The first wedding after you stop drinking is awkward. So is the first work party, the first dinner at the host's house, the first time someone you barely know hands you a drink and you have to decide whether to take it.
The awkwardness is mostly internal. Other people are not thinking about your glass nearly as much as you are. But internal awkwardness is real awkwardness, and there are specific things that make it easier.
Decide before you arrive
The single most useful thing you can do is decide what you are drinking before you walk into the event. Not what you are not drinking. What you are drinking.
Soda water with lime. Coffee. A specific non-alcoholic beer if the bar has one. A specific non-alcoholic cocktail if you scoped the menu. The point is that when someone asks what you want, you have an answer that takes one second to deliver. The hesitation is what creates the conversation. The conversation is what creates the friction.
This sounds small. It is not small. The cognitive load of deciding in the moment, in front of people, while someone is offering, is much higher than the cognitive load of having already decided.
The short answer is usually the right answer
When someone asks why you are not drinking, almost any short answer works. "I'm taking a break." "Not tonight." "I quit." "I'm driving." "I'm on a thing."
The instinct is to explain more. The explanation almost never helps. People are looking for a quick conversational handoff, not a story. If you give them a short answer in a normal voice, they will move on to the next thing and so will you. If you give them three sentences with a hedging tone, they will ask follow-up questions you do not want to answer.
The short answer is also more honest. Whatever your reason is, it's yours. You do not owe a justification to someone you are about to spend forty seconds with at a buffet line.
Hold something the whole time
A drink in your hand changes the social calculus more than you would think. Someone holding a glass looks like they have already engaged with the bar. Nobody offers them a refill. Nobody asks what they're drinking. Nobody notices.
Soda water with lime is the universal answer here. It looks like a gin and tonic. It costs the bar nothing. It frees you from being asked about your drink for the rest of the night. Take one when you arrive, refresh it once during the event, hand it off when you leave. The whole question goes away.
Leave when you want to leave
Sober events end differently than drinking events. The energy plateaus around the time most people would be hitting their second or third drink, and from there the room enters a phase that, when you are not drinking, mostly consists of people talking louder and saying less.
You are allowed to leave before that phase. You do not have to outlast the host. The polite move at any event is to thank the host, find one or two people to say goodbye to, and go. Doing this an hour earlier than you used to is not rude. It is just calibrated to a different version of you.
Bring an exit
For events where leaving early might feel hard, having an external reason to leave reduces the friction. An early morning. A pet to feed. A friend who needs help with something tomorrow. The reason does not need to be elaborate. It just needs to exist so that "I have to head out" reads as logistical instead of emotional.
Over time you will need this less. Early on, it is useful infrastructure.
What changes after the first few
The first three to five events are the most awkward. Your nervous system is encoding a new pattern, and the absence of alcohol in social settings reads as exposure until it doesn't. After about a month of regular events, the awkwardness drops sharply. After two months, most people stop thinking about it.
The exception is the very specific event where you used to drink the most. Whatever that is for you, your wedding, your friend's wedding, work parties, the holiday season, will take longer to recalibrate. That recalibration usually happens once. After you have made it through the specific category that scared you, the rest gets quieter.
A short list of things that don't help
Lying about drinking when you aren't. People can usually tell, and it puts you in the position of maintaining a story you don't want to maintain.
Announcing it. "I'm not drinking tonight, by the way" said unprompted invites the conversation you were trying to avoid.
Trying to convert other drinkers. Not your job, not the moment.
Drinking to fit in just this once. This sometimes works fine. It also sometimes resets the count and the confidence in a way that takes a week to recover from. Decide before you arrive, not while standing at the bar.
The thing that does help
Going to the event anyway. The pattern only changes if you keep showing up. If you start ducking events, two things happen: the events you skip pile up as evidence that being sober means being absent, and your social muscles get rusty in a way that takes more work to recover than just attending would have taken.
You do not need to enjoy the first few events. You do need to attend them. Sometime around the fourth or fifth one, you will notice that you are actually enjoying it, that you remember everything from the conversation, and that you are going to sleep at a reasonable hour and waking up without losing the next day. That noticing is what the project of all this was for in the first place.