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.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
On a 75-mile cliff-hugging stretch of highway in California, traffic is way up, despite soaring gas prices. And locals expect the busiest summer in years.
The road is Highway 1 in Big Sur, which reopened in January after three years of repair and reconstruction following a pair of landslides. Drivers can once again embark on the state’s most famous road trip, covering the 100 miles between Cambria to the south and Carmel to the north without leaving the two-lane coastal highway. And they’re heading out in big numbers.
Caltrans estimates that as of May, Big Sur restaurant and retailer guest counts are up 40% from last year, and that northbound traffic at Ragged Point, the southern gateway to Big Sur, has risen 900% year-over-year.
People pose for photos near Bixby Bridge. Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking around the bridge.
Safety cones prevent parking along Coast Road near the Bixby Bridge.
“Take your time,” said Kirk Gafill, co-owner of the popular Nepenthe restaurant and president of the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce, offering advice to travelers. “You’re going to be sharing the road with a number of people.”
As travelers rediscover the road, the cost of driving has been shooting skyward. California’s average gas price ($6.11 per gallon as of May 26) is up 26% from the year before. In early April, rates hit $9.99 at the isolated gas station in the Big Sur community of Gorda.
For spring and summer travelers, these numbers would seem to pose a stark question: Stay home and save money, or head for the coast because the road is finally open and it’s still cheaper than flying?
So far, the latter answer is winning big.
Fog lingers off the coast of Highway 1.
“We are definitely seeing a huge uptick in our reservations,” said Megan Handy, assistant general manager at the upscale Treebones resort. She estimated that bookings are 30% or more ahead of last year, and rates are unchanged since then. But “it’s still not feeling super crowded, which is nice. Everything still feels kind of calm.”
But added traffic has raised some anxiety. On May 19, Monterey County’s Board of Supervisors voted to explore a 12-month ban on parking at Bixby Bridge, one of the region’s top photo spots.
Over the years, the number of cars parking near the bridge — often illegally, sometimes impeding emergency vehicles — has risen. The proposed parking moratorium won’t take effect until the supervisors discuss it further.
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Busy as things are, several business owners pointed out that many international travelers have not yet returned — perhaps because most make their plans more than six months ahead, perhaps because of global politics, perhaps a little of each.
The biggest challenge for businesses during this resurgence? “Restaffing and retaining,” said Handy at Treetops.
At Nepenthe, Gafill said his business has seen a 45% boost in guest volume since the road’s reopening. Gafill said he would have expected a 35% pickup, “simply by virtue of reopening the highway.” The additional 10%, he said, might be “all that pent-up demand,” aided by “a very beautiful and very dry winter,” followed by a mild spring.
A lunch crowd dines at popular restaurant Nepenthe.
Another possible factor: Nobody can be sure how long the road will remain open.
To cope with the influx of people, Gafill said, “everybody is trying to recruit and retain their existing staff.”
At the Ragged Point Inn, where rates dropped as low as $149 nightly last fall, rates are back over $200 and staffers are suggesting that customers book at least six months ahead. The inn has reopened its snack bar for the first time since early 2023, and management is investing in capital upgrades and staging live music on weekends throughout the summer.
Business “is up over 100%,” said Diane Ramey, whose family owns the inn. “I know not all of our neighbors are having the same lift, but everybody is doing better.”
Traffic approaching Bixby Bridge.
A visitor poses in an oversized chair at Big Sur River Inn.
Even at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery above Lucia, the road’s reopening and coming summer season have made a difference. Bookings are up an estimated 30% at the hermitage, which rent rooms and cottages (for two nights or more) to visitors who agree to its requirement of silence.
Big Sur business owners advise visitors to travel on weekdays for less traffic and the best hotel rates, and to get on the road as early as possible.
Since its opening in 1937, the highway has been vulnerable to landslides and shifting ground, operating on a longstanding cycle of landslide, closure, repair, reopening and then another landslide, or sometimes a fire. The U.S. Geological Survey has identified the Big Sur coastline as one of the most landslide-prone areas in the western United States. The 2023-2026 closure was the longest in the highway’s history.
Over time, road crews have used increasingly sophisticated strategies. In the most recent efforts, Caltrans said, it used drones to help survey the slopes and remotely operated bulldozers and excavators to reduce risks to workers.
During the closure, no traffic was allowed on 6.8-mile span from just north of Lucia until about a mile south of the Esalen Institute. Drivers detoured inland by way of U.S. 101.
Correspondents of CBS’ 60 Minutes pose for a portrait in 2023. From left to right, they are Sharyn Alfonsi, L. Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Anderson Cooper. Former Executive Producer Bill Owens sits on the far right. Only Wertheim, Whitaker and Stahl remain at the program.
CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images/CBS
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When CBS fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday night, the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, told Pelley it was for insubordination at a staff meeting the day before.
The veteran correspondent argues he was defending the DNA of 60 Minutes and the integrity of its journalism.
The battle royale over the network’s most prestigious and profitable news program is part of a broader fight over the direction of CBS News.
And given CBS’s acquisition by a billionaire family whose business interests have become intertwined with the political interests of President Trump, it reflects a larger war over control of the media in the current moment.
That father and son, Larry and David Ellison, bought CBS’ parent company, Paramount, last summer. In January, they became co-owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Now they’re seeking approval from Trump’s regulators to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.
A glamorous show shorn, for now, of most its stars
CBS fired Cecilia Vega, a correspondent, and Tanya Simon, the executive producer, from 60 Minutes last week. They are shown in this photo at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 25, 2026 in Washington, D.C.
