One boring, sober year later

Lime and Sober

You think going one month without alcohol is impressive, do ya?, try one year bitches!

And that’s my friendly opener out the way.

I have now been off the source for a year and while I feel this is cause for… well, a drink – I don’t plan to get back on the wagon anytime soon. Instead, I feel like sobriety is part of my new, gulp, life.

A potentially rather boring new life. Let’s get this out the way straight away, being sober is often dull as f***. Funnily enough, when you take a source of great escapism and excitement out your life, it becomes somewhat dry. I’m still a social delight – don’t get me wrong! – but that feeling of anything is possible tonight doesn’t exist any more. Hard-core reality for all your waking hours is a ball-ache, my friend, even if you don't have balls. And yet it is a decision I'm coming to terms with. 

Now, I’m sure you are all on the edge of your seats wondering why I quit alcohol.

Well, I didn’t give up for a challenge or because I kept pissing the bed, I gave up because I had started listening to my body, and it turns out neither my body, nor my mind, much loved alcohol. *Getting deep alert*

Be it growing old and ragged, or too much damn yoga, I got to a stage when even after a couple of beers, I would feel my body and brain buzz the next morning and the prelude of paranoia sweep over me.

If you combine this level of sensitivity to the fact that I am (for the most part) past the stage of wanting to get absolutely shit-weasled, the real question quickly became: Why am I still drinking?

What was the frickin' point? To fit in, to loosen things up (you know what I’m saying. Aye!), to enjoy a finer selection of glassware, yes all extremely fine reasons but none of them felt fine enough.

Dans le nutshell, I stopped drinking alcohol because the cons outweighed the pluses. Okay that's not deep. But, oh look, here it comes... I also wonder if I stopped drinking because of my past relationship with alcohol. We have arrived. 

Looking back, alcohol has done me little to no favours. I don’t think it’s ever been a friend, or if it has it’s been a two-faced back-stabbing boyfriend stealing minx.

I blame alcohol for many of my failings. Yes alcohol – not me. Leave me out of this. How could I possibly blame that young pup, who alongside fellow other young pups, started binge drinking in their mid-teens and continued into university and beyond.

Drinking alcohol in excessive quantities was totally normal amongst my peer group and even when I started working, it was totally normal to binge on the weekends.

Now, once you find yourself here - 20 years or so of drinking later - it isn't quite so easy to see things soberly again.

But in the cold sober light of day, let’s say today (cue drumroll... the final day of dry January), I am actually quite disgusted about my past behaviour. How I repeatedly put myself in danger and relied on more sensible friends to look after me and then forgive me in the morning. Just because I was young, and just because I was drunk, that didn’t mean I had a right of passage to be a dickhead. A carte blanche to be a cunt.

And I wonder if this is partly why I can’t entertain alcohol in my life anymore – because even if it was only on the odd occasion, it turned me into a person who I am now sort of afraid of.  Or at least like to think I have outgrown.

There are many people who say it is our issues that drive us to over-drinking and that the buck ultimately lies with us. That is a nice idea – probably statistically sound too – but who doesn’t have issues? Literally, name one person right now you know that doesn’t have any issues. They may be big issues, they may be small, but we are all issue-ridden. Thus, dudes, there is always a risk that alcohol will be used to dull some of those issues down. And then there is a risk this might backfire. 

And yet - when I started drinking alcohol for joy in my late teens, I don’t remember many warnings about how easy it would be in later life, when things got more complicated, to start using it for its more anesthetising properties. To prescribe alcohol to deal with anything that felt a bit too rough, a bit too uncomfortable, a bit too real.

For me - the thing with anything that provides escapism, such as alcohol and drugs, is that so often my mind is stronger than the drug. Sigh. However much I try to put a dampener on my feelings, or pain, a part of my brain will recognise what I am doing and try even harder to get its message across. The reason my brain is doing this is not to hurt me (well this is my belief) but because it wants me to listen. It wants me to make peace with my feelings, and respect them – instead of using alcohol to run away and hide.

A few years ago I got to a pretty low place and I can't help but wonder whether this could have been avoided if I had never drunk alcohol. I think I would have been far more attuned with managing my feelings and wouldn’t have allowed my life to get so far away from me. This is why I blame alcohol, as much as myself. Naughty alcohol. 

The change

Now over the last year of boring sobriety, I have been acutely aware of my weaknesses and frustrations, but it is different. It’s manageable.

I think the one thing I have noticed since I quit alcohol is that I am much kinder to myself. You know, or hopefully you don’t, when you find something to beat yourself up with, and then that leads onto another, and then another, and then suddenly you feel overwhelmed by inadequacy but you can’t remember what started off the chain. Well when I’m sober the chain is chopped off very early on – I think of the first thing, perhaps a second – then I hear a voice saying ‘oh well’ and then I go on with my day. Things don’t progress to the point when I’m fighting imaginary demons or walking around with a brain fit to burst. Lime and soda, to soda and lime, that’s quite a remarkable achievement, don't ya reckon?  

I don’t want to preach about alcohol and everyone has to follow their gut instinct about it. Lots of people drink moderately throughout their lives and don’t have any problems. There are even some people I know who self-medicate with alcohol and that seems to miraculously work. To some degree. But I believe there are probably quite a lot of people like myself who perhaps just shouldn’t be drinking at all. People who would be able to moderate their thought processes, feelings and behaviour a lot better if they didn’t have to deal with raging hangovers or an urge to find their next drink. If they could perhaps open themselves up to a little more boredom.

Looking back to my lowest days, I don’t think alcohol was just something I used to deal with my issues, it was an issue in itself. Thankfully as soon as I cut down my alcohol, my depression eased. It was pretty much instantaneous. I could suddenly see things I could do to make my life better. That’s about all the evidence that I need to know about its dangers.

Maybe my sobriety is a phrase. I could easily enter into a more robust and less-sensitive period of my life and decide I fancy a glass of Chateaux Blah Blah Blah Number 7.

But even that’s a tad risky, isn’t it? Because, when you are complicated human beany baby, how long does stability of mind and body ever really last?

And being someone who knows how closely my emotional state and alcohol consumption is entwined, my second nature will always be to use alcohol to make myself feel better.

And in my experience it just helps to make matters a lot worse.