I Got Sober By Mistake
Last month's cava sip has inspired me to return to my writings on alcohol...
The truth is I actually got sober by mistake.1 After a couple of sweet, wholesome and varied near-fortnights of not drinking - thanks Dry Janiary! - I wanted more. My initial goal was to steer clear of booze for a year. I knew quitting for good wasn't possible. But a year...? Maybe.
After a dozen false starts, beginning New Year's Day 2016 (after yet another dreadful NYE, which one day I might immortalise in a personal essay) I realised I was going to need some help.
I had plenty of knowledge about what didn't work, now I needed some knowledge of what did.
I ploughed through memoirs about women who had gotten sober and listened to hours of recovery podcasts. (Recovery Elevator was a particular favourite, as the Americorns seem to require less significant rock bottoms and so I found their stories very relatable.)
I began to fill my head with counter-perspectives to the pro-drinking crowd that I was used to, and tried to tune out or at least ignore the booze-loving lager lout chorus residing in my head. I hunted for phrases with the same levels of authority as the time-honoured tradition of: "one won't hurt."
When books and audio still weren't enough to keep me out of the wine aisle, and I ended up in black out again when I’d sworn I wouldn’t drink anything, I found a community of women who were managing sobriety, contentedly, and asked what had worked for them.2
Accountability helped, apparently3, but I daren't tell the people closest to me what I was doing. What kind of weakling needed help sticking to their own decision?
Thus began my Entirely Accidental Addiction Education.
Lessons began with online Am I Alcoholic? tests and moved through to cricial thinking inspired by the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I absorbed podcasts and Ted Talks and the latest academic research. I was obsessed.4
The curriculum was compounded by my new sober women friends who listened to my questions, accepted my confusion, discussed theories and laughed at things I hadn't realised were funny yet. They said things I wasn't used to hearing, that stopped me in my tracks. Like:
What's the worst thing that would happen if you aren't alcoholic and you stopped drinking anyway?
Epiphany klaxon!!!!
They nudged me to call other people and see how I could be helpful to them, instead of hiding away and feeling sorry for myself all the time. They told me I was doing great and encouraged me to keep going, and I LOVED the praise! They said it would get easier, and promised it was worth it, and sometimes I actually believed them.
Still, I had no intention of quitting for good. Long-term abstinence was unthinkable. Gruesome. Shudder. Yuck. Gross. Etc.
This was just an experiment, something I would do for a year. If it was interesting, maybe I would write about it. I actually said that in AA meetings. Lol.
As I practised, at their suggestion, observing or sharing my alcohol-seeking thoughts rather than acting on them, another voice became prominent, one that had been calling to me for years about yoga and gardening and climbing and nature.
I made plans to do activities that didn't feature booze and grew to understand the point of cake and coffee. I created space for a new narrative around alcohol to bloom inside my psyche.
Instead of thinking fuck it, one won't hurt when a free glass of cava was offered on entering a fancy restaurant, I left the room and called a sober friend almost crying with anger and embarrassment. Why on earth couldn't I just drink it? Because it is never just one, she reminded me. Because you are trying something different.
Aaaargh. She was right. It took everything I had not to drink it, but I managed it, and I learned that I could still enjoy the delicious meal that followed.
I acted as if one would hurt, even though I didn't entirely believe it. Partly just because I didn’t want to let my new gang down, if I’m honest. And I began every day with the decision, a reminder, that I would not drink today.
You can drink tomorrow, I told myself, if it got difficult. And I never woke up the next day and thought, God I wish I had drunk last night.
More evidence that this was a good path.
Almost three years later,5 and still surprised by the ways my life changed as a result of removing this one thing, I can see I was incredibly lucky.
Nobody suggested I should stop drinking. My life wasn’t in tatters.
The message just rose up from within me, a deep sense that my life would be better without this drama, these hangovers, this absurd financial, emotional, spiritual tax.
My drinking was interrupted by me (thanks me!!! <3) at a time when I had the ability to stop with relative ease. Probably because, for that first year, I honestly had no idea I was genuinely stopping.
If I had known I was stopping I would have lovingly said goodbye to all of my favourite drinks. But no such careful planning was to be. I really had no intention of quitting for good.
Ironically, the relative ease with which I was able to stop would become the greatest hazard to me staying stopped. Did I stop too soon? This question has haunted great swathes of my sobriety…
Reading Sarah Allen Benton's book, Understanding the High-Functioning Alcoholic [HFA], Breaking the Cycle and Finding Hope, I began to better understand the particular difficulties I experienced getting and staying sober. I was perhaps, an HFA, for whom:
"the level of their own denial is heightened by the denial of society, their loved ones, and their colleagues." (p.109) she writes.
As well as an unwillingness or inability for loved ones to see the problem and the tendency of HFAs to drink in private, there is the fact that drinkers tend to gravitate towards people who drink like them. As Benton writes, "it becomes easy to be 'compared' out of having a problem."
I knew plenty of people (mostly men) who drank more than me and weren't trying to cut down. They made my drinking seem very tame. Not only this, but I'd seen 'real' alcoholics at close quarters – most notably my uncle – and my drinking was nothing compared to his.
He kept drinking in spite of losing his job, health, and in the end, his life. Anyone could see alcohol was ruining him.
