Three is a magic number. When my now six year old was a baby I used to play that song to her and dance round the living room. I sing it again to myself in the car sometimes now my two girls and I have become a mini family of three. I am an only child so my family of origin is also a three. Three in a lot of ways is my normal.
And now I am three years sober.
It is three years since I last drank alcohol, since I last experienced the depression, anxiety and awful soul crushing shame which used to be a regular part of my life, every time I woke up and realised I had done that again. Drunk more than I intended. Drunk until I blacked out, until I had no control over my actions or the words that came out of my mouth. Prioritised my need for another drink over my children’s best interests, my health, my life plans for the following week, over everything and anything else you could think of.
The last three years have brought me so much. Improved relationships with my parents and children, enough self-awareness to recognise that my marriage wasn’t working, enough courage to do something about it. So many wonderful new friends and a whole community where I feel like I not only belong but can make a positive difference. A book. That I wrote. An actual book! A new career path to follow that feels so aligned with my skills, values and dreams. Massively improved mental and hormonal health. A toolbox of self-care practices which actually work. All of that, I owe to my sobriety.
I don’t want to talk about that though. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because it feels so normal and natural to me now for my life to be this way. Perhaps because I’m not sure how helpful it will be to someone on day three or week three or even month three to hear from someone so far along the path about how great their life is, how sorted their shit is. I mean I know it does help, it helped me hugely, but I wanted to give some more practical advice, namely what I think are the ten fundamental building blocks of a successful recovery and a happy sober life.
So here it is.
1. Stopping drinking creates a space inside you. Or rather, you start being conscious of the space that was there all along. In AA they talk about a God sized hole. I’m not religious so it’s not that to me exactly, but it’s there and it’s the primary thing that makes this process so uncomfortable. You have to learn to live with the space. Get to know it, find out where its edges are, experience what it feels like to just sit there and let it be. You don’t have to do that all the time. I have temporarily filled my space over the past three years with many things: food, exercise, rollercoasters, Netflix, my phone, cuddles with my children and cats, work, music, inappropriate crushes and many, many more things besides. But the practices that let me be with the space instead of trying to run from it, like meditation, yoga and mindfulness, have been by miles the most effective tools of my recovery. Because when you let the space be, when you’re not desperately trying to fill it up from the outside, you will realise that it’s not empty. Not even close. And that’s a game changer.
2. You do not need to atone, you need to heal. I was so filled with shame at the start of this process. I felt like the biggest piece of shit that was ever scraped off the bottom of someone’s shoe. I thought I was the worst mother in the world, a weak-willed, horrible, defective person, who would prioritise my own selfish wine-guzzling pleasure over the needs of my innocent daughters. I thought there was something very wrong with me because I couldn’t drink alcohol ‘normally’. If you only take one thing away from this blog, please hear this: there is no such thing as a normal drinker. There is no such thing as normal when it comes to alcohol consumption. Alcohol is a drug. Manufactured, sold, promoted and advertised by people seeking to make a profit. It is not a normal or necessary part of human experience. There is no shame in having a brain and body that are particularly susceptible to its addictive properties. None at all. There may be specific things you did when you were drinking that you will want to take responsibility for at some point, relationships to repair, amends to make. But put your own healing at the top of your agenda. When you are stronger you will have a clearer idea of where you genuinely have work to do and where you are just steeped in self-blame for things that actually were not your fault at all. You have been through so much, both in terms of the physical effects of heavy alcohol use and in terms of the impact of reacting to our society’s favourite drug in a way deemed socially unacceptable and the inner turmoil which results from that. Be kind to yourself, first and foremost.
3. Get really clear about your why from the start. There’s a reason you got to this point, a reason why you’ve started to look for help in relation to your drinking. It might be crystal clear in your mind on day 1 but over time it fades, and the voice of the wine witch telling you it will be different this time gets louder and louder. So write it down. Think about it often. For me it was my children. What is it for you? Identify it. Remember it.
4. Commit to it. I mean REALLY commit to it. Holly Whitaker calls this ‘throwing the kitchen sink at it’. Laura McKowen says that anything and anyone that doesn’t support the process has to go. They’re right. That’s how I got sober, in a nutshell. I accepted that I could never drink again, I did everything I could to shift my mindset so I never wanted to drink again (I can highly recommend Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind and William Porter’s Alcohol Explained to this end), and I dedicated my whole damn life to making that happen. If I wasn’t sure if I could go to a social event and stay sober I didn’t go. I put my attempts at losing my baby weight on hold and ate whatever the hell I needed to eat to make sure I didn’t drink on a Friday night. I spent my evenings glued to the 100 days chat thread on Soberistas. I planned every single social event where there would be alcohol to the nth degree. I became obsessed with sobriety, basically, which might not sound like a lot of fun but it works and it passes. So it’s worth it.
