"I bet you feel amazing when you wake up in the morning?"
This is the question that I am asked most often. And the answer? Of course not....I'm a 43 year old, peri-menopausal woman. I wake up (if indeed I slept) with stiff, achy joints, a head full of cotton wool and puffy, blind eyes. This though is why I am so relieved that I no longer drink. Imagine, I think, inside my foggy brain.... imagine if I had also downed a bottle of wine last night. How absolutely disgusting would I feel then? So, it is not that I jump out of bed with renewed vigour every morning since I gave up the booze but rather the opposite that sells abstinence to me. I am no longer regenerating and I need to be kinder to myself. That's the physical element of not drinking and whilst we're there, I should add; no, I have not lost weight. I have, in fact, gained weight. Because, what I used to do sometimes (well clearly enough times to count for about half a stone of flesh on my hips) was drink instead of eat. Also, when you're taking in so much sugar from alcohol you have zero appetite for it in other forms. "I don't have a sweet tooth" was a thing I had actually been known to say. Well, take all that alcohol away and your body doesn't accept it without a fight. Suddenly, I crave chocolate. Chocolate! Like some kind of Bridget Jones stereotype I resort to eating cooking chocolate because my body needs its hit of the sweet stuff.
It's all fine though because, fatter and older I may be but I have so much more time to play with, and head space to enjoy the things that I actually enjoy, rather than things that I pretended to enjoy. Like, er, parties, or socialising after 9pm. The other day, I walked past a bar that I used to enjoy frequenting. The sun was shining and people sat by the river drinking Aperol Spritzes and I had a moment of longing but for what? I went home and sat in my sunny garden with a cold glass of lemonade and my book and it was bliss. What was I missing, really? There was some sense of FOMO, I suppose; because the people at the bar looked so overtly happy. But had I once looked happy when I was on my fourth Aperol and talking shit to deaf people I cared about not at all, whilst feeling a bit queazy and increasingly dizzy and pushing from my mind the knowledge that I was probably making a tit of myself and storing up a stinking hangover for the next day?
For a long time I had tried to control my drinking with various ingenious but ultimately ineffective strategies. There was the classic 'only drinking at weekends', which was fine if you didn't go on a bender at the weekend. Or fine if you didn't go out on a Tuesday night and break your own rule and then have to write off the whole week. Then there was the '3 nights on, 4 nights off' strategy. This was my most recent self-imposed rule that I would find justified ways of bending. Ultimately, if you are drinking on fewer nights than you are not drinking, you clearly don't have a problem. Yes? You are not drinking more than you are drinking, so how can you have a problem? Even if your 'on' days start with brunch + Champagne and carry on in a similar vein. Even if you look for reasons to drink excessively on your 'on' days. Still, how can you have a problem if you are 'off' more than you are 'on'. Then there was the 'two drinks' strategy. I will drink whenever I feel like it but I will never consume more than two drinks. Clearly, that one was never going to be terribly successful if you lack the moderation gene, and this is important.... over this year of sobriety, the people who do not, or cannot, understand, are those for whom excess never features in any form. Those who understand are often the very best drunks, the people who seem to be, as Churchill said, getting more from alcohol than alcohol is getting from them. Those people understand that for those of us for whom the pendulum swings from one extreme to another, moderation is not a choice that we have. In this way, giving up alcohol has almost been too easy for me. Can I control defensive patterns of behaviour, unhealthy eating habits or my problematic relationship with my body in the same abstemious way? No. But alcohol serves no purpose. It does not serve and can be cut completely. Once it's gone and you realise that life goes on, much the same as before but so so so much better, you forget that it ever took up so much of your time and thinking.
I want to make clear that the only person who can tell you that you have a problem is you. I am not pretending that I had a physical dependency on alcohol. In this country, we are conditioned to see problem-drinking as the park-bench men who swig from vodka bottles wrapped in brown paper. People with a drink problem are outside of society. They are not the mum who sinks a bottle of Prosecco every night or the business man whose enjoyment of long, wet lunches marks them out as people who 'like a drink' or are 'the life and soul of the party' etc. In other countries, particularly the US, the bar is set much lower. By the standards of the US, most Brits are problem-drinkers. The sober movement over there has, rather unhelpfully, been hijacked by American Christianity. As you can imagine, this creates a divisive system of judgement that seeks to label and polarise. There should be no judgement here. Alcohol is a highly addictive drug and we are encouraged to partake at all social events. People even allow their children to take the drug. Some encourage it for that indefensibly idiotic reason that they want their children to grow up to be responsible drinkers. Sure, not just any old drug-users but responsible drug-users. We need to address our cultural relationship with alcohol in this country. I wanted a punchy, humorous ending to this piece but I find that what was initially an incredibly personal life change feels political, now that I look around with this clear-eyed, much prized sobriety.
