I Was Everyone’s Favourite Drunk, Except Mine
And how I switched to sharing my secrets online instead of at the pub.
I’m trying to stop drinking, but alcohol won’t let me.
It recommends itself using my inner voice, the advice of my friends and family, billboards, the radio, books, TV.
One drink won’t hurt!
You can just have a couple.
YOLO! ; )
It doesn’t care how desperately I want to change my life, or trust myself, or fill my time with something else.
Alcohol is like a charismatic bad boyfriend with a PhD in Neuro Linguistic Programming who’s taken over my mind, fooled my friends and family, and refuses to let me go.
You’ll never meet anyone who makes you feel the way I do.
I’ve just turned thirty, and my drinking has been out of control for as long as I can remember, but lately I’ve started to care. It used to be exciting — social, wild weekday nights and lost weekends. Adventures, dancing, climbing scaffolding to look at the city stars. Now it’s always the same. Quiet nights in. Just me and a bottle of wine, sometimes a boyfriend, always the Internet.
I love it, but I’m not in love. We want different things, but I don’t know how to live sober.
“You don’t still stay up all night drinking, do you?” a friend asks when I tell her I can’t make it out for dinner — even though we haven’t seen each other since we graduated, and she’s just travelled five hours to visit me — because I’m still too hungover to be vertical.
“No!” I lie, instinctively. “It just got out of hand last night.”
She looks perplexed and I wish she’d leave. I love her, but what do you do with non-drinkers? I try my best not to know any, but this one slipped through the net. Drinkers are wonderful because they don’t need entertaining. No plan required. Just lead them to the pub, and voila.
Her words echo in my head long after she’s gone.
“You don’t still stay up all night drinking, do you?”
Wait — was I not supposed to? Was it somehow ungainly, shameful, wrong?
The words hit a target I didn’t know was there. That sad, confused look! That’s why I avoid non-drinkers. Too judgey.
So what if I’m thirty and still living like I’m twenty? I’m a writer. (If only there were a key that adds a fanfare along with the italics.) So what if I live in a shared house, no food in the cupboards, still ‘borrowing’ money off Mum and Dad? That’s what writers do.
“But you’re a fun drunk!” another friend tells me, a year or so later, as I admit that I long for a different kind of life — one with green juice and yoga and theatre outings. A life entirely incompatible with my current relationships, habits, and behaviours. I’m thirty-two now, and I’ve failed at sobriety more times than I can count. I barely dare speak my craving for change aloud.
Even I can’t take myself seriously.
Because that very night — a Friday — I convince this friend to come to the cinema with me, trying to avoid the pub, as usual, and thus salvage my self-esteem (though she has no idea this is what’s at stake, of course.)
But after the film, she suggests we ‘go see everyone’, and ‘everyone’ is of course at the pub. And I have no willpower. Immediately, I forget why I didn’t want to go.
Why am I being such a killjoy?
We decide to join the gang, just for one. Obvs! Or, okay — if more than one, then we’ll definitely stop drinking at midnight.
We can’t even stick to the rules while we’re making them, but we don’t notice that in the moment.
We make a pact and we mean it: leave the bar at midnight, no matter what.
“Anyway, you don’t need to worry,” she says, conspiratorially, as we walk toward the Volunteer Tavern. “I’ve solved the problem of getting too drunk.”
“Oh yeah?” I am all ears. My whole body is made of ears.
“Yes. The trick is to drink halves,” she says, delighted by her genius, and I nod encouragingly, feeling the soft part of my throat twerk at the mention of beer, as we step from the cold lamplit street into the warm, yeasty pub and wait for the barman to notice us.
Youngish people sit at wooden tables, playing board games and laughing and looking at their phones and swigging frothy pints. Utopia. Only I’m starting to feel scared.
“Two halves of Amstel, please,” I say, and the barman picks up two tiny thimbles of glass, leftovers from what I can only assume is some kind of teddy bear’s picnic.
“Sorry, I mean a pint and a half!” I panic-shout, before I can stop myself.
She shrugs, indifferent, not really listening, and I feel the dregs of my self-respect drain through the soles of my filthy Converse. Because who am I saying this for? Even I don’t listen to me.
The lager is cold and fizzy and as it touches my tongue I remember that I don’t like the taste, which is strange, since I was compelled to order a larger serving only seconds ago.
Still, I don’t worry about that now. I don’t worry about anything: I’m drinking. And when I’m drinking all is well.
I forget my silly dream of sobriety, forget my dissatisfaction, forget all the ways that the future is frightening me, and my friend and I talk and laugh and spill secrets in our usual breathless, hurtling way.
Then, suddenly, it’s midnight and she finishes her half, hugs me goodbye — she has writing to do in the morning — and heads home. A deal’s a deal!
I walk straight back to the bar to order another pint.
“Last night was wonderful,” she texts the next morning. “Seeing you was so nourishing.”