5. Honour the preference. You don’t have to give up feeling good because you’re sober. You don’t have to give up feeling comforted, relaxed, excited, sociable or any of the other happy states of mind you associate with alcohol. There are other ways to get there and you just have to find them. Build a sober toolbox with tools for all occasions. How will you relax? How will you celebrate? How will you comfort yourself when you’re feeling sad? Find alcohol free drinks you love. Find new things to do on a Friday night. You’ll soon find that you gave booze the credit for a lot of things it had nothing to do with, and that your new tools work so much better than alcohol ever did. This is how you get to the place where you don’t miss drinking at all, because you realise that you haven’t given anything of value up. You really haven’t.
6. Find a source of connection and support. For me this was Soberistas. I could not have done this without the connection and community the site gave me and the friends I made there. It’s as simple as that. Human connection is such a basic, fundamental need within us. And without sober connections stopping drinking can be a lonely experience. It makes all the difference in the world having friends, online or off, who are going through the same things you are, who will intimately get how you’re feeling. It helps more than words can say. Also it gives you accountability. For me the 100 day challenge thread on Soberistas was what I needed to get me through those first 100 days. I had people in my life, although at that point they only existed in my phone, who were invested in my sobriety. Who gave a shit if I picked up a drink. Knowing that was the only thing that stopped me from doing it a couple of times in my first year, not just in my very early days but also at that notoriously tricky 7-9 month period. So connect, reach out. I know it’s scary but let yourself be seen by other sober people, even if that’s just anonymously online. The day I posted my first blog on Soberistas was the day I made my long term sobriety a realistic possibility.
7. Be mindful of influences. When alcohol was your drug of choice you are in a uniquely difficult position when recovering, even in comparison with other drug addicts. Because the whole damn world is marketing alcohol to us, all the time. Our friends and family are. Birthday cards are. TV programmes are. Supermarket displays are. Social media posts are. Everywhere you turn you will see messages which are trying to tell you that it’s a totally normal and positive thing to drink alcohol. It’s bullshit. Alcohol kills. It’s poison. Those messages are being deliberately put out there or at least encouraged, by producers and retailers of alcohol, to get us to buy the damn stuff in the first place. Get curious about it. Get angry about it. But don’t forget about it, because that’s when it starts to seep into your subconscious and transmute to thoughts like “I wish I could be normal” and “maybe I didn’t try hard enough to drink moderately”. You are entirely normal. If you were a moderate drinker you wouldn’t be here. And Big Alcohol entirely relies on continuing to dupe problematic drinkers to drink in order to maintain their profit margins.
8. Tell the truth. To other people, but most of all to yourself. Honour your true needs. Let the things that are trying to bubble up out of your subconscious after you’ve been sober for a while come up to the light. Don’t run from them even if they scare you. It’s not always easy and it’s an ongoing practice, but it’s so worth it. When I was two and a half years sober my marriage broke up. It was terrifying and painful. It was necessary. It was true. I don’t have the words to say how grateful I am to be able to tell the truth to myself now, about everything. To stop the internal fudging and shoving of unacceptable thoughts back into various overcrowded boxes and drawers in my mind. A life lived in truth is a life lived without shame. A life lived with no need to hide. It is a beautiful thing and an amazing gift of sobriety.
9. Keep your mind and heart open. Sober life is a rollercoaster. It’s a journey of self-discovery. Your needs will change as time goes on. You will change, because stopping drinking takes the ceiling off your life. You are starting a process that I don’t think ever ends. Things will come at you out of left field and make you think WTAF was that about? Some of those things will be like an unexpected hug. Some will be like a kick in the arse. You will learn to see the good in both, how they both enable you to grow. Let yourself live your sober life flexibly, rolling with the punches. Allow yourself to fall in love with the journey and to feel excited about what it will bring next.
10. Build a life you don’t want to escape from. You do this by doing everything in 1-9 above. Build your new life. Fill it with wonderful things. Nurture it forever. And be proud of yourself, often, for creating something so beautiful.
Sending so much love to you all, from a place of gratitude, self-acceptance, peace and quiet joy, otherwise known as three years sober.
