Today, I’m celebrating Big Fish Day.

It’s not exactly celebrating one year without alcohol, but rather the one year anniversary of realizing alcohol was hurting me. January 1st, 2023, I started a dry January. I planned to clear my head from all the whiskey nog and celebratory rum cocktails that were part of my life at the time. By the 11th day, I started to notice my mind frequently reaching for a drink, planning what I would fix myself when I got home to start cooking and relaxing for the evening. After the dozenth time that day, reminding myself I was doing dry January, my brain took the downtime offered by a red light to imagine pouring a large mason jar full of ginger ale, dragon fruit puree, and Lemon Bacardi.

And then it hit me.

I had a problem with alcohol.

I wouldn’t have believed the amount of mental space drinking was taking up. A drink was something I enjoyed in the bath to wind down from a busy day or sipped while I cooked for the family in the evenings. Alcoholic nog was in my glass, dancing around the Christmas tree, and beer wasbottled in an ice chest for beach picnics. I thought I was enjoying beverages as part of living the good life, but like any toxic relationship, when I disrupted it, it fought back.

When I realized my brain was in a bad relationship with alcohol, I was headed home with an FJ cruiser full of groceries. I had one of those big planks of fish hiding from the windows as I raced home before the frozen berries beside it melted. I’d always wanted to cook a big slab of fish, like a Viking or real grown-up chef. I was aware of the fish back there as my commute turned into a realization.

I was shocked to realize that drinking wasn’t just drinking for me. My behavior was curved in around alcohol, letting the substance and all that went with it take up precious space in my life. I was stunned that even though I was using alcohol in a socially acceptable way, it was still threatening to drown me.

What I thought was a short-term, holiday-driven mental fog from drinking was actually a long-term, unacknowledged overconsumption of alcohol woven into my daily celebrations and rituals. I carried those groceries into the house with a louder-than-usual buzz in my ears. I unpacked them all and set about preparing that big slab of wild salmon.

I was painfully aware that my first action on entering the kitchen a couple of weeks ago would have been to pour an alcoholic beverage before beginning to cook. Decorated with fruit, it would have looked innocuous, not that different from a mineral water or infused Perrier. But a heavy pour of rum would have given it a strong buzz.

This time, I pulled out the cooking sheet and chopping board. I sliced a lemon and laid out the fish slowly, with the roar of silence in my ears, a growing knowledge that I’d been given an insight today, something I’d better not shake off. A quiet voice of recognition that something wasn’t okay for me, even if only the fish and I knew it yet.

So I named the big fish Robert the Bruce. I promised that big fish I would tell someone else, and I talked to God about what it could look like to never drink again. I talked to God, and the fish, about how maybe it didn’t matter if it wasn’t a big deal for others, or if I could get away with it in some fashion without it wrecking my life.

I admitted to the fish that my dad had a bad relationship with alcohol, and owned up to never wanting to think about it.

I admitted to the fish that there are many choices I’ve made after several drinks that I’m not proud of.

I admitted that sometimes drinking was a way of opting out of life, escaping from reality, of hiding from things that needed facing.

I admitted that though my doctor warned me alcohol would worsen my tinnitus, I never even considered quitting drinking. Shouldn’t that have given me pause?

I took a couple of days really formulating the words to share, but Bruce and I knew then the future needed to look different. Even though I didn’t know it, on December 31, 2022, I had already taken my last drink of alcohol.

It took several more weeks for my brain to resign as bartender. Each time my mind started fixing me a drink, I saw how many moments in my life were accompanied by the substance. It shook me. I felt relief so immense it bordered on grief.

To this day, I feel like someone who missed their plane, only to find it exploded mid-flight, killing everyone onboard. The track I was on was detrimental to my daily health, sleep, hormone balance, blood sugar, and cognitive clarity. But it was also a track that includes poor choices that hurt friendships, block engagement in my purpose, and harm others. It was only a matter of time before my choices hurt or killed someone, even if it was only, slowly myself.

I know I haven’t blogged a lot this year. Finishing my first book took the lion’s share of my focus. Maybe this seems like a heavy post for the Wild + Brave blog after so much silence. But today is Big Fish Day. On it, I celebrate the gift of a hard truth I didn’t want to hear, a painful insight that made room for a completely different future.

I’ve tasted that different future already. In this alcohol-free year, I’ve finished writing and publishing my first nonfiction book, something I started working on at sixteen. That’s over 20 years. Sure, as a high school kid sipping Frappuccinos at my local Barnes & Noble, I didn’t have a lot worth saying. But in the last decade of working and writing, I see a dramatic difference in my cognitive and emotional clarity when I have been completely free from alcohol’s influence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in my first sober year, I finished some of the best intellectual work I’ve done in my adult life.

Doing the big, remarkable thing that we’re made for is challenging, to say the least. Whether working with our hands, managing people, or doing knowledge work, working with purpose and fulfilling that remarkable calling at our core requires access to our mental, emotional, and spiritual resources. I can see how drinking dampened my access to those resources.

It was a mental, emotional, and spiritual choice to release drinking from my life. And now this thing that is different in my body has made me more available to life.

As a coach, sometimes I get to be the big fish in someone’s life. Like Robert the Bruce, I sit there, listening, receptive, as someone voices the thought that has surfaced to disrupt their status quo. You do this for friends, sometimes offering wide fish eyes to signal when they’ve said something that sounds new, important, or vulnerable. Those wide-eyed, receptive silences create space for your friends to register and engage with those fears and insights.

Whether you’re the someone hearing a small insight that you need to explore, or you’re the fish listening as someone else does it — remember that some discomforts don’t need to be smoothed over. Some fears don’t need to be calmed. They need to be listened to and taken seriously.

I have intimate friends who have often confronted me with things I needed to hear. I’m blessed like that. Still, this insight came quietly, unheralded by scary experiences or obvious wake-up calls. No one else knew I had a problem.

If someone in your life is hearing a fear, try first to be a big fish. Listen like Robert the Bruce in case something is brewing that no one knew to notice. Help them unpack what is bothering them before dismissing or challenging it.

Their chat with you might be the thing that delays them. Maybe they, too, need to miss a flight headed nowhere.

I’ll always celebrate freedom from alcohol on Big Fish Day, but the day itself is also an opportunity to slow down and listen for the soft voice of counsel, that spirit of wisdom and caution, trying to break through the noise of life.

As I looked back at my journal entries around the time of this insight, I see lots of pausing and seeking. I definitely wasn’t looking for the insight I got, but I was consciously stepping out of the noise, looking for what was missing.

I thought a cleaner diet would help me listen and think. I wasn’t wrong. But many things rise to the surface when there’s room and quiet to carry them.

Wherever you are, whenever you’re reading this, you’re warmly invited to celebrate Big Fish Day in your own life. Help others listen, and find a safe fish to speak the quiet thoughts trying to climb into the light in your life.

The rush to keep going through the motions might be a last call for the wrong flight. As your friend, let me say: you won’t regret missing that call.

And if you ever need a big fish to listen, I’ll be here.

~Coach Morgan