The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober

by Catherine Gray

Stigmas grow in the shadowlands. So, let’s floodlight the sober movement. Alcohol is an addictive drug. There’s no shame in not being able to use it moderately. You are not unusual if you can’t stop at one or two. You’re not broken. Or weak. You’re actually the norm. Two-thirds of Brits are drinking more than they intend to.

See, ‘stone-cold sober’ needs a re-brand. It should be called ‘sunshine-warm sober’ instead. Because that’s what it feels like. The loveliness of daylight, clarity and authentic social connection. Yes, you can no longer drink that magical potion to take social situations from level-two ‘insecure’ to level-eight ‘pogo-ing around a dancefloor’. You need to learn how to chug through levels three to seven for real, rather than using the dark art of an addictive drug. But once you learn the superpower of socializing sober, it never leaves you. And you’ll never want to go back.

There are, of course, things that I can’t do now I’m sober. Bummer. Those things are: snog people I don’t fancy, spend time with people I don’t like, do the Macarena in front of 90 people, dance to music I hate and laugh at jokes I don’t find funny. Hmmm. Not such a great loss, is it?

‘Sorry, that’s just how it is…You seem like a nice enough girl, why did you drink so much?’ I have no response. The truth is, I don’t know how to answer his ‘why?’ I never really feel like I have a choice. Once I start drinking, I finish. And 99.9 per cent of the time, I get trashed. Hammered. Wasted. Lifting the wine once seems to lead to me lifting it until I can no longer lift it, because I’ve run out of money, or my friend is making me go home, or all the bars have shut, or indeed, because I’m unconscious in a jail cell.

The first time I got drunk I felt like I’d finally unzipped my ‘wrong’ skin and slipped into a slinky new one. One that felt ridiculously right. One without the spiky inhibitions. It was like taking off chainmail and slipping into a heavenly silk gown.

Life was too sharp, too painful, too real and too loud when I was sober. Drinking softened the edges and blurred the clarity. It turned an intimidating Andy Warhol pop-art world into a misty Monet watercolour. Sober, nightclub dancefloors were about as appealing as the Mad Max Thunderdome. Drunk, they were my domain. It made me party-ready when I was party-meh. But, it wasn’t real. That me was not me.

I was scared to sit still. To stay in. To take a long hard look at myself. If I kept going out, kept drinking, kept running this-a-way and that-a-way, I wouldn’t have to actually confront what I’d become. A fraud, beneath the sequined dress and make-up. A liar who didn’t actually want to lie but kept finding herself in situations where the options were: a) get dumped by your boyfriend, b) lie. Or, a) get sacked, b) lie. Or, a) get kicked out of your house by your flatmate, b) lie. Lying was simply something I had to do to survive.

The thing with lying to everyone, to varying degrees? No one ever truly knows you. Which is a really lonely place to live.

But I also felt indignant. Why did the universe keep curve-balling these impossible dilemmas and predicaments my way?! It wasn’t fair. I truly could not see that booze was a villain, rather than a hero. I thought it was the pain-remover, rather than the source of the pain. And I couldn’t see that I was complicit. I was happening to life; life wasn’t just happening to hapless me. I was the architect of my own destruction every single time, along with my trusty sidekick, wine.

FAKE BONDS At any given party, my real friends would leave at a semi-sensible time. They could drink (otherwise they wouldn’t have been my friends at all, frankly) but they couldn’t drink like me. Hell no. So, come 1am, when I was just getting warmed up, I would find myself short of a wingwoman.

For me, addiction manifested itself in the breaking of hundreds of tiny rules. Tiny threads that tethered me to the ground snapped, one by one. The rules of Normal Drinking. I never thought I’d use my last grocery money to buy wine; until I did. I never thought I’d drink in the morning; until I did. And once you’ve broken a rule once, it becomes very easy to break it again. And again.

