grows to the size of an adult and then attacks a human clown with a stick. The human then decimates the machine with a hammer.
In an Instagram post, Library of Congress moving image curator Jason Evans Groth said the film represents, “probably the first instance of a robot ever captured in a moving image.” (The word “robot” didn’t appear until 1921, when Czech dramatist Karel Čapek coined it in his science fiction play R.U.R..)
“Today, many of us are worried about AI and robots,” said archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger, in an email to NPR. “Well, people were thinking about robots in 1897. Very little is new.”
A long journey
Groth said the film arrived in a box last September from a donor in Michigan, Bill McFarland. “Bill’s great grandfather, William Frisbee, was a person who loved technology,” Groth said. “And in the late 19th century, must have bought a projector and a bunch of films and decided to drive them around in his buggy to share them with folks in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York.”
McFarland didn’t know what was on the 10 rusty reels he dropped off at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. A Library article about the discovery describes the battered, pre-World War I artifacts as having been, “shuttled around from basements to barns to garages,” and that they, “could no longer be safely run through a projector,” owing to their delicate condition. “The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together,” the article said. It was a lab technician in Michigan who suggested McFarland contact the Library of Congress.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, who heads up the Library’s nitrate film vault, in the article.
Willeman’s team carefully inspected the trove of footage, which also contained another well-known Méliès film, Nouvelles Luttes extravagantes (The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match) and parts of The Burning Stable, an early Thomas Edison work. With the help of an external expert, they identified the reel as having been created by Méliès because it features a star painted on a pedestal in the center of the screen – the logo for Méliès Star Film Company.
A pioneering filmmaker
Méliès was one of the great pioneers of cinema. The scene in which a rocket lands playfully in the eye of Méliès’ anthropomorphic moon in Le Voyage dans la Lune is one of the most famous moments in cinematic history. And he helped to popularize such special effects as multiple exposures and time-lapse photography.
This moment from George Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is considered to be one of the most famous in cinematic history.
George Méliès/Public Domain
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George Méliès/Public Domain
Presumed lost until the Library of Congress’s discovery, Gugusse et L’Automate loomed large in the imaginations of science fiction and early cinema buffs for more than a century. In their 1977 book Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film, authors Douglas Menville and R. Reginald described Gugusse as possibly being, “the first true SF [science fiction] film.”
“While it may seem that no more discoveries remain to be made, that’s not the case,” said Prelinger of the work’s reappearance. “Here’s a genuine discovery from the early days of film that no one anticipated.”
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