I am terrified of relapsing. I am worried that the euphoria I feel today, non hungover for the first time for months, is just a brief honeymoon before the cravings start again. But today I will not drink. I have just poured the dregs of two bottles down the sink because they will soon go off.
What, if I beat this horror, will I not miss about drinking?
Here's a few:
- The guilt
- The fear of self inflicted serious illness
- The savage thirsts in the night, the bloodshot eyes in the mirror, the hangovers.
- Sneaking out to the bins every day, before the empties pile up
- Panicking about not having enough wine in the house, not being able to cope
- Spending too much on booze
- Mooching around in Iceland and Lidl looking for cheap wine.
- Feeling embarrassed at being recognised by the shop assistants.
- Tentatively joking to other people about my drinking, hoping they will tell me that they also indulge heavily.
10. Telling myself that I don't have a problem because I 'only' drink wine, because I never drink during the day. Although, since I crack open a bottle at 5 pm on the dot, that kind of is daytime drinking, isn't it?
One thing that occurs to me is how condescending I have felt towards 'real' alcoholics and their blue plastic zeppelin bottles of cheap cider. But how am I different? The cheap, sour wine I buy is just as bad - blended from grapes of poor quality, from the leftovers of the harvest, blended from different sources.
There is something romantic about wine - one imagines hot, sunny vineyards with rustic locals tilling the soil, richly coloured grapes fattening under the sun. But what is the reality? An article I read recently said that there is a dark side to the wine industry, that it is full of snake oil salesmen.
I remember a woman who hung around, with a bunch of other 'alkies' near where I worked in London. She was always begging for money for more booze. Her face was deep red with broken veins and I used to shudder when I saw her. One summer's day, I went to eat my lunch in the park and there was a crowd of people drinking out of cans containing cheap lager. I left, feeling nervous around them.
Two of my uncles are alcoholics. Although they are related to me by marriage, their drinking still affected the entire family. They have three failed marriages between them and their children are still suffering the effects of fathers who abandoned them, for months at a time, to disappear no binges.
My grandfather died of alcoholism related illness in his early fifties and, before his death, he had lost his marriage, his children and his job. His drinking bankrupted the family.
Right now, I feel no craving, no worries about not enough wine in the house. Usually, I am edgy if there are fewer than three bottles. I hope this lasts, I can only hope.
One thing I remember is that one particular alcoholic, though I only met him once, had a permanent effect on the rest of my life. I was seventeen and it was my first morning of university. At 9 a.m., eager and nervous, I knocked on the door of my Advisor of Studies to discuss the course I was going to do.
Within a minute of sitting down in his office, I realised he was absolutely blotto, completely drunk and stinking of whiskey. I should have got up and left but I was young and frightened and I didn't know what to do. He struggled to speak and scrawled notes onto my studies form that were illegible. His hands were shaking. I left his office with a course plan that was completely different to that I had planned to do. It worked out okay in the end, I enjoyed my course, but that's not the point.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling on. I was thinking all this over in the night and needed to get it down.
Good luck, babes :)