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Started reading
February 8, 2025
But, giving up drinking felt like an enormous loss. A bereavement. I was convinced it brought fun and laughter to my life. I thought, ‘I will never date, dance, party or feel truly relaxed ever again.’
People feel like they’re more charming, more sexy, wittier and socially invincible after a few drinks. I know I did. But it’s a drug-induced illusion. Just because we feel that way, it doesn’t mean we are that way.
I suffered from Wishful Drinking. Tonight would be the night I cracked it. The night I would have two drinks in the pub, laugh with my friends and go home, rosy-faced and aglow with wine, to make a stir-fry and have an early night. Tomorrow would be the morning I would actually get up and go for the 7am run before work, rather than groaning and stabbing at the alarm to make it stop. Like the desert spring the dying man crawls towards endlessly, but never reaches, I was never able to locate that oasis. My ideal ‘tonight’ and ‘tomorrow’ remained shimmering in the distance.
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.
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.
An unnamed dread spread inside me like an ink blot. My fear that something Godawful was about to happen became more and more urgent. The ‘watched’ feeling grew. I was convinced people were starting to notice. I felt like cornered quarry.
My addictive voice said that wine was the fairy dust new friendships needed. That without it, things weren’t as magical, like a snow globe before you shake it. We just needed to get drunk together again, and then the shimmer would start to dust us once more.
Addiction has an imperceptible grip, that tightens ever-so-gradually. Nobody wakes up one day and suddenly can’t stop drinking. The progression is apparent to others perhaps, but mostly dismissed with quizzical glances. However, the person themselves is usually totally oblivious, because they are shrouded deep in denial. Deep, deep, deep in denial.
There were less funny stories these days. And more scary stories that I kept secret. Like a wet gremlin fed after midnight, my drinking had mutated from fluffy to frightening. It’d grown teeth and claws.
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.
I didn’t know who I would be without drinking, and that scared me. What about you?
‘If you’re failing to moderate, then abstinence is the best option. It’s easier to be abstinent than moderate,’ says neuroscientist Alex Korb.
‘The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.’ – SAMUEL JOHNSON
‘Shame is a soul eating emotion.’ – Carl Jung
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
I would say I have had hundreds of tiny rock bottoms, mostly imperceptible to others. They were the moments when I realized that my actions were not mirroring my values in any way.
I was wrong, and I knew I was wrong, yet I couldn’t seem to stop behaving in ways that completely contradicted how I wanted to behave, or expected others to behave.
I don’t actually want to die. But I can’t endure being alive any more. It’s a catch 22.
‘New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.’ – LAO TZU
‘For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.’
‘THE BEST THING ABOUT RECOVERY IS THAT YOU GET YOUR EMOTIONS BACK. THE WORST THING ABOUT RECOVERY IS THAT YOU GET YOUR EMOTIONS BACK’
Channel Thomas Edison, the chap who invented motion pictures and the light bulb. In 1914, his lab burned down and his life’s work whooshed up in a ball of flame, raining back down upon him as black confetti. Instead of being plunged into depression, Edison saw it as a chance to rebuild. He reportedly said, ‘Thank goodness all our mistakes were burned up. Now we can start again fresh.’
My top sober reads are: Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety by Sacha Z Scoblic, Blackout by Sarah Hepola, This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol by Annie Grace, Dry by Augusten Burroughs and Kick the Drink...Easily by Jason Vale. For podcasts, I love Home and The One You Feed.
Beginning to trust myself to take care of myself has been a really amazing process. I’ve stopped eyeing myself suspiciously, as a toddler would an unpredictable parent, and started folding into myself with relief.
soon, after you’ve pushed through the social awkwardness barrier, you will be able to do everything you used to do, just minus the drinking. Now is not the time to test yourself. Do whatever helps you not to drink.
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.
Self-critical scripts are actually addictive, says neuroscientist Alex Korb, author of The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time. ‘Guilt, shame and self-pity activate the reward circuitry in the brain. The only way out of this addictive loop is to practice radical self-compassion instead.’
I thought happiness was something other people had to give me. That the world owed me. That I was somehow being short-changed. Gimme. Unless it’s a day when a parent dies, or your city is bombed, or some other nuclear event hits your life, most days you wake up and have a choice. To be happy. Or to be unhappy.
