For many who experienced and lived through the arrival of COVID and the subsequent lockdown in 2020, the pandemic crisis led to a reevaluation of life’s priorities. That was certainly true in the case of Freda Love Smith, a then-rock drummer and an academic advisor at Northwestern University. By her own admission, she quietly hit rock bottom 10 months into the pandemic. “I probably appeared to be basically fine to anyone who interacted with me on Zoom at the time,” she says now. “But honestly, I was unraveling. And part of it was related to drinking. Like a lot of people at that moment, I was drinking more than I usually had. I was drinking quite habitually. I wasn’t thinking about it. I was unconsciously reaching for whiskey every single night.”
That feeling was further exacerbated during Inauguration Day 2021, she says, which occurred a few weeks after the January 6 Capitol riot. “There was a massive amount of stress and tension in the air,” she recalls. “I was feeling it very hard. And it was really that day after I’d watched the inauguration, there was a sense of relief – everything was fine. But I wanted to drink so badly at that moment, and it was noon, a workday. It deeply startled me out of a kind of stupor that I’d been in. I felt like, ‘Maybe I needed to put the brakes on this for a bit. This is not good. I’m not doing well.’”
Not only did Smith—who is best known for work with the rock bands Blake Babies, the Mysteries of Life and Sunshine Boys—put on the brakes with her drinking but other addictive habits such as caffeine, sugar, cannabis and social media. She decided then that she would quit one addiction a month and see how she did. That time of experimentation has now been chronicled in her new book, I Quit Everything. Written with both poignancy and humor, the work could be considered part memoir, part self-help manual, and part sociological study in that it looks at the origins of her addictions while contextualizing them.
“I think that often these moments of hitting bottom can be helpful because there’s energy there,” she explains. “You’re so utterly fed up, so utterly low, that you feel strongly that something’s got to change. So that was my case. My decision to quit drinking was quick and it was absolute. I knew for sure that I had to take a break.
“One thing that I think comes through in the book pretty strongly is that I’m a person who’s drawn to extremes. I have a long history of quitting things or trying to quit things. So when I decided to quit drinking pretty quickly, it didn’t feel like it was enough to only quit drinking. And so I pretty quickly decided to toss a bunch of my other bad habits on the fire.”
In the case of her drinking, Smith examined the factors that shaped her previous attitudes and beliefs about alcohol, including how drinking was portrayed to her through such films as The Bad News Bears, Barfly and Arthur. “That was some of my favorite parts of writing this book,” Smith says, “that kind of detective work of digging back to films from my childhood and my young adulthood, like l ooking for clues about this complex relationship that I had with alcohol, wondering where did I get all these assumptions that I have about booze—assumptions that alcohol is essential, a necessary part of life, equated with looseness and glamour and even happiness. All of that led me back to those films and not to blame or criticize them. In most cases, I still really love and appreciate them, but to try to understand myself a little bit better.”
Smith also explained in the book that she took cannabis to cope with stress, including at her regular academic job. “During the pandemic, I was leaning hard on all of these substances, including THC, which had been previously a very positive force in my life. And I feel like it is again now. But for that period of time, I felt I was increasing my dosage It wasn’t so much that I was doing it for the enjoyment, but turning to it more and more to numb out. That’s always a red flag…And so I was feeling groggy, feeling spacier than I wanted to. It didn’t take long for all of that to go away. It really did require an honest look at myself and my usage, and it did require a total break for some months.
Of the habits that she stopped during her experimentations, caffeine was the hardest for her, says Smith. “Most people, I think, aren’t as sensitive to caffeine as I am. But for me, it was causing some health problems. My eyes were twitching. I was having a lot of trouble sleeping. I was also having some heart palpitations and my blood pressure was higher. So I became very sensitive to it. I always have been, but I think it intensified as I aged. It was pretty extreme. It was kind of messing up my life…I was tired of being owned by a molecule, which I think is a recurring theme in my book— just this longing for freedom. Caffeine was hell to quit…It’s the only thing that I quit in the book that I am still off.