It was so demoralizing, never being able to live up to my best intentions. What I wanted to do, and what I ended up doing, never matched. My friends turned my name into a verb that was shorthand for getting obliterated and rolling home in the wee hours – ‘I got “Cathed” last night.’ People frequently called me ‘trouble’. They did so affectionately. But I was. I was trouble.

‘ALSO, THE DRINKER’S SELF-IMAGE IS AT PLAY. MANY CLIENTS I’VE WORKED WITH HAVE AN IDENTITY THAT IS BOUND UP WITH ALCOHOL.’ ‘They see themselves as bubbly, wild or spontaneous,’ continues Burke. ‘Often those labels are treasured. It’s something they’ve been rewarded for; people find them entertaining and they get invited to every party. If they feel those “likeable” qualities are dependent upon alcohol, it can be very scary to imagine living without it. It could be a cover for shyness and social unease.

I relate, massively. I was always the ‘party girl’. I didn’t know who I would be without drinking, and that scared me.

‘I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim.’ – FRIDA KAHLO

I was like a house that looks presentable enough on the outside. But when you open the door, you’re engulfed by a cloud of dust, unseen inhabitants scurry around, none of the lights work, and there’s unopened mail all over the floor.

‘What has worked for me is to find something I wanted more than I wanted to drink, which was a fuck of a lot… The way to stop drinking is to want sobriety more.’ – AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS, THIS IS HOW

Today I have been Googling ‘painless ways to commit suicide’. Turns out there is no painless way. One post jolted me out of myself. It said: ‘There is no painless way to end your life. You’ll probably fail. And even if you succeed, you will cause your loved ones endless heartache. Seek help instead.’

I AM UNDER NO ILLUSIONS THAT I HIT ACTUAL BOTTOM ON THAT DAY. I KNOW THAT IF I CHOOSE TO GO OUT TO SEA SOME MORE, I WILL FIND DEEPER BOTTOMS AND MORE MALEVOLENT CREATURES. I KNOW THERE ARE INKIER DEPTHS STILL. DEPTHS I NEVER, EVER, EVER WANT TO MEET. I NEVER WANT TO SWIM INTO THE

COLDER, DARKER WATERS OF THE ABYSS. What happened with me, and what happens with most dependent drinkers, is that I put more and more time together sober. Four days, seven days, ten days…so on. And spending that time sober, although tremendously hard, was also like being transported from the perilous, deep-sea shelving, to pootling around in a safe, warm, shallow reef with cute clown fish and smiley stingrays. You start to see that you like the reef a heckofalot better. Each time you go back out, you realize it’s a harder, longer swim back to the reef. You begin to realize that next time, you might not make it back. You choose the reef. ‘New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.’ – LAO TZU

People who don’t understand addiction think it’s self-indulgent. That you inhale that bottle of wine because you are a reckless, selfish, pleasure-chasing lush. It’s not like that. While I undoubtedly chased pleasure at first, there was a point where my use of alcohol mutated from self-indulgent to self-harm. You can see that the person shoving a 15th eclair into their face is no longer having fun. You can tell that the gambler holding their head in their hands at the roulette wheel is not having fun. Why can’t people see that the blackout drunk unable to walk is not having fun? There is, of course, a brief burst of relief in the first glass of wine. Just as a cutter finds pleasure in the pain of the razor, or an anorexic finds satisfaction in a 150-calorie day. But those practices – cutting or anorexia – are undoubtedly viewed by society as self-harm. Addicted drinking is the same. Addiction is all about seeking external relief from mental pain; whether you use cocaine, online poker, shopping, sex, razors, cake or exercise. Addictions are all the same ultimately. You seek to treat an internal pain with an external substance or activity. You pursue a once-pleasurable activity to the point of self-sabotage. Alcoholics often lose their jobs, houses, relationships, friends, everything; how can anyone call that self-indulgent? A self-indulgent person seeks to hang on to the things that make them happy. A self-harming person finds themselves torpedoing them. Addicted drinking i...