It is beginning to dawn on me that my current network can’t help me stop drinking. They can’t solve this thing that lives inside me, because they don’t understand it. Nobody means to be unkind when they encourage me to drink, but at this point, with this level of internal conflict about drinking, it feels unkind to me.
I need new friends, new habits, maybe even a new brain.
I read books about sobriety (Blackout, Drinking: A Love Story, Lit) and binge posts on sites like Hip Sobriety and Soberistas, and I feel inspired, excited, determined — until the next time a pint sounds like a good idea, and I decide to “just have one,” and wake up hungover.
The same pattern over and over again.
I make the same promise: I won’t drink tonight, no matter what.
And then I break it.
Again and again and again. Until I’m so tired.
In my circles, alcohol is like water. Life isn’t possible without it, and if that’s wrong, we don’t want to be right. Popular culture agrees — drinking is fun! — as long as you do it responsibly, which is so easy and intuitive that only the party-pooping government offers any guidelines.
Booze solves your problems: loneliness, boredom, crap TV, ageing, ugliness, death. It provides sex and adventure. It increases beauty — not just yours, but everyone’s. The world itself. It turns up the colours, adds a coat of hyper-gloss to the matte finish of Planet E.
Why would anyone give it up? I certainly don’t want to.
If I could just stop thinking drinking is a problem, maybe the problem would vanish. Poof!
So why can’t I stop thinking drinking is a problem?
Because the truth is: I’m thirty-three, and I do still stay up all night drinking. Quite often.
And I really don’t want to. It doesn’t happen so much, and the consequences aren’t as bad, but I can never predict when it a certain, unshakeable thirst will take hold and I’ll keep drinking — after last orders, after the house runs dry — until I’m at one of those after-hours booze shops that don’t bother with decoration because they know they don’t need to. We will go there anyway.
I lose my bank card, my wallet, my values, my dignity. I take drugs so I can stay up talking to people I don’t feel comfortable with about things I will probably regret talking about.
And even worse than those nights — the real horror — is how the rest of my life revolves around preventing them. The micromanaging of alcohol consumption. Pouring out many minute glasses of wine to make the bottle last. Delaying the moment I start drinking, so I won’t end up too drunk.
All the things alcohol used to give me — fun, relaxation, peace, belonging — have left. It’s like I’ve used up all the magic.
And what magic!
All that’s left is the headache.
So I make a decision. I’ll stop drinking — for a month.
I’ll do my first Dry January.
I can’t wait!
One month without booze. With the support of a national campaign.
How hard could it be?
This is an excerpt of my first-ever published piece of non-fiction. It took around six months for me to dare publish it, and then on January 1st 2019 I hit post on my newly launched blog, Beautiful Hangover. I was almost three years sober.
It got a few hundred views, and I earned a bit of money from engagement, but it was huge for me personally because it was the beginning of the end of a long period of trying to be who I thought I was supposed to be.
Who I wished I was, maybe.
It was the beginning of what I would come to understand as a grand and long-term project of unmasking. The beginning of my ‘coming out’ as neurodivergent. Even, to myself!
Beautiful Hangover featured stories from me and other writers, all about how we quit drinking in order to become more authentic versions of ourselves. Two years after I launched it, I would be diagnosed as Autistic and ADHD.
This new information threw all of my previous self-discovery into a new light, and I started a new project: Polite Robot.
My hope is that people struggling with alcohol but not identifying as neurodivergent will recognise themselves in the conversation about how to live a good life.
And that those who do identify as neurodivergent, but haven’t struggled with alcohol, might recognise themselves in something else: a process, a pattern, a behaviour, a compulsion.
Gaming. Food. Love. Work.
Anything that offers you magic.
Until one day, it doesn’t.
That’s what you’ll find here each week: honest, often awkward, sometimes funny explorations of what it means to want more from life — and to figure out how to get there without burning out, selling out or giving up.
If you’re the kind of person who thinks too much, feels too much, and wants to feel okay about it — this space is for you. <3
📚 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.
Yey to being that kind friend! And we can be them to ourselves too. I'm still learning this.
I've been so lucky to have made some incredibly caring and not addicted friends in later years... Once moving into The Best house share ever and also, years ago, on my MA.
I was still in the 'alcohol is water' years on my MA so sadly couldn't connect as fully as I can now, but luckily the wonderful ones stuck with me and I'm trying to be a better friend these days...
Thanks for your thoughtful response, I hope you're really well! 💗
"I'm a writer" was the slippery slope for spending more time than I should have spent outside of myself. That line "Let's go and see everyone" Was a well-grooved slope back into the old habits. I noticed how much of my tribe, my crew, my people were a ritual of disappearing. Taking a step back, going dry for a while and coming back to those spaces was a step into the underworld. Took a while to balance being in those places and not feeling like I had to jump back into the mix. I have no diagnosis, but I recognise a lot of attention deficit tendencies, and how seductive the disappearing was, took a lot of time to step back and see what lights up that neuro light pad and recognise what I was trading off. Thank you so much for sharing that story, for opening up that conversation.