Ashley McBryde will soon celebrate a major milestone, but it won’t be with a glass of champagne. The 41-year-old will celebrate her 900th day of sobriety on November 28, which happens to be Thanksgiving Day.
“It’s awesome,” McBryde tells People. “I was adding up — I want to celebrate on the 900th day of being sober, and I was like, ‘That’s a milestone! You should celebrate that.’ I looked, and it’s Thanksgiving Day, so it’s got a holiday built in this time. That is quite a milestone, and it’s one of the most important changes I’ve ever made.”
With so many days without drinking, it’s unlikely now that McBryde will ever go back to drinking alcohol.
“If you had told me even ten years ago, you think you love your voice? You should hear it without drinking, because along with drinking comes smoking for me,” McBryde says.
When McBryde chose to quit drinking, she said she realized she was using alcohol to numb pain. Instead, the Arkansas native found other, healthier ways to deal with her struggles, a decision that has positively impacted every other area of her life as well.
“I’ll still encounter a situation where I’ll be like, ‘Oh, normally I would drink about this,'” admits the singer. “And I go ahead and sit with that feeling and I’m like, ‘Okay, you had a great show or you had a great interview, or you had a great interaction, or whatever. Why on earth would you punish yourself for that?'”
“It takes a while to understand that’s what’s going on,” she adds. “Literally, it was punishing myself for doing good things. And when I stopped doing that, the good things got better.”
In September of 2023, McBryde announced that she had quietly quit drinking more than a year ago, waiting to go public with the news until the time felt right.
“I didn’t really want to talk to anybody about it even lightly until a year had passed because I was like, ‘What if I screw it up?’” McBryde said on Apple Music Country’s Today’s Country Radio with Kelleigh Bannen.
When announcing her sobriety, McBryde said it was when she cut it out of her life that she could finally realize how much drinking was hurting her, personally and professionally.
“Turns out it was just really detrimental,” McBryde acknowledged at the time. “And then when you’re finding out the reasons that you’re going so overboard all the time was because of your inability to feel something that your brain was like, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it.’ I’m like, ‘Well, that’s weak. I’m not going to accept that. I’d rather just hurt.’ This morning I was at the boxing gym working out with my coach. We were doing something that was hard, and he said, ‘Are you okay? Do you need a break?’ And I said, ‘I know how to hurt.’
“I do now,” she added. “I mean, I knew how to hurt before and add extra to it for no reason. And now, when I’m uncomfortable, I say out loud, ‘I know how to be uncomfortable.’”
McBryde has a lot to be thankful for this year. The talented tunesmith will wrap up her run with Cody Johnson on his Leather Tour in December, and will return in 2025 to join him on his Leather Deluxe Tour, as well as headline many of her own shows. Her new single, “Ain’t Enough Cowboy Songs” will be out on December 6. But this week especially, McBryde will celebrate Thanksgiving with her favorite foods, sans alcohol.
“Mostly my plans are green bean casserole, and you know what I think we should add to traditional Thanksgiving desserts? Banana pudding,” McBryde says with a laugh. “There are always like four kinds of pie, and hardly any puddings.”
Find all of McBryde’s music and tour dates at AshleyMcBryde.com.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of the CMA