Sobriety: it is quite boring but it works for me

Or how you should give it a whirl but never in January

Let me start this off by saying that I never had a problem with booze.

I drank in my 20s, 30s and some of my 40s (the periods when I was going through fertility treatment or was pregnant). Then in 2020 my father died, Covid came and whipped us all into submission and I gave up booze. At first it was a temporary thing. I was getting a lot of headaches and heart palpitations. I felt like perhaps I had Covid but wasn’t testing positive. Sometimes the headaches were so bad that they’d wake me up in the night, and I’d feel like I was about to pass out. I went to the doctor and they said I was ‘stressed.’ This felt like a cop out (doctors often seem to accuse women of being highly strung when something more sinister is going on), but I went on some medication for my headaches, and had some rudimentary exams to see what was going on. And I stopped drinking.

I am a very needy person. I am very self obsessed. I have high expectations of life and am generally a bit of a fantasist. I’m also prone to low mood and rumination. I would say that sometimes I can ruminate on one single sentence I’ve uttered for 48 hours or more. I have to write the sentence down, and do a diagram to try and unpick my thoughts, or I find myself muttering it over and over to myself. Like many I have a negative bias so tend to assume the worst at all times. I say this because alcohol wasn’t great for me. It gave me an initial rush- a feeling like I could hurl myself into a group of people I didn’t know well and get on with them but soon things would go wrong. I’d say something that wasn’t acceptable at a dinner party. Or I’d read too much into something. I tended to drink as much as the drunkest person in the room (maybe that was a problem). I had an obsession with counting the units I was drinking. Not in a way that would make me drink less but just to keep track (I do this with other things like food/drinks/exercise - perhaps it is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder). All of the above could be summarised thus: I WAS NOT ENJOYING DRINKING ANYMORE.

Was it hard to give up? In a word…no.

It wasn’t hard because in the beginning nobody was going out. There were no social gatherings. I’m sure that period of time is a blur for you too, but it seemed to consist of eating bread, crying, regular panic attacks, and a lot of screen time. There weren’t any awkward quizzings by friends as to why I wasn’t drinking. Once those gatherings started again, they tended to be relatively low key, and I just told people that I’d had Covid, and so drinking wasn’t helping me recover (something I believed anyway what with the mysterious headaches). One year turned into two years. I am now on my third year sober and have no intentions to start again.

Is it boring?

Yes I’ll be honest and say it is. I don’t get any buzz so if I wake up in a certain state of mind then I have to use ‘natural methods’ (that sounds like a form of contraception) to get a slightly pathetic kind of buzz. The same buzz you’d get if you inhaled smoke from a burning banana skin (this was something we did at school after a slightly off the wall supply teacher told us we could get stoned that way). I have the very occasional vape in the garden and am fully aware it’s not healthy BUT it gives me a little, mini buzz. I am perhaps the same as Keith Richards surveying his garden, aged 83, having just mown the lawn, rather than the version who graced stadiums in his youth, and looked like he had a microphone stand shoved down the back of his T-shirt to help him stand upright.

It’s boring because whilst there are some nice drinks coming out on the market, many of them are overpriced and basically taste like Dandelion and Burdock. It’s boring because there isn’t a heap of drama going on when you’re not drinking so you don’t tend to pick fights. It’s boring because you won’t flirt with people you don’t know. Youare unlikely to try helium because ‘it seemed like a fun idea at the time!’ You won’t vomit on your shoes. You won’t put your back out by twerking in front of a group of school mums. You won’t lose your keys. You won’t wake up with all your make up on and your heart hammering in your chest. You won’t be in Soho trying to find your coat and then realising that you left it in a cloak room in Shoreditch several hours previously. You won’t shout at your boss - ‘I see you kissing that ass!’ at the top of your voice, or grab an orange from behind the bar, cut it into segments and then insert two segments into your bra, and the other into your mouth, whilst gyrating wildly to ‘Ole Dirty Bastard.’

So yes it’s boring. I’m still trying to discover who I am without the thing that I used for many years to help me navigate life. Who was that person who picked up a cat (not her cat I hasten to add), and put it in her bag and took it home? Who does that? It makes things more gnarly and difficult. I thought I would be more even-tempered without the highs and lows but the moods remain (and navigating menopause too means there are more mood changes anyway).

You also get clarity on people- what they’re like, whether you want to hang out with them, how they make you feel, even how they feel about themselves. This means that your social life will become smaller but the people in it will feel more like ‘your people’. That actually makes socialising easier in the long run as you shouldn’t have to work too hard at bants I feel.

Our society is designed to teach us that we aren’t good enough. It’s only if we are not good enough that we can be sold to. If we hate our bodies. Or our hair. Or our homes. Alcohol is part of that conspiracy I feel. It is also fun of course.

If it makes you feel great then run with it. I won’t judge.

I still vape remember. And it’s sour apple flavour. I know. It’s bad. I know.