The Outrun

by Amy Liptrot

Energy never expires. The energy of waves, carried across the ocean, changes into noise and heat and vibrations that are absorbed into the land and passed through the generations.

Something was crumbling deep within my nervous system and shook my body in powerful pulses to the extent that I was frozen and drooling, until they eased off enough for me to pour another drink or rejoin the party.

I was always getting into horrible states but what other people perhaps didn’t realise was that I didn’t want to get into horrible states.

was dumbfounded and unable to make decisions about where to go, whom to see or what opinion to hold, filling the void with alcohol and anxiety.

Not the same as the smell of booze, it is a sickly fragrance emitted from the pores of a creature whose internal organs, liver and kidneys, are struggling to process toxins and push the poison out though the skin, fingernails and eyeballs.

lived – and continue to live – with two things: the obsession and the craving.

When we drink, alcohol, or more specifically ethanol, is absorbed into the stomach lining and enters the bloodstream. In the brain, alcohol confuses messages between neurotransmitters and acts as an intoxicant and a depressant or relaxant. For those of us susceptible to addiction, alcohol quickly becomes the default way of alleviating anxiety and dealing with stressful situations. Through repeated use of the drug, our neural pathways are scored so deeply they will never be repaired. I will always be vulnerable to relapse and other kinds of addiction.

The prime minister was talking tough, picking out addicts and people with weight problems (there were apparently around 80,000 addicts on incapacity benefits, including 42,360 alcoholics – my peers were surprised at how low this number was), saying that the public only wanted to pay taxes ‘for people incapacitated through no fault of their own’.

I was finding that being sober could be kind of a trip and I was just riding it like a soldier.

When I broke up with my boyfriend I’d spent a long time feeling it was almost futile to cook for one. What was the point of watching a film alone,

I was coming around to the idea that alcoholism is a form of mental illness, rather than just a habit or lack of control.

learning that the thing with cravings is that they pass: I sat through it and an hour later wondered what it had been about.

wondering if this was all there was to sobriety. I felt as if I had got myself ready for something but didn’t know what it was. I was fit, healthy, clean, and home alone again all weekend, too scared to go anywhere. If this was the future, I didn’t want it.

Getting sober is one thing – I did it hundreds of times – but staying sober is a daily challenge in which there are moments when it comes together and I felt certain I’d done the right thing, then times when it was painfully hard.

knowing that I need to do more with myself than just not drinking.

I’m repairing these dykes at the same time as I’m putting myself back together. I am building my defences, and each time I don’t take a drink when I feel like it, I am strengthening new pathways in my brain. I have to break the walls down a bit more before I can start to build them up again. I have to work with the stones I’ve got and can’t spend too long worrying if I’m making the perfect wall. I just have to get on with placing stones.

but when I’m flagging, the sky does something amazing. I love the mist that hangs below me in Orkney’s gentle valleys, as if I’ve climbed to the top of the beanstalk.

Rose Cottage is like a perfectly designed halfway house, where I can have my own place and develop healthy, responsible routines, within the sheltered community of the island.

London is an island within the rest of the UK, defined and separate.

I can physically feel the nightlife, happening out there without me while I sit by the fire with a blanket over my knees, wondering how I suddenly became an old lady. I miss seeing and being seen and feeling close to the centre of the action.