When I look to other people to fill me up, as if I’m some kind of empty vessel, I make myself helpless. Sitting there and waiting for other people to gift me with happiness; such a waste of time.
FOR ME, PERSONIFYING AND DEMONIZING MY ADDICTIVE VOICE ALLOWED ME TO DISENTANGLE MYSELF FROM IT. TO STAY ON THE RIGHT PATH, DESPITE THE MONSTER TRYING TO COAX ME OFF IT.
I started to get angry with the voice; with my addiction. How dare it attempt to savage my self-esteem, plunder my money, rampage through my relationships and crush my career. I became determined not to let my addictive voice get away with it any more. A burst of anger helps us gather together the gumption to unknot ourselves from a destructive relationship with a partner. Addiction turned out to be no different.
When we make a clear-cut decision, rather than engage in the debate, our brains quieten down, says neuroscientist Alex Korb. ‘Making decisions includes creating intentions and setting goals – all three are part of the same neural circuitry and engage the pre-frontal cortex in a positive way, reducing worry and anxiety.’ ‘Our brain likes definite decisions,’ Korb continues. ‘When we’re torn between two possibilities, such as “do I drink tonight or not?”, the limbic system is amped up. The uncertainty of indecisiveness means our limbic system has to sort through all the different possibilities
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Whenever I started becoming my own cheerleader and refusing to go down the ‘you’re shit, you are’ neural pathway, I became more motivated, happier and kinder to others. And most of all, I stopped wanting to drink. I needed to raise my self-esteem to rise above the desire to drink.
‘I have a bone to pick with you’ was like an icy dagger being plunged into my heart. Jumpy ‘beer fear’ has been replaced by a luxuriously clean conscience.
I can now see people without the soul-eating paranoia of what I did or said to them last time I saw them.
The price tag of being the Party Girl was – and is – too expensive. I was never really her anyhow.
When I was drinking being alone meant the self-loathing set in. I had wanted the distraction of other people, because I didn’t like myself. Sober, I started to love being alone.
used alcohol as if it was a computer game cheat code. I didn’t need to learn how to motor through levels three to seven. All I had to do to take me from level two (terrified) to level eight (bouncing around a dancefloor to Blur) was to drink. So I did. With gusto. Until I was utterly reliant on it for any sort of socializing.
‘Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.’ – ANNE LAMOTT
I remember sharing far too much information when smashed. I remember being told off for being arrogant when wasted. I remember searching people’s faces to see if they were annoyed with me.
I built a memory palace too, except it was made out of resentment. The foundations consisted of the tall poles and wide rafters of my unfulfilled expectations. I placed painful memories from my teens into glass cabinets and returned to look at them as if they were ornaments, while swigging cider. I put my romantic rejections into chests in the attic and mainlined wine while rummaging through them. I would wander the labyrinthine rooms of my vast memory palace of resentments, barefoot in a torn cocktail dress, muttering expletives like a Tasmanian Devil, slugging from the bottle swinging from
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Some days are pregnant with things to be grateful for. Heaving with them. They’re easy days. On others, you have to grope around to find the slivers of beauty in an otherwise shitty day. Those are the tougher days, and arguably the more important ones. Hunting gratitudes alters the way you see the world; when you seek the good, rather than point out the bad, everything looks rosier.
It’s well documented that our brains are programmed to scan the horizon for threats. In the olden days, this saved us from being eaten. Now, this brain reflex just stops us from being happy. As Albert Einstein said, ‘The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.’
As I’ve worked on my own self-esteem, I’ve felt less need to seize upon other people’s defects. As I am kinder to myself, I have grown kinder to others. It’s an inside-out sort of a process.
Every now and then I find myself excoriating somebody’s character. Or thinking something catty about someone I meet. The difference now is, afterwards I feel dirty, like I need to scrub myself clean. To make up for it, I write a list of nice things about them so that I can flip my focus to their positives, or I give them a compliment. The nice nixes the nasty.
‘Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.’ – ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Fantasies of being able to moderate? Get down and give me 20 examples of when you tried moderation and utterly, irrevocably failed. It’s a mental muscle which is steeled by fighting fantasies with reality.
At one year sober, I still treat alcohol like an unexploded bomb. I don’t touch it. I don’t go near it. I don’t even look directly at it. It’s lurking, but I don’t want to even give it a chance to obliterate me. Alcohol cannot hurt me if I don’t pick it up. Simple.
