Thanks for the congrats! And, yes, Venus, at one time going more than a day without drinking seemed an impossibility. Anyhow, I mentioned a longer post.....hang on to your hats, your Opal Fruits and Barrie's tank (who is currently looking after Barrie's tank?)
So, a year ago today I stopped drinking. There’s a nice simple sentence! I’d like to share some of the journey so far. My relationship with alcohol didn’t really begin until my twenties when I was an undergraduate and decided fitting in meant joining in with pub visits and mixing lethal blends of MD 20/20 (anyone remember that?) and vodka and calling it ‘punch’ - never was a word more aptly applied. It was a classic case of feeling uncomfortable in my skin and realising that alcohol created a lovely warm, cosy place I just kept wanting to return to. There are ‘hilarious’ pictures of me passed out before the night even got started. People thought it was funny and that I was a bit of a boozer but a good sport. The fact I couldn’t figure out when I’d had enough should perhaps have warned me back then, but didn’t.
After that, came a gradual creep towards rewarding myself with alcohol, consoling myself with it, banging on in insufferably middle class ways about ‘fain wains’ - I mean, I’m not a problem drinker, dahling, I’m a wine buff. Alcohol saw me through miserably unsatisfying jobs and a deep sense of disappointment. We jogged along together for a couple of decades, alcohol and I, until the relationship started to decline. When did I first begin to think something’s wrong here? When meals with friends routinely saw me downing several bottles of wine and moving on to spirits afterwards. It’s not a problem if you only drink with food, right? When I struggled into work hungover, (to my shame once even throwing up on a bus). When a colleague kept making references to habits of people who have an alcohol problem. Who, I wondered, could he possibly mean? When alcohol-induced anxiety started to be like ants having a party under my skin.
All the while I was carrying on pretty much as normal. I have missed maybe two days of work because of alcohol. I have never made serious errors or put anyone but myself at risk because I was drunk or hungover. In the last few years the work I do has become much more people-focussed, and I think that perhaps it was this that finally made the difference. I didn’t want to be slightly detached any more. I wanted to be alive, feeling and, yup, vulnerable. There was no big disaster or lost weekend. Though I have behaved in some pretty embarrassing ways when drinking nothing has been catastrophic. There was, however, a growing sense of boredom with the repetitive cycle of craving, drinking and regretting. And one day last year, I decided I wouldn’t drink, maybe for a month, we’d see. It was provisional. Previous attempts to moderate had all failed. I just have no off switch. I have two choices when it comes to booze: none or excess.
So, what’s changed and what have I learned? What’s changed is partly physical; necking somewhat north of 50 units a week has quite an impact. For at least a month after quitting, I felt crap: tired, skin breaking out, digestion all over the place. It turns out the fatigue is alcohol withdrawal and fairly normal, but I felt cheated. I wanted the reward of weight loss and glowing skin. I have eventually lost weight, but my initial surprise was the sugar craving that scuppered any early slimming fantasies. Man, the sugar craving! Alcohol has lots of sugar in it and my body was really missing its supply. Once the mad ice-cream binges subsided a bit, the weight began to come off. My face is also less puffy. I feel better, yes, still me, just in smaller trousers, as the late Victoria Wood once almost said.
Mentally, emotionally, the changes have been bigger still. I have an inner critical voice who can be a very nasty drunk, berating me about all my failures at 3am and refusing to let me sleep. Without his fuel supply, he’s now reduced to muttering passive-aggressively in a corner and I can shut him up. I am much more open to feeling and emotional intimacy with others. Therapy has helped a lot, though it took a very long time to work up the courage to tell my therapist I had to stop drinking. The amazing Babes have been there and reading all the threads has helped hugely.
There has been a cost too. Not all my friendships have survived sobriety. Not all days are free of missing alcohol (just wish it didn’t taste so good). Clarity is a bloody uncomfortable feeling sometimes; I now have questions about my life that are, let’s say, incompatible with chilling out. Has it been worth it? Yes, without question. I wouldn’t have got away with my level of drinking forever. It would have escalated. I feel I’ve walked up to the precipice and looked over. Whilst I may never have been someone with a visible ‘problem’ or someone who fitted a medical diagnosis of alcoholism, I certainly wasn’t in a good place either. I don’t know why I have no off switch, whether to blame genetics, personality or circumstance, or a bit of each. I don’t think knowing ‘why’ is ever the whole answer in any case. If you are still reading, thank you!