Hi loves and merry Christmas Eve to you all! I just wanted to drop a few reminders here for anyone who needs them today:
1. If you could just have one drink you wouldn’t have found yourself here – one drink leads to more drinks which leads down a path you very much do not want to follow. You’ve been that way before – you can choose a different and better path now.
2. The voice in your head telling you that drinking is a good idea does NOT have your best interests at heart. Give it a name (wine witch, gin genie, lager lout, hell call it Bob if you like) and tell it to fuck off, every single time it comes calling. Even if that feels like it‘s every five minutes at the moment. Eventually it will get the message, I promise.
3. Sobriety is a beautiful gift you can give yourself this Christmas – trust those of us who have walked this path for a while when we say that you DO reach a place where you never crave a drink and you don‘t miss alcohol at all, plus your life is positively transformed in so many ways you wouldn’t go back for a million pounds.
4. You don’t have to do all the things for all the people tomorrow, if that’s what your Christmas looks like. You deserve rest but it may be that you have to demand it. So demand it – the world won’t end I promise and you will stay firmly back from the ‘poor me, poor me, pour me a large one’ threshold of overwhelm.
5. Your sober tribe is here in your back pocket. Stick close to the soberverse. There will always be someone ready to listen and sympathise. You are not alone in this thing.
6. And if you are physically alone tomorrow (or surrounded by people and feeling alone and believe me I’ve been there) remember remember that alcohol is not a friend, it can’t give you a hug or listen to your troubles. It can’t fill that ache inside you. All it can give you is a big fat hangover (and a fear of looking at your phone if like me you’re prone to blackouts) – NOT the Christmas gift you deserve. Wrap up warm, drink hot chocolate, care for yourself like you would a small child all day long and this time of your life will pass I promise. The way out is sobriety.
7. If people are pressuring you to drink remind yourself again and again and again that this is about them and their relationship with alcohol not about you and yours. Rise above it, it’s glorious up here soaring about all the societal conditioning about booze. It feels like freedom.
8. Everyone I know who had their Day 1 before Christmas rather than waiting for afterwards is grateful for that fact and many of them have commented on how much this has supported their sobriety going forwards, knowing that they’d already got a sober Christmas in the bag. Think how awesome you’ll feel this time next year if you’re about to do your second sober Christmas.
9. You deserve not to poison yourself. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, what your life looks like right now. You (yes YOU, reading this right now) deserve health and possibility and new adventures in 2022 and sobriety can deliver them if you commit to it and keep an open mind.
10. Festive joy cannot be found in a bottle, especially not a bottle filled with a chemical that is also used to sanitise hospital surfaces and fuel space rockets. Ignore the fancy labels and seductively shaped bottles and remember that if they contain alcohol, they contain this:
There has never been such a range of delicious non-alcoholic drinks available for adults to suit every taste. Beautiful flavoured waters and sodas. Fancy tonics. Chilled coffee concoctions and iced tea. A non-alcoholic version of pretty much every alcoholic drink known to man. Drink them and revel in the taste, the placebo effect of relaxation which so often happens just from the action of having your favourite beverage and taking five minutes for yourself, the clarity of your thoughts all day long and the fact that you are 100% in control of how many you have Every Single Time. And look elsewhere for your festive joy – in the faces of those you love even if they are just little squares on a Zoom screen again this year. In the kindness to others you can put out into the world this Christmas. And most of all in your own heart and your hopes for the shiny new year ahead, in which this journey of sobriety can take you to places more wonderful than you can imagine right now, if you let it.
Merry Christmas Xxx
