The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: Discovering a happy, healthy, wealthy alcohol-free life

by Catherine Gray

realized that if I hid behind a fake name, I would effectively be saying that growing addicted to booze, or getting sober, are things to be ashamed of. Which they’re really not.

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I had an epiphany that unless I quit drinking, I

Yep

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

Ha!

You’ll wish you could hoover the wine out of their system and return them to being sober. 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

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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.

Huh

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

Yep

wrote

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Back in the beginning, it was like drinking sunshine; it made me feel brighter, warmer, lazier. Gradually, the alcohol broke. It stopped giving me the warmth, the click, the buzz. And started to feel as imperative as oxygen. When I wasn’t drinking, I felt like I was suffocating. When I got the oxygen, I gulped it hungrily, needily. The hardest bit was, I had to obtain the oxygen, while seeming nonchalant about it. Like I didn’t need it.

Yes

In 2012, I started hiding bottles. Stuffing the cold, hard evidence into public bins, rather than into my own rubbish. Or, glancing up and down the street shiftily, before slipping them into a neighbour’s recycling bin. ‘That bottle is their problem now! Ha. Theirs. Not

Familiar?

Then it strikes me. Yesterday I did this exact same walk, only I was six days sober. I had zero suicidal thoughts. In fact, I was eating a Calippo and singing along to the The Lemonheads’ ‘It’s a Shame about Ray’. I even skipped when I found myself on the road alone. The penny starts to drop. Don’t drink = happy. Drink

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I’ll lie, which is what I always do to get myself out of these predicaments.

Huh

have increasingly become physically addicted to alcohol and stayed in a relationship about a year longer than I should have done. Why? Because I didn’t respect myself, so him disrespecting me? I was fine with that. Until I started to string two, three, four, five days together sober, and started to see him clearly. ‘When people show you who they are, believe them.

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Numb the dark and you numb the light.’ Ergo, when you numbed out the bad stuff, you numbed out the good stuff too. You will now swerve wildly between extremes of euphoria and wretchedness. You’ll find yourself floored by shame as a blackout corpse bobs to the surface of your memory, aargh, and you’ll frantically try to shove it back into the murky depths with your oar. An hour later, you’ll be all skip-down-the-street sunshiny because you just went to the supermarket and you weren’t hungover. You bought peas, whoopdeedoo! High, low, high, low, up, down, up, down. It’s madly exhausting. You will need a lot of sleep to deal.

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discovered a mania for exercise that I have sadly, never located since. I was running 12km for kicks. Swimming 50 lengths for jokes. Doing 90 minutes of hot yoga and wanting more. I have never been more toned. I would head out for a run wanting to rip someone’s head off, or hating on myself with the power of a thousand suns, and come back feeling Gandhi serene. A runner called Monte Davis summed it up beautifully in the 1970s, when he said, ‘It’s hard to run and feel sorry for yourself at the same time.

Yes

Which is why so many newly sober people discover a tiny athlete tucked away inside their drunk self.

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When I was drinking, I thoroughly despised baths. I rarely drank in them, for a start, so they were time away from my precious wine glass. Secondly, I hated being alone, which is utterly bizarre, since now I love being alone.

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wanted to listen to every interview, learn about every scientific study, read every ‘how I got sober’ story. I became obsessed; just as obsessed as I had been with drinking. 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

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You’ll be walking down the street and bam! You’ll realize that it’s digital self-harm to stay friends with your ex on Facebook, and you’ll no longer want to do that to yourself. Your mind will expand on a near-daily basis. As

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can be around drinking and not crave it. I can be friends with people who drink regularly. I love these people dearly; they are far beyond the drinking buddies I no longer see. But I also need rest days, otherwise I am fatigued. And when I’m fatigued, I’m vulnerable. Like a deer who has fallen short from the herd and can be picked off by a wily wolf. And after three nights of hanging in drinking establishments, I needed a rest day.

Huh. Good

My friends found it difficult to reconcile the shift in me. ‘You’ve been up since 7am? You don’t want to go to the party? You want to go to a museum? Who are you?!’ I remember earnestly telling one friend that I’d discovered I was in fact an introvert, and

Yep.

So, I was an introvert now. Huh. I started researching it. Turns out it’s all about blood flow in our brains. Extrovert brain blood flow is directed to the regions of the brain concerned with interpreting sensory data – making sense of the outside world. Whereas introvert brain blood flow is more pronounced to the frontal lobe, which deals with the internal processes of decision-making, memory, solving problems – our inner landscape.

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Sober, I started to love being alone.

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You’ll soon learn that parties are indeed fun sober, but they are also draining. You’ll learn not to say yes to every party. To save your socializing credits for those who you really want to spend them on. Parties

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I didn’t spend an astronomical amount of money on cocktails or taxis. I didn’t wake up in any strange beds. In fact, I did nothing to warrant disgrace, whatsoever. I told no lies. I remember everything. Sitting on the train home, I realize I don’t feel like I need another week’s holiday, to get over the holiday. I feel refreshed and ready to go back to work. I choose sober holidays. I

Yep

would say that the fear of What People Will Think keeps millions of us drinking. Whenever you don’t smoke, drink tea or eat Doritos, nobody gives a damn. Nobody asks you ‘why not?!’ huffily, as if they have a right to know.

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When I was first trying to be sober, my brain felt like a foe. I didn’t want to drink, and yet my brain was suggesting I drink. Over and over and over. It was utterly confounding. I didn’t understand why my intentions and brain were at odds. Why they were locked in a maddening debate.

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Eventually becoming something that is no longer pleasurable, and is just a

Then, the lying, the calling in sick, the infidelities (all crazily common side effects of addiction) create yet more stress to drink on. ‘The social habits that accompany addiction, like lying to yourself and others, mesh so very easily with the self-soothing (or self-feeding) habits that make up the addiction itself,’ says Marc Lewis. So around and around we go; where we’ll stop, nobody knows.

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‘wanting something is not the same as liking something’.

Huh

I’d rather be single until I’m 60, than settle for second best.

Yep

HERE’S THE THING I’VE NOW REALIZED. INHIBITIONS ARE GREAT. THEY KILL BAD BUZZES, NOT GOOD BUZZES. WE SHOULD NOT WANT TO TURN THEM OFF. THEY PROTECT US.

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‘Blacking out is NOT passing out asleep in a drunken stupor. It’s quite the opposite. Your brain is sleeping like an innocent little baby, but your body is at a rave and it keeps making decisions…This is why blacking out is incredibly dangerous. You might look like a regular drunk girl, but you’re actually a zombie who won’t remember shit later.’

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I thought it was payback for me being an inherently ‘bad’ person.

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When I got sober I sort of expected that I would be treated well in return. That my relationships would work out, because I was doing my very best. That people wouldn’t be bitchy, or sly, or cheats, or liars, given I wasn’t any more. Ahem. Yeah. Not so much. Life is vastly, immeasurably better, but it’s far from perfect.

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Because we openly acknowledge that cigarettes and heroin are addictive. We know they’re bad guys. Yet, talking about alcohol as a villain is socially taboo. You’re seen as a wet blanket, a joy-slayer, a party pooper if you do so. It’s a mass delusion of millions. So,

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Also in 2016, the World Health Organization classified alcohol as a group one carcinogen, alongside tobacco and asbestos. We now know that alcohol directly causes eight different cancers. And that heavy drinking shortens our lifespan by between 10 and 12 years.

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So, it causes cancer, guys! It really, really does. And no amount is healthy. Full stop. End of.

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