Dryuary 2025 Day 1: Welcome to Dryuary -Your Safe Harbor

Sylvie felt her potential: for bravery, brilliance, kindness, joy. All of these sails rested on the deck of her ship; they were hers, but she hadn’t seen them before.

Napolitano, Ann. Hello Beautiful: A Novel (p. 192). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Welcome to Dryuary 2025. Our theme this year is “Explore the Adventure of an Alcohol-Free Month.” Following the physical to and fro and the cresting and plummeting of the emotional waves of the holiday season, you may feel like a vessel seeking safe harbor, its sails in need of mending, its engine ready for an overhaul.  Adventure is the last thing you want or need right now. What you need is rest and repair in a safe place.

Almost since the moment I met him, my husband made it clear that living on a sailboat was on his horizon.  I am from Kansas.  If you’ve been to Kansas, you’ll need no explanation why the idea of living on a sailboat seemed just about as foreign as boarding a spaceship to go live on Mars. The biggest body of water within 300 miles of my hometown was our municipal swimming pool. What can I say? I was crazy about the guy, so I raised my hand to my brow in a salute. “Permission to come aboard, Captain.”

Sailing is an adventure, especially if you’ve never sailed before and don’t know your aft from your bow or your port from your starboard. I had a lot to learn. The thing about sailing is, you can’t learn how to do it in the calmness of a harbor, you’ve got to get out there in the open and unpredictable ocean. You learn to sail by sailing. There were a couple of things I was surprised to find out.

• You can’t sail directly from point A to point B unless the wind and the current align and the weather gods are smiling on you. You can stay in port and wait for the unlikelihood of this happening within the next millennium, or you can tack, sailing back and forth in a zig-zag manner to catch the wind in your sails, all the while paying close attention that the wind does not blow you completely off course. This reminds me of my journey to change my relationship with alcohol. If I’d waited until the conditions were perfect to set sail, I’d still be stuck on that rickety dock.
  
  
• When you’re out in rough seas being tossed around like a bobber in the agitation cycle of a washing machine and you’re dreaming of a calm harbor, staying out in that rough open water until the seas calm is the safest place for you. Inlets to safe harbors are narrow and usually lined with rock jetties just waiting to destroy your boat as you try to navigate the maelstrom of confused waters. Many a boat has been dashed to pieces on those rocks along with the dreams of its captain and crew.
  
  Some of us may be worried that sailing the narrow inlet from the full-force gale of drinking that is the holiday season to the calm waters of Dryuary may be too treacherous right now. That’s okay. One maneuver sailors use in rough conditions is to hove-to, setting their sails so there is no forward progress further into the rough waters. The boat stays in the same position outside the inlet, close enough that they can still see the light from the navigational beacons that will lead them into the harbor when the seas calm. If you feel it will be too uncomfortable to stop drinking right now, take a few days to hove-to and let the waters calm. Just like a sailor reduces sails when the winds are too high, slowly reduce the amount you are drinking until it is comfortable to enter the harbor.
  
• Time spent in dock for repairs or waiting out bad weather would come to be my favorite time. It was at dock that I met other sailors who were also dealing with breakdowns and repairs and waiting until it was safe to venture out into the ocean again. It was in safe harbor that we shared our misadventures with others who understood what we had gone through. It was in safe harbor that we learned from each other and encouraged each other to stay the course toward our destination. Even though we were safe at dock, we still explored. We explored other people’s knowledge, and we shared our own. We took time to explore and travel to land-based destinations that were marked on a map instead of a chart. We laughed and complained about our chosen life of sailing while we commiserated that others didn’t understand why we made the choices we made. We confessed our fears and doubts. We delved the depth of our desire to continue sailing and weighed it against the lure of staying safe in harbor. It may not sound like much of an adventure compared to life on the high seas but I discovered more about myself in those calm waters than I could when my concentration was largely devoted to survival and staying safe until I could reach a safe harbor again.

We hope you consider Dryuary 2025 your safe harbor. It is a secure place for us to explore places that aren’t plotted on the chart we use when navigating a world in which we are drinking.

Often amid repairs, sailors sail out of the harbor on day sails to test those repairs and then return to the harbor to continue and fine-tune those repairs. Their fellow sailors always welcome them back, catching their lines and securing them back to the dock again. If you sail out for a day sail, please know that we will be awaiting your return to catch your lines.

Systems Check:

Every Monday of this month, we’ll be doing a quick systems check to assess how those repairs are going. Try to do this as a compassionate observer instead of a critic, we’ll learn more about this next Monday but for right now, just do a quick once-over.

Physical: 

Head:

Eyes:

Complexion:

Heart (If it is concerning you, please contact your medical provider.):

Tummy:

Skeleto-Muscular System: Any muscle aches or injuries?

Mental/Emotional:

Energy:

Anxiety:

Outlook:

Share the results of your systems check in the comments below or in the private Dryuary 2025 Facebook group.

by Mary Reid
Moderation Management Executive Director, author of Neighbor Kary May’s Handbook to Happily Drinking Less or Not Drinking At All with the Support on Online Communities, editor/writer of Moderate Drinking Success Stories and Lessons Learned: Tales from the MM Community and Beyond and creator/writer of MM’s Kickstart Moderation Program.