This is the third of ten in The Manifesto Sessions—a series about unlearning, reclaiming, and stepping into who you were always meant to be. See here for the full list
WHAT WE BELIEVE AT PURPLE DOG SOBER: Life is too short to waste on boxed wine and “someday.” What happens when you stop waiting, and start doing.
We love the idea of readiness. We wait for clarity, for confidence, for the perfect stretch of calendar space and emotional bandwidth. We tell ourselves that someday we’ll go after the thing, write the book, leave the relationship, quit drinking, take the trip, change our lives.
But here’s the hard truth: readiness is a myth. Life doesn’t arrive with a neat green light telling you when to go. Most of the time, the only thing standing between you and the life you want is the willingness to begin anyway, messy, unprepared, and halfway convinced you’re not doing it right.
This isn’t about reckless leaps. It’s about inching forward with shaky hands and a rebellious heart that whispers, what if now is good enough?
I get it. There’s a false sense of comfort in believing that if you can just wait until things settle down, then you’ll be ready to make the change.
If you can just get through the holidays, then you’ll quit drinking. If you can just get through your daughter’s graduation, then you’ll quit drinking. If you can just get through this deadline, then you’ll quit drinking.
It sounds like a plan. Like you’re acknowledging that something needs to change, that you're almost ready to do something different. But what’s really happening is that you’re wrapping fear in a disguise and trying to fool yourself.
There’s never going to be a perfect time to start living the life you actually want. To take the chances that are calling you. And the longer you numb out, the more life you miss.
This pattern isn’t unique to drinking. We do it with everything:
“I’ll start working out after vacation.” “I’ll leave the relationship once the kids are older.” “I’ll take the art class when things slow down at work.” “I’ll quit the job I hate after one more raise.” “I’ll write the book when I’m more confident.” “I’ll start therapy after this deadline.”
I’ve been stuck in this place, overthinking, overplanning, trying to codify every single step to protect myself from failure. It sounds responsible, even thoughtful, like you’re planning for the future. But most of the time, it’s just a quiet refusal to take up space in your own life. A way to delay discomfort while pretending you’re in motion.
I think, especially as women, we get stuck here because we’re not always taught to trust ourselves. We’re told we need to have the perfect plan, get all the certifications, listen to all the gurus, or know all the answers, before we begin.
But you don’t need to earn your shot at joy, creativity, fulfillment, or freedom.
Taking that first step is what clears the path.
Waiting doesn’t just cost you time, it chips away at your sense of self.
When you’ve spent years being told that your ideas don’t matter, that your voice doesn’t count, or that your dreams are unrealistic, you start to shrink. You get quieter. Smaller. You feel like there’s no room for you in your own life.
And so, you start covering it all up, the emptiness, the ache, the quiet rage of never being enough. Never meeting the expectations. The ones handed down from your parents, your partner, your friends, the PTA, Instagram, or fucking Marie Kondo. (What even are those expectations, anyway?) You distract yourself with the minutiae, keeping the house presentable, staying busy, staying small.
Because what happens when a woman wants something bigger, when she wants to create something real? Shame kicks in. Not because she’s doing something wrong, but because she’s breaking the script. And deep down, she already knows what she wants to build. She’s just terrified to put it into the world. Because if she does, she risks being misunderstood. Dismissed. Ridiculed. And most of us were never taught how to be resilient in the face of that.
I know I wasn’t.
I didn’t have a partner who understood me. I didn’t have friends who wanted to talk about big dreams. Most were stuck in the same cycle; long boozy playdates, PTA drama, pretending everything was fine. And under all of it, I think we were all dealing with the same shame. Just too scared to say it out loud.
So, what did I do? I shoved my biggest ideas into the dark and numbed out the ache of not using my voice.
That’s what waiting cost me.
I know many of you are familiar with the words of Mary Oliver, from her poem The Summer Day:
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
For years, my answer, whether I admitted it or not, was to sit on my couch with a bottle of wine, most nights of the week. That was what I was choosing to do with my “one wild and precious life.”
I was bubble-wrapping the present so I didn’t have to feel it. Alcohol became my socially acceptable way to self-soothe, to self-medicate, to blur the sharp edges of a life I wasn’t sure how to fully live.
Need a boost after juggling work and family? Grab a bottle of wine. You deserve it. Walk into an event where you don’t know anyone? Take a Tito’s and soda for that hit of “liquid courage.”
It all looks like comfort. Like reward. But what is it really?
Disconnection. Distraction. Delay.
In her book Why Bother?, Jen Louden calls these things shadow comforts, the habits we turn to in search of relief: alcohol, food, shopping, scrolling, performing on social media.
They start off feeling harmless, even helpful. They soothe. They reward. But they don’t actually nourish. They don’t strengthen us. Instead, they keep us just numb enough to stay stuck, slowly draining our energy, our confidence, our time, until the habit is no longer in the shadows at all. It’s staring at us right between the eyes, and we feel like we’re a spectator in our own life.
Sobriety forced me to look at all of it. To ask harder questions. To examine the places I’d been hiding, even from myself. Sobriety didn’t just strip away the alcohol, it stripped away the excuses. It gave me eyes to see what was really going on. And once I started looking clearly, this is what began to surface in my journal:
Questioning a lot of my “addictions” right now. My need to post on social media, my relationship with food, my lack of respect for myself and my body. I think that all this comes out now. The idea that sobriety allows me to look at the rest of my life with clear eyes and I can evaluate and see what supports me truly and what doesn’t. I feel like I have completely stepped away and another veil has fallen away from my eyes and I feel like a completely different person. I feel like some sort of invader has left my body and that I’m back on the solid footing of where I was meant to be.
When you remove alcohol, you stop time-traveling through your life. You stay rooted in the present. You start to name your feelings, or at least you try. You begin to process what’s happening as it happens, rather than outsourcing your emotions to a bottle and hoping they’ll disappear.
Yes, it’s awkward at first. Uncomfortable. Raw. But then something remarkable happens: you begin to feel your strength gathering force. You start to create space to ask the real question: Who the hell am I, really?
Now, I sit in the comfortable and the uncomfortable. The joy and the pain. The beauty and the horror.
And that, I’ve come to believe, is what it means to live a wild and precious life.
I used to think sobriety would dull everything, that taking alcohol away would strip the sparkle from my days. That it would leave me with a life of beige routines and too much time to think.
But I was wrong.
Sobriety didn’t make my life smaller. It cracked it wide open.
And the wildest part?
It didn’t require a grand plan. Just a decision, one quiet, radical choice to start now. Not when I felt ready. Not when life settled down. Just now.
That’s where everything began to change.
You don’t need to wait until you feel ready. You just need to want your life back.
What is your someday dream? And what would it look like to give it a try, not when you're ready, but right now, exactly as you are?
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Love the idea of not needing a grand plan, just a starting move. I think this is true of lots of good things!