Flashback Soberistas blog from 6 months sober
For the last five years, since we started trying for my eldest, when I drank it was mostly, on paper, moderate. Every single thing on my list of awful things that happened to me when I drank happened in 2011 or before. 2012 onwards I would often have a couple of glasses of wine on a Friday night and stop there due to complete exhaustion. I would go out with friends and just have a few and come home at 11 because I had to get the last train or because the people I was with weren’t up for getting hammered. I would have a meal with my husband and have half a bottle of wine and no more because we had to get home to relieve babysitters.
But that made no difference to how alcohol affected me, the mental slavery of it. The amount of headspace it took up. My secret shame and anxiety about my drinking behaviour and how important alcohol was to me. The plotting and planning and making sure I could drink regularly even if it meant dragging my kids to something they were not that interested in. I loathed the fact that I wasn’t ever entirely in control of when I would just have one or two and when I would have a fuck it moment and drink myself into a blackout. Any alcohol has always made me want more alcohol, and more and more, so it would always be in the lap of the gods really whether circumstances (tiredness, willpower, competing priorities namely my kids, being with moderate vs heavy drinkers) would save me or not. And I was just sick of it, I’d been getting pissed for two decades. When I woke up in my clothes on the sofa after my 40th birthday do with my ‘end of the night solo drinking’ wine beside me and had to hide the evidence before my kids got up, I think I just knew in my heart that I was done. I was also absolutely fucking terrified, I had no idea how I could do it or even if I could do it but I knew I had to do something different.
Luckily, as it turns out, for me, total sobriety has been this beautiful, amazing surprise and so many of the good things, that just keep getting better and better, would never have come to me if I’d kept clinging on to the idea of just having a couple of drinks. It really is an all or nothing sort of deal but trust me it is SO worth it. I would not trade the things sobriety has brought into my life for moderate drinking in a million years, seriously. The sober nights out having real genuine unadulterated FUN, the peace, contentment and inner strength, my rapidly expanding world thanks to the amazing people I’ve met and all the extra time and energy I have, the total absence in my life of shame, regret and self-disgust, the way I’m dealing with shit from my past and moving forward in my life both practically and emotionally, the increased love and connection I am feeling with my family. All this was waiting on the other side of the thing I was most afraid of.
You have to get your head in the right place though, it doesn’t work if you’re half hearted about it. I know that’s easy for me to say, that’s the bit I wish I could magically share, that shift in mindset I’ve been lucky enough to experience. All I can say is read as much as you can – all the quit lit and blogs (Hip Sobriety, Laura McKowen, Mrs D, Sober Mummy). For me the key was realising that the way I felt, the more more more thing – there’s no getting round that because it’s what alcohol does. It’s the nature of the drug, it’s how it works. I spent so long afraid there was something wrong with me because I felt that way but it wasn’t me, it wasn’t ever me, it was the nature of the substance I was taking and how it affected my particular brain chemistry. That was what unlocked the whole thing for me. It might not for you but something will and you will find it if you keep reading and learning. There’s this whole sober world out there that I had no clue about before and you can just immerse yourself in it. I really feel now like it’s the world’s best kept secret.
I do get it, how it feels to wish you were ‘normal’, to feel like cutting alcohol out of your life completely is a punishment, a tragedy and an impossibility. I was in that place of trying to control and moderate my drinking for so long. It didn’t work and would never have worked because I was trying to force myself into something that didn’t fit. I never would have guessed it in a billion trillion years but it turns out that sobriety fits me perfectly. It might fit you perfectly too and you’ll never know if you don’t give it a try. Sobriety isn’t a punishment or even a consolation prize. It’s quite simply your life with a bloody great big negative removed from it. One that has been there so long you have adjusted your expectations to accommodate it and you may have come to believe it’s a positive just like I did for so long. But it’s not, it’s really really not. If you’re here then alcohol is definitely already bringing some hugely negative things into your life and so you have so much more to gain than to lose by ditching it once and for all and finding your freedom. I can absolutely promise you that.