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Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images/Variety
But the specifics of this individual episode matter — for 60 Minutes, CBS, its audience of millions, and even the news business itself.
The program has been the most glamorous post in broadcast news. The correspondents are the stars of the show. And now, there are just three of them.
Anderson Cooper left last month, concerned over the direction of the network’s coverage. Last week was a virtual bloodbath: correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. So were a producer and two show executives — including Tanya Simon, a longtime staffer who had stepped up as executive producer when her predecessor resigned in protest before the Ellisons’ takeover.
With Pelley’s ouster, only correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim remain. Now they are considering whether to resign, according to two associates with knowledge.
Their brand-new boss, Bilton, was previously a tech reporter for The New York Times and an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair. He executive-produced a documentary for Netflix about a couple accused of laundering Bitcoin and has been a producer on several other films.
Notably, he has no experience in television news.
Neither does Bari Weiss, whom David Ellison installed as the network’s editor in chief last October. The Ellisons also bought her center-right views-and-news site, The Free Press.
She has maintained that the network of Walter Cronkite needs a makeover for the digital moment. She has also contended for years that CBS, along with the rest of mainstream media, is too reflexively anti-Trump, anti-Israel, and too woke.
A rejection of CBS News executives’ overtures
The new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, has been a tech journalist and documentary filmmaker, but lacks experience in broadcast news.
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Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
Bilton attempted to set a conciliatory tone at Monday’s meeting — his first with the show. Pelley, a formidable veteran correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor, wasn’t having it.
Pelley called Bilton unwelcome and unqualified. And Pelley said that Weiss was attempting to “murder” the program.
In firing Pelley on Tuesday, Bilton said the journalist had hijacked the meeting and rejected overtures to work constructively through their differences. (NPR obtained a copy of the firing notice.) Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show came through loud and clear.”
In his own statement late Tuesday evening, shared with NPR, Pelley accused CBS’s new news leadership of killing 60 Minutes‘ DNA and pushing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”
The accusations, to which CBS has not yet responded, echo those made by Alfonsi and Vega, the two correspondents fired last week.
Earlier this year, Alfonsi publicly complained after Weiss held one of her stories at the last minute, and kept it frozen for weeks, demanding an on-camera interview with a Trump White House official that never played out. It ran, unchanged from the intended version, with additional statements from the administration tacked on to the end.
After being fired, Vega said in a statement obtained by NPR that her team had “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.”
“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both censorship and self-driven” Vega continued. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”
Weiss previously rejected Alfonsi’s and Vega’s allegations. (CBS said Vega’s claims, for example, were “not based in reality” while expressing appreciation for her work.)
Weiss and Bilton say digital threat requires a 60 Minutes overhaul now
In a meeting this morning, Weiss said that Pelley chose his own path — that is, to be fired rather than to find a way to work through his concerns, according to attendees. The network and Weiss have not yet publicly addressed Pelley’s accusations of interference.
Bilton and Weiss say they respect the show’s traditions, its accomplishments and its legacy of enterprise reporting, extended interviews and visual storytelling. It rose in the ratings 9% over the past season under Simon.
The two news leaders say, however, 60 Minutes needs to be overhauled before it becomes increasingly irrelevant in the era of streamers and other sources of news, information and entertainment in the digital age.
Interviews with 12 current and former CBS News staffers, from producers to executives, suggest great reservations and suspicions remain about Weiss’ judgment and her ability to handle the prominent and even famous journalists on whom her division relies.
Weiss had initially sought to reinvent the CBS Evening News, dropping a two-anchor format that had sagged in the ratings. Cooper turned down Weiss’ overtures to anchor it and left the network altogether, concerned about her approach, according to associates. (They spoke on condition of anonymity because Cooper has not chosen to speak publicly on the matter.)
David Ellison became chairman and CEO of CBS’ parent company, Paramount, after buying it last year.
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Noam Galai/Getty Images for Paramount/Getty Images North America
The ratings have continued to sag under new anchor Tony Dokoupil. And some CBS journalists, including producers who have left the Evening News, have publicly accused Weiss of making editorial decisions driven by politics. She has rejected those claims.
The decision to take on overhauling two key shows — one listing, one highly profitable, both high profile — carries significant risks for Weiss and the network, even apart from other considerations.
But the Ellisons’ presence cannot be ignored.
When Shari Redstone was negotiating the sale of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to the Ellisons’ Skydance Media last year, the network announced the end of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. He had been one of the president’s most biting and acerbic critics.
David Ellison also made a series of concessions directly to Trump’s chief broadcast regulator, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, gutting CBS’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and appointing a conservative ombudsman to field complaints of bias against its news reporting.
Carr and other regulators approved the Paramount deal last summer.
The accommodations echo those made by other media titans.
Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos remade the editorial pages of the Washington Post, which he owns, into a far more hospitable zone for Trump at the outset of his second term. So did Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a noted medical device inventor. Amazon and Blue Origin have multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government. Soon-Shiong’s medical research firm routinely has patent applications up for review with federal regulators. One was approved Tuesday.
The Ellisons are hoping to win approval from federal regulators next month for their purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at more than $110 billion. It would include Warner Bros. Studio, HBO and CNN, among other properties.
As Weiss routs CBS News’ old guard, the question of what role she might play at CNN — and what changes that portends at CBS — hangs over journalists at the two networks. The fate of 60 Minutes serves as a high-stakes case study for both.
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