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July 23 - August 16, 2024
I’m facing forward, towards healing, rather than ripping out my stitches over and over.
Why is it hard to stay sober long-term? Society is a drink-pusher. Everywhere you look, there is encouragement to drink.
Alcohol is the only addictive drug that is still rampantly glamorized.
Society expects us to regularly use an addictive drug, without becoming addicted to it. Alcohol is the only drug where, the second you stop taking it, you’re seen as being too weak to handle it. It’s truly bizarre.
When we give up alcohol, it’s like we’ve chosen to leave the party. Boo hiss. Which is why non-drinking can be perceived as a mark of shame, rather than a badge of pride. Ex-smokers brag about their former pack-a-day habit and how many smoke-free years they have, whereas sober people tend to apologize for their non-drinking.
The reason society wants to brush the ‘alcohol is highly addictive’ fact under the rug, is because most people are addicted to it to some degree. As we’ve already established, addiction is not a ‘normal drinkers’ versus ‘alcoholic’ division; it’s a spectrum.
If you can’t live without something, it’s an addiction. The inconvenient truth that we conveniently ignore is this: it’s practically impossible to drink alcohol without it getting its hooks into you. Because it’s addictive.
heavy drinking shortens our lifespan by between 10 and 12 years.
Social change is glacial, but steady. It could be that we’re on the threshold of a similar shift: society falling out of love with alcohol. It may take decades, but there’s definitely a leaning towards wholesome brunch and boutique gyms, and away from slurry pub crawls. The number of coffee shops has gone up by 12 per cent in the past decade and only three per cent of teenagers say that alcohol is an ‘essential part of socializing’.
I soon discovered that one of the main reasons I drank my face off, was to shut my chattery mind the eff up. Sober, I no longer had that silencer. Once we don’t have booze to turn down the volume of our minds or anaesthetize our moods, we need other methods.
My brain insists that I firefight three potential disaster scenarios before I even have breakfast.
the strongest predictor of whether someone will become addicted to alcohol, is a traumatic childhood.
‘You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way and the only way, it does not exist.’ – NIETZSCHE
I think of moderate drinking as a desert mirage. Every time I tried to leap on it, I always wound up lying on the floor, stunned, dejected and with a mouthful of sand.
Nothing was ever good enough. I was always thinking, ‘If only X would happen, or Y would profess undying love, or I would get Z amount of money, I would finally be happy.’ I thought my disenchanted default kept me reaching, striving, bettering my life. But the problem was, each time X, Y or Z came off, I would instantly ‘tick’ and take those for granted. Then swivel to find a new XYZ to point towards.
Gratitude isn’t about giving up on the attempt to better your life. It’s about stopping to smell the roses you already have gathered around you. Making a note of how enchanting they are. While also continuing to plant and tend new ones.
In Japan, they repair broken ceramic bowls with gold lacquer and consider it ‘more beautiful for having been broken’. That, to me, sums up the people I have met who are in recovery.