“Sugar was a little bit more emotional,” she continues. “I definitely did feel some physical withdrawal. But a lot of times, what I felt was sorry for myself because I couldn’t have a nice piece of cake or a bowl of ice cream. Now I’ll let myself have a little bit every now and then. I eat a lot less sugar and I do feel much better. But I don’t think I need to have a strictly hardline stance on it. I have to say I felt much better without it.”
In contrast to caffeine, social media was easier for Smith to give up, providing her with more calm and clarity; she eventually returned to it as part of her book’s recent promotion. “I know I very much enjoyed the break, but I missed it too. There are people in my life who I really only interact with on social media. And I missed those people, especially since this was still during the pandemic time. So even though it was the easiest thing to quit, there were also challenges for sure. It was nerve-wracking to get back on…I was afraid like, ‘Oh, am I going to lose myself in it again? And is it going to be you know I’m just going to have to kiss all that time goodbye that I had gained back?’ So I’m still trying to figure it out.”
As she was quitting these habits, Smith also reevaluated her career both in academia and music. At the time, she was drumming as part of the trio Sunshine Boys, who had released their second album Work and Love in 2020. Smith says that she has had a long history of quitting drumming since her time in Blake Babies, the alternative rock band that included Juliana Hatfield and John Strohm. This time around, she decided to bow out due to physical issues. “I’ve always had a somewhat fraught and ambivalent relationship with drumming,” she says. “But honestly, all of that changed over time and especially with the Sunshine Boys, which was a thoroughly positive experience.
“This time I started to think of it not as quitting from drumming but retiring from drumming. I had to be honest with myself and listen to my body. I think probably even heading into the pandemic, I had a sense that my days are numbered here and I wanted to plan a deliberate exit. Starting to mentally reframe that as retirement was really helpful to me—to think of it as a way to embrace my career, to celebrate my career, and to end it on a high note instead of out of frustration or disappointment. So I was grateful to have that opportunity to do that in a conscious and deliberate way.”
Over the years, Smith has shifted from music to writing; prior to I Quit Everything, she wrote the book Red Velvet Underground, a memoir, which was published in 2015. Her literary ambitions began in high school. “In a way, I got sidetracked by music. I mean, it’s a wonderful sidetrack. I met John Strohm, and he was a drummer and playing guitar. I loved music, too, and I got very caught up in that. He taught me how to play drums, and then the rest is kind of my whole history. But [writing] does feel a little bit like returning to something that I loved and cared about and aspired to do when I was younger. So it’s always been there but was laying dormant until more recently.”
Since the publication of I Quit Everything, Smith acknowledges that she has worked through the issues while also considering herself a work in progress. On one hand, she has a much better relationship with alcohol in that she had one drink in the last several months. On the other, she is still trying to figure out how to have an ideal relationship with social media. “But I also feel comfortable with just continuing to experiment with it,” she says. “I’m like, ‘It’s okay. I don’t have to reach some perfect point of having it all figured out.’ I guess that’s true sort of across the board with all of these habits, substances, practices and addictions.
“Because I am a person that is drawn to extremes, it’s been a good learning experience for me to allow for that little bit of flexibility, of that identification as 99% sober. With sugar, I try to stay conscious, try to pay attention. The same with cannabis. I mean, that’s the one I still have maybe the most work to do. Maybe I already said that about social media. But with cannabis, I love it. I value it. I think it’s really good for me. I just have to watch it and I try to take periodic breaks from it. It’s something that seems to me so much less damaging than alcohol and so much more conducive to the kind of life that I want to have. So I do very regularly have low-dose cannabis edibles. I feel like they’re helpful.”If there is one thing that Smith would like people to take away from her latest book is that they don’t have to entirely change who they are when it comes to self-improvement. “I realized I didn’t need to try to become a completely different person. I’m like, ‘That’s okay. I can grow. I can evolve.’ But I can’t quit being who I am. I can’t quit being myself. “
I Quit Everything: How One Woman’s Addiction to Quitting Helped Her Confront Bad Habits and Embrace Midlife, written by Freda Love Smith, is published by Agate and available in bookstores.
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