Me, aged 20 something being ‘not that bad’ in Ibiza
This morning I was hoovering up play sand and thinking about Kristi Coulter. Pretty much a normal morning in my house. Specifically I was thinking about how she shares (in Nothing Good Can Come From This, her collection of brilliant essays about sobriety) that she drank a bottle of wine a night. I was also thinking about an Instagram post I saw from Club Soda linking to a blog written by someone who went back to moderate drinking after years of sobriety. And I was thinking about how, even though I no longer want, with any part of my conscious or subconscious brain, to drink alcohol any more, other people’s drinking can still raise the ghost of ‘not that bad’ in my mind.
I had what I’ve since heard termed as a high bottom (which makes me smile – if only that were true). Meaning not that I have buns like Kylie, sadly, but that my rock bottom wasn’t really all that rocky, outwardly at least. The wheels were not coming off my life. I had a job, a family, a pretty healthy bank balance, a clean house. I still had several drink free days most weeks. I was able, sometimes, to have a few drinks and stop. Leaving aside the ‘big nights out’, which were truly messy, my weekly booze consumption at the end was sometimes two bottles of red wine but more often one.
When I read that a fellow sober person used to drink more than I used to (which is pretty often) it makes me feel simultaneously grateful and momentarily confused. Grateful because I stopped before it got any worse. Because my rational brain knows that my drinking behaviour always bothered me however well I hid it from the world and also that problem drinking is progressive – I may not have been there yet but that doesn’t mean I would have never got there. But also confused, because I am still affected by a lifetime of conditioning that says that in order to stop drinking you have to first reach a certain level of ‘that bad’. That you are either entirely in control of and at peace with your alcohol consumption or (you poor pitiable thing) you are an alcoholic, destined to live a life consumed by alcohol whether that means drinking it and having your whole life consumed by it or not drinking it and having all the joy and pleasure in your life consumed by the lack of it.
And that is just not the reality of how alcohol works. Most of us are, or were, somewhere between the two, each at our own individual point on a spectrum of infinite varieties. A phrase that always petrified me when I drank was ‘if it’s a problem for you then you have a problem’. Because my drinking, my behaviour around alcohol, always bothered me. I remember it bothering me as a teenager. But I just couldn’t bear to admit that having a problem with my drinking meant I had ‘a drinking problem’ – such a loaded phrase which has come to mean so much more than ‘an individual having a problem with their own drinking behaviour’. And so rather than looking at what drinking was adding to my life and what it was taking away and making a rational decision on this basis whether or not to keep it in my life, I entered a kind of panicky denial. I had places in my mind I dared not go, or if I did I certainly would not linger for long. And I lived with that shadow side for 20 years.
So my ‘not that bad’ may have looked like one or two bottles a week and the odd night out overdoing it. It may have looked like living the moderating dream to someone who has progressed further down the dark pathways of addiction. But it also looked like lying to myself, it looked like walking home alone in a blackout at 3am, it looked like sneaking extra drinks on nights out because the people I was with weren’t drinking fast enough. It looked like being more interested in the amount of wine left in the bottle and when I was likely to be able to get a top up than the conversation at dinner. It looked like making myself sick the morning after a binge because I was so consumed with shame and regret I couldn’t bear to have the poison that had caused it in my system a moment longer. It looked like a night out with friends automatically meaning being barely able to function the next day, at the age of 39, as a mother of two young kids. It looked like hating myself, being constantly at war with my own brain, depression, extreme anxiety, suicidal thoughts. It looked like a very small and limited life which I never questioned because I secretly believed that was all I deserved.
Yeah, not that bad.
So let go of the ‘not that bad’ if your drinking has become a problem for you. Problem drinking doesn’t look like just one thing and physical quantities do not necessarily denote how destructive a force alcohol has become in a person’s life. Not that bad keeps so many people trapped in indecision, so many lives curtailed by the constant effects of a toxic drug. Do you really want to live a life that’s just not that bad? Or do you want to live your best life, one where you are honest with yourself, take proper care of yourself and refuse to limit yourself just because of a hugely outdated and highly marketed notion of how we all should behave around alcohol?
My drinking in some ways was ‘not that bad’. In some ways it was. Either way it doesn’t matter because the beautiful, wonderful surprise that was waiting for me on the other side of my greatest fear is that sobriety really is that good. And that’s what keeps me sober. I honestly believe it always will.
