My Slow Road to Sober

I didn’t just wake up one day and decide not to drink. Its been a slow process of decision making and breaking. It was like the slowest break up on record …. I loved a drink, momentarily it made everything so much better.

Here’s an excerpt from a journal I started writing called ‘Life begins at 42”. There was a real urge to document the relationship I was having with myself and alcohol. I didn’t write every day, would miss for months. But the process did actually help me make the decision to final give sobriety a go.

23rd August 2016

Alcohol has always been part of my life. My mother gave me the nickname ‘Boozy’ as a toddler, I never really understood why until she explained I used to skirt around the tables during their parties sipping the dregs from the unwanted glasses. That was before she left, my being around 5.

I’ll always remember collecting the coupons from Babysham bottles, sending them off and receiving a free gold bracelet with dancing baby bambies swing around my wrist… I must have been around 10 I guess.

Its easy to blame alcohol, I do it all the time.  Now I want to have a gauge, a study of how it effects me. I would say I started thinking that having a drink made me a different person, for the better, when I was around 14. I remember when at a party in Sydney, Australia a school friend called me ‘wild’, I took this as a compliment and a sign that alcohol made into the person I wanted to be.

There’s only two periods in my life when I didn’t drink. That was during my two pregnancies and a year after each in which I breast fed my boys. I’d have the occasional glass of wine but really alcohol wasn’t on my radar. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t feel like I have a drink problem, I wouldn’t even say I’m alcohol dependent. In the past couple of years I’ve gone for weeks without a drink, and then only having a couple on the weekend. I’ve noticed how good I feel physically and more importantly mentally without it. You could ask why would I choose to drink if it doesn’t agree with me…. problem is I really enjoy the feeling when I do , the first one at least, but I can never have just one.

My relationship with alcohol isn’t cut and dry, I’ve used it to mask, numb and inspire …. at what point did I think it was ok to write my thesis for my BA with a bottle of vodka as a tool ? I need to know what I can achieve without it in my life. Therefore I’m in the process… not ready to just commit just yet to a year of no alcohol… at this point, this doesn’t include my annual summer holiday … that would be a step too far FFS !

Writing your thoughts and experiences down offers hard evidence in black and white, you can look back and analyse wether you’re better with or without it.

If you’ve started thinking about your life without alcohol possibly means you’re already on the road to giving up. It was three months after that day when I finally said I was giving up alcohol, not for ever, I challenged myself with a year first.

Have you ever really thought about your relationship with alcohol and how it effects you ?

Get in touch, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image credit

Photo by Erik Nielsen on Unsplash