I was a socially anxious wine-drinking lightweight in comparison. A binge-drinker overreacting to a non-problem. I needed to try a bit harder to control myself, perhaps, but that was all.
It never occurred to me that my uncle's drinking had shifted from one style to another, that he had once been a sweet lil binge drinker like me. I had no concept of 'alcoholism' as progressive,6 before I began the quest to manage a year sober.
My uncle was taken over by his addiction so gradually, over fifteen or twenty years, that even from close hand it is difficult to say when he crossed that invisible line from 'liking a drink' into true dependence. When did it become apparent that he was dependent? I'm not sure he ever realised.
Addiction changes its argument to keep you captive. What begins as ‘drinking is fun!’ shifts to ‘you deserve it!’ shifts to ‘life without it would be no life at all’.7
As they say in AA, addiction is ‘baffling and cunning’. It is as smart as you, and it can come up with the perfect argument to get you to undertake the action it requires.
Did my uncle go through a period of promising himself today he wouldn't drink, only to find himself drunk yet again?
Was his booze-parasite's grip so great he never asked for help?
I didn't witness any efforts to quit, but I know how pride can stop a person from revealing the conflict within.
In the 90s, in my small town, I suspect AA attendance was more shameful than showing up for the morning session at the local pub.
I didn't see that my drinking related in any way to my uncle's until I started trying in earnest to stop. Desperately wanting to stay sober, and drinking anyway, I began to understand his predicament. I saw how a person could lose the power to choose, in spite of what it cost them.
Having fought to get and stay sober, in spite of frequent suggestions from myself and other unhelpful sods that sobriety was impossible/dumb/boring/unnecessary, I find it remarkable that anyone ever manages it, especially those already gripped by a physical dependence.
The early days of sobriety are such a leap of faith, and alcoholism (for want of a better word) talks to you in your own voice, using your best arguments, tailor-made for you, by you, to get you drinking again.
Just one!
Yolo!
This is why it's so important to find people who will help you stick with your decision when you lose track of why you're doing it, which those of us harbouring a booze-parasite tend to do after two or three days/weeks of healthy living. Do you have these people yet? If not, begin to find them. I promise they are around!
Almost three years sober, and content with my decision to keep not drinking, a day at a time, I wonder for how many decades my drinking might have been minimised by me and those around me.
I think of my uncle and wish I could have understood his predicament better and helped him.
I wonder how bad it has to get these days before people intervene.
And how many people never stop drinking, although they desperately want to, because those around them reassure them they aren't that bad?
A simple truth that helped me is this: if you think your drinking is a problem; your drinking is a problem.
If booze is stopping you from living the life you want then that is good enough reason to make a change.
You don’t need anyone’s permission to take action.
Find people who will challenge the booze-loving narrative in your head. AA worked for me. Smart is also brill.
Tell the ones closest to you what you are doing and why, and ask them to help. If they love you, they will want the best for you, whether they lose a superfun drinking buddy or not. Take yourself seriously today, because there's a good chance it won't be any easier to stop tomorrow.
I’m sorry, but it’s true!
And if your experience is anything like mine, you'll wish you quit years ago.
Unlike many people I’ve met and become close to since, I didn’t need medication or treatment to free myself from this habit picked up in my teens. However, I did need a lot of support, inspiration and encouragement.
Benton discusses how denial, by its very nature, refuses to see itself. Coming out of denial is a painful and gradual process that can take a long time. For me it felt like having two 'me's inside, fighting for control over my perspective. It was hard to know which to trust.
Aka I went to AA.
This was SO KEY. And it remains key to me if I want to get anything done. As an ADHDer, accountability is everything.
In the parlance of Autism, I suspect AA, addiction and sobriety became a special interest, and I spent hours reading up on it.
Nine at the time of editing this piece!
Allen Carr uses the analogy of the pitcher plant to describe it in his book The Easy Way to Quit Drinking. A meat-eating plant native to Madagascar, India and Australia the pitcher plant is perfectly designed to attract insects. It emits a smell that entices them, and offers a drink they find delicious. They fly towards the wonderful scent, eager to taste the honeyed drink, not minding that they must get a bit sticky to indulge. They have wings, they can fly out at any time, and besides the drink is sweet and rich, it will keep them going for days!
The insects keep drinking, confident that they are in control. They don't notice how narrow the entry into the pitcher is or how gradually it slopes to the pool of nectar at the bottom. They don't see how each of the plant's internal hairs points downwards. They are too busy enjoying the drink. Thank goodness for wings! Except when they are ready to take off, they find the nectar's stickiness weighs them down. They begin to struggle.
Annie Grace captures the fear of this moment in This Naked Mind: "Eventually the slope becomes very steep, and the daylight seems further away as darkness closes in around you. You stop drinking just enough to see dead, floating bodies of other bees and insects around you. You realise you are not enjoying a drink; you are enjoying the juices of other dead and dissolving bees. You are the drink."
This was written when I was very much abstinent minded. More recently I have come to believe a harm reductionist approach is more helpful when thinking about drinking for neurodivergent people, and probably all people. Some people can only function at the necessary level with the support of alcohol or other substances. Abstinence is not a simple one size fits all solution, which can sometimes be under-acknowledged in abstinent spaces like AA.
📚 Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a book for Jessica Kingsley Publishers about the connection between undiagnosed neurodiversity and addiction + her first domestic noir. 📚